D
Deleted member 1074
Guest
You saw it and you liked it and it doesn’t make you gay.
Morrissey’s lyrics have been the weakest thing about Morrissey’s music since 2004
You saw it and you liked it and it doesn’t make you gay.
Young And Alive
Senior Member
A man can dream.
I remember the 'comeback' - 2004, first album in seven years, the TV appearances, Top of the Pops, top #10 singles. It was once again 'cool' to like Morrissey.
Heady days and thanks largely to the Alain co-writes. And the live band just hasn't been the same since he left.
D
Deleted member 1074
Guest
It’s also much harder to pronounce all their names now.
ZOOM FROM GLOOM
LASCIATE OGNI SPERANZA!
Are they not Whyte enough for you?
D
Deleted member 1074
Guest
You have the worst f***ing dad joke humor.
Mr. Jackpots
Clutch.
I'll take a little issue with you on that, although agreeing overall. But don't you think that if he has to "labor" over something like lyrics then the battle is already lost? I remember an interview on Australian radio I used to listen to all the time as a kid; I had a CD of it, it was from the Meat Is Murder era and he said he something to the effect of "I have loads of issues that must be plowed through; I think that if I get to the point where I have to grasp at something to say, I'll probably stop, then." Something like that. Seems like anymore all he does is grasp and repeat himself. Doesn't necessarily result in a bad song; I like a lot of his latter day output. But even my favorite of it pales in comparison to his earlier stuff.
D
Deleted member 1074
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If Morrissey is so rigid that he can’t recognize his own weaknesses and adapt, then yeah I guess the battle is lost.
If someone like Leonard Cohen, who was an infinitely better lyricist than Morrissey ever was, had to take the time to labor and craft lyrics as he grew older then there is no defeat in Morrissey doing the same.
Mr. Jackpots
Clutch.
OK but Cohen was cut from a very different cloth. Only on the first Smiths album was Morrissey not "hit the nail on the head" lyrically (and even then he was pretty straightforward); whereas Cohen has always been nuanced and poetic. My point is, I think it's easier to stay pretty (Cohen) and harder to retain magic (Morrissey) when you've built a 35 year legacy on mining profundity from pedestrianism.
I like Cohen. I'm just saying it's apples and oranges.
D
Deleted member 1074
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I disagree...both with your general point and your description of Morrissey’s early lyrical style.
If anything, it should be far easier for Morrissey to retain credibility because the standards are admittedly set much lower for him.
Mr. Jackpots
Clutch.
That's fair but then it gets to a point where you're Mark Kozelek, pretty much just literally reading endless diary entries of linear minutiae of your day to day life with no melody or mystery because you've lost any semblance of poetic or lyrical structure, whereas once you were an unparalleled master.
I just meant that the first Smiths album is slightly prettier than what followed.
D
Deleted member 1074
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I want to reply to this. Maybe later.
Mr. Jackpots
Clutch.
A
Anonymous
Guest
Do you think Morrissey has lost interest?
Mr. Jackpots
Clutch.
You haven't.
A
Anonymous
Guest
In fact, it's not the (obvious) decline in Morrissey's lyrics that have left so many people disillusioned.
Morrissey's lyrics with The Smiths (more or less flawlessly executed within the scope of his artistic aims and ambitions) were only the works of a poet in the broadest possible definition – here was someone who had an unusual talent for articulating a certain authentic common sense - lifting shared truth from common experience - with wit, honesty and compassion. The Smiths collected songs are a perfect expression of a specific (and limited) sensibility, formed (like all art) out of a particular historical and cultural situation – the situation of Morrissey's life between 1959 and 1987. He is a figure of English punk and post-punk – witty, scabrous, angry, romantic, paradoxical, ironic, scornful, unhappy, anti-establishment – with a complex relationship to traditional (and historically 'American') notions of 'glamour' and 'success'.
This punk, romantic, queer (like the Edwardian 'queer' of a ginot all is as it seems) – sensibility identifies with outsiders on the margins of society for their supposedly more intense and truthful (to a putative 'human condition') experience: the poor and the dispossessed, the working class, the jobless, the homeless, the disabled, the lonely, the ugly, failures in sex and love, (sometimes) ethnic minorities, sexual and gender 'difference', (sometimes) women. It is urban or more commonly semi-urban, nihilistic and full of longings for an intensity in violence and sexuality beyond the measure of bourgeois culture: the 'gilded gutter' life. It romanticises criminals, gangsters, teenagers, the underclass and trades in grand notions of sacrifice, destruction and redemption. It is shared, in whole or in part, by artists including Francis Bacon, Samuel Beckett (tenuously), Derek Jarman, Gilbert & George, the whole of "Britpop", and the 'Young British Artists' (specifically Tracey Emin):
"...Morrissey's fascination with the underbelly of a reimagined England familiar from the novels of Graham Greene, a not too distant, but fast-fading, urban Albion populated by underworld spivs, rent boys and juvenile delinquents, a land of 'jumped-up pantry boys' and tutu-wearing vicars. Morrissey, like Greene, is drawn again and again to the seedy and the sordid, the louche and the low-rent, seems spellbound by the sight of 'loafing oafs in all-night chemists'..."
Writing in 1936, Greene observed that 'seediness has a very deep appeal: it seems to satisfy, temporarily, the sense of nostalgia for something lost'. For better or worse, no other songwriter has captured that sense of a lost England, Arcadian yet besmirched, quite like Morrissey.
Viva Hate is the afterword of this sensibility in Morrissey's work, with an increased focus on personal memory and confession in the singer-songwriter style.
Thereafter, Morrissey draws on this edifice sparingly, in songs like "Friday Mourning", perhaps "The Never-Played Symphonies", "Forgive Someone", – and in the paratext of his work – interviews, iconography (gladioli), photoshoots, use of photos and videos at concerts and on sleeves, etc.). He also adds to his range in his movement from epicene romantic poet to charismatic hard man, the "Ringleader of the Tormentors", his embracing of English hooligan laddism and later Latino and Italian street culture, and his post-1999 self-positioning as a global outsider speaking up on behalf of his romantic deities, "the animals" and "the people".
(In this of course, he bears resemblance with demagogic populists in mass politics of the early Twentieth and early Twenty-First centuries.)
'Kill Uncle' was an experiment in camp self-fashioning; the next phase of Morrissey came with Your Arsenal, where he developed the hard sound and look that he has kept up more or less unchanged to this day. The lyrics are increasingly condensed (except in the case of occasional masterpieces like 'Maladjusted'). There is more repetition, the use of lists, synonyms, repeated verses with one or two words switched, and so on. As has been noted, with such limited themes, the well runs dry. Still, "Years of Refusal" and "World Peace Is None Of Your Business" are not poor recordings at all. It's only with the dross of "Low in High School" and his recent releases (the new album seems set to continue this trend) that he really has lost any semblance of quality control. Note also the truly embarrassing cover sleeves, public interviews, fashion choices, and endless shit-stream of crude merchandising and insulting re-releases. His nephew has not helped with this, and he has obviously surrounded himself with yes-men for a long, long time. All of it speaks of a slow and painful decline. None of this actually needs to impact on his lyrical talents, which still flash with (very) occasional brilliance, but are mostly put to use in a half-arsed, indolent and desperate kind of way, grasping for attention and relevance in a saturated media environment, and reflect his sad isolation as a slightly sour, narcissistic troll in a bubble of foolish opinion and demagogic entitled privilege.
To come to the point: his relevance, his moment – has passed. The British post-industrial landscapes out of which he emerged are more or less gone, and with it the emphasis on street "realism" – we live in a total hyperreality now – and an old-fashioned romanticism. His contemporary equivalent, sad to say, is Stormzy, who speaks the youthful vernacular of his tribe and time and semi-scandalises the mainstream media and the body politic with supposedly 'bold' political statements and activism. Morrissey has also long since betrayed his position as a punk outsider (not that I resent him for this – I don't – it's what people do when they become old and wealthy) – and come to occupy a relatively comfortable position as a conventional and unexceptional member of the rich and famous. His political posturings of the past ten years are really no more ridiculous (simply more crude and ill-informed, reflecting his own privileged position and indolence) than his often naive and simplistic political posturings in the past ('Don't go to work tomorrow'; 'Meat is murder', 'I don't think that white and black people will ever really get on' etc.) – which often gave strength and force to his songs. After all, pop songs are not a form that often require sustained textual analysis or interrogation, and rely on the power of gut expressions, however forcefully presented.
Morrissey's lyrics with The Smiths (more or less flawlessly executed within the scope of his artistic aims and ambitions) were only the works of a poet in the broadest possible definition – here was someone who had an unusual talent for articulating a certain authentic common sense - lifting shared truth from common experience - with wit, honesty and compassion. The Smiths collected songs are a perfect expression of a specific (and limited) sensibility, formed (like all art) out of a particular historical and cultural situation – the situation of Morrissey's life between 1959 and 1987. He is a figure of English punk and post-punk – witty, scabrous, angry, romantic, paradoxical, ironic, scornful, unhappy, anti-establishment – with a complex relationship to traditional (and historically 'American') notions of 'glamour' and 'success'.
This punk, romantic, queer (like the Edwardian 'queer' of a ginot all is as it seems) – sensibility identifies with outsiders on the margins of society for their supposedly more intense and truthful (to a putative 'human condition') experience: the poor and the dispossessed, the working class, the jobless, the homeless, the disabled, the lonely, the ugly, failures in sex and love, (sometimes) ethnic minorities, sexual and gender 'difference', (sometimes) women. It is urban or more commonly semi-urban, nihilistic and full of longings for an intensity in violence and sexuality beyond the measure of bourgeois culture: the 'gilded gutter' life. It romanticises criminals, gangsters, teenagers, the underclass and trades in grand notions of sacrifice, destruction and redemption. It is shared, in whole or in part, by artists including Francis Bacon, Samuel Beckett (tenuously), Derek Jarman, Gilbert & George, the whole of "Britpop", and the 'Young British Artists' (specifically Tracey Emin):
"...Morrissey's fascination with the underbelly of a reimagined England familiar from the novels of Graham Greene, a not too distant, but fast-fading, urban Albion populated by underworld spivs, rent boys and juvenile delinquents, a land of 'jumped-up pantry boys' and tutu-wearing vicars. Morrissey, like Greene, is drawn again and again to the seedy and the sordid, the louche and the low-rent, seems spellbound by the sight of 'loafing oafs in all-night chemists'..."
Writing in 1936, Greene observed that 'seediness has a very deep appeal: it seems to satisfy, temporarily, the sense of nostalgia for something lost'. For better or worse, no other songwriter has captured that sense of a lost England, Arcadian yet besmirched, quite like Morrissey.
Viva Hate is the afterword of this sensibility in Morrissey's work, with an increased focus on personal memory and confession in the singer-songwriter style.
Thereafter, Morrissey draws on this edifice sparingly, in songs like "Friday Mourning", perhaps "The Never-Played Symphonies", "Forgive Someone", – and in the paratext of his work – interviews, iconography (gladioli), photoshoots, use of photos and videos at concerts and on sleeves, etc.). He also adds to his range in his movement from epicene romantic poet to charismatic hard man, the "Ringleader of the Tormentors", his embracing of English hooligan laddism and later Latino and Italian street culture, and his post-1999 self-positioning as a global outsider speaking up on behalf of his romantic deities, "the animals" and "the people".
(In this of course, he bears resemblance with demagogic populists in mass politics of the early Twentieth and early Twenty-First centuries.)
'Kill Uncle' was an experiment in camp self-fashioning; the next phase of Morrissey came with Your Arsenal, where he developed the hard sound and look that he has kept up more or less unchanged to this day. The lyrics are increasingly condensed (except in the case of occasional masterpieces like 'Maladjusted'). There is more repetition, the use of lists, synonyms, repeated verses with one or two words switched, and so on. As has been noted, with such limited themes, the well runs dry. Still, "Years of Refusal" and "World Peace Is None Of Your Business" are not poor recordings at all. It's only with the dross of "Low in High School" and his recent releases (the new album seems set to continue this trend) that he really has lost any semblance of quality control. Note also the truly embarrassing cover sleeves, public interviews, fashion choices, and endless shit-stream of crude merchandising and insulting re-releases. His nephew has not helped with this, and he has obviously surrounded himself with yes-men for a long, long time. All of it speaks of a slow and painful decline. None of this actually needs to impact on his lyrical talents, which still flash with (very) occasional brilliance, but are mostly put to use in a half-arsed, indolent and desperate kind of way, grasping for attention and relevance in a saturated media environment, and reflect his sad isolation as a slightly sour, narcissistic troll in a bubble of foolish opinion and demagogic entitled privilege.
To come to the point: his relevance, his moment – has passed. The British post-industrial landscapes out of which he emerged are more or less gone, and with it the emphasis on street "realism" – we live in a total hyperreality now – and an old-fashioned romanticism. His contemporary equivalent, sad to say, is Stormzy, who speaks the youthful vernacular of his tribe and time and semi-scandalises the mainstream media and the body politic with supposedly 'bold' political statements and activism. Morrissey has also long since betrayed his position as a punk outsider (not that I resent him for this – I don't – it's what people do when they become old and wealthy) – and come to occupy a relatively comfortable position as a conventional and unexceptional member of the rich and famous. His political posturings of the past ten years are really no more ridiculous (simply more crude and ill-informed, reflecting his own privileged position and indolence) than his often naive and simplistic political posturings in the past ('Don't go to work tomorrow'; 'Meat is murder', 'I don't think that white and black people will ever really get on' etc.) – which often gave strength and force to his songs. After all, pop songs are not a form that often require sustained textual analysis or interrogation, and rely on the power of gut expressions, however forcefully presented.
gordyboy9
He Punched The Highlights Out Of Her Hair.
im always happy.
D
Deleted member 1074
Guest
Especially after you looked at the picture of my ass.
gordyboy9
He Punched The Highlights Out Of Her Hair.
I can ass ure you I wasn't.
D
Deleted member 1074
Guest
You’re a liar.
D
Deleted member 1074
Guest
No one is going to read that lawl
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