Very true, people took Dylan's his words as powerful rallying cries, whether he intended it or not. His career coincided with a great wave of naivete.
By the time The Smiths came along, everything had gone to Hell with Reagan and AIDS, trickle-down economic theory and the Religious Right. It was an awful time - the "revolution" had been brief, and the backlash was brutal. Large scale political action was a thing of the past, but being politically organized and fighting back became an underground cultural obsession. The Smiths made it seem like a solitary refusal to cooperate could actually change the world. Morrissey is 1000% right - anger is the greatest motivating principle in pop. I love him for saying that.
Yes, it's very sad, isn't it? Politicians are just self-indulged teens all grown up. They continue to grind us into the ground while the young self-medicate, in an endless parade of selfish indifference and the resultant destruction. I think it's a terribly bleak song, devoid of hope. Morrissey does seem to be taking stock these days (as one does at fifty, I suppose) and finding that what once seemed terribly important may have really been just a good time.
Yes, but The Critic still gives Dylan props for being an altruistic leader, and Morrissey stick for being nothing but an attention seeker. You could reverse these two things; Dylan gave up his role (which he may have never wanted in the first place) and broke with the movement, but Morrissey never stopped believing in the power of song to illuminate his innermost landscape, thus empowering bookish, shy, socially awkward, despairing, ambiguous and eccentric listeners everywhere to rejoice in their difference. Morrissey still gives voice to those emotions people least want to confront (especially now we're all older and presumably wiser). He's stated that he's a man on a mission, which he has not yet abandoned. No singer could ever topple damaging social norms single-handedly, but Moz (like Dylan) gave it his best shot.
"Anger is the sinew of the soul; without it, a man would be lame". - Shelagh Delaney
Excellent post, Anaesthesine. Not much one can add to that!
Being thorough, however
...
I think the last thing you said about Morrissey not abandoning his mission is very true-- he's due his share of criticism, surely, but his consistency isn't just a matter of stubbornly staying the course, as it is for most. He's been the same because there is no "course", it's just him, emptying his diary. He's confined himself to provocative yet stable positions about himself and about the world. In short, some small slips aside, he made himself immune to hypocrisy. Who else can say that? We talk of Bono-- and I'm one who isn't blind to the good he does-- and in him you see the risks in attempting to go about change in the spirit of the Sixties, namely, that for everyone who finds Bono inspiring there are probably two more who are angered by him and turned off to the very idea of activism in that form.
Two points, not necessarily in response to yours...
First, the Dylan comparison is probably unworkable to begin with because Dylan was much more popular than Morrissey. I don't claim to be an expert on Dylan or the Sixties but I'm pretty sure that ten years after Dylan's early records made a splash the landscape had changed significantly enough to measure his distinct influence. Ten years after "Hand In Glove" a lot had changed, but almost none of it was influenced by The Smiths. Not to say you couldn't find bands who liked Morrissey and borrowed something from him, just that the really
vital new forms of music were hip-hop and other electronic-based stuff. I'd have an easier time believing that the real Dylan of the Eighties was Madonna or Chuck D.
Second, one of the crippling problems of comparing Sixties altruism with Eighties self-absorption is that it ignores the nihilism of punk rock. Whatever one thinks of the music, certain strains of punk undeniably captured the primary anxiety of the times in the words "No future". The Sixties were possible because the future wasn't foreclosed. They could envision a future. They could dream their Utopias, however lame they might look to us now. As J. G. Ballard said, "The first casualty of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the concept of the future".
Morrissey sang in a time (recently depicted in "Watchmen", following on the original book) haunted by the specter of nuclear annihilation. Where else was there to go but down inside oneself-- not least because the example set by the Sixties was one of a glorious few years of protest followed by passive assimilation into the system? It was in the air. Punk had articulated that feeling that it was all over, nothing was left. After that, you didn't necessarily need to abandon any hope of changing the world for the better, but you certainly had to find new tactics, and Morrissey did. And of course some of his tactics didn't look ahead to the future but involved an imaginative return to the past, which was wrongly taken as small-mindedness, political backwardness, and impotent escapism. In my view his way was superior: Morrissey's vision lingers on in the imagination, shallow protest or activist music does not.
P.S. Jello Biafra as Dylan-- yes, that gave me a chuckle. Wish that had been so!
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