To be honest, looking back at some of the old interviews the persona Morrissey created, I don't think he's really changed all that much. He's gotten more bitter (I miss the "hope at the end of the tunnel" that used to permeate through much of his music), more detached from reality... but he's always been a frustrating narcissist. It's just that, as a teenager and a young man in the early '00s, I found his frustrating ways endearing and I thought he was a legitimate genius. One of the things I find painful in witnessing his downward spiral is realising that this man I thought was so clever isn't very clever after all and, outside of his songwriting brilliance, he never really was.