Ask me, ask me, ask me

well, one or two people did, so here is the text of my paper from the EMP pop conference. this is the expanded text, director's cut style, since (unlike both of my fellow panelists) I didn't want to go over my allotted 20 minutes. the highlight was when greil marcus came in, sat down, then got up and left within a two-minute span, long before i started. i recognized two musicians i really admire in the house, which was pretty cool. and the Q&A got very real there for a minute...

"Sister, I’m a ____: Morrissey’s Artful Evasions"
By Sean Nelson

“Coming out has long been the sine qua non of gay identity politics—shine the light everywhere and the truth shall set you free. Our first duty has always been confession, self-exposure. Liberation is promised in the solidarity that will follow with our queer brethren… In the narrow terms of gay politics, we must either come out, and secure the victory of our own self-definition, or remain oppressed by the closet… [But] the reversion of sexuality, out of the political marketplace, back to the furtive interiors of private persons, accomplishes a great deal more than simple retreat. It clears the ground for the articulation of that mystery called love… Let the world’s homophobes deal with the queasy realization that repressed sexuality exists everywhere, ineradicable, unlocatable, beaming beside them at their wedding, asleep in their bed, even somewhere inside them. Going back in the closet does not erase the world of queers; it queers the world.”—Matthew Stadler, “Love Requires Liars,” 1997.

Queering the world is a notion that probably would have appealed to the young Morrissey… so long as the light that’s supposed to shine everywhere was focused just a little extra brightly on him. It’s also a fair approximation of the effect of The Smiths on—if not the entire world—then certainly the world of popular music (at least in the ‘80s, in England, and the dorm rooms of collegiate America). You’d have to be not only blind and deaf but a liar—or at least a very frightened straight man—to deny the radical gay energy of early Smiths music, embodied all but literally by their singer, the great and ludicrous figure whose voice alone has polarized more listeners than… I can’t even think of an analogy; Morrissey has none.

Partly because of the current wave of new bands that sound exactly like really good old bands from the early ‘80s (no names), one forgets that the bleak, Margaret Thatcher midwinter from which the Smiths arose were the time of Boy George, George Michael, Spandau Ballet, Soft Cell, Duran Duran—New Romantics, non-romantics. If the vogue of the glam era was to claim to be gay or bisexual even when you weren’t, the rule of thumb at the dawn of the Smiths was to look, act, and sound as gay as a tree full of kittens while pretending adamantly not to be. There was no love in New Romantic pop, and not much lust either—just flamboyance and calculation. The Smiths albums and singles fairly well explode with love (and calculated flamboyance), but, as Morrissey made clear in the first verse of the band’s very first single, “it’s not like any other love. This one’s different because it’s ours.”

For all its captivating energy and catchy melody, love à la Smiths was not of a stripe typically recognized by pop. As with punk, whose corpse was still warm when the Smiths got started, it was a love energized by hate (the good kind of hate: working class hate aimed upwards; an idler’s hate aimed at working; adolescent hate aimed at boredom and cliché; self-hate aimed inward, which is the same thing as self-love, ultimately). But the love is also energized by thwarted—as opposed to unrequited—desire and unwanted—as opposed to undiscovered—yearning. And its locus lay in Morrissey’s controversial throat. His singing voice, to some a noxious yowl, to others a gorgeous plaint, is in any case, the instrument without which his lyrics would just be, like most pop lyrics, fake poetry in a five-inch booklet. Given form, however, the words play out a series of superbly crafted tricks. They may sound sad while being archly hilarious; they may seem profound while being intentionally vacuous; and they may appear to be self-lacerating while truly being brilliantly self-aggrandizing. Such tricks exist in the bag of many a clever-ist songwriter, and can be tiresome or delightful depending on the listener and the day. But Morrissey’s primary device—as both writer and pop figure—has always been a hybrid of confession and evasion. His appearance, demeanor, and style all scream “here I am, I can be no other”—but from the very beginning, from the first single, he has forwarded a simultaneously transparent and cryptic persona: obviously out and proud yet intensely personal; equally sex-mad (“I know what will make you smile tonight” in “I Don’t Owe You Anything”) and sex-less (“the hills are alive with celibate cries” in “These Things Take Time”). Although everything about Morrissey may seem perfectly, painfully, even repugantly clear, in the end, he always leaves the space designated for a pop-star’s self-declaration defiantly blank:

“All men have secrets and here is mine, so let it be known”

“I’m not the man you think I am. I’m not the man you think I am.”

“My only weakness is—well, never mind, never mind…”

And so on, suggestively, throughout song after song—what he leaves out isn’t simply as important as what he puts in; the bits he leaves out constitute his boldest gesture. There are just enough recurring themes and dynamics to allow the assiduous fan (and with Morrissey, there really is no other kind) to construct his or her own story: The woman who “divides” in “These Things Take Time” may well be the same “fat girl who’ll say, OH-oh-oh-oh, ‘would you like to marry me and if you like you can buy the ring,’” in “William, It Was Really Nothing,” or the famous, funny one “consumed by brass (money)” to whom “an engagement ring doesn’t mean a thing” at the fair in “Rusholme Ruffians,” or even the “sad veiled bride” who needs more than loves her handsome groom in “I Know It’s Over.”

In each of these songs (and others), the singer suggests that he’s waiting for a man to come to his senses and ditch the girl at his side, to return to the fond embrace of the “unlovable” wretch who can’t stop mooning over him. Him her him her. It’s a lot of pronouns to keep track of—the interference is intentional, but the message is clear: I want the one I can’t have, and it’s driving me mad. Not exactly a new idea in pop music. Perhaps a slight refinement on the familiar statement of desire, but otherwise, the coy mistress is as familiar in popular music as she was in romantic poetry. And no, I’m not really going there, except to say that by adding the confrontational gender confusion and overtly gay associations at a foundational level—there could be no Smiths music without these elements—Morrissey’s persona also suggests Marvell’s “Definition of Love”: “My love is of a birth as rare/as tis for object strange and high:/It was begotten by despair/ upon impossibility.”

Of course, he would have sung it, “impossibili-tye.”

The Smiths is a gem housed in the plainest of settings—it’s easily the worst sounding great album I can think of. It’s also the repository of a lifetime’s worth of political/musical/confessional/sexual fantasizing by its creators. And through the tinny production—even because of it—one can discern Morrissey’s burning need to declare his existence, and his peculiarity—the trick nature played on him—to a world that won’t listen. But for every bold evocation of his urges, there is a demonstration of restraint, of delicacy. Of not “coming out” while blissfully enjoying the liberation of being and doing what he wants—and never needing to define his terms. “The sun shines out of our behinds!” “We go wherever we please!” “Ask me why and I’ll spit in your eye!”

The thrill is of a secret shared but not revealed. As Mark Simpson wrote in what one can only call an essential text (at least for the purposes of this panel), Saint Morrissey, “This was the supreme subversiveness of Morrissey’s erotic project—to use ordinary language and feelings to convey what were supposed to be extraordinary conditions… It was also the key to his artistic masterstroke: since (homo)eroticism was simultaneously universal but still beyond the pale, it offered Morrissey an entirely fresh, unadulterated, and vibrant vocabulary for his depiction of human desire—and weakness.”

That vocabulary expanded a great deal (as did the band’s sonic palette) on Meat is Murder. Brutality and romanticism, loneliness and despair, yearning and rejection—all themes treated with suggestive, rather than didactic description. Well, okay, “Meat Is Murder” is the most didactic song ever written. But if the lyrics elsewhere leave figurative holes (“I’ve seen this happen in other people’s lives and now it’s happening in mine” in “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore”; he never tells us the joke, never says what “this” is) they are filled in by the swooning guitars, the Caucasoid funk bass lines, the rock band textures. Which is appropriate, because of the way his band’s group identity was able to stand in for the queer “community” identity—what Matthew Stadler called “the narrow constraints of the new liberation,” with its mandate for public pride. Pride, as any Catholic knows, is sin. Fortunately for Morrissey, who was raised Catholic (providing an intersection of influences that would require not only its own paper, but indeed its own conference), he had his art form, and his band to use as reflecting pools of the prideful urge. For an artist whose self-regard is so conspicuously spot-welded to his self-loathing, the concept of coming out in the classic sense—in song or in life—couldn’t possibly have rung true.

Here we enter some dicey territory. As I stated in my proposal, I have no interest in outing anyone or anything. As a longtime devotee of Morrissey and The Smiths, I know as well as anyone that he has steadfastly refused to accept any of the conventional sexuality labels that have been foisted on him by the press and by even his most ardent fans. I also know that straight people don’t say things like “I’m not into labels.” I’m sufficiently thrilled and edified by the beauty and originality of Morrissey’s life and work that I’m prepared to simply leave the question of what he is open forever. None of my business at all. But as for his music, his stage persona, his pop identity? GAY GAY GAY! Screaming gay. Suh-lamming, super, marathon, megaphone, skyscraper gay. So gay that gay people are often like, “Wow, that’s kind of gay.” And so gay that straight boys are sexually attracted to him without even understanding why or how; if ever there was an argument for the existence of homosexual yearning in even the most defiant heterosexuals, it exists on the “Morrissey Live In Dallas” video from the early ‘90s, in which the singer is mobbed on stage by so many shirtless teenage boys in search of hugs that he literally can’t sing another word. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The gay energy of early Smiths music was a vital element in the transformation of independent pop music in the ‘80s; it forged a tiny connection between underground and mainstream culture that represented, if not real progress, than at least a momentary respite from the vapid-on-one-side, dismal-on-the-other reality of ‘80s pop life. You could also make the case that the band’s enduring appeal, and Morrissey’s celebrated solo career, set a few important paving stones for more widespread tolerance in the traditionally hateful world of rock’n’roll (lest one forget). But to read Morrissey’s arrival in the world as a stock “coming out” story, is to miss the beauty of all his blurred lines, his misdirection, his glorious confusion. It’s not that it was impossible to “come out” as gay in 1984. It had been done long before, notably by David Bowie and Elton John… (both of whom later apologized and married women for their sins). More substantively, Jimmy Sommerville of Bronski Beat and the Communards was out and proud and on the charts by the time the Smiths came around. A little nearer the closet, The Smiths were hardly the only band writing thinly-veiled appreciations of male-male relationships. Consider this little chestnut, released the same year as The Smiths first LP.

“Deadly as the viper
Peering from its coil
The poison there is coming to the boil

And all the pressure that's been building up
For all the years it bore the load
The cracks appear, the frame starts to distort
Ready to explode… Jawbreaker!”
(From “Jawbreaker,” by Judas Priest)

But Morrissey’s gesture was more subversive and certainly more durable than those of his contemporaries. To announce one’s self as queer is to render all of one’s works through the filter of queerness. You become a queer artist, your songs queer songs, your audience a queer community, your whole life a series of pre- and pro-scribed placards rather than a dance of description and suggestion—a recipe for queering the world

From the moment the Smiths were launched, Morrissey made no secret of his “vile nature”—from the nude male model on the cover of “Hand in Glove” to the swanning appearances on Top of the Pops, to, of course, the evasive confessions and confessional evasions in his lyrics, he was unmistakably queer. But he never said it, never claimed the identity. He never allowed the easy understanding of “gay,” “bi,” “queer,” or anything else, to define, and therefore constrict him. That refusal afforded him the artistic luxury to embrace the thematic expressiveness of his unstated orientations, to pamper, as it were, the complexities of sexual desire, in the same way he balanced miserable loneliness and alienation with ribald humor and camp posturing. It was a masquerade without a mask. This charming man isn’t sexually ambiguous, as is often stated. He’s sexually ambivalent, a walking series of rich contradictions. Desire and disgust. The conjunction of the mind and the opposition of the stars (Marvell again). “Does the body rule the mind or does the mind rule the body? I dunno…” But the “dunno” is caustic. He knows. He’s just not saying. Talk about a coy mistress…

The problem with coming out is that no one can or should be proud all the time. In a more realistic cosmology—one evinced by Morrissey’s body of work—to again quote Matthew Stadler, somewhat out of context (I’m pretty sure he hates Morrissey)-“Shame is never erased, so much as it is put in its place, contextualized, and incorporated into the broad stream of eros.” Likewise, Morrissey’s evasive declarations contextualized pop music (and by extension, himself) in the broad artistic and social tradition of open secrecy among queer figures in polite society—like Morrissey’s beloved Oscar Wilde. Needless to say this “tradition” was born of unfortunate necessity, dating from when same-sex sex was a crime, which it was in Great Britain until 1967, and, one feels compelled to mention, still is in some parts of America. Still, the codes and signals that arose from the secret world provided a subversive strain of expression that clearly captivated the author as a young man. Wilde’s plays and epigrams reveal, among their many delights, a good deal of sub rosa naughtiness (apparently, the word “Earnest,” was Victorian slang for “homosexual”); to say nothing of Palare, the ‘60s London street hustler argot that was later paid tribute in a Morrissey solo single (“Picadilly palare was just silly slang between me and the boys in my gang”).

Turning now, to the late Susan Sontag—because no talk of Morrissey can entirely skirt the subject of Camp…

“[Camp is] a mode of seduction—one which employs flamboyant mannerisms susceptible of a double interpretation; gestures full of duplicity, with a witty meaning for cognoscenti and another, more impersonal, for outsiders… the Camp sensibility is one that is alive to a double sense in which some things can be taken. But this is not the familiar split-level construction of a literal meaning on the one hand and a symbolic meaning on the other. It is the difference, rather, between the thing as meaning something, anything, and the thing as pure artfice…” (From “Notes on Camp,” 1964)

In other words, the eternal dilemma, or, if you like, the eternal beauty of pop music: nothing more meaningful, nothing more disposable. And in the bright lexicon of pop, few have rivaled Morrissey for a pure, intuitive understanding of this dichotomy. But with pure intuitive understanding comes the great pop peril of grasping your persona so completely that the glove threatens to wear the hand. Or, as hated Smiths biographer Johnny Rogan put it, “remarkably, he was now in a position where his emotional inadequacies had been magically transformed into commodity”

Certainly the band and its writers got more musically accomplished on subsequent records, but as the band became more popular, so did their singer become more institutionalized, a factor that necessarily affected their development. Even on their most earnest records, The Smiths had Camp moments—the squawk on “This Charming Man,” the Elvis-style rockabilly shuffle on “Rusholme Ruffians” (a song that typically segued into a medley with “His Latest Flame” when played live). Sontag describes “a tender feeling” that “arises from boredom,” and the dandy figure’s quest for “rare sensations, undefiled by mass appreciation”—all these are facets of the Smiths diamond. Musically, the camp sensibilities showed up as early as their in-joke third single, “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” (surely number zero the list of best Smiths songs), but grew more refined—from lowercase to capital C, let’s say—on later works. The Queen Is Dead is basically a camp album, designed to feed on and advance the band’s persona. As great as some of its songs are, the record is impersonal—the first sign that the powerful urge for declaration heard on the early works might be changing into something more common.

Strangeways, Here We Come, features a song that represents the band’s ultimate reversion into big C camp. On paper, “Girlfriend In a Coma” reads like the confession/evasion of old: the narrator feigns concern for a comatose girl while secretly relishing the opportunity to comfort her worried boyfriend. But the track is glib (as opposed to irreverent or bold or daring or beautiful or funny or sad), in both conception and performance, and the end result is distinct for the simple fact that it is being sung by a distinctive singer—but it isn’t special. In fact, it’s emotionally stingy, as though taking a cue from a line in the album opener: “don’t mention love.” The real issue is that by the time of “Girlfriend in a Coma,” one could almost predict a dark image like “Girlfriend in a Coma” coming out of Morrissey’s mouth; his persona had become purest Camp, an ongoing “instant character,” defined by Sontag as “a state of continual incandescence—a person being one, very intense thing.”

Indeed, even one very intense name.

“11. To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-As-Playing-A-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.”

At the higher levels of stardom, when the artist’s self is subject to the demands of a huge number of total strangers who are invested in his every whim, it’s easy to understand the impulse to take refuge in persona. But when the artist’s art consists of persona invention (through song in this case), one wonders where the cycle can end. In a sense, he becomes pop itself: no self but in the performance of self, no identity but in the fluid, anonymous reality of song—Is the I really me? Is there a me left to discover? I dunno.

Morrissey’s post-Smiths career has been a study in contrast between his original instant character and the Camp icon he developed into along the way. The consummate example is the 1988 b-side, “Sister, I’m a Poet,” which depicts a renegade naif, intoxicated with “the romance of crime,” and wondering “is evil just something you are or something you do?” The refrain is the title, minus the word “poet,” repeated twice, with “all over this town” tagged to the end. The result is a huge space into which the singer refuses to sing the defining noun, choosing instead to let the listening fill it in, and I think, daring anyone who might care to, to insert a two-syllable slander in its place. Such is the twin refuge of a Camp persona. Of course, his evasions also got him into big trouble in England, where he was accused of racist and fascist leanings after writing so called “ambiguous” songs about dark-skinned immigrants and National Front supporters. Because he has never addressed these accusations, I won’t either, except to say that one of the songs in question is patently a character study, and if Morrissey is a fascist then Pete Townshend is a child molester, and vice versa.

Having long since abandoned the question of how to feel lonely and rejected when millions of people are lining up to love you, he has returned time and again to the twin devices of confession and evasion, of coming clean without ever really owning up. The very first song on his very first solo album addresses his listeners’ desire for insight into his private life by asking (himself) the blunt question, “were you and he lovers, and would you say so if you were?” but adds a coy “I ask (even though I know).” Things are not so simple. Minutes later, he’s out on “Maudlin Street” with a bad boy who complains that “women only like me for my mind.” But then there is the deluxe chintz of “Hairdresser On Fire,” a brilliant song that is nonetheless full of self-conscious camp rhymes like “you are repressed but you’re remarkably dressed.”

As the career has progressed, the balance between obviousness and artfulness (within the larger invented reality of Morrisseyness, of course) has listed back and forth. Sometimes, the whole story is told by the song title:
“Will Never Marry,” “Lucky Lisp,” “I’m The End of the Family Line,” “There’s A Place In Hell For Me and My Friends,” “I Am Hated For Loving,” “Maladjusted,” “Wide To Receive,” “Swallow on My Neck,” “I’ve Changed My Plea To Guilty,” and of course the best dirty joke LP title in history, “Your Arsenal.” Other times, the old inventiveness arises, but only in the service of themes like fame and lawsuits, it fails to stun. Middle period dalliances with themes of criminals and boxing weren’t particularly convincing. A little too much career-based paranoia and bitterness shadowed his later albums, and a seven-year absence from recording caused legitimate concern that perhaps he had run out of things to say (and not say).

And then came You Are The Quarry, his comeback album from last year, a work of incredible strength and wit and one which—perhaps intentionally—ties together the many strands that complicate his Camp identity and his persistent voice. The title alone is a perfect introduction to such an effort (the full title, in fact is Morrissey, You Are The Quarry, leaving little doubt as to the identity of the “you” in question). On this record, he is direct about his prior abstractions (“I have forgiven Jesus,” he sings, “for all the desire he placed in me when there’s nothing I can do about desire”) and blunt where he has been evasive (“the woman of my dreams, there never was one”). And not for nothing, but You Are The Quarry also contains the first iteration of the word “gay” on a Morrissey record (and “dyke,” too but I don’t think anyone was waiting for that one). At a glance, it might seem that such developments signal a betrayal of the very virtues this unforgivably long paper was sent here to extol. But after 22 years of “continual incandescence,” it’s nice to hear Morrissey allow his persona to re-evolve back to incorporate the truly personal once again. If that means hearing his confession, then so much the better. Plus, it’s not as though the new stuff is stingy on wit—“Close your eyes,” he sings “and think of someone you physically admire, then” (the song’s title and the next line are both “Let me kiss you”).

And lest there be any doubt that age, wealth, and adoration have completely replaced the questing decadence that inspired his emergence to begin with, the last line—an archetypal Morrissey confessional evasion—reminds us that, mask or no mask, there are worlds within this charming man that we will never know, no matter how many of his blanks we care to fill in:

“Then in the end, your royalties bring you luxuries, but—oh, the squalor of the mind. The squalor of the mind. The squalor of the mind. The squalor of the mind…”