Morrissey

It is the modus operandi of all dandies to be deeply contradictory. If they are flamboyantly decadent and fashionable, they are also reviled and insufferable. And with his fastidious devotion to style and culte de soi-même, Steven Patrick Morrissey has undertaken the role no differently. He has played the glamorous and the gauche, the pop star and the anti-pop star, the outspoken celebrity and the reclusive introvert, the aesthete and the icon of ordinariness.  He has single-handedly popularised the creased brow, and second-handedly affirmed that a wit that transcends all else is still no criterion for decency. A bastion of l’étranger; his is the voice of the healthily deprived, and the healthily depraved.

And yet, to say that Morrissey is your traditional dandy would be an injustice to both parties, for it belies the ‘carnivalesque’ side of his persona, which is at once in tension with his dandyism and yet equally essential to his vocal style. While his verse is nimble, melodious and plangent there is also a reflexive protest involved in its delivery. His baroque ululations dip and swerve in search of an alternative strategy for communication. That distinct, operatic yodelling being a desperate attempt to express his interiority without language; it is, ultimately, the sound of feeling straining to communicate itself unclothed; primal and pure. This carnivalesque spirit is also apparent in his manhandling of language; in his bold stretching out of words, far beyond their customary length or shape, and squashing of words and syntax into conventional spaces of popular music.  And what beautiful words they are... Even those which would most rather be spat. Borne out of complete physical necessity, they tug at the straps of our own inner straightjackets. Why do you smile at people who you'd much rather kick in the eye?

Alas, Morrissey's aristocratic aversion to work is now finding him unhappily without it. It is with great sadness and little surprise to learn that no imperious record label has yet to blow the dust off his unreleased tenth studio album, which has long been ready to flutter wildly against the bars. And of course, no man of wit preserves his integrity by living in retirement. It is his duty to go purposefully among the bores of this world to remind them of his superiority. He must be given a stage to impart his epigrammatic gift; to miraculously invert the most conventional and apparently reasonable values so as to reveal to us the perfect sense of their antitheses. Morrissey, by his very nature, is terrible at being dull and criminally wasted when unseen. For the time being, we may only attempt to endure without him…