Morrissey Is Too Big to Cancel | The American Spectator

Some of Morrissey’s biggest fans in the 1990s do not in the 2020s want you to listen to his music.

The former Smiths singer just released his first album since Capitol Records pulled Bonfire of Teenagers, the five-year-old unreleased album whose titular track (“The morons sing, ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’/I can assure you I will look back in anger ‘til the day I die”) memorialized the victims of the terrorist attack at a Manchester Ariana Grande concert.

Make-up Is a Lie does not repackage Bonfire of Teenagers under a different title. Songs do, here and there, delve into the controversial subject matter that presumably derailed that unreleased LP — none more controversially than “Notre-Dame.” The lyrics suggest a nefarious cause to the fire at the French cathedral (“Before investigations/They said there’s nothing to see here”).

Of course, when 38 years ago Morrissey sang, “The kind people have a wonderful dream/Margaret on the guillotine,” the same crowd seeking to cancel him now fawned over him. They found his bluntness in interviews charming, and his lyrics poetic, literary, and witty.

“Remember when Morrissey was actually good?” begins the Paste.com review of his new record. It ends: “Do not listen to it.”

The fans listen to what the philistines forbid.

The standout track acts as a sonic love letter to a real music critic. “Lester Bangs” celebrates the Creem and Village Voice scribbler exiled from the pages of Rolling Stone for “disrespecting musicians.”

Bangs suggested that readers buy the Canned Heat album The New Age only if they had a lot of money and flippantly described Black Sabbath’s debut as “Vanilla Fudge paying doggerel tribute to Aleister Crowley.” To my knowledge, he never trashed an album because the musicians held a heterodox political opinion.

Morrissey, who describes himself as a nerd 3,000 miles away hanging on Bangs’s album reviews, sings, “But ah, when you lift your pen/For Roxy Music and the Dolls/The Village Voice, it has no choice/It must laud your every word.”

The inclusion of the song on the album strikes as a work of subversive genius. It forces the listener to juxtapose Bangs, a tasteful connoisseur of music, with the pod people ostensibly occupying his space today. Their political obsessions so overwhelm their artistic preferences that they now declare Morrissey, a man who could do no wrong when he released Meat Is Murder or sang such homosexual-themed songs as “Piccadilly Palare” and “Hairdresser on Fire,” as a talentless windbag.

It recalls the recent scribe epiphanies on Van Morrison and Eric Clapton upon their criticism of COVID public policy. More so does it recall the Communist Party’s embrace of “art is a weapon” and denunciation of “art for art’s sake.”

Ninety-two years ago, Max Eastman wrote in Artists in Uniform about this bizarre, category-mistake view of art as merely a tool for ideologues to hammer their points home.

Eastman, who, as an octogenarian, provoked a teenage Carly Simon to declare him upon sight as the most beautiful man she had ever seen, strikes as the very type of person Morrissey might put on an album cover or write a song about (à la James Dean or Reggie Kray). After all, Claude McKay, the black, bisexual socialist-turned-Catholic, kept a naked picture of Eastman as a prized possession and cried and threw a fit when Eastman eventually retrieved it. Aesthetically and intellectually, Eastman fits the Mancunian’s sense of life.

In 1933, a group of Communists in Morrissey’s homeland founded Artists International, which proclaimed that art “renounces individualism,” awaits collectivization, needs systemization, organization, and discipline, requires creation under the guidance of a political party, and, most importantly, “is to be wielded as a weapon.”

All these years later, Morrissey’s fans-turned-haters embrace this bigoted, anti-art view of art. Morrissey, as his celebration of John Keats, W.B. Yeats, and Oscar Wilde in “Cemetry Gates” indicates, cultivates a more refined and less brutal taste. So do his real fans.

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