[DEBATE] : Morrissey

[Russell Grinker]

Tuesday 4 December 2007

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before

Former Smiths frontman Morrissey is alleged to have made reactionary
comments in an interview for NME. But what’s new about that?

Neil Davenport 

The former Smiths singer Morrissey has threatened the New Musical Express
(NME) and journalist Tim Jonze with a libel suit for allegedly misquoting
Moz in a front-page interview. Apparently, the journalist reported that the
48-year-old singer made hostile remarks about mass immigration into Britain,
saying that the country was ‘unrecognisable’. Jonze was incensed that the
NME toned down the piece to make it PR friendly, while Morrissey’s lawyers
are using this as proof to press for defamation against the NME after the
magazine refused to publish an apology. 
Jonze has hit back on the Guardian’s Comment Is Free site by insisting that
‘every single quote attributed to Morrissey is 100 per cent correct, there
was no provocation at all’ (1). Now, whether it is Morrissey still
blathering on about Little Englander fantasies, or the NME getting upset and
righteous over ‘unacceptable views’, we’ve been down this road many times
before. The struggle to choose between such headlines as ‘Stop Me If You’ve
Heard This One Before’ and ‘Big Mouth Strikes Again’ is as grimly
predictable as Morrissey’s recent albums. 
Although The Smiths were a strikingly original and creatively potent outfit
back in the Eighties, Morrissey’s views were always profoundly reactionary
and conservative. At the time, it was only NME journalists and
impressionable teenagers who believed that Moz’s witterings on animal
‘rights’, ecology, hatred of the modern world and victimhood sensibilities
appeared somehow ‘radical’ or insightful. Such misanthropic drivel was
considered, to use Eighties argot, ‘right on’ by journalists then and now.
It is only on immigration and, by implication race, where Morrissey is
suddenly ‘exposed’ as being a bit backward. 
Morrissey, though, has been on a loop about immigrants for nearly two
decades now. Central to The Smiths iconography was a lament for the decline
of the post-war consensus in Britain. It was ironic that while Morrissey
championed the kitchen sink dramas of the Sixties (A Taste of Honey,
Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, Billy Liar etc) as a forlorn counterpoint to
garish Eighties Britain, originally these dramas bemoaned the changes of
1950s Britain and were already nostalgic for a mythical ‘Old Britain’
themselves.  While many leftish journalists indulged such twaddle, the logic
of this tunnel-visioned, Little England outlook is to start bemoaning
changes brought about by mass immigration, too. And that, of course, is
precisely what Morrissey started to do. 

Leaving aside Moz’s infamous ‘reggae is vile’ jibe from 1985, the first
major controversy was around the track, ‘Bengali In Platforms’, from his
1988 debut solo album Viva Hate. But it was the furore surrounding his
appearance at Finsbury Park supporting ska band Madness, wherein he waved a
Union flag in front of a montage of skinheads, that caused the NME to ask on
its frontpage ‘Flying The Flag or Flirting With Disaster?’ back in August
1992. Unusual at the time, but the debacle also made headlines beyond the
music press. The mainstream media’s engagement with the controversy was a
sign of how ‘anti-racism’ was starting to be used to create new moral codes
in wider society. 
Although the left’s stern ‘acceptable/non-acceptable’ codes in the Eighties
(which often meant referring to people or ideas as ‘ideologically
sound/unsound’) were routinely ridiculed by the Tory tabloid press, by the
early Nineties this kind of thinking was gradually being co-opted to forge a
new conformist etiquette and behaviour code. The year after the
Morrissey/Finsbury Park debacle, the BBC started promoting ‘anti-racism
awareness’ on Radio One and the NME publicly backed the re-launched
Anti-Nazi League and their populist ‘Anti-Racist’ music festivals. 
Since then, the NME has been at the forefront of the new conformism, as they
have revealed during the latest Moz ‘controversy’. ‘We’re really nice
people, we’re committed anti-racists, you know?’ seems to be the NME’s
chest-puffing response to it all. Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but haven’t
pop stars – generally not known to be the brightest bunch – often spouted
ill-informed garbage? Who can forget boy band Blue’s belief that dolphins
were now sadly neglected because of all the ‘fuss’ over 9/11 fatalities? Or,
my particular favourite, female grunge outfit L7, who argued that men go to
war because ‘it’s their way of emulating female menstruation’? And then
there is the long documented flirtation with Nazism that David Bowie,
Throbbing Gristle and Keith Moon would use to generate headlines and record
sales. 
Back in the 1970s, the daft and sometimes dark ideas that pop stars
entertained obviously aroused controversy and anger, but it wasn’t used to
draw lines in the sand and denote who was a ‘worthy’ conformist and who
wasn’t as it is today. By all means journalists should question and
challenge duff opinions, but it shouldn’t be used as moral
self-aggrandisement or, worse, to justify an even more censorious public
climate. What’s surprising is that, with Morrissey’s track record on this
matter, why any journalist would be ‘shocked’ that he equates Britain’s
decline with mass immigration. 
Nevertheless, Morrissey’s response to the NME’s published interview is even
more vile and reprehensible. Calling in the lawyers and the libel laws to
silence the press has always been the rich man’s form of censorship. Far
from being an outspoken maverick, even the hermetically sealed-off Morrissey
probably understands that flirting with racist sentiments is now the
equivalent of championing paedophilia, as he once did in his first set of
music press interviews back in 1982. The difference then is that whereas
music journalists saw through Moz’s posturing as ‘darkly comic theatre’ and
‘grimy rock’n’roll’, today they’d be demanding he’d be jailed for such
comments and put on the Sex Offenders Register. ‘I Know it’s Over (if this
allegation sticks)’, as it were. 
Once, the music press could be replied upon for caustic comments and
Establishment-baiting brio. Today, they’re the harbingers of unthinking,
unblinking conformism. Forget any Morrissey-sponsored panic on immigration.
The censorious climate of public discussion is surely a clear example of
Britain becoming a ‘worse place’. 
Neil Davenport is a writer and politics lecturer based in London. He blogs
at the Midnight Bell. 

 (1) Morrisey, NME and Me, Comment Is Free, 30 November 2007 
reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/4146/