VIVA MOZ

Come summer, Morrissey will have a new album out. ‘World Peace is None of Your Buisness’ will be the singer’s 10^th studio album and his first in five years. The reasons for the long delay in releasing new material are many; health problems, cancelled tours and the lack of label interest to name a few. For the last five years Morrissey has found himself subject to the whims of the modern music industry, whereby true artists are never given a pedestal or a voice and certainly not money. When Morrissey’s new album drops this summer, off the back of a monumentally successful Autobiography, the press will hail it a comeback of magnificent proportions, define it the singers greatest work and Morrissey will instantly become ‘the legend’ in print, no longer ‘the jester’. Morrissey has been in the music business for thirty years now and has endured every possible scrutiny the media can place on an artist, he has been hailed, celebrated, ridiculed and dismissed, yet all that came before means nothing when an artist reaches the big 'three zero'. Now that there is five years between his last record, the robust and utterly fantastic ‘Years of Refusal’ the media will create new context of their own design, which of course has nothing to do with Morrissey himself or his music, but he will be hailed a legend, simply for ‘hanging on’, irrespective of the fact that he has consistently released music of the highest quality and has never come close to retiring/ The tenth Morrissey album will be lauded with acclaim and the singer will be redeemed in the eyes of the media, for redemption he had never sought after nor warranted.

Morrissey is, has and always will be one of the greats, one of the most significant artists in music’s history. The most unique, original, authentic, talented, intelligent, articulate, and real artists to ever fall under the umbrella ‘pop artist’. When all is said and done, and he lays peacefully in the grave, Morrissey’s name will be spoken along side a very select caliber of artist: Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan etc. a true legend. 

Unfortunately, if you so much as dare create meaningful music with a genuine servitude to creating real art, you will be dissected, cross examined and ripped apart by mainstream culture, ridiculed for being too pretentious, too precious, and your intelligence and sincerity will be seen as callousness and unkindness in the face of a dimwit culture, and halfwit pop stars. Morrissey - a pop artist - has had to, for thirty years, share an apparent similarity and kinship, by technicality, with shallow, vapid, moronic, talentless, non-stars. Within that circle, within that charade, Morrissey will always be the odd one out as he is none of those things, yet his love of classic pop music and desire to do nothing but sing has unfortunately, circumstantially fated him with such poor company and therefore such horrific representation in the media. To quote the man himself ‘we do not live in terribly sophisticated times’ and that is being very polite. In the thirty years that Morrissey has been making music, culture has been reduced to the point of liquefaction and intelligence resides only in museums and on gravestones. To speak freely and intelligently in the world of the celebrity lacquered media frenzy we all sift through day in day out, here in the west, is to open yourself for ridicule by those who cannot even partially understand the words you speak.

The media has always been cruel to Morrissey, branded a racist, a liar, truculent, deceiving, and a self-perpetuating miserabalist. He has been branded a threat to national security and pro terrorist. His political views and frank honesty have always ben met with hostility and dismissal. The press has never been his friend, especially in the UK. He was hailed and lauded a genius in the ‘Smiths’ days and his ‘quirks’ and ‘charisma’ were tolerated; yet by the mid-nineties, the British press declared war on Morrissey and decided overnight that he was as vicious as an atom bomb and did everything to silence him through ridicule. For once you have been ridiculed, your opinion holds no merit, and this of course is the procedure the media takes when ones opinion is only that of the truth. Morrissey has never been a controversial artist, he has merely told the truth, unfortunately the truth is very ugly and people don’t like it, so we make this out to be a cute eccentricity, undermined and ridiculed until the opinions (truth) one is discussing becomes indoctrinated to the public as the wrong opinion. Morrissey has only ever yearned for the best in humanity and only ever maintained hope that we are capable of such behaviour. His vegetarianism has been endlessly mocked by the media, a lifestyle exemplified as ‘alternative’ to ‘the norm’ whereby we only shop in ‘Holland and Barratts’ and enjoy only celery and papaya for dinner.  The fact that you must claim an identity as ‘a vegetarian’ to acknowledge you do not have a normal diet, is mocking of its integrity in itself.

The media has vilified Morrissey for most of his career, the genius of his art and the kindness of his soul have always been overlooked. It is not Morrissey that is bitter, but the world around him. The truth is that Morrissey is too intelligent for mainstream culture, for pop music and celebrity, for television and journalists, he would probably find much kinder company in writing poetry and literature and share only the company he chooses, than brush the shoulders of teen non-stars with no light in their eyes. Yet one does not pick his own destiny and from the age of five Morrissey has only ever had one love and that is popular song. So these are the great sacrifices that must be in the quest for true art and in creating music that matters, means something and will live forever.

The black and white filter in which all information is presented in the media is mirrored only by the black and grey print from which it reads. The reductive narratives that the media presents in its quest to reduce all our minds to marmalade remains popular for there is no alternative, Morrissey will be subject to yet more media objectification come summer, and his new album - which undoubtedly and deservedly I’m sure - will be hailed as a masterpiece, and as the singer hits fifty-five we are expected to see some grand significance to it all, that only once you have survived the brutality that is a career in showbiz, can you really create something of value. No, Morrissey has always been fantastic, he has always been light-years ahead of his peers both in talent and brains, and has never, for a single second succumb to the demands of what is deemed acceptable and ordinary, for he is extraordinary, an artist rivaled only by the likes of Elvis Presley, and still to this day, remains peerless and untouchable. In modern times, amidst the opaque broth of banality and triviality that is modern culture, it is important to cling to intelligent art. You should never apologize for being intelligent, thinking with your own mind and striving for something more than what is spoon-fed to you. Morrissey never has, and never will.