Dear Morrissey (if I may),
We’ve never met, but since you have decided to make your spat with your 35-years estranged Smiths colleague Johnny Marr public, I am performing this intervention. You have put out a message on your website, very 21st century way to pour salt on a 1987 wound, to ask, really demand in a cease and desist-y way, that Johnny Marr never utter the magic name Morrissey in public ever, ever again. Ever. Drop the mic. “This is not a rant or a hysterical bombast,” you say as convincingly as the narrator from The Tell-Tale Heart. As someone who first learned about the Divine Oscar from you: talk about the love that dare not speak its name!
I’m saying this because there are many of us who love your songs, but are horrified by your political views and affiliations, but who cannot let go of our teenage selves and the succor we found in The Smiths. I remember what I did and who I did it with when I was 15 and was the proud owner of a used vinyl copy of Louder than Bombs and it was my ticket to finding bliss in my indignations. The year before, as you recall, The Smiths released their final album, Strangeways, Here We Come, then broke up before we could hear you play the new songs live, a disappointment I have had to survive all these unforgiving years. I went to an arts high school in Dallas, with a crowd who adored you in a city you surely found to be absolutely vile. The older kids waxed about seeing The Smiths play a place called The Bronco Bowl in 86. It was a one nighter in Dallas where you heard the pins go down after “The Queen is Dead.” I’m sure you never got over it. It might even be the reason The Smiths broke up, and I get it. You probably thought—I am a god in human form. I shouldn’t even be here. I’m a Penguin Classic. I felt a version of that, which is part of why I fell for your music, but you had to be the lead singer in a town with the JFK Assassination Museum, where the only food options were steak on a stick or starvation. (But are you a member of People for the Ethical Treatment of Humans?) I wish I could have found something you would have liked in Dallas, but then I don’t know a place on Planet Earth that would suit you, and, for those of us who still swoon over your songs, we find that adorable.
A girl in my freshman English class was assigned The Odyssey and called it The Morrissey. The Morrissey is not an epic, and I’m not sure if it’s even epic, not in the trials and tribulations sense. It is something we can’t get over, though. It is a wound that never heals, which is why we still love your songs, even as you went on Jimmy Fallon and elsewhere wearing a badge advertising the fringe British political party “For Britain,” which even some racists think is, you know, pretty racist. Anyone out there have a racist uncle you still dearly love? Imagine that racist uncle is Morrissey.
I don’t think any of this has anything to do with why The Smiths have not been inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It’s not just your 80s British peer group—The Cure, Depeche Mode, and so on—that got in, but Bon Jovi got in there. Does anyone really think Bon Jovi contributed more to rock and roll than The Smiths? Who are these people? Well, they obviously exist because here we are. I used to think nostalgia was lame, because nostalgia kept great artists in a jukebox and didn’t let them grow and mature. But now I am nostalgic for a time when I thought this. Moz, I know you are the Lord Mayor of Don’tgiveafuckistan, but I have experienced such, to use a Morrisseyean phrase, infinite sadness, that now I want to go back to that little room on that little bed where I first took you in before I knew other vital information. Kafka wrote of the “fishhooks” that draw children into a musical catch, and I’m still on the hook, even if I should know better. Nostalgia is a narcotic. Our actuarial odds get worse every day, and we want that feeling back, even if it is all an illusion. It’s cloud illusions, I recall. Moz, we have both interviewed Joni Mitchell, and she agreed with both of us about her genius. A friend of mine interviewed you, and he did so when you ran away when he was from Rolling Stone, then got rematched with him when he was from somewhere else.
I was clued into your disappearing act early, when it hurts. I first saw you on some weird show after 2 am when I was 14 and was first introduced to the name Oscar Wilde and the concept that a dashingly handsome and, yes, charming man could possibly choose celibacy. When I got your records, I didn’t know what Rough Trade meant or the implications of the word “Panic.” Pretty goth girls had their theories about if you really were having sex and with what gender and what positions. This must be skeeving you out, but remember, I am here to confront you. You were the President of the UK New York Dolls fan club, and loving Patti and David Johansen was the flip side of hating The Ramones and much else. Those of us who loved you were mopey, hated sports, stayed out of the sun, and found what we were looking for was in our bedrooms. You sang “The Headmaster Ritual,” possibly the best song about being bullied by hired “belligerent ghouls,” and what was true in Manchester rang just as true in Big D and elsewhere. Many of us who fell for you were celibates, too, at least for a brief window, technically and briefly incels, before that was a word. But you had courage. We all loved you, but, if your celibacy story is for real, you didn’t have to deal with, you know, a human.
If I seem a little strange, well that’s because I am. Your words, Steven Patrick. You brought us together, and we weren’t necessarily good to each other, but that’s not your problem. Your problem is that there is this place called The Internet where you are haunted by your past. Well, welcome to the rest of us. But here it gets dark. You have revealed that you are being treated for cancer. Cancer! And you offered these comforting words: "They have scraped cancerous tissue four times already, but whatever. If I die, then I die. And if I don't, then I don't. Right now, I feel good. I am aware that in some of my recent photos I look somewhat unhealthy, but that's what illness can do. I'm not going to worry about that, I'll rest when I'm dead." You are not going to worry about how you look? You? Nancy Sinatra’s one-time roommate? I hope you are not cat-less in this time and that you are brooding to it, and that the sound of it is glorious.
Honestly, Morrissey—and at that point, I think we both may—you are a world-famous rock god and I am not, but when I hear those songs, I feel we share a common space where only the cleverest get to go on the cemetery games, and only one of us can win. I wish I could explain why Keats, Yeats, and Wilde are not on separate sides, and if I could do that, maybe I could mind the gap between you and the great Johnny Marr. “Life is very long when you’re lonely,” you told us when you were young, and I bet you haven’t changed your mind. We all feel that sometimes. We put up with you, because you bring us back to where we were when we first heard “I am the son and the heir to a shyness that it criminally vulgar,” or “Learn to love me, assemble the ways,” or, “Sometimes I’d feel more fulfilled/ Making Christmas cards with the mentally ill,” and we try to get it right, this time, and we cling to ourselves and each other while we’re doing it. Fuck the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but to be truly among the poets and inhabit that space—the language, the imagination, the power to go deeper than that 15-year-old bed, all the way to the numinous and sublime, where you would surely find reason to complain because that’s your art and that’s your deal—that’s your bloody Hall of Fame. “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at.” Your man Wilde said that. We’re a long way from there, but we also don’t have to be sent to the dock for “the love that dare not speak its name.” Still, we are in desperate times, Steven Patrick. A lyricist who doesn’t play an instrument is just giving a mostly empty poetry reading without the right riffs. Has anyone outdone Marr’s “How Soon Is Now” and countless others? Of course not. You’ll be hiring Marr imitators for the rest of your performing career. If the real Marr were to come to you and grovel and beg and humiliate yourself at your throne, well, I have an idea how that would end up. Try and work things out at a pub and walk out with an empty sack. We live in a word where the closest thing to The Smiths is a law firm. You made much beauty and truth, and perhaps we never deserved it. You can plant a flag on the map with Utopia on it while the rest of us descend into darkness. I won’t tell, but I think that might have been a smile.
Oh, get up, Steven Patrick, we love you,
David
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