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More Morrissey
The misery-monger sounds more confident than ever on his latest album
by Christopher McQuain
n a world that seems to have less and
less use for nondisposable, larger-
than-life icons, the unusual case of
Morrissey becomes ever more
intriguing (and encouraging). The
former Smiths singer is now in the 24th
year of his singular musical journey and
has just released his eighth solo album,
Ringleader of the Tormentors (Sanctuary
Records), probably his most musically
adventurous and confident record to date.
Morrissey is generally considered
“alternative” by the categorizers, but like
his rejuvenated 2004 album, You Are the
Quarry, Ringleader is a Big Production with an indelibly embed
ded conviction that a pop album can be a work of art. This is
nowhere more apparent than in his choice of producer: Tony
Visconti, who recorded many of Morrisseys beloved 1970s glam
rock masterpieces by the likes of T. Rex and David Bowie, gives
Ringleader a rich, shimmering, decadent sound. On particularly
gorgeous tracks like “Dear God Please Help Me," “Life Is a
Pigsty” and "At Last 1 Am Born,” Visconti guides Morrissey and
his musicians to previously unsealed heights of lush, inspired and
impeccably articulated pop drama-queenery.
Another surprise collaborator is sun-drenched old-world
Rome, where the allegedly misery-mongering former inveterate
Englishman has been living and where Ringleader was composed
and recorded. It’s a decidedly Rome-besotted album, and the jour
ney south is as metaphorical as it is geographical: The Ennio
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Morricone-orchestrated ballad “Dear
God Please Help Me,” Ringleader's
loveliest episode, finds Morrissey wan
dering the Italian capital, his “heart on
a string," tremulously cruising and
being cruised (all involving a conspic
uous “he”—a slightly eyebrow-raising
surprise from a lyricist who usually
keeps his bisexually responsive options
open with gender-neutral pronouns).
Morrisseys chronic suspiciousness
toward romance, love and sex is now
leavened with shreds of hard-won hope.
The album’s centerpiece, “Life Is a
Pigsty,” makes a convincing case for the squalor of human existence,
only to end with a defiantly triumphant litany: “Even now/ln the
final hour/Of my life/l’m falling in love again, again, again, again."
And the last lines of the album-concluding “At Last I Am Bom” are
almost boastful about Morrissey’s carnal rebirth: “I once was a
mess/Of guilt because of the flesh/lt’s remarkable what you can
leam/Once you are bom."
It would be an exaggeration to characterize our legendary
misanthrope as tanned, rested and happy, but Ringleader of the
Tormentors is, in the end, an unexpected but brilliant chronicle of
a famously tender, hypersensitive and critical persona finding a
way to acknowledge life’s inevitable pain while finally deigning to
embrace some of its pleasures. ©
C hristophfr M c Q uain is a Seattle freelance writer.
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IH
Is It Really So Strange? (Strand Home
Video), a documentary just released on DVD
by queer video artist William E. Jones, is—at
least on the surface—about Morrissey’s
intensely passionate Latino fan base in
Southern California. The theretofore very
English singer himself lived in Los Angeles
from 1997 to 2005; several of the interview
subjects talk about visiting (stalking?)
Morrissey at his home, spotting him on the
town, etc. Jones, also an L.A. resident, inter
jects first-person narration about his own Morrissey fandom, slyly
straddling the fence between fan and assayer of fandom.
Jones has earned a name for himself in avant-garde circles with collage
like, quasi-documentary works such as 1997’s Finished (about the suicide of
gay pom star Alain Lebeau) and 1998’s The Fall of Communism as Seen in
Gay Pornography, and his work differs from most conventional documen
taries in that he often uses his ostensible topics to get at an infinitely more
global theme. Accordingly, Is It Really So Strange? is less a document of a
particular scene or cult than an investigation into the implications of
obsessive, literally fanatical dedication to a celebrity, especially when a
significant subset of the fans are oppressed or disenfranchised people. As
Jones cuts to each fan in their turn and they say their piece about what
Morrissey means to them, the singer becomes a more and more remote
figure in the film; it is certainly more about the fans themselves, and even
more so about the meaning of fandom.
Is It Really So Strange? has little to say about Morrissey that we didn’t
already know. But what makes it fascinating, moving and even haunting
viewing is its disorienting yet insightful implication that Morrissey—or any
celebrity distinctive enough to inspire obsessive devotion—could through
no fault of his own somehow be all things to all people. Jones seems to be
showing us that perhaps we all respond to our favorite celebs in the same way
his subjects do, which means setting aside, in a kind of idol-worshipping
myopia, some or all of our critical thinking—our own selves—and seeing in
them just what we want: our own idealized reflection.
-CM
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