That example proves my point all the more that he doesn't have perfect grammar, and he's well aware of it. His fans apparently aren't.
... My original argument is that people aren't acknowledging that there are mistakes.
Who isn't acknowledging the mistakes? I hear people calling Morrissey a literary genius but that isn't the same thing as saying he uses perfect grammar. If we acknowledge that Morrissey's mistakes are usually ironic, and he acknowledges the same, aren't we all in agreement? Why should anyone go out of his way to point out mistakes we're all aware of?
I believe grammar is a crucially important matter in ways that go beyond simple classroom proficiency. At the same time, you have to give artists some latitude. In Morrissey's case, would you say the overall effect of his music and personality is to make people love words, grammar, and literature more or less than they already do? The number of people who picked up Keats and Wilde after listening to "Cemetry Gates" is much, much greater than the number of people who were led astray by the bad spelling mistake in the title. The impression we all have of his stunning literary brilliance, and the way he has made literature so much more attractive to so many of his fans, prove that in some cases grammar is less important than the total effect.
There was a great
New Yorker article a few months back about famous writers and the shocking mistakes they made in the rough manuscripts of their books. Authors like Eliot, Joyce and Orwell were shown to have made astonishing errors over and over again. Tried to find it online but couldn't. If someone else has a link, it would be welcome in this thread.
I did run across this piece by Louis Menand, a review of "Eats, Shoots & Leaves". It contains a paragraph which is relevant here:
"One of the most mysterious of writing’s immaterial properties is what people call “voice.” Editors sometimes refer to it, in a phrase that underscores the paradox at the heart of the idea, as “the voice on the page.” Prose can show many virtues, including originality, without having a voice. It may avoid cliché, radiate conviction, be grammatically so clean that your grandmother could eat off it. But none of this has anything to do with this elusive entity the “voice.” There are probably all kinds of literary sins that prevent a piece of writing from having a voice, but there seems to be no guaranteed technique for creating one. Grammatical correctness doesn’t insure it. Calculated incorrectness doesn’t, either. Ingenuity, wit, sarcasm, euphony, frequent outbreaks of the first-person singular—any of these can enliven prose without giving it a voice. You can set the stage as elaborately as you like, but either the phantom appears or it doesn’t."
If the phantom appears, don't worry about the rest. (And it does-- what is Morrissey if not The Voice?) I think most Morrissey fans understand this, whether or not they make a point of acknowledging it.
