The Seeker of Good Songs
Well-Known Member
something from 2004 I came across...
http://www.believermag.com/exclusives/?read=article_veltman
"THE PASSION OF THE MORRISSEY AUGUST 2004
The gladioli are in flight. On the stage of the Henry Fonda Theater in Hollywood, a slender man in heavy 1950s style eye-glasses, floral shirt, white jeans and pompadour hairdo is energetically hurling a bunch of gangly blooms into the audience whilst singing something about spending warm summer days indoors writing frightening verse to a buck-toothed girl in Luxembourg. In the auditorium, tough-looking twenty-somethings in cuffed jeans, baseball boots and voluminous quiffs, sing word-perfectly along, their eyes shining as they strain to catch the somersaulting stems like blushing bridesmaids outside a country church. Gradually, the adoration turns into unabashed devotion, as people try to clamber onto the stage. Those that make it past the heavy-set bouncers cling desperately onto their pop idol like lepers begging for a miracle. As the singer up on stage leads the bacchanal of flailing bodies in a rousing chorus of "Hang the DJ! Hang the DJ, Hang the DJ!" the scene resembles something of a cross between a room full of lagered-up soccer hooligans and The Sermon on the Mount.
Displays of unencumbered emotion have been a regular characteristic of pop concert audiences ever since Elvis scuffed his Blue Suede Shoes. Watch virtually any piece of crackly live concert footage of the Beatles and you'll witness at least one young woman behaving like a latter-day, mascara-bedribbled Julian of Norwich — the Medieval mystic who passed out every time she thought she saw Jesus. Scenes of rabid fans clawing the clothes off a pop star or trying to rush the stage are as unremarkable as spotting the words "Radiohead Rules" or "My Bloody Valentine Forever" scrawled in permanent marker on a scruffy schoolbag.
But the aura surrounding Morrissey, vocalist and wordsmith of 1980s British pop group The Smiths, now turned solo artist, is of a wholly (holy) different order. In the wake of the furor surrounding Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ, which film spawned renewed debate about the cultural appropriation of religious icons in pop culture, this aging and comparatively marginal British singer is blurring the lines between what it means to be a pop icon and a religious icon.
Morrissey is hardly a household name. Despite becoming well-known as lead singer of The Smiths, a band that during its shortish lifespan between 1983 and 1987 put out five bestselling albums and 14 hit singles and achieved an ardent following in both the US and the UK, Morrissey has never come close to assuming the Bard-like magnitude of a Bob Dylan or David Bowie.
Yet whatever Morrissey does on stage seems to take on a symbolic life of its own: back in the days of The Smiths, fans waved gladioli or daffodils at concerts like Palm Sunday palms because Morrissey would often be seen on stage with these flowers, and sported drooping pompadours, heavy eye-glasses and even hearing-aids to imitate their idol's esoteric fashion sense.
But beyond the confines of the concert hall, fans took Morrissey's words and ideas even more fervently to heart. As legend has it, The Smiths' 1985 album Meat is Murder, Morrissey's melodramatic treatise against the slaughter of animals, inspired a rise in vegetarianism amongst young people. The band's split in 1987 motivated a number of isolated teenage suicides and in the same year, a crazed fan hijacked a radio station in Denver, Colorado at gun-point, demanding that the DJ play non-stop Smiths songs. Today, some 17 years after the demise of the band, Manchester boasts a museum dedicated to The Smiths, at The Salford Lads Club. Besides posing in front of the building for their 1986 album The Queen Is Dead, The Smiths never had much to do with the Club. Nevertheless, fans have treated the site as if it were a holy shrine ever since.
With this kind of behavior going down in the annals of pop history, it's possible to begin to understand what Andrew O'Hagan meant when he confessed in a recent article in The London Review of Books, "I was a Smiths fan, a position, I'd discover, only slightly less involving than being a Moonie," and what Joe Pernice, lead singer with US-based rock group The Pernice Brothers and author of a novella about The Smiths, Meat is Murder, was talking about when he described his experience of growing up as a Smiths fan in Massachusetts to me over the phone recently: "Fans of The Smiths were nuts. It was a lifestyle, not just a band you liked."
Since The Smiths split up in 1987, the veneration of Morrissey has become even more zealous. From magazine illustrations depicting Morrissey as a be-haloed saint, leading an adoring sheep in magazines, to recent books about the singer and his ex-band with messianic titles like Saint Morrissey and Songs That Saved Your Life, Morrissey's image has been gradually heading heavenwards. As Simon Goddard, author of Songs That Saved Your Life eloquently put it in a recent telephone conversation:
The difference between seeing The Smiths live and Morrissey live can be characterized as the difference between adoration and idolization. When you went to see The Smiths perform live it was like going to a soccer match where you're rooting for the home team. Morrissey was the captain of the team, but people chanted for other members of the group too. Morrissey solo has become more of a religious experience. It's all about what he represents. It's sort of like kissing the papal ring.
Like some kind of divinity, Morrissey's pull has become so powerful that the artist doesn't even have to appear in person to make his presence felt — the "idea" of him is enough and he merely needs an effective vessel to bestow his teachings upon the masses. The scene at the Henry Fonda Theater that night in late February serves to illustrate the point: the crowd prostrated themselves before the singer on stage, but it wasn't even Morrissey they were shaking their gladioli at and singing effusively along with; it was a young Mexican American by the name of José Maldonado, the frontman of Los Angeles-based Morrissey/The Smiths cover band, Sweet and Tender Hooligans, performing at a "Totally 80s Convention."
Cover band: these two little words brings back unsavory memories from several years ago of sitting through a crotch-thrusting performance by London's most famous Chinese Elvis impersonator at a Streatham curry house as my chicken tikka masala congealed. But when the Hooligans stepped on stage at the Henry Fonda Theater, all my misgivings evaporated.
The combination of the music of The Smiths and Morrissey, the gung-ho performance by Maldonado and co. and the ritualistic adoration of the fans, transformed an evening of flaccid nostalgia accentuated by embarrassing 80s pop star look-alike contests, into a chimerical display of infectious music and raging hormones. What amounted to little more than a mass suspension of disbelief felt in some ways creepily like being at a real Morrissey or The Smiths concert. It didn't matter to the fans that they were watching a facsimile; to them the experience was authentic — Morrissey was there in spirit, if not in body. "What Morrissey says is so important to me. I can relate to every word," said 23-year-old Deseree Hernandez, hanging out in her The Smiths T-shirt in the theater lobby after the Hooligans had finished their set. "It doesn't matter to me that it's not the real thing."
Of Morrissey's most arduous fans today, the southwestern-US-based Latino audience which turned up to see The Sweet & Tender Hooligans that night — as they do on many occasions, regardless of whether it's to see the real Morrissey or an imitation — are undoubtedly the most devout. When the crowd chanted "Mexico! Mexico!" at an off-the-beaten-track Morrissey concert in the desert town of Yuma, Arizona a few years ago, trying to get Morrissey to acknowledge that the majority of the audience was Latino, the singer responded by saying: "I'm going to sing a couple more songs then all of you can go back to Mexicali." The convention center auditorium ricocheted with cheers. "Only one white man in the world — and he's not the Pope — can tell a group of Mexicans in the United States to return to Mexico and not only avert death, but be loved for saying so," wrote journalist Gustavo Arellano in an article about Morrissey's Latino fans in the pop culture 'zine LoopdiLoop.
Morrissey's "Latino connection" has been a source of amusement and confusion to journalists who cannot quite see how this skinny, effete Englander with his oblique references to dank Manchester cemeteries could appeal to the traditionally macho, sun-kissed Latino culture. Nevertheless Morrissey dedicated his 1999 ¡Oye Esteban! tour to these fans, once famously told an audience in Orange County "I wish I was born Mexican," and the singer's new hometown is affectionately referred to as "Moz Angeles" by the local Latino contingent. Of the handful I spoke to at the Totally 80s Convention, all had seen Morrissey perform live at least twice, all had visited the annual The Smiths convention held each year in Los Angeles, and two had even met Moz in person. "Everyone we know has been touched by at least one Morrissey song," said Hernandez. "He's been in our lives for many years."
What's behind this Morrissey-Latino love fest? Arellano draws interesting parallels between Morrissey's music and Mexico's ranchera music tradition:
His trembling falsetto brings to mind the rich, sad voice of Pedro Infante, while his effeminate stage presence makes him a UK version of Juan Gabriel. As in ranchera, Morrissey's lyrics rely on ambiguity, powerful imagery and metaphors. Thematically, the idealization of a simpler life and a rejection of all things bourgeois come from a populist impulse common to ranchera...."
http://www.believermag.com/exclusives/?read=article_veltman
"THE PASSION OF THE MORRISSEY AUGUST 2004
The gladioli are in flight. On the stage of the Henry Fonda Theater in Hollywood, a slender man in heavy 1950s style eye-glasses, floral shirt, white jeans and pompadour hairdo is energetically hurling a bunch of gangly blooms into the audience whilst singing something about spending warm summer days indoors writing frightening verse to a buck-toothed girl in Luxembourg. In the auditorium, tough-looking twenty-somethings in cuffed jeans, baseball boots and voluminous quiffs, sing word-perfectly along, their eyes shining as they strain to catch the somersaulting stems like blushing bridesmaids outside a country church. Gradually, the adoration turns into unabashed devotion, as people try to clamber onto the stage. Those that make it past the heavy-set bouncers cling desperately onto their pop idol like lepers begging for a miracle. As the singer up on stage leads the bacchanal of flailing bodies in a rousing chorus of "Hang the DJ! Hang the DJ, Hang the DJ!" the scene resembles something of a cross between a room full of lagered-up soccer hooligans and The Sermon on the Mount.
Displays of unencumbered emotion have been a regular characteristic of pop concert audiences ever since Elvis scuffed his Blue Suede Shoes. Watch virtually any piece of crackly live concert footage of the Beatles and you'll witness at least one young woman behaving like a latter-day, mascara-bedribbled Julian of Norwich — the Medieval mystic who passed out every time she thought she saw Jesus. Scenes of rabid fans clawing the clothes off a pop star or trying to rush the stage are as unremarkable as spotting the words "Radiohead Rules" or "My Bloody Valentine Forever" scrawled in permanent marker on a scruffy schoolbag.
But the aura surrounding Morrissey, vocalist and wordsmith of 1980s British pop group The Smiths, now turned solo artist, is of a wholly (holy) different order. In the wake of the furor surrounding Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ, which film spawned renewed debate about the cultural appropriation of religious icons in pop culture, this aging and comparatively marginal British singer is blurring the lines between what it means to be a pop icon and a religious icon.
Morrissey is hardly a household name. Despite becoming well-known as lead singer of The Smiths, a band that during its shortish lifespan between 1983 and 1987 put out five bestselling albums and 14 hit singles and achieved an ardent following in both the US and the UK, Morrissey has never come close to assuming the Bard-like magnitude of a Bob Dylan or David Bowie.
Yet whatever Morrissey does on stage seems to take on a symbolic life of its own: back in the days of The Smiths, fans waved gladioli or daffodils at concerts like Palm Sunday palms because Morrissey would often be seen on stage with these flowers, and sported drooping pompadours, heavy eye-glasses and even hearing-aids to imitate their idol's esoteric fashion sense.
But beyond the confines of the concert hall, fans took Morrissey's words and ideas even more fervently to heart. As legend has it, The Smiths' 1985 album Meat is Murder, Morrissey's melodramatic treatise against the slaughter of animals, inspired a rise in vegetarianism amongst young people. The band's split in 1987 motivated a number of isolated teenage suicides and in the same year, a crazed fan hijacked a radio station in Denver, Colorado at gun-point, demanding that the DJ play non-stop Smiths songs. Today, some 17 years after the demise of the band, Manchester boasts a museum dedicated to The Smiths, at The Salford Lads Club. Besides posing in front of the building for their 1986 album The Queen Is Dead, The Smiths never had much to do with the Club. Nevertheless, fans have treated the site as if it were a holy shrine ever since.
With this kind of behavior going down in the annals of pop history, it's possible to begin to understand what Andrew O'Hagan meant when he confessed in a recent article in The London Review of Books, "I was a Smiths fan, a position, I'd discover, only slightly less involving than being a Moonie," and what Joe Pernice, lead singer with US-based rock group The Pernice Brothers and author of a novella about The Smiths, Meat is Murder, was talking about when he described his experience of growing up as a Smiths fan in Massachusetts to me over the phone recently: "Fans of The Smiths were nuts. It was a lifestyle, not just a band you liked."
Since The Smiths split up in 1987, the veneration of Morrissey has become even more zealous. From magazine illustrations depicting Morrissey as a be-haloed saint, leading an adoring sheep in magazines, to recent books about the singer and his ex-band with messianic titles like Saint Morrissey and Songs That Saved Your Life, Morrissey's image has been gradually heading heavenwards. As Simon Goddard, author of Songs That Saved Your Life eloquently put it in a recent telephone conversation:
The difference between seeing The Smiths live and Morrissey live can be characterized as the difference between adoration and idolization. When you went to see The Smiths perform live it was like going to a soccer match where you're rooting for the home team. Morrissey was the captain of the team, but people chanted for other members of the group too. Morrissey solo has become more of a religious experience. It's all about what he represents. It's sort of like kissing the papal ring.
Like some kind of divinity, Morrissey's pull has become so powerful that the artist doesn't even have to appear in person to make his presence felt — the "idea" of him is enough and he merely needs an effective vessel to bestow his teachings upon the masses. The scene at the Henry Fonda Theater that night in late February serves to illustrate the point: the crowd prostrated themselves before the singer on stage, but it wasn't even Morrissey they were shaking their gladioli at and singing effusively along with; it was a young Mexican American by the name of José Maldonado, the frontman of Los Angeles-based Morrissey/The Smiths cover band, Sweet and Tender Hooligans, performing at a "Totally 80s Convention."
Cover band: these two little words brings back unsavory memories from several years ago of sitting through a crotch-thrusting performance by London's most famous Chinese Elvis impersonator at a Streatham curry house as my chicken tikka masala congealed. But when the Hooligans stepped on stage at the Henry Fonda Theater, all my misgivings evaporated.
The combination of the music of The Smiths and Morrissey, the gung-ho performance by Maldonado and co. and the ritualistic adoration of the fans, transformed an evening of flaccid nostalgia accentuated by embarrassing 80s pop star look-alike contests, into a chimerical display of infectious music and raging hormones. What amounted to little more than a mass suspension of disbelief felt in some ways creepily like being at a real Morrissey or The Smiths concert. It didn't matter to the fans that they were watching a facsimile; to them the experience was authentic — Morrissey was there in spirit, if not in body. "What Morrissey says is so important to me. I can relate to every word," said 23-year-old Deseree Hernandez, hanging out in her The Smiths T-shirt in the theater lobby after the Hooligans had finished their set. "It doesn't matter to me that it's not the real thing."
Of Morrissey's most arduous fans today, the southwestern-US-based Latino audience which turned up to see The Sweet & Tender Hooligans that night — as they do on many occasions, regardless of whether it's to see the real Morrissey or an imitation — are undoubtedly the most devout. When the crowd chanted "Mexico! Mexico!" at an off-the-beaten-track Morrissey concert in the desert town of Yuma, Arizona a few years ago, trying to get Morrissey to acknowledge that the majority of the audience was Latino, the singer responded by saying: "I'm going to sing a couple more songs then all of you can go back to Mexicali." The convention center auditorium ricocheted with cheers. "Only one white man in the world — and he's not the Pope — can tell a group of Mexicans in the United States to return to Mexico and not only avert death, but be loved for saying so," wrote journalist Gustavo Arellano in an article about Morrissey's Latino fans in the pop culture 'zine LoopdiLoop.
Morrissey's "Latino connection" has been a source of amusement and confusion to journalists who cannot quite see how this skinny, effete Englander with his oblique references to dank Manchester cemeteries could appeal to the traditionally macho, sun-kissed Latino culture. Nevertheless Morrissey dedicated his 1999 ¡Oye Esteban! tour to these fans, once famously told an audience in Orange County "I wish I was born Mexican," and the singer's new hometown is affectionately referred to as "Moz Angeles" by the local Latino contingent. Of the handful I spoke to at the Totally 80s Convention, all had seen Morrissey perform live at least twice, all had visited the annual The Smiths convention held each year in Los Angeles, and two had even met Moz in person. "Everyone we know has been touched by at least one Morrissey song," said Hernandez. "He's been in our lives for many years."
What's behind this Morrissey-Latino love fest? Arellano draws interesting parallels between Morrissey's music and Mexico's ranchera music tradition:
His trembling falsetto brings to mind the rich, sad voice of Pedro Infante, while his effeminate stage presence makes him a UK version of Juan Gabriel. As in ranchera, Morrissey's lyrics rely on ambiguity, powerful imagery and metaphors. Thematically, the idealization of a simpler life and a rejection of all things bourgeois come from a populist impulse common to ranchera...."