Morrissey saved my life tonight. Music was breaking my heart. Remixes. Remasters. Bullshit upon crap built to suck the last few pennies from my already empty pockets, retroactively taxing me for buying albums that were apparently poorly mastered in the first place. Mediocrity. New albums from old favorites that serve as little more than patina on a precious catalog.
Photo: Dave Bullock (eecue)/Wired.com
It started with Depeche Mode, the Jesus of my personal trinity of holy teenage music love. I had heard little bits of their new Sounds of the Universe and was far from in love. And frankly that’s been the norm since 101 and Violator first made me swoon. But I saw mention of a full-album stream on David Gutowski’s wonderful largehearted boy. Click. Listen. Ugh. There’s nothing so bad about the record, but nothing new either. Not a hint of evolution or glimmer of new ideas. Just more of the same and somehow less than before.
So I dive back into my feed reader and find a post about Coachella. Opening I find a picture of Robert Smith leading the current incarnation of the Cure, hair a-tangle and complete with the standard red lipstick. The Cure are, were, and likely always will be one of my favorite bands. And that credit is almost exclusively earned from Disintegration back. But they’re another band quasi frozen at their peak. They’ve worn dresses, gone (and helped define) goth, done Peel sessions and stadium tours — but now its just 1994 but older. And less flattering. Would no one accept Robert Smith without the hair and makeup? I thought that rule applied only to Kiss. And that sound that seemed to defy evolution and shift so quickly from one early album to the next now moves like tar, complete with dinosaurs.
But now the heart of the matter: Morrissey, I love you.
And yes I know, the repeated standard from Moz is that he’s detestable, contemptable even. And those that profess to love him don’t know him. And I certainly don’t know the man. But the myth? I love the myth. How can you not? From the incredible energy bursting from the Smiths to a lifetime refining and redefining that energy, the largesse that is Morrissey is simply undeniable. At every turn he choses scorn over adoration, poking instead of caressing and always seeming to choose brutal honesty when fluff is demanded or evasiveness when a simple answer would suffice. It’s brilliant.
I imagine he’d hate the comparison, but Morrissey is Sinatra. He would be hated and discarded if only he wasn’t loved so fucking much.
This brings me back to Coachella, the RSS post. Next to Robert Smith is a photograph of Morrissey, included here and taken by Dave Bullock. In it Morrissey looks defiant, whipping a microphone chord across the stage with a sneer on his lips. It’s triumphant. And I hear he was a right prick on stage, just as he should be. His latest album Years of Refusal is one of the best of his solo catalog. If anything it brings an increase to that raw energy, a vital sound that’s lacking to most with a career spanning the years his has. And he must know it. it drips from the speakers.
Music brings such hope to me, and tonight was a bleak and hopeless night until I saw a single photograph of the myth that is Moz — the only real survivor from the adoration of my youth.
All these opinions might not ring true to you, but to me they’re very real and true facts. They matter, and they’re important. And the one fact above all else:
Morrisey endures.
