I wrote this thing about Morrissey in Esquire. That's nice.
And so, with little fanfare, begins this 54th revolution around an indifferent, dreaded sun for perhaps the man for our times: one Mr. Steven Patrick Morrissey. One of the more naggingly persistent cultural figures bestriding a decades-long run of disposability, the doggedness of the Poet Laureate of Dissatisfaction and Woe probably shouldn't be surprising. The one time and forever frontman of The Smiths has sung our contradictions, our contained multitudes, back to us for near thirty years now, and we do not like what we have seen reflected: our stymied lusts, our mercurial peccadillos, our heroic puniness, but we do not like it in such a way that its offing also pleases us. It's appropriate that his last worthwhile effort, in 2009, was titled Years of Refusal. Decades, perhaps, may have been a more accurate description.
While you'll find all manner of reluctant celebration of this unhappiest of birthdays in the more musical-minded corners of the Internet today, many of them will focus on the songwriter's greatest moments. This seems a misreading of the meaning of the man and his work. When I interviewed him a few months back, I tried to get him to admit to his own experience of necessarily pitiful and obvious humanity, but, forever imprisoned in the character of his own devising, he refused the bait. He was not just another human being, he protested. Beloved musicians, he said, never are, "however much you try to wish that they are.”
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