Morrissey : This Charming Man?

 

Morrissey let me down. After finding the former Smiths singer upon his re-entry into the alternative rock world in the early noughties and then indulging my teenage romantic rebellion in all the revelry and reeling around the fountains that The Smiths offered, it soon became apparent to me that Morrissey was the rock star idol I had always dreamed of. Growing up in a working-class family that championed literacy and music above all else, picking Moz as my cultural North Star was a no brainer. Sadly, as time has passed and I’ve grown up in a world that feels far scarier than ever before, it’s hard to ignore the uncomfortable truth about Stephen Patrick Morrissey.
 
My story is not a unique one. Whether it was in the early 1980s when Morrissey joined his Iggy-influenced jangle-pop counterpart Johnny Marr to create The Smiths or you caught wind of the poetic rock and roll pomp of the band after they’d already broken up — the band had a habit of changing everything about you after only a few listens. Teenagers, especially, are drawn to the band like mopey moths to an all too enticing flame of flowery language, intellectual snobbery and disdainful danceability. The draw of The Smiths may have been spread across these ideals, championing a literacy within pop music that had never been so desperately needed, but Morrissey’s charisma spearheaded it.
 
Morrissey has never been a shy or retiring figure. Even from his teenage years, a time he spent reading and writing, slowly walking around the dark and gloomy streets of Manchester, bored by modernity and desperately craving stardom, Morrissey knew that his opinions could get him attention. He would share them in letters and, when given the opportunity by NME, he would use them in reviews of otherwise acclaimed artists. For Morrissey, almost everything, apart from New York Dolls, was below par.
 
It was a proposition that connected with swathes of a generation in the early eighties. The cultural landscape at the time was blighted by commercialism and a sincere lack of care or creativity. The cocky eighties were a decade that only saw the value in cold hard cash. It turned the music world from a crucible of artistic integrity into a smorgasbord of poorly-produced candied pop. Morrissey and The Smiths arrived with authenticity for their work that, only a year after their inception, in 1984, The Smiths were becoming a nationally recognised pop band. In fact, they were one of the biggest bands on the planet. Having already been crowned the kings of the indie scene, the creative pair of Morrissey and Marr were still set on conquering the world. While some would go to war, The Smiths would do it by providing a genuine alternative to the music scene.
 
Morrissey used his lyrics and his looks to provide that alternative. Lyrically, he represented one of the most sincere and sought after voices around. Championing the downtrodden, he was sincerely anti-capitalist and a bonafide animal rights activist, providing a voice for those who needed it most. He was authoritatively anti-monarchy, ensuring that the machismo of rock was given a thorough bashing with his bouquet whenever possible and delivering a safe space for a generation of disaffected teens. It saw Morrissey become an idol across the board as one of the most subversive rock stars around. Little did we know that, some years later, this predilection for controversy would change with the times and cast Moz as music’s answer to Tucker Carlson.
 
There’s no doubt that in the early days, Morrissey showed a nationalistic tendency that seemed innocent enough. After all, artists from The Beatles and the rest of the ‘British invasion’ all the way up to Sex Pistols have claimed their country and apparel for their in one way or another. It would continue into the nineties, with Noel and Liam Gallagher also claiming the Union Jack as part of their ensemble. But for Morrissey, things started to take a more serious turn.
 
Around the same time as Britpop exploded, Morrissey began getting pictures taken draped in the British flag; he also began making disparaging remarks about immigration. Hell, he even wrote a song called ‘The National Front Disco’. But while Morrissey’s views always gained column inches, as his music waned and the singer’s original fandom began to find themselves in bank manager positions, he began to find his place in the press less and less often. Years later, he made a big return in 2004 with You Are The Quarry, his first new album in seven years. It was about this time, at around 15 years old, that I would become enchanted with Morrissey.
 
I pawed over his new record, found particular favour in the somewhat strangely placed ‘Irish Blood English Heart’, and began to dive deep into The Smiths rich tapestry of indie-pop. It would sate me in the exact same way as it had for generations before me. Morrissey was not only a singer, a writer of clever and morose lyrics or simply a rock star, Moz was the embodiment of a romantic dream that England seemed incapable of genuine producing. Time passed, the indie explosion hit in a big way and as nu-rave arrived with a Day-Glo sexiness that sitting in cemeteries didn’t produce. I moved on.
 
That allowed the furore of Morrissey’s comments to largely pass me by. After all, smartphones were still in their infancy, and people’s reliance on social media had only just begun to take root. It was straightforward to ignore the ramblings of an ageing rock star, such as his 2007 conversation with NME journalist Tim Jonze: “Britain’s a terribly negative place,” he said. “And it hammers people down, and it pulls you back, and it prevents you. Also, with the issue of immigration, it’s very difficult because, although I don’t have anything against people from other countries, the higher the influx into England, the more the British identity disappears. So the price is enormous. If you travel to Germany, it’s still absolutely Germany. If you travel to Sweden, it still has a Swedish identity. But travel to England, and you have no idea where you are.” Comments like this could go by without so much as a second glance. These days, it isn’t so easy to keep things quiet.
 
Over recent years, the volume of Morrissey’s voice has become an ever-increasing one. Having made some seriously disgusting remarks about Anthony Rapp, the accuser of Kevin Spacey: “One wonders if the boy did not know what would happen,” said Morrissey, “When you are in somebody’s bedroom, you have to be aware of where that can lead.” Every disparaging comment made by Morrissey is now picked up like the cheap thrill it is and shared across the globe in seconds.
 
When it comes to different races or nationalities, Morrissey can get a little more vicious. He labelled Chinese people a “sub-species” because of their animal rights policies; he said he couldn’t understand how the mayor of London Sadiq Khan spoke, saying, “Even Tesco wouldn’t employ Diane Abbott,” about the Cambridge-educated former shadow home secretary. He also supported the far right-wing political party For Britain (largely because they were determined to remove Halal killings) and said the way the press treated Tommy Robinson (a known racist political figure) was too harsh. It all mounts up.
 
However, one of his worst moments came in 2019 when, after Stormzy provided a generation-defining performance at Glastonbury, Morrissey posted a video claiming that the British institution promoted multiculturalism over white culture. Posting a video titled ‘Nothing But Blue Skies For Stormzy … the gallows for Morrissey’ on Morrissey Central. The clip showed headlines of Stormzy glorious performance contrasting with headlines about Morrissey’s support of For Britain. It has seen the singer labelled as a racist by his detractors.
 

  
Morrissey has made a number of controversial comments in recent years. (Credit: Alexander Film)
A swing to the right politically is somewhat expected as the years roll by, but there are other incidents to consider. In 1986, the singer told Mojo that there was a “black pop conspiracy” which was keeping The Smiths out of the charts, labelling reggae as “the most racist music in the entire world” and that he “detests […] black modern music”. In 1992 he caused Cornershop to turn their back on him for his use of the Union Jack in provoking a skinhead crowd into vicious remarks. When the NME wrote a story about the moment, he refused to speak to them for 12 years — a trick that the singer often pulls off when the press paint him in an unfavourable light. He even took shots at The Simpsons this year for alluding to his moral character. But in the last few years, things have gotten far worse.
 
It’s a view that has left many of his supporters in complete limbo. The man who had given them safe refuge from the cold and careless commercial world was now keen to pull up the drawbridge and start firing out fearsome remarks like a dragon in their turret, happy to cause damage and make dollars whenever he can. The uncomfortable truth about Morrissey is that he has quickly become everything he stood against and let us all down in the process. Perhaps what is even more uncomfortable is that he isn’t alone.
 
Swathes of the same generations who moved to liberate women, who fought for sexual freedom, championed the rights of refugees, and LGBT people are now succumbing to the easy contrarianism of celebrities like Tucker Carlson, Piers Morgan and, yes, you guessed it, Morrissey. Sadly, after his recent album releases, it has become abundantly clear that the only way Morrissey can continue to remain relevant is to keep making these remarks, firing them out into the ether, unconcerned with the damage they may cause and retreating to his masturbatory echo chamber of fans claiming innocence whenever things get a little too hairy.
 
For me and many other fans of the singer’s band and his solo work, it can be incredibly difficult to align my own values with that of a former idol. The singer represented such a pivotal moment in my life; he offered so much connection in one of the loneliest periods of my teenage years that it can be easy to get offended by the evidence noted above. It can feel like an attack on one’s own character to have your teen idol be torn down. But really, we should thank Morrissey for making us feel this way.
 
It is only through his left-wing values in the eighties that we can note just how screwed up his opinions in the 21st century are.
 
The uncomfortable truth about Morrissey. By  Jack Whatley. Far Out Magazine, May 22, 2021.

 

 

1.       Commonplace
 
I first  saw the object  in someone else’s hands. She was a teenager at Vallco, the most comprehensive shopping mall in the Silicon Valley. This was 1986 or so, when I was not yet teenaged myself. I watched her pull the twelve-­inch square out of her Rainbow Records bag. Roughly half the plane, though it seemed like more, was occupied by one man’s face. Even in severe close-­up, cropping out cues like hairstyle or shirt collar, he had the look of a chap from decades before—from back when the world was safe, watched over by strong-­jawed fathers.
 
The man conveyed a respectable anonymity. (Much later I’d learn that he was Richard Bradford, an American actor known for his role as a private eye on the British TV series Man in a Suitcase.) His angle is one of reverence, forty-­five faithful degrees. He could have been a priest, or Joan of Arc in the silent film. He could have been on his knees about to pray—or give head. Maybe he was just filled with ennui. In front of him, electric blue letters, italicized and sideways, spelled out “SMITHS.”
 
The ascetic design seemed far more sophisticated than what I’d hitherto known. I’d started out buying records by Duran Duran and the Go-Go’s, bands with recursive names and album artwork crowded with ancient palimpsests and party bunting. But here a process of extraction had occurred, and what was left was stripped so bare it was almost embarrassing to see. The cover also depicted a specific kind of manhood—generic, taciturn, self-­contained. In this man’s presence, I’d be clumsy, unintentionally speak too loudly. The stoic became an object of desire. Though the cover did not state the name of the single, “Panic,” it elicited in me that febrile state of being.
 
By thirteen, I’d become devoted to the band. In the suburbs of northern California, I felt adrift. The sunshine and manicured lawns that surrounded me could not be my natural habitat; I belonged somewhere more historical, and gloomier. I found my place through the Smiths. The band, a product of post-­industrialism, formed in 1982 in Manchester, England, where, under Margaret Thatcher, manufacturing was in decline and unemployment on the rise. Fronted by the beguilingly maudlin, lizardy, weird-­sexy lead singer Morrissey, the Smiths had little truck with the New Wave flourishes—teased hair, pirate blouses—of acts like Dead or Alive and Adam Ant; instead, their look was more akin to a style dubbed “hard times” in the September 1982 issue of The Face—distressed, rockabilly-­tinged, Dust Bowl-ish, evincing downbeat economic realities.
 
Morrissey, born in 1959 to Irish immigrants in a Lancashire town outside Manchester, came to embody a caustic and erudite distillation of northern English working-­class sensibilities. His lyrics, wrapped around Johnny Marr’s distinctively jangly guitar lines, tackled economic disparity (“England is mine, it owes me a living”), and his public comments cut straight to the mendacity of powerful politicians.
 
Morrissey constructed himself as an unlikely bard of the common people. In place of Thatcher or the queen, his national treasures were the saturnine playwright Shelagh Delaney and the bouffanted Viv Nicholson, who flamboyantly squandered the small fortune her husband won gambling. Morrissey’s spotlighting of working-­class figures could be vital and productive. But he tended to fix his gaze on a certain point in history, some time in the era of his youth. He made icons of a photogenic few while dismissing the rest as hoi polloi. “Birds abstain from song in postwar industrial Manchester, where the 1960s will not swing, and where the locals are the opposite of worldly,” he wrote in his autobiography. Rendering a subtly camp vernacular from this provincialism, Morrissey aestheticized a partial, and mostly whitewashed, image of the working class. I was yet to grasp all this consciously: I came into an aesthetic the way young people do, in a conundrum of longing and envy.
 
     2. Shirtlifter
 
I was compelled, too, by the post-­Warhol sameness and replication of Morrissey’s art direction. The Smiths’ cover artwork comprised a procession of faces: when they weren’t brash working-­class women, they were statuesque white men in banal clothing. It was a homo that was distanced from the sexual. “I hate this ‘festive faggot’ thing,” Morrissey proclaimed of gay culture in 1984. People said he was celibate, which made him attractively hard to get. He was a pinup for the closet, expert in imperious denial: “I’m not embarrassed about the word ‘gay,’ but it’s not in the least bit relevant. I’m beyond that frankly,” he said in an interview in 1985. (Weirdly, few seemed to talk about the significance of a sexually abstinent pop star rising to fame at the time of the spread of AIDS.)
 
The band’s sparkling second single, “This Charming Man,” tells of a lad who gets into the car of a flirtatious gentleman. The song was as chaste and codified as Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax” (released a week earlier) was smutty and overt. Words like charming and handsome gleamed like polished antiques; the syntax of hillside desolate was archaic. Even when Morrissey’s lyrics were forthright, as in the song “Miserable Lie,” the sex remained awkward: “I know that windswept, mystical air / It means: I’d like to see your underwear.” This was reassuring to someone like me, as desperate to be corrupted as I was terrified by penetration. We Smiths fans kept our undies on.

 
In place of copulation, the Smiths extolled stalking, hesitation, repulsion, disavowal. This provided me with a model for deflection: Instead of being gay, I could be what the critic Richard Dyer identifies as “the sad young man”—as Dyer points out, generally meaning “sad young white man”—a paradoxically impermanent archetype in literature, “moving between normal and queer worlds, always caught at the moment of exploration and discovery.”
 
I was enthralled by an older Smiths fan named Aaron. He worked the lightboard at the theater where I ushered. He had a serious, sensuous face, with hair lying close to his scalp in golden waves. He passed close by me in the lobby once, wearing a necktie as a belt, its length dangling along his thigh. I was deeply impressed. Not long after that, Aaron shot himself in the head. It was said he did so in his bedroom beneath a giant poster for the Smiths’ single “Shoplifters of the World Unite.” I fought against imagining his shattered brains on the wall.
 
A lot of kids kill themselves in the aspirational county where I was raised. But Aaron’s suicide seemed to me specifically homosexual. Only recently did I learn that shirtlifter was once a British slur for gay men; the phrase “Shoplifters of the World Unite” may be Morrissey’s play on words. I can’t imagine that Aaron would have been any more alert to this reference than I was; we had no way of learning about that kind of history. We had only our intuition about the atmosphere around such codes.
 
 
      3. The sun and the air
 
After moving to London in my thirties, I rediscovered that “Panic” twelve-­inch in a basement record shop. I purchased it, finally, and marveled that the dour cover had captured the attention of my very young self. I then set out to write a memoir about growing up out of place—a Smiths fan in the California suburbs. I titled the manuscript “The Sun and the Air”—a mondegreen of “the son and the heir” from the Smiths song “How Soon Is Now.” My homophonic misapprehension goes some way toward demonstrating how I construed in the band something elemental, transcendent. The actual verse is, “I am the son / And the heir / Of nothing in particular,” a culturally specific reference to bloodlines, to the lack of title or entitlement. But I had taken Morrissey’s post-­industrial landscape of iron bridges and grim side streets as poetic invention and the spiritual home for my own awkward puberty.
 
In Saint Morrissey: A Portrait of This Charming Man by an Alarming Fan (2003), the critic Mark Simpson coined the portmanteau melanalgia (combining melancholy with nostalgia) to describe how Morrissey’s lyrics pine for the England of a gritty yet spectral past. To Simpson, who actually grew up in England, melanalgia meant wearing secondhand clothes and checking foxed books out of the library, pointedly reacting against the slick 1980s status quo. To the sect of American teens to which I belonged, it meant identifying ourselves as alternative. The term wasn’t futuristic or utopian; instead, we donned makeshift signifiers of authenticity from eras past. At Savers, a sprawling thrift store, I sought out the hand-­me-­downs of strangers. I particularly loved a scratchy green cardigan the hue of an artificial Christmas tree. We traded optimistic, aggressive Americana (cheerleading, drinking from kegs, weight machines, jeeps) for the chalky terroir of old England. Though I had near-­perfect vision, I was always looking out for a pair of bulky spectacles like the ones Brits got for free from the National Health Service. Morrissey wore a pair like that. He adorned himself in meretricious stigmas such as Band-­Aids and hearing aids to accentuate his alluring vulnerability. Like him, we wanted to look wounded.

 
Morrissey emboldened my sense of disaffection through songs like “What Difference Does it Make?” and humored my persecution complex in songs like “Unloveable.” I responded to his historicized English landscape because I saw myself in it—a romantically anemic, damp, pitiable, somehow justified version of myself. I wanted to be, as the press called Morrissey, “pale and interesting.”
 
 
     4. Common name
 
When fans talk about the Smiths, they talk about themselves. They testify that Morrissey’s lyrics seemed to speak just to me. I knew as much but remained convinced that my own elision of fandom and autobiography was somehow idiosyncratic enough to merit pursuing at book length. I got down tens of thousands of yearning, impetuous words. What I didn’t grasp was that a meaningful study of my connection to the band would require me to expose a rupture.
 
As a boy, I had been told that Smith was the most common name. I saw commonness as an honor. I envied every Smith I knew, all of them blonds; I failed to note the many Smiths of color. In a 1984 interview on Good Morning Britain, Morrissey said of the band name: “It really had to be as basic as humanly possible.… It’s the most popular name in the universe, nearly…” The host interjected: “Outside of a couple of Chinese ones, which wouldn’t have gone down too well in this market.” Morrissey demurred with a grimace. For my part, I tried to take consolation when my father informed me that Lin was a Mandarin equivalent of Smith—a ubiquitous name in China, meaning “forest.” But it did not have the trustworthiness of the Old English patronym, as derived from blacksmith—a reliable, hardworking appellation.
 
In my inchoate memoir, I fixated on my compulsion to blend in, be undetectable. I was the son of a Chinese immigrant writing about the urge to achieve anonymity through manifesting an essential Englishness. I invoked Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: “To go unnoticed is by no means easy. To be a stranger, even to one’s doorman or neighbours.… This requires much asceticism, much sobriety, much creative involution: an English elegance, an English fabric, blend in with the walls, eliminate the too-­perceived, the too-­much-­to-­be-­perceived.” My proclivity for white Englishness wasn’t totally extrinsic—I’m of Anglo matrilineage. In Morrissey (and in his stand-­in on the cover of “Panic,” or in his other heroes/surrogates, like James Dean and Little Joe from Warhol’s Factory), I sought compensation for what I took to be the disapproval of white males in my extended family. I latched onto Morrissey’s perpetual ambivalence. I didn’t have to impress Morrissey; I could imagine his affection as a remote possibility. Morrissey loves you, we all love you, a friend wrote in my yearbook. (The icon was ours to ventriloquize like that.) Yet I wasn’t obsessed with Morrissey in order to feel seen but because he looked the other way.
 
In 1991, my junior year in high school, Morrissey, by then a solo artist, released the song “Asian Rut,” about three white lads beating a druggy, vengeful Asian boy. The narrative was ostensibly a nuanced condemnation of racial conflict, but it was told in a manner at once fetishistic and phlegmatic. My Asian American friends and I giggled uncomfortably over the title. We understood that in Britain, Asian referred to the subcontinent, to Pakistan and Bangladesh; our ancestors were from China and Korea. Still, it felt personal. We detected a vague chauvinism cast over Morrissey’s perspective, as in his 1988 song “Bengali in Platforms,” with its vexing line “Life is hard enough when you belong here.” I felt seen, but in a creepy way, as in sussed out.
 
But Smiths fandom proved hard to outgrow. After moving to New York City, Ben, my Korean American friend, magnetic and as “out” as could be in high school, began to cohost a night inspired by the band at a club called Sway. The weekly event had no name, so people referred to it however they wanted, keeping its image low-­key and cool. Soon enough “It began to draw crowds, first of downtown scene-­making types, later of celebrities.” That line was from Ben’s 2017 obituary in The New York Times, headlined “Death of a Downtown Icon” to chime with the Smiths song “Death of a Disco Dancer.” At his funeral, a gospel choir performed another, “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,” and those words were illuminated in LED.
 
When we were in our twenties, Ben regaled us with the tale of spotting Morrissey at a restaurant in Los Angeles. He’d been in the presence of big papa, as he put it. Or would he have spelled it like the Notorious B.I.G.: “Big Poppa”? Either way, it put in mind the Indian American girl at the high school next to ours who legally changed her surname to Morrissey at sixteen. This idol worship seemed tongue in cheek and yet obviously committed and strangely devoid of any introspection about why we all yearned for a grumpy white daddy. Maybe on some level we thought our purchase on Morrissey and his doppelgangers—the ordinary aesthetic, classic grooming tics, regular fit jeans—was empowering. There was nobody to enlighten us as to how ordinary, classic, and regular, like neutral, had been constructed by a culture dominated by whiteness. What’s more, alternative may have been just a different shade: even whiter.
 
 
   5. Big Papa
 
I figured Ben’s funny, slightly icky nickname for Morrissey had been spontaneously put, a one-­off. Recently, my brother-­in-­law Euan was strolling in a park in Los Angeles when a Chicano man approached, calling “Hey, big papa!” and offering him a protracted handshake. At some point, Euan realized he was being mistaken for Morrissey.
 
By now, it’s well known that the singer has a lot of Latinx fans. In a 2017 TEDx Talk, Gabriel Avalos, an earnest Mexican American teenager, wearing a blazer over his Smiths T-­shirt, almost tripping as he walks onto the stage, advances the theory that while artists typically define the fans, in this case the fans have redefined the artist. Other devotees wear T-­shirts that transpose Morrissey’s song “Irish Blood, English Heart” to “Mexican Blood, American Heart.” The symbol riffs on Mexico’s coat of arms, adding an American bald eagle to the Mexican golden eagle devouring a rattlesnake while perched on a prickly pear cactus.
 
Morrissey has professed his fondness for Mexico, donned a Chivas jersey, and written a song called “Mexico” to lambast inequality across the border: “If you’re rich and you’re white / You think you’re so right / I just don’t see why this should be so.” Writing in The Guardian, Raf Noboa y Rivera describes a shared “sense of estrangement and longing” that links the lyrics of Morrissey’s ballads and those of Ranchera, a northern Mexican folk-­music tradition. “My family has myriad tales of living in a golden Mexico during the 1940s and 1950s,” he writes. “Those stories helped foster a deep-­seated melancholy within me about where I truly belong. Not quite American; not wholly Latino, living in all the spaces in between.”
 

The etymology of the word nostalgia combines Greek nostos (a return to home or native land) with algos (pain or suffering). It was once a medical term for homesickness, considered to be a physical disease. The historian David Lowenthal explains that by the seventeenth century, immigrants who had languished or perished were considered to have been enfeebled by dislocation from their homeland; bodies that succumbed to meningitis or tuberculosis or malnutrition were said to be nostalgic. “Today,” the critic Carol Mavor wrote in 2007, “nostalgia is a disease of longing, sociocultural and not medical.”
 
That year, Morrissey lamented the impact of immigration on his homeland: “England is a memory now,” he said. Curry and reggae had come to be considered national heritage, evidence of a pluralistic society. I had my own part in spoiling the English identity, I guess: I relocated there a few months before he made that comment. Morrissey himself had done the reverse, moving to Los Angeles in 1995. “The England that I have loved, and I have sung about and whose death I have sung about, I felt had finally slipped away,” he said about his expatriation. With that statement, he laid bare how he—the son of immigrants—authored his own England, a willful confabulation. Even in his most miserable depictions of Britain, Morrissey helped mythologize it as a place to be cherished as waves of foreigners erode it. Long before he left, Morrissey dwelled in the old country.
 
 
     6. Apologist
 
Morrissey is not a racist. So stated, with whatever amount of sincerity, the editors of NME in a 2012 apology after Morrissey sued the magazine for suggesting otherwise. Then in 2019, the singer proclaimed the word racist meaningless. “If you call someone racist in modern Britain you are telling them you have run out of words,” he said. “You are shutting the debate down and running off. The word is meaningless now. Everyone ultimately prefers their own race—does this make everyone racist?”
 
As I toiled over my prose about being his fan, Morrissey would periodically pass remarks like that. He spoke of how the Chinese could be a “subspecies,” considering their record on animal welfare, and how London has been debased by a British Pakistani mayor who “cannot talk properly.” On late-­night TV, Morrissey wore the badge of a far-­right U.K. political party whose leader has focused on quashing Muslim immigration. I tried to take his outbursts in stride, to fix my narrative in the past, as if the past is fixed. But revisiting his lyrics, I began to find them more vituperative, less empathetic than I’d recalled. A song’s narrator would be woefully misunderstood, but that was because he was surrounded by the dim-­witted and distinctly othered: women buck-­toothed and monstrous; gay pederasts; Bengalis who don’t belong. Whereas I’d once positioned the singer in a coalition of outcasts, I began to see him as sneering at the rest.
 
In his essay “The White to Be Angry,” the critic José Esteban Muñoz revisits the lyrics of X, his favorite band as a teenager. Their anthemic song “Los Angeles” describes a resident of the city who finds herself hating Blacks, Jews, Mexicans, and gays. It’s an allegory about white flight, but listeners may suspect the message is as collusive as critical. Muñoz, a Cuban American, writes:
 
           ‘Though queerness was already a powerful polarity in my life, and the hissing pronunciation of “Mexican” that the song produced felt very much like the epithet “spic,” with which I had a great deal of experience, I somehow found a way to resist these identifications. The luxury of hindsight lets me understand that I needed X and the possibility of subculture it promised at that moment to withstand the identity-­eroding effects of normativity. I was able to enact a certain misrecognition that let me imagine myself as something other than queer or racialized. But such a misrecognition demands a certain toll…to find self within the dominant public sphere, we need to deny self.’
 
Self-­denial is a tricky position from which to write memoir. Ultimately, I was relieved to abandon “The Sun and the Air.” You’d have been brought onto the radio, a friend laughed, and introduced as a Morrissey apologist.
 
 
     7.  Weirdos and Misfits
 
In early 2020, Dominic Cummings—then chief special adviser to Prime Minister Boris Johnson and architect of the victorious Brexit campaign—posted a job recruitment notice for “weirdos and misfits with odd skills.” This jargon, and the jobseekers it attracted, came under scrutiny after one new hire was forced to resign; comments he’d made in support of eugenics had surfaced. The ­“weirdos and misfits” line struck me as in accord with the way alternative was now being bandied about—as in alt-­right, or alternative facts.
 
In my youth, “alternative” connoted, or so I thought, not only a position on the social margins, but the open-­border policy there. At some point, the word flipped to mean angry white people with abandonment issues, the far-­right fringe. I’m forced to consider that the subculture I’d participated in, by centering the narrative of wounded white men, might have laid foundations for this consequential turn. Looking back, what was alternative without bitterness, pasty complexions, hatred of the contemporary, feelings of ostracization, moping? The alternative scene was basically angry white people with abandonment issues. Morrissey’s England was depressing yet glorious, an island in the doldrums, yet halcyon, white—the very place members of today’s alt-­right want to paddle back to.

 
Mid-­ to late-­period Morrissey, paunchy, remote-­eyed, spouts off a rose-­tinted jeremiad about the loss of identity. He’s pretty zeitgeisty that way. Just recently a poll showed that nearly a third of England’s adult residents, hot off leaving the European Union, would also vote in favor of independence from the United Kingdom, despite London being the center of power and seat of government. The academic Alex Niven responded in The Guardian: “One of the major problems with contemporary debates about ‘Englishness’ is that England does not really exist as either a coherent or a concrete political reality.” Niven cites the historian Benedict Anderson’s concept of “imagined communities,” which are drummed up to foster a sense of shared belonging. “England,” Niven proposes, being scarce of political institutions that differentiate it from Britain as a whole, “can mean pretty much whatever people want it to mean.” England, to amend Morrissey, is now a false memory.
 
“Why did you call yourselves the Smiths?” a schoolboy asked the band on a children’s TV show in 1984. “Because it was the most ordinary name,” replies Morrissey, almost teacherly, “and I think it’s time that the ordinary folk of the world showed their faces.” I admired that class consciousness. It took much longer to recognize that Morrissey saw ordinariness in his own image, a perspective that can slide into “Make ________ great again” politics. I’m not sure there’s a place for (mixed-­race, faggoty) me in that mythical past.
 
When I was an alternative teenager, uneasy in the present, I sought refuge in the retro. The fashion statement of my anachronistic green cardigan was, basically, History is worth repeating. In truth, against my skin, it wasn’t a great look. But I was a Smiths fan, charmingly old-­fashioned, thriving in disjunction from my surroundings. Today, having forsaken my idol, I’ve also exited the illusory country he inhabits. I can never go back to the house of the wrong daddy again.
 
The Wrong Daddy :  Morrissey and the cult of the wounded white male. By Jeremy Atherton Lin. The Yale Review,  May 19, 2021. 

Also of interest :  
 
Bigmouth strikes again and again: why Morrissey fans feel so betrayed. By Tim Jonze. The Guardian, May 30, 2019. 

Lace, Nostalgia and Craft : Fashion Designer Olivier Theyskens

Olivier Theyskens’ signature is sumptuous fantasy balanced with solemn formal rigor. The designer will inaugurate "In Praesentia," a rich carte blanche display of his imaginative universe, at Cité de la dentelle et de la mode, a.k.a. the Museum of Lace and Fashion, curated by Lydia Kamitsis (June 15-January 5). Located in the northern French city of Calais, the venue has previously featured exhibitions on Hubert de Givenchy, Cristóbal Balenciaga, and Iris van Herpen.

In successions of theatrical vitrines, Theyskens silhouettes mix with in-house historical garments: pairing forms, colors, and materials across decades and even centuries. The selected pieces are beautifully mixed with vintage industrial tools — a lace press, patinated bobbin boards, trestles, registries of lace samples — that double as sculptural totems. The show provides an authentic and striking tribute to Theyskens’ recurring creative obsessions.

The Belgian designer precociously started his own label in 1997, after quitting fashion school. Over the next two decades, he fashioned lavish gowns at Rochas and Nina Ricci, then contemporary separates for Theory. Theyskens revived his namesake line in 2016 and, since February, his Paris atelier has been headquartered in a stunning historic building. The ground floor was built in the 19th century, for an aristocrat during the French Directory; upstairs, amidst architecture from a later period, he and his team work in an Art Nouveau jewel with dark wood panelling and stained glass windows (The setting is pulled down to earth thanks to schoolchildren screeching through recess in an adjacent courtyard).

Theyskens, sporting a black T-shirt that read “Dirty Mind” on one side, and “Clean Oceans” on the other, discussed his insatiable appetite for drama, his wariness of big brands re-writing fashion history, and the pleasures of deconstructing his own work.

You had an exhibition in 2017-2018 at MoMU in Antwerp. How will this show be different?

When the MoMU asked me to do a retrospective, I always imagined it as something you do at the end of your career — and I feel like I’m in the middle! That exhibition was purely chronological; we were featuring absolutely every show I ever did and some key outfits. The visitor would see my evolution collection by collection, plus some fashion sketches, photographs, and personal documents. It was a very classical approach to showing one designer’s path. Soon after the exhibition ended, I got this solicitation from the museum in Calais. I believe by seeing the exhibition of the MoMU, they linked my work to theirs. Their permanent exhibition is about the history of the French industry of lace… I started off by using vintages laces, and reconnected with lace when I started at Rochas — it was their logo. And the museum is celebrating its tenth anniversary during the exhibition.

You’re entwining pieces from their collection into your show.

I felt key elements in their conservation department could dialogue well with parts of my work. It was important for me that the experience of looking at my work for this exhibition be different than what I’d done two years before. I went to Calais a lot — they have clothes from the 18th to the 20th century, but they also have a department of conservation for industrial tools: machines, furniture connected to the industry. I thought that was interesting to show, and they had never exhibited it. I was looking at my own archives without the lens of "this was a great outfit from the show" — it was about the components, and things that didn't make it to shows, that I edited out; I felt some of them now had some resonance. I’m showing more the métier than what people have already seen. The way we could define a new approach in my work was to really dismantle all my methodology and focus on the key elements in my work — black, bias-cut, the feel of nostalgia… We created links between these themes and what I found in the museum. My methodology has something retro, a way of designing clothes like a couturier. With the stuff from the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th, you see the link — I’m in continuity with the past. That was interesting — to feel you’re a bit part of that family.

How do you negotiate that balance between nostalgia and reinvention? Looking back on the history of fashion, but also moving it forward?

Even when I do something new, I can have this vibe that makes you think of the past. My last show was definitely retrofuturist, in my mind, and there were things that were definitely connecting it to the ‘40s, but at the same time the clothes themselves, from my point of view, were new. They didn't look derivative. I think that the nostalgia is in my inspiration — it is fueled by these feelings of watching some elegant past — movies, paintings — that there was a beauty to the way people would dress, which then appears in the sketches. Already as kid, I would draw silhouettes that would feel costume-y, that looked 18th century. I’ve always been like that. And sometimes I love to have something that feels disconnected from anything: the novelty of a new way to create a shape or a cut.

What are some of those implicit influences?

I like artists with melancholy. I appreciate pop artists — I’m open-minded — but I don't personally feel connected to that. I love Louise Bourgeois, though never did an ode to her. I always loved Hans Bellmer, and one time I decided to integrate pieces of his photographic work in my collection. This is something I had never done. I integrated them not for valeur ajouté [added value] but like a real ingredient: with discretion and respect.

Are you yourself someone who goes to fashion exhibitions?

The first time I started seeing fashion exhibitions, I was disappointed about how fashion looks in a museum. It’s very… [pauses] fashion is generated in motion. I remember how much I was fantasizing on the idea of beautiful dresses. In Spain, in the 2000s, I saw an exhibition with some outfits from the 19th century … I saw how small the dresses were, and there wasn't this drama. There was something regional about it. Even Versailles-type dresses with the baskets on the side that are like two meters wide… I’ve been disappointed. I’ve also seen exhibitions that were amazing, where you see how beautiful the clothes are… I loved the Vionnet exhibition.

What about splashier exhibitions like, say, Dior?

I went to the Dior one but it was painful because of how many people there were. Painful. And there was so much. I wish I’d been able to stop in front of the things I truly admire. In my early 20s, I read Christian Dior’s autobiography, and it made me love his work. That exhibition had all the key pieces, which was amazing. I was aware that it was lucky, but I couldn't experience this appreciation. And I regret it. It was too splashy. With the décor! And this! And that! This overlooooad… you just think, today, there are players in the fashion industry. The marketing surrounding these brands is rewriting the culture and the way we see 20th century fashion.

Rewriting the culture in what sense?

When I was at Rochas, it was so hard to find elements about the house and its history. There were a few documents; you couldn't find anything on the Internet. There hadn't been archives or preservation work. I had a small black-and-white book from the ‘80s, and the archives of the perfume, which inspired me so much. Meeting people from fashion museums, meeting Hélène Rochas… I had so much respect for the legacy and what Marcel Rochas brought, actually, to fashion. It’s as much, if not more, than some of the famous brands today. But no one will think that because we only see Chanel here, Dior here, and that’s all. It makes me nervous sometimes, because I am aware of how much other people brought. Good curators can really put everything back in order — but that’s not the splash. That’s the history. Most books are done by brands on their own terms, with a very cleaned-up fashion history. I always take distance from that. Christian Dior, when he launched, he was in his 40s. He had been a pattern-maker for different designers. He, apparently, admired Rochas dresses during the 1940s; during the war, there were already these dresses cinched at the waist in silk taffeta. That silhouette was not absolutely new—it was just a way to bring it back, and enhance it, with talent, with a pure sense of the joy of beauty. There were precursors, and visionaries. And this you will not read in a Dior book today — I imagine! [laughs]

What about your own narrative? Gothic and Romantic are without fail the adjectives associated with your work. Do you like those associations?

I accept that — in essence, I’m first and foremost a melancholic person. I know it because of how I was as a child. I always loved drama, terrible things — I could see beauty in there. I did not fancy funny things that much. What I bring out is some sensitivity… it connects with something dark, something nostalgic, something fragile, something haughty.

Would you say your vision of femininity has remained constant over the past 20 years?

It goes back even further, like 40 years [laughs]. I feel there is a Theyskenian girl. I can never say there is a muse — my inspiration comes from things that aren't just physical, but impressions. When I sketch, it’s a female incarnation of a sensation, an emotion. I spent so much of my childhood imagining myself as a girl.

That’s interesting. Does the conversation about gender fluidity today change your thinking in any way about being a womenswear designer?

A little bit. I admire the youth, who have the bravery to get there. My parents let us express ourselves, and as a child I was so obsessed with dresses and clothes I wanted to be a princess, to have the drama of posing with that dress. In my case, it was a fantasy; not the true will of having that identity. I went to a dance school, and I was imagining being a ballerina because I thought they were beautiful and elegant. It was for the visual of it, of being a ballerina. But the kids that dare to go there and work the identity that is right for them? I can't stand hearing 60-year-old gays saying: ‘We paved the way.’ Yes, but still today — it’s a challenge for these kids. It’s not easy. Take a train and just go to a regional spot! Might be more difficult. But I think it’s really good: I always draw a girl, but it can blend, eventually, because I admire the body of a man. It can be a grey zone.

In terms of wanting to maximize drama, have you done costumes?

I did some costumes! In Brussels, I did almost 300 costumes for an opera. And it was an amazing experience because of the diversity of the physiques. There was a chorus of 80 people, men and women. They displayed all the shapes a human can have — but they had similar costumes, and so I had to adapt and fit all of that with real people. And I enjoyed it so much, whether I was fitting a large short man with legs a bit in the shape of an X…. Your eye just adapts instantly to the person. At Theory we did made-to-measure for endorsements. A football player has huge legs. You reconsider all the time how you make clothes. It’s great to collaborate on special projects. You use your brain differently.

Designer Olivier Theyskens on Drama, Reinvention, and Finding Beauty in Terrible Things. By Sarah Moroz.   i-D , June 14, 2019. 

Olivier Theyskens, the Belgian designer known for creating rarefied, darkly romantic clothing, describes working with lace as “a habit”. The centuries-old fabric is found throughout his oeuvre: from his first collection Gloomy Trips, which featured shards of antique Chantilly lace collected by his grandmother, to his tenures at Theory, Nina Ricci and Rochas – he revived the latter’s moribund signature lace, spending seven months with a French lacemaker to make sure it was just right. And, over a decade on, at his eponymous label, where Theyskens now works solely (his most recent show in February in Paris saw balconette bodices, hook-and-eye blouses and gowns in various iterations of the fabric). “It’s always captivated me,” he tells AnOther. “It is so intimate, so feminine.”

This weekend, a new exhibition, Olivier Theyskens: In Praesentia, opens at the Museum for Lace and Fashion in Calais. The city, which sits on France’s northern coastline, is known for producing lace of all types: from abundantly detailed Chantilly to lighter-than-air French tulle, and much between – houses, such as Chanel, Valentino and Dior, all use lace from factories in the region. The museum, which itself is housed in the abandoned Boulart lace factory, collects the spoils of centuries of French lace-making: clothing, furnishings and ephemera, including the machinery and tools long used to create it. In Praesentia gave Theyskens access to the museum’s entire archive – whether on display or otherwise – asking him to weave a narrative between past and present, between his work and the numerous artefacts in the museum’s collection.

“I had just done a retrospective in at MoMu [ModeMuseum, a fashion museum in Antwerp, Belgium] when the Calais museum contacted me to do something on my work,” explains Theyskens of how the exhibition began. “I never thought I’d do another exhibition, but I was interested because they talked about a new approach – at MoMu it was very chronological, a reflection, show after show after show of what I did – but here, they were interested in my creative process, and work with lace. They gave me carte blanche to do whatever I liked with their collection; to start a conversation between past and present.”

The resulting exhibition is what the designer deems an “emotional” experience, an attempt to replicate the visceral appeal of the fabric itself. “Lace has always captivated me, even when I very young. That sexy side of lace – like lingerie – and how most lace was always hidden,” he says. “When I was growing up my grandmother used to collect little bits of antique lace offcuts for me, and since I have always used it in my collections.” In Praesentia, then, diverts from typical exhibitions on a designer’s work – instead, it is a series of reveries from Theyskens on various themes, the colour black, illusion, nostalgia and the corset among them.

One new, unexpected fascination Theyskens discovered was with the machinery of lace production itself: in the exhibition, mannequins might balance on old worker’s stools; bobbins and boxes might be stacked alongside a towering heelless boot, designed by Theyskens while at Nina Ricci. “I found myself interested in some of the pieces connected to the activity of making lace: the furniture, tools,” says the desinger. “When I was working at Rochas, and I would go to the factories, I was overwhelmed by the environment. The lace is very delicate, very intricate, subtle, fragile, meticulous, and the environment is extremely brutalist: the machines are very heavy, very ancient, there is a lot of noise, it is very dusty, and I kind of like this contrast.”

It is a contrast he has struck in his own work, too, where clothing often teeters somewhere between brutality and beauty: his early collections hinge on just this, combining the excess of 17th- and 18th-century costume with industrial elements – like the hook-and-eyelet fastening, one of his signatures – or fetishistic understones – gimp masks, leather, severe corsetry and the like. Theyskens’ own renown came on the back of Madonna – another artist astute at balancing brutality and beauty – who wore a corseted yellow Theyskens gown for the VH1 Fashion Awards in 1999, taken from only his second collection. Hook-and-eyelet fastenings criss-cross the satin skirt, like it has been slashed apart, and stitched back together.

“I think a lot has changed since then, we were never thinking about creating content,” Theyskens says of that moment. “The fashion world was a lot smaller, we were working with people who we knew, who were experts. But I like change, I never thought that the industry wouldn’t move on: I love that in the history of 20th-century fashion, there are such big changes between the 1950s and 60s, the 60s and 70s, the 70s and the 80s; the reappearance of designers, the disappearance of others. It’s always been about change.

Change might be on Theyskens’ mind, but an exhibition like this provides a chance for a designer to take stock, and look back: Theyskens recently rearranged his archive, which had previously been in storage in Belgium and not looked at for many years. Within it, he discovered a wealth of pieces that even he didn’t immediately recognise, including several garments which, for one reason or another, did not make it into the final runway collection for a given season. Some of these will appear In Praesentia: “I’m always pressured when I put collections together to take out things that don’t quite fit in the story; [with this exhibition] I’m happy to work in a way which isn’t just about ‘full looks’ or collections,” he says.

Such an approach makes the range of In Praesentia far wider than a typical retrospective: instead, it provides a brief journey into the frenetic, resourceful workings of a creative mind. “It’s a dialogue between past and present, between new and old ways of working, of nostalgia and craft,” Theyskens says. “When I make or put things together I draw on emotion, or feeling. Sometimes, I want to put the intellect aside.”

Olivier Theyskens: In Praesentia is on at Museum for Lace and Fashion in Calais, France from 15 June, 2019 – 5 January, 2020.

Olivier Theyskens’ New Exhibition Is About the Seductive Power of Lace. By  Jack Moss. Another Magazine , June 13, 2019. 

In celebration of its 10th anniversary, Cité Dentelle Mode in Calais presents “In praesentia” as a temporary exhibition from 15 June 2019 until 5 January 2020. About 10 months in the making, the exhibition invites viewers into a small part of Theyskens’ universe by expressing the connection between some of his past pieces and lace itself.

Curator Lydia Kamitsis explains the captivating title as a poetic word that evokes a sense of imagination and curiosity. Put simply, “Praesentia,” a Latin term, means “presence”. The title encourages visitors to be present and immerse themselves in the atmosphere and ambiance of the exhibit. She describes “praesentia” as a singular word that one does not have to translate into other languages, as everyone understands its meaning.

In this project, Theyskens works to protect the link between the culture and fashion of the present and the past. Certain pieces preserved by the lace museum inspired him, reminding him of his past works and other memories. Kamitsis carefully mixes pieces from different collections and different times, (as opposed to displaying the pieces chronologically) which serves as another manner of bringing the idea of nostalgia to life while presenting a new way to view modern work with museums.

The exhibit also pays homage to the “behind-the-scenes” industrial workers, bringing them to the forefront by featuring different pieces of lace-making equipment and tools alongside the pieces displayed on mannequins. These roles often go unmentioned, hence the desire to honor them.

Theyskens notes his belief that the exploration of lace with its complex motifs and complicated production techniques is unfinished; he believes that lace is not used enough in the modern context and that it has so much to offer in the world of fashion.

Olivier Theyskens’ “In praesentia” Curated by Lydia Kamitsis at Cité Dentelle. By Kiana Rizel Sales.  A Shaded View of Fashion , June 14, 2019. 

Cité de la Dentelle et de la Mode, Calais