Undoubtedly, pain is entertainment and a mass-market one, too. From popular tourist destinations like museums featuring authentic but quite thankfully derelict medieval torture instruments to extreme bondage websites devoted to showing people putting them to modern use, it seems that our fascination has not in the least wavered. It’s not so much as death but the agony we seem to respond to, that we are compelled to witness and, needless to say, savor. (These days, one can actually hear the collective groan from the audience in the cinema whenever the last victim finally breathes her last.)
Pop music is no less guilty. In fact, the pleasures these days one really derives from listening to the biggest hits can only be explained by a certain masochism on the part of the listener – much like watching the gruesome sight of bodies being pulled from a automobile smash-up and being unable to turn away. (Really, the popularity of Britney Spears, Dashboard Confessional, Hoobastank or Linkin Park makes sense only on such terms.) But for those whose tastes are more exquisite, we point you towards the Witkin freak-show display with the placard that reads: Steven Patrick Morrissey.
His former muse and sometime collaborator Sandie Shaw (he claims to have proposed marriage to her once) called him a "miserable sod" and it’s a description that has stuck to the man – albeit endearingly – since the heyday of his influential Mancunian quartet from the ‘80s, The Smiths.
More than bringing a much-needed Oscar Wilde sharp wit to the MTV generation’s culture diet, Morrissey is perhaps best known for giving depression its voice. Portraying himself forever the outcast, he managed the feat of making his personal anguish into three-minute pop songs of such verve and ingenuity – anthems that rang true to a worldwide audience who mostly had never heard of Manchester, or Wilde, for that matter.
"You Are The Quarry" is the latest from the man the British press have affectionately dubbed "Moz." The man who once declared that "England is mine/And it owes me a living…" has since relocated to sunny Los Angeles. Still a mythical la-la land, LA with its myriad array of swimming pools that twinkle at you as your plane descends at the airport can do wonders for the spirit and disposition of any person. But, as expected with Morrissey, he will somehow notice the curious sight of screenwriters that float facedown on its otherwise pristine surfaces. In absence of overcast skies, our man will find inspiration in the orange smog that hangs perennially over Hollywood like the miasma of decomposing dreams that litter its boulevards. This is, of course, someone who has expressed envy upon hearing about Kurt Cobain’s suicide and whose guiding motto has always been, "There isn’t necessarily always tomorrow."
Its’ first track America Is Not The World is a poisoned love letter to his adopted homeland to which he professes both devotion and disgust to. Tempering his spite in lyrics like "America/It brought you the hamburger/You know where you can shove your hamburger…" with a coda filled with litanies of "I love you," Morrissey is equally passionate of both sentiments, throwing up his head in grief at the contradictions.
The same goes for first single Irish Blood, English Heart wherein he offers up his sentimental dream for the country of his birth and countrymen. Despite decrying the English for their apathy and their acceptance, he can’t help but feel sympathy for them – misplaced as he himself confesses in its last lines because of the fact that he knows it will never change. These are fighting words from a bruised and beaten pugilist: As always, Morrissey relishes being the loser.
To long-time admirers, this is not new. Indeed, Morrissey’s enduring and cross-cultural appeal lies in his constant self-flagellation, his open wounds making a world of bedroom poets fall over themselves to genuflect at his altar. While accepting the adoration, he has not succumbed to it, his work still weighted by the cross of his childhood obsessions and adolescent traumas. Of course, the faithful wouldn’t have it any other way: They want their beast of burden to remain in stasis just like one of Hirst’s formaldehyde cows.
If he indicated in 1994’s Now My Heart Is Full from "Vauxhall And I" that he’s pulled the sheets off the ghosts of his past, what he found hiding underneath was his own reflection; despite the thick girth of his present frame, he remains the skinny pale boy that pleaded with schoolyard bullies that the "joke isn’t funny anymore." He just can’t escape nor help it.
Not that nothing has changed. Instead of Rusholme ruffians and Piccadilly rent boys, he now embodies his doomed romanticism with Mexican street gangs just like in the current album’s standout cut, The First Of The Gang To Die. Clearly, despite the obvious disparities, Morrissey finds empathy with these Pretty Petty Thieves and much glamour in the squalor of their environments. Underlying it though, there remains a festering despair.
"Why should their pain produce such marvelous beauty?" ponders Melnibonéan prince and anti-hero Elric in Michael Moorcock’s popular fantasy saga as he listens to a choir of slaves who are mutilated to be able to only sing but one perfect note. Pale, melancholic and brooding (resemble anyone?), he then asks himself: "Or is all beauty created through pain? Is that the secret of great art?"
With Morrissey selling out shows on both sides of the Atlantic (without much pre-publicity), it seems to be the source of a popular one as well.