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STMTCG: Moon River (Extended Version)

  
  

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Ganesh
09:33 / 28.01.06
(Cheers, again, to Mr Fear for suggesting this.)

Bit of a marriage or tussle of classics here: classic American song meets classic British institution. Stephen Patrick Morrissey surely needs no introduction, and most of us are likely aware that Moon River was composed by Henry Mancini for Audrey Hepburn's dissolute-but-melancholy Holly Golightly character in Breakfast At Tiffany's (supposedly tailored to Hepburn's limited vocal range). Mancini's score bagged him an Oscar, and Hepburn herself reportedly threw massive strops when there was talk of removing the song from the final cut.

(Truman Capote originally wanted Marilyn Monroe for the role of Holly Golightly, but Monroe's advisors nixed the idea of her playing a call girl - even though the character was considerably prettied up for the celluloid version.)

Moon River has apparently been covered at least 1000 times, by various artists (some of 'em collected here) - but, for me, Moz's extended version (YouSendIt MP3 doodah version here) tops them all by dint of straying far, far from traditional interpretations but, weirdly, tapping into a more 'authentic' darkness at the roots of Capote's original inspiration.

Morrissey's chopped-up and distinctively-yowley lyrics:

Moonriver
Wider than a mile
I’ll be crossing you in style
Someday

Oh, dreammaker
You heartbreaker
Wherever you’re going
I’m going your way

Two drifters
Off to see the world
I’m not so sure the world
Deserves us

We’re after
The same rainbow’s end
How come it’s just around the bend?
It’s always just around the bend?

Moonriver
Wider than a mile
I’ll be crossing you in style
Someday

Oh, dreammaker
You heartbreaker
Wherever you’re going
I’m going your way

Two drifters
Off to see the world
I’m not so sure the world
Deserves us

We’re after
The same rainbow’s end
It’s just around the bend
It’s just around the bend
It’s just around the bend
It’s just around the bend

Oh!

Ooh ...

Moonriver
Wider than a mile
I’ll be crossing you in style
Someday

Oh, dreammaker
You heartbreaker
Wherever you’re going
I’m going your way

Two drifters
Off to see the world
I’m not so sure the world
Deserves us

We’re after
The same rainbow’s end
How come it’s just around the bend?
It’s always just around the bend?

-crying-

Moonriver
Wider than a mile
I’ll be crossing you in style
Someday

Oh, dreammaker
You heartbreaker
Wherever you’re going
I’m going your way

Two drifters
Off to see the world
I’m not so sure the world
Deserves us

We’re after
The same rainbow’s end
It’s just around the bend
It’s just around the bend
It’s just around the bend
It’s just around the bend
It’s just around the bend

What you gonna do?

Opinions vary on Morrissey's complete excision of the "my huckleberry friend" line, but I'm glad to see the back of it. Removing it makes the song slightly less identifiably American in tone, generalises and de-sentimentalises it (I'm no longer assailed by images of Tom Sawyer sitting by the Mississippi) into a more universal expression of yearning.

But!

A few minutes into the extended version, one realises this isn't simply a meandering rewrite of an old-fashioned favourite. Through Morrissey's mournful choruses, one becomes aware of a woman sobbing, at first barely audible but gradually increasing in volume and emotional intensity. It's terrified sobbing, and the intertwining juxtaposition of this with La Moz's detached, almost mantra-like delivery is truly eerie. Why is the woman weeping? Why is the singer ignoring her distress? It's like watching someone fail to attend to a ringing 'phone or, more apposite, a crying baby; one's confusion and anxiety rises. What the fuck's going on here?

The song continues to unfold, Morrissey and the distraught woman fading in and out of each other. As the weeping becomes harder to listen to, the repeated "it's just around the bend" lyric becomes fuzzier, transcendent but oddly soporific, trance-like, almost sedative. The singer's off in his own world, oblivious to the incoherent pleas of his frightened companion - who eventually entreats, "what you gonna do?"

Unnerving in the extreme - but what's it about? The cultural associations of singer and song yield an interpretation or three. Although it never appeared on the album itself, Moon River was recorded around the time of Vauxhall And I, arguably the peak of Morrissey's oft-expressed fascination with young, male, working-class criminality. Although the B-side of Hold On To Your Friends, his version was first available as part of an import EP, with Now My Heart Is Full (the chorus of which references the murderous protagonist of Graham Greene's depressing 1938 novel Brighton Rock) and Jack The Ripper (written from the viewpoint of the 1888 killer of Whitechapel prostitutes). The CD cover depicts the naked, slightly out-of-focus torso of La Moz, apparently hanging from his arms - looking for all the world like the star of a snuff movie...

The song itself is secondarily associated, via Breakfast At Tiffany's, with Capote - another non-heterosexual writer attracted to the murky glamour of young, male, working-class murderers of the early 20th Century. With In Cold Blood in mind, the idea of "two drifters off to see the world... not so sure the world deserves us" takes on a rather more macabre cast.

So. Without fundamentally changing the lyrics, Morrissey manages to take Moon River into the realms of... well, serial murder, the slaughter of women by men. His emotionally distant vocal starts to sound like the disconnected ditty of a sadistic killer ignoring the cries of his victim, getting himself 'into the zone', sharpening his knives...

That's the feel the song gives me. Am I reading too much into it? Perhaps it's because the lyric is so stripped-down and circular - and the twin vocal so disturbing - that I've sought meaning in the extended context: what I know of Morrissey's character and preoccupations, the history of the song itself, the CD tracklist and packaging?

Is it a good cover version or a bad cover version? Does Morrissey's uniquely personal interpretation ruin the song? Is it offensively misogynist?

Again, here's the YouSendIt link to the song itself, good until Feb 4th or 60 downloads. Have a listen, let us know whether your spine tingles.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
10:48 / 28.01.06
In the context mentioned (which I'd guess is correct,) couldn't this be a love song from Myra to Ian? It'd hardly be uncharted territory, after all, and given that it seems to have been recorded during Morrissey's 'aversive' period (circa 'National Front Disco'? - well after that anyway, and for the rest of the '90's) the fairly brutal subversion of such an ostensibly swooning old standard would appear to chime with his concerns at the time.

You can imagine them there, back in the early Sixties, possibly during a fireworks display, on a Saturday night, staring out over the Manchester shipping canal - Does the world deserve them?
 
 
Ganesh
10:58 / 28.01.06
Why, that's just around the bend.

Morrissey's obsession with the Moors Murderers (Moor River?) is certainly deep-rooted, going back to Smiths days, and that'd be one possible interpretation. It seems slightly literal, though, for him. Also, the weeping sounds, to my ear, more adult than child.

During the Vauxhall And I period, he was hanging out with a bunch of South London skinheads, so it's perhaps unsurprising that his preoccupations moved southward too: rather than Brady and Hindley, Moz's inspirations have diversified; he sings about glamorous criminals from London, Brighton, etc. rather than specifically t'North. I suspect that, while the root of his obsession is tangled up with a Manchester childhood coloured by reports of the Moors Murderers, Moon River is a more general variation on the theme.
 
 
Jack Fear
11:24 / 28.01.06
The In Cold Blood connection is one I'd never considered—Perry and Dick as the "two drifters"—but it certainly makes sense.

Another echo: It's long been thought (and the new movie Capote apparently takes as given) that Truman Capote developed an erotic fixation on Perry Smith during the hours of interviews leading up to the writing of the book—a fixation of a type familiar to the Morrissey fan: an admixture of masochism, envy, rescue fantasy and nostalgie de la boue.

So maybe the narrator isn't the killer himself—maybe it's Morrissey himself (question: does Morrissey ever really sing "in character," or does he always remain essentially Morrissey?), watching the killer about his work, or imagining the scene (much as Capote did with In Cold Blood)—and kinda getting off on it.

In a way, that's almost more disturbing. The confession of a murderer is one thing. The masturbatory fantasy of a murderer-hag is quite another. (Question: Have Morrissey's unclassifiable sexuality and early-career proclamations of celibacy caused all subsequent erotic content in his music to "read"—for me, at least—as masturbatory? Or is it the general air of self-involvement and narcissism?)

More about the music itself, after I've had time for a proper listen and a few notes.
 
 
alas
19:00 / 28.01.06
(I'm no longer assailed by images of Tom Sawyer sitting by the Mississippi)

I agree, that getting rid of the "huckleberry friend" line is an improvement, to me, I think because it sounds so...I don't know, too but being an annoying american lit scholar, I'd just point out that the Moon River of the original, with a reference to Huckleberry Finn and two drifters, is actually more suggestive of Jim, the fugitive slave with whom Huck floated down the Mississippi in the eponymous novel...

And, thinking about the time period, it's interesting to me to note that, for whatever it's worth, the homoerotic edge to the tender scenes between Huck and Jim on the river would have been in the air around the time of the film and the song's composition (ca. 1960), as Leslie Fiedler had published his famous essay on this theme, "Come Back to the Raft Again, Huck Honey!" in 1955 and was busily revising it into his book-length study, still a classic, Love and Death and The American Novel, where he argued that homoerotic attraction was a basic element of much of the "great American" fiction of the 19th century. (Along with a serious sadistic and misogynistic streak, as well...)

I have no idea if Johnny Mercer would have been directly aware of this literary criticism, although Fiedler was something of a celebrity academic/public New York intellectual, but it's kind of interesting, to me, given the way this song is being read in relation to Capote's later work, In Cold Blood (1966)....

I like the Morrissey version, although it is unnerving... the weeping, and the scared question, "What ya gonna do?" at the end--where the terrified woman seems to be asking him, "what are you going to do to me?" The song has gone around a bend, the man has gone around a bend somewhere, and she has no idea what's going to happen to her. She's not looking for a rainbow's end.

It's eerie how similar this reading would seem to be to Fiedler's literary criticism--exploring as it does the possibility of a kind of submerged homoeroticism and a more explicit examination of misogyny... (great thread, Ganesh, great thread idea, Jack...)
 
 
Ganesh
20:12 / 28.01.06
Another echo: It's long been thought (and the new movie Capote apparently takes as given) that Truman Capote developed an erotic fixation on Perry Smith during the hours of interviews leading up to the writing of the book—a fixation of a type familiar to the Morrissey fan: an admixture of masochism, envy, rescue fantasy and nostalgie de la boue.

That kind of erotic fixation isn't just evident among Morrissey fans but, to an extent, in Morrissey's relationships with his own idols. Many of these have been sexually ambiguous young men associated with early-to-mid 20th Century celluloid, literature or underworld legend. He's never expressed a fixation with Perry Smith in the way Capote reportedly did, but that kind of fetishisation is very reminiscent of some of Morrissey's earlier paeans to the Kray Brothers, say - to the extent that, in Last of the Famous International Playboys, he imagines himself in exactly the position of a gaoled "murderer-hag":

Dear hero imprisoned
With all the new crimes that you are perfecting
Oh, I can’t help quoting you
Because everything that you said rings true
And now in my cell
(well, I followed you)
And here’s a list of who I slew

Reggie kray - do you know my name?
Oh, don’t say you don’t
Please say you do, (oh) I am :

...

And in my cell
(well, I loved you)
And every man with a job to do
Ronnie kray - do you know my face?
Oh, don’t say you don’t
Please say you do, (oh) I am :

...

In our lifetime those who kill
The newsworld hands them stardom
And these are the ways
On which I was raised
These are the ways
On which I was raised

I never wanted to kill
I am not naturally evil
Such things I do
Just to make myself
More attractive to you
Have I failed?

So maybe the narrator isn't the killer himself—maybe it's Morrissey himself ... watching the killer about his work, or imagining the scene (much as Capote did with In Cold Blood)—and kinda getting off on it.

Given the ambiguity of yer standard Mozza song, he could be fantasising himself as killer, observer or even (given his sometime-expressed gender ambiguity) victim - or all three. It's become a cliche of sorts, in celluloid depictions of killers, to emphasis psychopathic detachment or derangement by justaposing the violence with incongruously smooth/'pure' music (Hannibal Lecter and the Goldberg Variations) or the cracked/stuck record (HAL's Daisy Daisy), and that's what Morrissey's Moon River makes me think of.

(question: does Morrissey ever really sing "in character," or does he always remain essentially Morrissey?)

It's almost always unclear - to the frustration of many (misguided fooools) who'd like him to be less equivocal. He tends to avoid 'explaining' his songs too - or gives facetious, tongue-in-cheek hints - so whole mythologies are constructed around particular readings.

(Question: Have Morrissey's unclassifiable sexuality and early-career proclamations of celibacy caused all subsequent erotic content in his music to "read"—for me, at least—as masturbatory? Or is it the general air of self-involvement and narcissism?)

The unclassifiable sexuality yes, but I think he's managed to shrug off at least some of the 'celibacy' stuff. He's made subsequent statements to the effect that he's had (relatively few) sexual encounters with men and with women, but resolutely avoids self-labelling or confirming/refuting the speculation of others. Vauxhall and I, though, the work contemporaneous with Moon River, seems to be Morrissey's 'London hard men' album. Around this time, he had a young skinhead ex-boxer 'companion', Jake, whose photography (and tattooed flesh?) features on the inside cover - and to whom Vauxhall is dedicated. There's a whole substrand of Morrissey tracks which are probably 'Jake songs', charting the highs and lows of that relationship. Whether it was homosexual, homoerotic or merely homosocial (from Jake's point of view) is anyone's guess.

But... yes, I know what you mean about Morrissey songs frequently sounding "masturbatory". In the case of Moon River, I think this is almost literally true. As Moz's vocal becomes more indistinct and dream-like, it's almost as if the singer has submerged himself in (presumably sadistic) fantasy, and his surroundings are slipping away. He's 'in the moment', a state of heightened (yet languid) perception. Once he's done "what you gonna do?", he may return to reality with a (self-loathing?) jolt. And have a corpse to dispose of.

Brrrr.
 
 
Ganesh
20:15 / 28.01.06
For added queerness, there is, of course, the fact that Capote's real life 'Holly Golightly' wasn't a New York call girl but a Marine on shore leave...
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
21:07 / 28.01.06
(for some reason my Realplayer can't read that file. Am digging around for an mp3, but in the meantime, I just want to say that I am loving this thread.)
 
 
Ganesh
21:07 / 28.01.06
... the Moon River of the original, with a reference to Huckleberry Finn and two drifters, is actually more suggestive of Jim, the fugitive slave with whom Huck floated down the Mississippi in the eponymous novel...

Duly corrected, Alas! I'm rather ashamed to admit that, having read no Twain at all, my knowledge is gleaned almost entirely from the televised adaptation I used to follow avidly as a child. To be entirely frank, the Moon River line also makes me think of Huckleberry Hound.

*wince*

And, thinking about the time period, it's interesting to me to note that, for whatever it's worth, the homoerotic edge to the tender scenes between Huck and Jim on the river would have been in the air around the time of the film and the song's composition (ca. 1960), as Leslie Fiedler had published his famous essay on this theme, "Come Back to the Raft Again, Huck Honey!" in 1955 and was busily revising it into his book-length study, still a classic, Love and Death and The American Novel, where he argued that homoerotic attraction was a basic element of much of the "great American" fiction of the 19th century. (Along with a serious sadistic and misogynistic streak, as well...)

Wow, that's really interesting, Alas; I now want to read Huck Finn just so I can then digest Fiedler's stuff. The Freudian edge to his queer analysis (suggested in your link) makes me think he might be an American precursor of one of my own favourites, Mark Simpson (coiner of 'metrosexual' and fellow Morrissey obsessive).

I have no idea if Johnny Mercer would have been directly aware of this literary criticism, although Fiedler was something of a celebrity academic/public New York intellectual, but it's kind of interesting, to me, given the way this song is being read in relation to Capote's later work, In Cold Blood (1966)....

I suspect it's a convergence of associations rather than a deliberate allusion on Mercer's part - although I'm tempted to do some reading up on Mercer...

It's eerie how similar this reading would seem to be to Fiedler's literary criticism--exploring as it does the possibility of a kind of submerged homoeroticism and a more explicit examination of misogyny...

I think this is quite an important subtext in the reading of Moon River and Vauxhall and I, because the particular brand of homoeroticism that Morrissey fetishises (and which is perhaps at its most explicit in his music of the mid-'90s) seems almost contingent on a degree of misogyny - or, at least, the exclusion of women from a male 'gang'.
 
 
Ganesh
21:11 / 28.01.06
(for some reason my Realplayer can't read that file. Am digging around for an mp3, but in the meantime, I just want to say that I am loving this thread.)

I thought you might.

You could try the link from here...
 
 
Whisky Priestess
21:45 / 28.01.06
Have not checked but I do believe the usual line following "Two drifters, off to see the world" is "What a lot of world to see", rather than "not so sure the world deserves us". Which is an improvement, I think (the latter on the former, I mean.)
 
 
Ganesh
21:49 / 28.01.06
You're right, Whisky. MP3 of the Hepburn version here. Lyrics are:

Moon River, wider than a mile,
I'm crossing you in style some day.
Oh, dream maker, you heart breaker,
wherever you're going I'm going your way.
Two drifters off to see the world.
There's such a lot of world to see.
We're after the same rainbow's end--
waiting 'round the bend,
my huckleberry friend,
Moon River and me.

I'm wondering if that line was changed for Morrissey's version or if it's a more gradual evolution through post-Hepburn incarnations.
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
22:58 / 28.01.06
That's an interesting point, am digging to see if I can find any history of the various cover versions.

Have finally sorted a copy of this, and wow.

I'll try and improve on that, shall I?

I'll have a go at the musical side of things, as textual analysis by 'nesh is masterly and the context provided by alas is fascinating.

It is an extremely sinister piece of music.

The spaciousness of the production makes Morrissey's voice seem to float in from nowhere, a spectral presence far removed from the nostalgic/utopian/romantic sense which Mancini, Mercer and Hepburn give it.

There are those swirling noises and the occasional jab of a string instrument, creating thick, impenetrable fog of sound.

Sometimes Morrissey's vocals are barely audible above the layers of echo and distortion, it sounds like he's sinking/drowning, which ties very vivdly into the sense that what might be 'waiting round the bend' is death in some form.

Then there's the pace, the song is driven to its end by a funerally-slow heavy bass/drum-beat. On a couple of listens I can't actually tell what instrument it is, again because the sound is 'thick', muffled.

The beat is provided at the beginning of the song by a very slight accent on the guitar during the first beat of each phrase.

This sends the song a slight 'swing' which becomes more and more pronounced through the song, until we're being dragged along by a sound that is reminiscent of dragged steps.

I may be reaching here, but in the context of Huck Finn and Jim, I almost hear that beat as the sound of chain-gang steps, heavy, almost drugged, inexorable.

It's perhaps a different way to the original to remind us of the Southern rural origins that MR and alludes to.*

That's how this sound feels to me, as if the singer and the un-named female figure are being dragged onwards ... to what?

To whatever is around that bend.



* "Smiths suggestion [is]... that the film's happy ending [...] is partially undermined by a darker subtext: Holly's incesctuous feeling for her brother Fred. Smith argues that this view is supported further by the song's lyrics both through their direct allusion to Holly's rural past and their semantic poly valence."

from Davison, Annette (2003),Music and Multimedia: Theory and History. Music Analysis 22 (3), 341-365.
doi: 10.1111/j.0262-5245.2003.00189.x

So, we have a cover version of a song that may well have a trace of deviant sexuality in it, sung by a character for whom death and love are very mixed together, overlaid in this version with audible sounds of a woman crying.
 
 
Ganesh
23:27 / 28.01.06
Ooh, thanks for that, GGM! I really ought to read the 'Stupid Questions' thread to enlighten myself about this aspect of things. I really liked your comments, though; you've managed to articulate some of the musical aspects I found difficult to describe. The word 'plodding' was in my head but not quite right; your chain-gang dragging footsteps probably is a stretch, but it ties some of the other associations together quite nicely.

I'm listening to Vauxhall and I again as I write, and it seems to me that Moon River would fit very well within the themes of that album: mesmerising male brutality, simultaneously depressing and invigorating (Now My Heart Is Full, Spring-Heeled Jim - who, like Ennis Del Mar, will "do, he'll never be done to"), homoerotic attraction/cruelty (Billy Budd, with its sampling of deliberately ambiguous Cockernee urchin - "one fellow was in the copper's arms, wannee? ... Please don't leave us in the dark", the latter tonally not unlike Moon River's final pleading "what you gonna do?"), the bad seed (Used To Be A Sweet Boy which reminds me of the neighbour-of-murderer cliche, "he was always quiet and polite, kept himself to himself"), the importance of male 'gang' loyalty (Hold On To Your Friends) and women dying while men sit by, apparently unconcerned (Lifeguard Sleeping, Girl Drowning).

Although these are constant, recurring themes in Morrissey's work, Vauxhall and I marked a particular convergence, an apogee. In the same way as his attraction to 'rough trade' has led him to flirt with racist conceits, it could be argued that tracks like Moon River see Morrissey shading into frank misogyny. As far as I'm aware, he's never been hauled up for this, by anyone. Any theories as to why?
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
23:40 / 28.01.06
Fascinating. I'll have a think about that. Is it possibly because of his long-standing associations with/friendship with people like Linder Sterling?
 
 
Ganesh
23:45 / 28.01.06
Possibly. And the vegetarianism, I suppose, tied in to '80s tropes of all-purpose Feminist Lefty. I think his sexual preoccupations cut across that to a certain extent, though, leading to weird hybrids.
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
23:54 / 28.01.06
well, Moz is nothing if not contradictory.

It's entirely possible, and I think this is what he does, to be feminist/pro-women as yet another way out of the frightening world of compulsory masculinity. Moz only likes masculinity if he fetishes it, and the animal-love/feminism is all part of his retreat from day-to-day blokedom.

Buuuut then, he's at times terrified/utterly refusant of sex and sexuality and intimacy and this I think where fear-driven mysogyny enters the mix. A kind of 'ugh. bodies. nasty messy sticky bodies' response
 
 
Ganesh
00:00 / 29.01.06
I think that's right... but I'm not sure whether he avoids actual sex (as opposed to at-one-remove fetishisation of working-class masculinity) because he's terrified of it or because he's in the unfortunate position of venerating 'straightness' ie. if the objects of his desire return his affection, they become 'gay' and are thus diminished in terms of desirability. Possibly a bit of both.

I'd still have thought someone would have hauled him up for misogyny, though, at some point. Is it perhaps a more commonplace or less defended 'crime' than racism, musically speaking?
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
00:04 / 29.01.06
(oh, and have modd'ed that comment, to add a bit more clarity on what I mean)

yeah, I'd say mysogyny, outside of certain circles, is often very 'under the radar'. I always think in this context of Nick Cave, who made, for god's sake an entire album of 'Murder Ballads'.

Perhaps also because we all assume (quite possibly wrongly) that Morrissey hates everyone so it's a bit silly to critique individual elements of his misanthropy?
 
 
Ganesh
00:10 / 29.01.06
Maybe - although I think he's more motivated by the glamour of young psychopathic males than wanting to see women dead, particularly. In fact, if Mark Simpson's to be believed (and he devotes quite a bit of Saint Morrissey to this), Moz actually seems to identify himself quite strongly with a particular type of Northern Women - so there may even be an element of masochism involved.
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
00:18 / 29.01.06
strong element of masochism

You know, listening to the track again, this really rings true for me. Certainly, no-body is have a good time in there. It's decidedly not a 'see my mighty masculine power as I Smite you, whore' vibe. There's no energy, no passion, no feeling of any sort, really.

I'm not quite clear on this so I'll have to have a think and get back to it, but there's a sensation that everything is degrading, atrophying, sinking. (which completly randomly and unintentionally reminds me of the prose of Joseph Conrad, where often everything is very dull, slow, there's always a sense of disintegration through entropy, and that's what I'm getting here.)
 
 
Ganesh
00:23 / 29.01.06
As I say, Morrissey could almost be the about-to-be-hurty woman. The import EP cover certainly made it look like he was chained to the ceiling in the Pulp Fiction cellar, about to be gimpily snuffed - and this was around the time of his fixation with boxers (including the single, Boxers), when he took to painting fake cuts and bruises on his face and accessorising with Elastoplast...
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
00:40 / 29.01.06
he argued that homoerotic attraction was a basic element of much of the "great American" fiction of the 19th century. (Along with a serious sadistic and misogynistic streak, as well...

And actually, I really need to re-read Love and Death... as I suspect that much of what Fiedler says about Twain, Hawthorne et al would apply to Morrissey equally well, albeit played out in different ways. I'm not sure if I'm being clear here, but...

I have a feeling based on not much right now that where in Fiedler's analysis troubled homoerotic attraction, sadism, and misogyny power C19 US novels, troubled homoerotic attraction, masochism and misanthropy power Morrissey's.

Similar dynamics, different poles, is I guess what I mean.
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
00:41 / 29.01.06
There's certainly some sort of fetishising of violence, and being hurt, going on his work around that time, I'd say
 
 
Ganesh
01:20 / 29.01.06
Before Vauxhall and I, Morrissey tended to emphasise his separateness, the ways in which he was Not Like Ordinary Boys. Post-Smiths, he foundered for a while before establishing his 'gang' then seemed to rally, going through a Bolanesque phase with Your Arsenal, all the while seeming more and more comfortable with the idea of his own masculinity - and masculinity in general. I suspect Vauxhall and I was something of a turning point in that it was the time he became part of a gang other than his band-members and briefly got involved with who-knows-what (probably minor league) thuggery. I wonder whether he began to fetishise the marks of physical violence (cuts, bruises, plasters) around this time because they symbolised a new physicality, a type of male-male contact he'd previously feared/fantasised about but was now experiencing on some level - hence the Jake-photograph on the album sleeve, of swallow-tattooed fingers massaging flesh.

(Of course, the Jake thing doesn't seem to have lasted. Is it the reason Moz decamped to Los Angeles? I strongly suspect certain songs on subsequent albums - Best Friend On The Payroll, Sunny, Come Back To Camden - refer back to that relationship...).

As with the accusations of racism, it's not always enormously clear that Morrissey's actually aware of what he's doing. When he flirts with racism or misogyny, it's difficult to be sure to what extent he's doing so knowingly.
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
02:13 / 29.01.06
(I love this thread. Nice work, sir )

Oh, and on the musical terms, I assume when you talk about the Stupid Music Questions thread you're referring to this part:

The beat is provided at the beginning of the song by a very slight accent on the guitar during the first beat of each phrase.?

Should actually have been 'each bar'.

What I mean by this is that the guitar accompaniment, (which probably also sounds 'swingy' because it has the same time signature as a waltz, sounds like this):

Each bar lasts for 3 beats, and has a steady beat that the guitar part plays, and first of every three strums is slightly louder. So you get



STRUM strum strum | STRUM strum strum | STRUM strum strum

By the end of the song, where everything else dissolving/the vocal is becoming submerged, the guitar has gone, and you just have the drum/bass/'thud' sound, but it's still hitting that first beat, so you've got

THUD (rest) (rest)| THUD (rest) (rest)| THUD (rest) (rest)


(a 'rest' is a beat of silence)

So the what starts off as an accent, or placing of emphasis, is, by the end of the song, all that's holding it together/pushing it onwards.

Hope that makes sense.
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
03:12 / 29.01.06
(and he devotes quite a bit of Saint Morrissey to this)

Oh my, must also get around to reading that. You know, nesh, I assume (presume Simpson discusses this in the book) that in SM Simpson is explictly evoking Jean-Paul Sartre's Saint Genet?

For the purposes of general information on this thread, I think it might be useful to discuss this briefly here. Hope this isn't too offtopica, but I find it fascinating.

(from an interview with Mark Simpson)

There are some interesting parallels between Genet and Morrissey: the humble origins, the alienation, the determination to wreak a kind of revenge on the world through their art, their gallows humour, their fascination with young toughs, boxers and rebels, and their perverse determination not to flinch when looking at unpleasant truths about desire and human nature. Above all, both came to be symbols for a certain kind of self-willed outsider status

I mention this here because it locates Morrissey in a tradition within which the oddness of this cover begins to make some kind of sense.

Does Morrissey doesn't explictly reference Genet?

Commentary on Genet, much like alas' raising of Fiedler above, could very easily be commentary on Morrissey:

from the translator's note to Saint Genet:

The original title of the present work, Saint Genet: Comédien et Martyr, loses its allusiveness in English translation. Saint Genet evokes the memory of St. Genestus (known in French as Genest, or Genêt), the third-century Roman actor and martyr and the patron saint of actors. His career is the subject of Le Véritable Saint Genest, a tragedy by the seventeenth-century dramatist Jean de Rotrou. In addition, the word comédien (which means actor--not necessarily comic) is used familiarly to designate a person who shams or "puts on an act."

Actor, martyr, tortured 'soul', maybe this is what Morrissey is giving us in his cover of Moon River.

Also, from the start of Saint Genet, another quote that seems apt to me, Sartre discussing Genet's descriptions?

the "ebony prick", spring white flowers, death and flowering of pleasure; a decapitated head falls from the guillotine, a black member shrivels and droops. If metamorphosis is a death, death and pleasure are metamorphoses.

Morrissey is obsessed, as noted upthread with killers, murder, and death, and this is a song in which an edge of violence and suffering grows throughout a song whose refrain is 'waiting around the bend'. We're waiting, as are the characters, to see what is going to happen next, for a possible moment of metamorphosis.
 
 
Ganesh
03:15 / 29.01.06
Yes, I think it's the really slow waltz time signature that gives Moon River its bludgeoning relentlessness - and that combination of old-fashioned ONE-two-two and audible terror on the part of the nameless female is probably what makes me think of Anthony Perkins slow-dancing his mother's corpse around the room. That sort of thing.

Had another listen, on proper headphones, and realised that there're another couple of alterations that haven't been picked up in the lyrics sheet. In one of the more drugged-sounding choruses towards the end, Morrissey adds "how come" before "it's just around the bend", then, almost plaintively, "it's always just around the bend".

What is it that's forever just around the bend? Tantalisingly close but, like the horizon, impossible to reach? Death? Escape? Happiness? Life? I'm reminded of the Smiths' How Soon Is Now? wherein he asks

When you say it’s gonna happen now
Well, when exactly do you mean?

I'm pretty sure there are other Morrissey-penned songs in which he agonises over when life - as it's lived by 'normal' people around him - is going to begin. How does he start? Who does he need to ask? Perhaps he's stopped trying to fit in, and accepted that, for him, a full sense of belonging/life will be always just around the bend? The anticipated metamorphosis will never happen.

Right at the end of the epic 9-plus minutes of Moon River there's a sort of fuzzy-radio-signal noise, as if contact's been gradually fading and has now been lost altogether. Drowning? Giving up hope?

Thoughts?
 
 
Ganesh
03:20 / 29.01.06
I'm pretty sure Simpson explicitly discusses the Genet references in Saint Morrissey, and I'm equally certain La Moz has evoked Genet himself, either lyrically or indirectly through Smiths cover art.

Should probably dig out Saint Morrissey and give it another skim.
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
03:25 / 29.01.06
I can swop you for Saint Genet, which I never actually finished, but might, with Moz in mind, have another go at.

I kinda thought Moz must have referenced G. There are some important differences, notably Genet's emphasis on release through orgasm/publicly naming himself as a homosexual vs Morrissey's early fetishising of abstinence and refusal to identify, but in many ways, Genet is the older brother Morrissey never head
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
03:34 / 29.01.06
Right at the end of the epic 9-plus minutes of Moon River there's a sort of fuzzy-radio-signal noise, as if contact's been gradually fading and has now been lost altogether. Giving up hope?

Yup, clicks with what I say above about how the 'waltz beat' slowly fades and dies as the song progresses/entropy.
 
 
Ganesh
21:33 / 29.01.06
To change tack slightly, does anyone feel Morrissey's overstretched things in interpreting Moon River this way? He's lopped bits off and changed bits around, extended it lengthwise and repeated the chorus so many times it almost seems tidal, mantra-like. To me, it seems to occupy the grey area between a cover version and sampling.

Has he mangled the original song?
 
 
grant
16:24 / 30.01.06
(for some reason my Realplayer can't read that file. Am digging around for an mp3, but in the meantime, I just want to say that I am loving this thread.)

(It's an .m4a file, which I think means it was bought off the iTunes music store -- might want to look out for that and convert to .mp3... to play this, I had to d'l winamp onto my work computer, which they've deleted off this machine before.)

-----

There are a lot of motifs from horror soundtracks in the production, which is kind of fun to hear. The most noticeable is that funereal kick drum on the one that starts up after the end of the first verse (just around the bend...) and gets bassier and bassier and more compressed and more compressed until it's just a thudding heartbeat.
The eBow solo (that weird, sustained guitar sound that's almost like a violin -- same sound in Bowie's "Heroes") is a "creepy" hallmark, and there's a weird bass drone that comes in around the same time that doesn't exactly follow the chord changes. And finally, throughout, there's a barely audible tremolo -- I think it's a guitar, but it might be an accordion -- that's just a little faster than twice the tempo of the song, so it slides in and out of rhythm, driving you absolutely skincrawly nuts without exactly knowing why. In the final verse, there's another, near-half-speed tremolo on top of that, going in and out of phase.

I'm really wondering if the woman weeping was sampled from something. It sits in the mix like a sample -- I'd have to see the notes on the album for copyright notices.

This song seems almost designed to make me jealous -- I also have a love for twisting covers and for songs that get inside serial killers' heads (I've written a few). It's hard not to think of In Cold Blood while hearing this. It's a little over-the-top... I think that last verse might be one too many. On the other hand, I really love the way the dreamy vocals sort of fade in over the weeping.

Johnny Mercer, by the way (wikipedia just told me), is notable not just as being one of America's great songwriters, but also as growing up in the Mercer House of Savannah, Georgia -- the site of the murder in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. I'm pretty sure Mercer would have been at a lot of the same parties as Capote, definitely knew his books and was probably at least marginally aware of the criticism/theorizing around them. They were both Southerners who became kind of sophisticated, urban entertainers.
 
 
Ganesh
21:15 / 30.01.06
(It's an .m4a file, which I think means it was bought off the iTunes music store -- might want to look out for that and convert to .mp3... to play this, I had to d'l winamp onto my work computer, which they've deleted off this machine before.)

It is from my iLibrary, so yeah... Might be worth trying to download Mozza's Moon River from the database here.

I'm really wondering if the woman weeping was sampled from something. It sits in the mix like a sample -- I'd have to see the notes on the album for copyright notices.

The Hold On To Your Friends single doesn't credit the crying woman, and I'm not sure the extended Moon River has appeared on any album. There was a shortened version on World of Morrissey, but I don't have that collection (already owned all the songs off it) and am not sure she featured on the 3-minute cut.

I think 'she' is two different samples. She seems to be a looped sample: the weeping reaches three or four remarkably similar-sounding crescendos, and the final "what you gonna do?" sounds, to me, like it's from a separate source.

I think that last verse might be one too many. On the other hand, I really love the way the dreamy vocals sort of fade in over the weeping.

You might be right, but I think the meandering, ebbing and flowing vocal is literally suggestive of a river, of drowning. I like the fact that one falls into the hypnotic repetition, and the distressed weeping winds around that.
 
 
Aertho
02:02 / 31.01.06
The extent of my knowledge of the words "Moon River" prior to this thread:



Yes, everything is about Comics in my world, and if you want me to play, I'm bringing my satchel of books with me.

Anyway, for those who gave up on Promethea, issue 14, titled Moon River, is about the protagonist's travels in the realm of the imagination. Her first realization is that the subconscious is also the realm of the dead. Upon rendevous with her friend, the story's other hero, we learn that the dead found there are only insubstantial memories. The name of the one who educates: Cruelty.

Morrissey's cover of Moonriver (titled as one word?) is so heavy. Yes, heavy like water. I've been listening for two days now. Truly a disturbing choice, for all the reasons supplied.

That woman. She's not dead, yet. Is she dying? She's crying like Freddy or Jason just cut off her leg, but ends with an accusatory question, like there's another person in the fog with her. It's not Morrissey. It's not the character of "Moonriver" if were to believe ze is a character, and not a setting.

I mention Freddy or Jason because that's what this sounds like to me: a weird soundtrack song that incorporates dialog from the film. The mood is eerie, and the words make no sense. Obviously if there was a film, we'd have linked to it by now, but that's the impression I get.
 
  

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