Ah, Stephen Morrissey, deeply-flawed genius...
What's the big deal? Well, besides the obvious NME-style 'achingly beautiful cathedrals of sound' etc., etc. he produced along with Johnny Marr, there's the very specific appeal of Morrissey's lyrics. They were unconventially intelligent for the time, incredibly black-humoured, bitingly witty and extremely passionate - and they distilled a strong sense of what it's like to feel uncomfortable in one's environment, in one's own skin. This obviously struck a pretty deep chord with those of us who, for whatever reason, found adolescence and young adulthood difficult or threatening. There was also the strong appeal of being part of a sort of outsider gang, with its own arcane language and cultural references (all defiantly but self-deprecatingly 'British').
The 'gay thing' has been extensively probed and analysed; it was extremely evident in Morrissey's Smiths lyrics (in a shifty, implicit manner which both appealled and tantalised) and became more pronounced in his subsequent solo work. 'Gay' is the wrong word: Morrissey's stuff is more homoerotic, at times merely homosocial. He's attracted to archetypically straight men, straight vaguely 'dangerous' men - teds, skinheads, bikers, 'ordinary boys' - and that, in some ways, is the whole tragedy of Morrissey. He appears attracted to men who project a violent (often stereotypically 'working class') glamour and simultaneously wants to be physically intimate with them but also to 'belong'. One suspects also that if any of his skinhead 'companions' actually did respond to him sexually, they'd become less desirable in his eyes. Morrissey himself, I think, projects an image which appeals, particularly, to men who are attracted to the company of men (and, especially, gangs of men) but wouldn't even begin to articulate this as 'gay'.
I've seen Morrissey live on three occasions. Each time, I counted around forty separate stage invasions (not including the inevitable 'scrum' at the end); of these, perhaps two or three each time were women. The atmosphere on each occasion was heady with testosterone, the 'butch', rather threatening appearance of many of his fans and the football-type chants made the whole experience surreal - but extremely sexy.
Why doesn't he 'come out'? Because to do so would destroy some fragile mystique ('mystique' isn't the right word, but it's the nearest I can come up with) in his music and his public persona. Also, as a(n almost certainly) gay man who's attracted to straight men, he taps into the whole Men Who Have Sex With Men (but don't identify as homosexual and would punch you for asking) thing - 'coming out' would alienate a large part of his fanbase and, perhaps more importantly to Morrissey, jeopardise his chances of ever getting off with another skinhead pipe-fitter...
That's some of it, I guess, Margin. As a phenomenon, it's not exclusively male, homoerotic or British, but those are the elements which pulled (and still pull) most strongly at me, personally.
(And I think you'll find Robert Smith's British too.) |
