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Morrissey is a singer who used to just be famous to trendy people, but nowadays those trendy people have grown up and run the media. So now he is famous to everyone. What are Morrissey’s greatest ideas?
It is OK to be sad sometimes. Don’t eat meat because cows are often killed to make it. Bengalis shouldn’t wear platform shoes.What are his key characteristics?
Sad a lot.
World is against him.
Likes books.
Dislikes enemies.
Has a quiff. Why doesn’t he act happy like most people who smile even though they are often also dying inside?
Well, you may have answered your own question there. Morrissey believes that we should wear our sadnesses on our sleeves because that’s what makes us beautiful and our lives meaningful. It's marketing, basically. Kind of like how George Foreman is always talking about how he has eight sons all called George, Morrissey has to constantly put his sadness brand into the marketplace in order to avoid ceding market share to other sad artists like White Lies or London Grammar. Why are people attracted to Morrissey’s songs and image?
This has to do with the way in which people represent their own limited and often banal experience to themselves. The fact that even scion of privilege David Cameron can weave his workaday adolescent problems into a tapestry of outsiderness that has resulted in Smiths fandom suggests that humans are, actually, very good at taking their own indistinguishable range of hurts – a date that didn’t work out, a social situation that made them feel a bit excluded, a day when they were all like: "I feel a bit weird today, tbh" – and turning it into a broiling psychodrama somewhere between Madame Bovary and The Kill List. This was Morrissey’s key insight. That people are all sad on the inside. Keats kind of started that. But Morrissey really whacked the thing home. Why does he say silly things to the media?
Morrissey often has new albums he needs to promote. As their quality has declined along with the quality of his publicists, Morrissey has tended more and more to rely on saying that everyone in Latvia should be forced to watch their parents being humiliatingly rejected for a bank loan, or suchlike, just in order for journalists to put him ahead of their interview with The 1975. Basically, imagine a giant conveyor belt shovelling two thousand pounds into your bank account every time something boring you said about the Chinese ended up as a pull quote in the Independent, sidebarred with an Andy Gill op-ed about whether you've finally gone too far this time. Would you say boring things about the Chinese? Why does Morrissey have gladioli in his back pocket?
Morrissey enjoys taking the norms of being a popstar and subverting them. Most popstars don't have gladioli in the pockets, for reasons of both convenience and style. But Morrissey does – a clever subversion of the non-gladioli norm. He also wore a hearing aid even though his hearing is quite good and most people report that he hardly ever says "Eh?" or "Baking powder??!" when they are talking to him in a low voice at dinner parties. So essentially he lies about being disabled. Even when Marilyn Manson was sucking shit out of Twiggy Ramirez’ arsehole with a straw, he couldn’t be as downright disgusting, immoral and offensive as that. This is why people like Morrissey: he is a middle-class Slipknot. What are the tropes of Morrissey's songwriting?
Normally it starts with a title that sounds like he just overheard someone in conversation: "That's How People Grow Up", or "You've Got Everything Now", or "Just Put It Back In The Box And We'll See If We Can Return It, It Is M&S After All If That Still Means Anything In This Day And Age". Then he'll put in the bit about how he seldom has sex. Obviously, when FKA Twigs or Danny Brown write a song, it chiefly concerns how vigorously or often they have sex. When Morrissey writes a song, it has more to do with how he hasn't had sex. You would think that this would be less interesting to the public: after all, if we all listed the things we hadn't done in songs, then they'd be pretty dull. Never been to Gwent. Never seen The Godfather Part III. Yet strangely, when people hear Morrissey talking about what he hasn't done, that's suddenly interesting. Why does Morrissey hate the Queen when she has barely expressed any opinion on him except to say that she felt Years Of Refusal "wasn’t his best" and that maybe the re-issue of Viva Hate was a bit overplayed?
Morrissey feels that hereditary privilege is unfair. In the just utopian society for which he is striving, everyone should have to get by on the ongoing exercise of their talents unless they have already been afforded "living legend" status by the British media. Why doesn’t Morrissey eat meat?
Morrissey believes meat is morally bad for you because you need to kill animals to get at it, unless you just anaesthetise them and chop their legs off, which is either more or less cruel depending on how you look at it. The basic idea is that when Morrissey sees a cat he sees a tiny person in a fur coat, except better, because people are unbearable. This means that when he sees you eating a burger, it might as well have a baby's little bootie mixed in with the lettuce. Why is Morrissey fascinated by working-class toughs?
Morrissey believes that working-class toughs represent a kind of idealised action-led male now consigned to an idealised recent past. He sees them as sort of like antelope on a reserve: they don't think or have interior lives. They're beautiful because they don't know they're beautiful, unlike, say Christina Aguilera; about whom he would never write anything.
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Not at the time of going to press, no. Morrissey has never married, and frankly is running out of time to find a good woman to tie himself down to. Doesn’t Morrissey want to marry?
You’d imagine so, wouldn’t you? It can’t be much fun just hanging around with blokes all the time, can it?Follow Gavin and Victoria on Twitter: @hurtgavinhaynes / @sinforvictoryMore on Morrissey:Morrissey's Moral HierarchyWe Need to Talk About MorrisseyIn Defence of Morrissey