Morrissey & Wilde: quick wits & glam rock 

Di Alex R. Falzon 

In: Semicerchio LIV (01/2016), “Poesia sulla pietra”, pp. 76-81. 

I 

Wilde claimed that the secret of life is art and argued that true artists must always seek to extend the subject matter of art. […] Morrissey has extended the subject matter of popular music more than any other artist in the last thirty years. With his ‘lovely singing voice’, he has used the three-minute pop song to embrace society’s outsiders and tackle taboo subjects such as child murders, suicide, poverty, animal rights, violence, vegetarianism, racism, mental illness, football hooliganism, paedophilia and police corruption. The very subjects that 99.9 per cent of all recording ‘artists’ avoid for fear they will smear their lovely careers [Len Brown 2011, 10]. 

Morrissey, in an interview he gave in December 1984 to Biba Kopf for New Musical Express, made this bold – yet not totally unexpected – statement about Pop Music: «I find people who are quite artistic and creative crawl from dreadful conditions, whereas people who are cushioned in life tend not to produce anything dramatically artistic. To me popular music is still the voice of the working class, collective rage in a way, though seldom angst ridden. But it does really seem like the one sole opportunity for someone from a working class background to step forward and have their say. It’s really the last refuge for articulate but penniless humans» [Kopf 1984, 23]. 

Morrissey’s view finds an echo, as well as a corroboration, in Iain Chamber’s seminal study Urban Rhythms: Pop Music and Popular Culture (1985) wherein he writes that British Pop Music, starting from the mid-‘50s of the 20th century, was: «predominantly a culture of young working-class youth, the expression of those who had left school at fifteen and gone out to work [as Morrissey, in turn, had done]. What this ‘teenage culture’ promised was the increased possibility for a generational style previously excluded not only by economic means but also cultural ones. This was particularly attractive for working-class youth faced with older forms that were either disappearing or being dispersed». [Chambers 1985, 26]. 

Maybe the greatest change that occurred – again in the mid-‘50s – and which may, at first, seem trivial, was how the still widespread term ‘popular music’ (i.e. ‘light’ music aimed at adult listeners), steadily began to be shortened into just ‘pop music’: and this entailed not only a change in the music itself, but also in the audience it was targeted to, creating – in its aftermath – a generational gap that had huge epistemic, and hence cultural, implications. As Peter Lewis remarks in The Fifties (1978), up until the advent of rock ‘n’ roll in Great Britain: «all previous popular music had been middle aged [headed by balladeers such as Doris Day and Perry Como and crooners like Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby]. The music was too languid to support anything but a slow smooch foxtrot or (often Victor Sylverster accompanied) stiff-tempo quickstep. Rock ‘n’ roll swept it all away». [Lewis 1978, 7]. 

Chambers gives an exact date to this epoch-making shake-up in the musical landscape: «1956 is the year when it begins. There were naturally earlier precedents. […] But it was in 1956 when in Britain the scattered signs came together in the recognisable shape of rock ‘n’ roll. From that moment on it becomes possible to refer to a new and distinctive ‘pop music’». [Chambers 1985, 18]. 

Concerning this, one must bear in mind that it was precisely in the mid-‘50s – round about the iconic year 1956 – that Warhol, Lichtenstein and Rauschenberg ushered in Pop Art in the U.S.A. and that meanwhile, in the same period, Hockey, Hamilton and Blake introduced the same movement in the U.K. It was the beginning of an era in which the visual arts and pop music became ever more connected. But I shall dwell – later – on the intrinsic role that Pop Art played within the field of Pop Music; for the time being, I’d like to point out that the musical and depictive aspects of ‘Pop’ constantly pursued each other in the ensuing decades until they finally mingled, and fully merged, in the early 1970s, thanks to the rise of Glam Rock (on which I shall also return, linking it all to Wilde and Morrissey). 

Two were the major factors which, in the course of the 1950s, contributed to the birth of Pop Music and to the Youth Culture it was closely associated with: the first regards the impact of rock ‘n’ roll (see Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and Gene Vincent ) exploding together with the equally cataclysmic rhythm & blues (see Chuck Berry, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters and Bo Diddley) that was then spouting from North America and was now overflowing across the Atlantic ocean. These «US musical forms were taken up and eventually translated into British cultural concerns, later becoming an integral part of British pop» [Chambers 1985, 23] (see Billy Fury, Cliff Richard and, later, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones who, in the early ‘60s, when American rock ‘n’ roll turned ‘cute’ – and was in danger of obliteration – spearheaded the so-called ‘British Invasion’ of the US, feeding (back) its Youth Culture with those very roots it was no longer able to acknowledge). 

The second factor concerns the outbreak of a new social category: that of ‘teenagers’, chiefly represented by working-class urban youths who in the post-war years, thanks to an ever-increasing affluence, could at last dictate, and project, their own tastes and whims onto those sanctioned by the ‘System’, thus bringing about an alternative culture to the official, and more restrictive, one that – ‘till then – had tended to discard them altogether. 

And it was again in the mid-‘50s that London theatre-land witnessed the triumph – in 1956, of course – of John Osborne’s drama Look Back in Anger (which was adapted for the silver screen in 1958, obtaining the same acclaim) and which, in turn, opened up the door not only to the so-called Kitchen-sink Drama (the British realist theatre of the ‘50s and ‘60s) but also to the British Free Cinema wherein – in both media – one heard for the first time the ‘authentic’ voice (i.e. the regional accents) spoken by the generation of Angry Young Men (and Women: think of Shelagh Delaney), stemming – ‘unadorned’ – from the working-classes themselves (and, in particular from the North of England). These plays (Delaney’s A Taste of Honey [1958] above all) and these films (the John Schlesinger-directed Billy Liar [1963] above all) were later to become a main source of inspiration for the song-lyrics Morrissey wrote for The Smiths in their heyday (also inspiring those images – personally chosen by Morrissey – which accompany the picture sleeves of their albums and singles). 

Morrissey has always identified with this provincial, working-class culture which he absorbed in his ‘non-youthful’ Mancunian days, later becoming its outspoken mouthpiece in expressing the frustrations and ambitions of its ‘humdrum’ existence. Speaking about this important influence which has informed all of his own work, during a 1985 interview on Australian Radio, he readily admitted: 

«I’m afraid that they probably remind me of my childhood because I lived in lots of those circumstances and I also think that […] I gaze upon them fondly because it was the first time in the entire history of film where regional dialects were allowed to come to the fore and people were allowed to talk about squalor and general depression and it wasn’t necessarily a shameful thing. It was quite positive […], people were allowed to be real instead of being glamorous and Hollywoodian, if that is a word, and I sincerely hope it isn’t». [cit. in Simpson 2004, 58]. 

Indeed, the ‘50s and ‘60s, those two decades that encompass Morrissey’s own childhood and adolescence spent in the backstreets of Manchester, stand at the very heart of his [Northern] England which was being slowly eroded by consumer greed, by the ‘Americanization’ of mores (and of the English language itself) and was dealt its death-blow by Margaret Thatcher who, Morrissey reckons, was: «dispassionate and obviously mad, […] raging war on the needy and praising the highborn […] with never once a gesture of understanding or kindness. […] Power-mad, Thatcher destroys the miners with relish, a damned and unhappy soul [whose] demonic influence throws further shadows across the now lost soul of England». [Morrissey 2013, 143-44]. 

II 

Growing up on the biggest council estate in Europe
as I did, you get used to seeing violent confronta
tion. I saw pop culture as a way out of that, and a
way into expressing and reinventing myself. [John
ny Marr, 2007]. 

From the ‘50s onwards, as we have seen, Pop Music became the most obvious and effective means of broadcasting the signs and signals sent off by the diverse British youth-oriented subcultures: from the Teds to the Mods, and from the Hippie Freaks to the Glitter Bands, not forgetting the Nihilists of Punk nor the Indie Style advocated by Morrissey (with or without The Smiths). As Chambers neatly puts it, for the post-‘50s successive generations of British ‘tribes’: «the carefully assembled collage of clothes, hair, music, argot and body […] re-works a traditional working-class concern for looking ‘smart’ and ‘flash’ in a more mobile, increasingly media-conscious consumer context». [Chambers 1985, 27]. 

This narcissistic note leads me – at last – to deal with Oscar Wilde’s pioneering yet lasting contribution to the supervening Pop ‘Scene’. Michael Bracewell, in his erudite England is Mine, though aware of the fact that British Pop finds its inception in the discontent of ‘50s urban working-class youth, at the same time points out that: « this rebellion – the hatred of certain young people for [dominant] values – began at the end of the nineteenth century in the cult of aesthetics and artifice which grew around Oscar Wilde». [Bracewell 1998, 13]. 

Mark Simpson, re-enforces this concept by suggesting, not without a pinch of salt, that: «Oscar Wilde was, after all, the leader of the nineteenth-century Glam-rock Movement (though back then it was known as the Aesthetic Movement). By sheer force of will and the meticulous cultivation of his personality, Oscar succeeded in making himself a pop star without learning to play an instrument, forming a band or signing to a record label long before pop music had even been invented. His epigrams were 45 rpm singles avant la lettre: beautiful, poisonous, brilliant little flashes of lyrical egotism and vanity that proved instantly catchy, zooming to the top of the social hit parade and getting played over and over again at parties». [Simpson 2004, 82]. 

Did you perhaps find this a bit over-the-top? Well, then try and guess who wrote the following review of a compilation entitled Chants of Labour: A Song-Book of the People: «They are not of any high literary value, these poems that have been so dexterously set to music. They are meant to be sung, not to be read. They are rough, direct and vigorous, and the tunes are stirring and familiar. Indeed, almost any mob could warble them with ease. […] Should the Revolution ever break out in England we shall have no inarticulate roar but, rather, pleasant glees and graceful part-songs. The change is certainly for the better». [Lynskey, 2010,687]. 

Yes! It’s him: Oscar Wilde who, in February 1889, wrote the above review of Edward Carpenter’s Chants of Labour for The Pall Mall Gazette (cf. «Poetical Socialists», February 15, 1889). All this reminds me of Todd Haynes’ film Velvet Goldmine (1998) where Wilde is transported in a spaceship that drops him off in Dublin and whilst there, at school, declares that, as a grown-up, he shan’t become a doctor or a lawyer but a… pop star! The green Irish ray he emanates travels forward into time and then lands in the sleepy and monochromatic London of the early ‘70s which – suddenly – awakens and brightens up when his green ray finally deposits the explosive musical formula of Glam Rock. 

The film is packed with allusions and references not only to the principal perpetrators of Glam (David Bowie, Roxy Music, Lou Reed, Marc Bolan, etc.) but also to their ‘godfather’ Oscar (and so it’s not by chance that one of the main characters should be called Curt Wild). In the end, it turns out to be a musical soundtrack to Wilde’s dandy philosophy, according to which it’s only style that matters and that – consequently – everybody can reinvent themselves, and take on a new, more ‘authentic’ identity, as long as it’s a ‘true’ artefact. And it’s exactly now that: «the Pop Art lesson that the ‘synthetic’ and the ‘artificial’ are ‘real’, that they ‘count’, begins its aesthetic life in popular culture and pop music. […] Apparently seduced by its own narcissism, sophisticated glam rock knowingly advertised the artifice and construction of the ‘star’. […] [It] became pop’s most self-conscious expression». [Chambers 1985, 82 & 128]. It’s not hard, then, to see in Roxy Music’s song In Every Dream Home a Heartache (1973) the sonic transmutation (or intersemiotic ekfrasis ) of Richard Hamilton’s picture Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? (dating back to 1956 [!]) and which, indeed, could have adorned the album For Your Pleasure that contains that very tune. 

Glam Rock also sabotaged that ‘macho’ attitude which had accompanied Pop Music from its very onset (think of the crudely misogynist lyrics of the early Rolling Stones or the very muscular, ‘hard’-rocking sound of Led Zeppelin), unabashedly displaying its brash male sexuality (latterly known as ‘cock rock’… what else?). Glam Rock, Chambers rightly observes: «behind its disturbing theatrics, the masks, make-up, hair dye, platform heels and changing costumes, betrayed a wildly contradictory range of cultural motifs. […] Further, it raised disturbing questions about male sexuality and styles from within a masculine universe». [Chambers, 1985, 128]. 

Chamber goes on to stress how among: «glam rock’s fiercest critics it was reluctantly accepted that the music’s primary audience was made up of white, working class teenagers. Glam rock was a ‘focal point’ in working-class culture». [Chambers 1985, 135]. Among these ‘white, working-class teenagers’ one can certainly discern Morrissey who, at the tender age of twelve, went to his first live concert in 1972, to watch T. Rex play in Manchester’s Bellevue and who, that very same year, also saw David Bowie perform on stage for the first time. 

III 

Most youth cultures come from the U.S.A., except
skinheads, which as I understand, is an exclusively
British invention. [T]he original idea of skinheads
was just about clothes and music. And in England
it still is to a pretty great extent. Style and every
thing it involves for me have their roots in the British
working-class. That’s where all culture I appreciate
passes on and in some degree is updated. [Morris
sey, 1992]. 

Morrissey’s ‘passion’ (and that’s the right word to use, with its ‘hallowed’ connotations) for music, goes back to his childhood when, at the age of six, in 1965 to be exact – after many a whine and whimper- he managed to persuade his mother Betty to buy him his first 45 rpm: Come and Stay with Me by Marianne Faithfull (who, many years later, in 2008, did him the honour of ‘covering’ his own song Dear God Help Me, as he proudly recalls in his autobiography [2013, 378]). 

For the budding Morrissey, first pop music and then record-shops became a kind of haven, a paradise regained, where he would spend hours, in sheer ecstasy, rummaging about the racks and shelves. Music had become for him a substitute as well as an antidote to his ‘grey’, solitary and tormented life (due to his parents separating when he was 17, to his school masters who taught him only a harsh, humiliating, discipline based on terror tactics and – not least – to his ‘criminal’ timidity which, when combined to his excruciating sensibility, made him – in the long run – prefer music and books to the company of his age-peers («There’s more to life than books, you know» – he sings in Handsome Devil [1983] – «but not much more»). 

As he confessed in an interview he gave in 1991: «I lost myself in music at a very early age, and I remained there. I did fall in love with the voices I heard. […] I loved those people. For what it was worth, I gave them my life, my youth. Beyond the perimeter of pop music there was a drop at the end of the world». [ in Simpson 2004, 35]. 

In an earlier interview (1984) he also acknowledged the central part that Oscar Wilde had played in that dark period of his life: «As I blundered through my late teens, I was quite isolated and Oscar Wilde meant much more to me. In a way he became a companion. If that sounds pitiful, that was the way it was. I rarely left the house. I had no social life. […] As I get older, the adoration increases. I’m never without him. It’s almost biblical. It’s like carrying your rosary around with you». [Birch 1987, 23]. 

It was – again – his mother Betty, an assistant librarian who, when he was eight years old, introduced him to the world of books, insisting he should read Wilde first, as he duly did, becoming immediately obsessed by this writer whose «every single line affected me» [Birch 1984, 23]. In his Autobiography, Morrissey has only words of praise for Oscar, also recognising in him the forerunner of Pop Culture: 

«As the world’s first populist (first pop figure), Oscar Wilde exploded with original wisdom, advocating freedom for heart and soul, and for all, regardless of how the soul swirled. He laughed at the squeezers and the benders and those born only to tell others what to do». He was: «the man who had brought more positive change and excitement and fun to the London literary world more than anyone else – dead or alive, […] the writer who has yet to be matched or equalled, even now, one hundred and ten years after Wilde’s death» [Morrissey, 2013, 98]. 

The critic Pierpaolo Martino, in his acute essay Wilde’s Legacy (2013), states that Morrissey can be considered our latter-day equivalent of Wilde. Martino then lists the many themes and tropes that link the two artists and which, when analysed, present four main aspects: 1) the many intertextual references in Morrissey’s song-book to Wilde’s work (see, for example, the snippet from The Importance of Being Earnest [1895; Everybody’s clever nowadays, placed at the explicit of Rubber Ring (1986)] but also the various epigrams, paradoxes and quips culled from Wilde’s witty repartee that Morrissey enjoys emulating in many of his interviews (e.g.: «I say a lot of things I don’t mean» [2003]; «I normally live in Los Angeles, if you can call it normal living» [2003); «I don’t perform. Seals perform» [2006]; «The reports of my death have been greatly understated» [2003]). 

Morrissey also quotes Wilde ‘in person’ – as it were – in many of his songs where the Victorian writer puts in an idiosyncratic appearance: for example, in Cemetry Gates (1986), Oscillate Wildly (1985), Speedway (1993) and I’m Throwing My Arms Around Paris (2009); the last two hinting at the Queensberry Trials and his subsequent exile on the Continent. 

2) The influence of Glam Rock on Morrissey (and their respective and common debt towards Wilde’s dandy philosophy as expressed in Pen, Pencil and Poison [1891] and The Decay of Lying [also 1891]), leading to the increased possibility of loosening up the rigid concept of gender from its binding ties with the past in order to create a new, more authentic identity (and which, in Morrissey’s own case, really meant a true ‘resurrection’, thanks to the music and art of The Smiths which gave him, literally, a new lease of life). 

The final two aspects are equally interesting and just as apt: 3) Wilde and Morrissey share a caustic and iconoclastic approach, yet their frank and direct depiction of often controversial issues, in their mixing of pathos with bathos, and the hilarious with the tragic, can create beauty out of anguish and poetry out of pain. This element of the sublime which Morrissey traces in Wilde’s work can therefore also be found in many of his own excellent lyrics. 

And, finally: 4) their being Anglo-Irish rebels who dared to criticise England from their respective fin de siécle viewpoints, meant that they both finally had to endure an insulting series of trials wherein the Establishment avenged itself on their deconstruction of its most awesome taboos concerning Politics, Sex and Religion (see, in Morrissey’s case, his lyrics to the songs The Queen is Dead [1986], Margaret on the Guillottine [1988] and the more recent Irish Blood, English Heart [2004] which is not only anti-monarchic in sentiment but also a condemnation of British imperialism). 

When, in 1985, Tony Wilson, a television journalist, asked Morrissey, rather bluntly: «I must ask you, what right does the fact that you are a popular and successful popstar give you to comment on political and…», an infuriated Morrissey interrupted and retorted: «Well, I feel that, if popular singers don’t say these things, who does? […] And if you say what ‘right do you have’, the implication there to me is that popular music is quite a low art, it should be hidden, it can be there but let’s not say anything terribly important, let’s just make disco records or whatever. So I really feel we do have an obligation and I know that people respect it and they want it and it’s working to great effect». [in Wilson 1985]. 

Changing people’s lives through pop music has always been at the very top of Morrissey’s agenda. As far back as 1983, when The Smiths were beginning their musical career, he was quoted as saying: «It’s a matter of life and death to me. Music affects everybody and I really think it does change the world! Everybody has their favourite song and people’s lives do change because of songs. Music is the most important thing in the world.» [Morrissey in Worral, 1983, 23]. It’s therefore not surprising that the title of his latest album (released in 2014), should debut with the words: «World Politics» (no less) and conclude with the very ironic: «Is None of Your Business»! 

References 

Bracewell, M. (1998) England Is Mine: Pop Life in Albion From Wilde to Goldie, London, Flamingo. Brown, L. (2011) «Preface» to Devereux, Dillane & Power (eds.) Morrissey (see below), pp.9-11. Chambers, I. (1985) Urban Rhythms: Pop Music and Popular Culture, London, McMillan. Devereux E., Dillane E. & Power M.J. (eds.) (2011), Morrissey: Fandom, Representations and Identities, Bristol, Intellect. Kopf, B. (1984) «The Smiths: A Suitable Case for Treatment», New Musical Express, 22 December. Lewis, P. (1978) The Fifties, London, Heinemann. Lynskey, D. (2010) 33 Revolutions Per Minute, London, Faber & Faber. Marr, J. (2007) in Marshall B. «Meet Johnny Marr», Uncut, August. Magid A.M. (ed.) (2013) Performing Wilde’s Paradigm in the 21st Century, Newcastle Upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Martino P. (2013) «Wilde’s Legacy» in Magid A.M. (ed.) (see above), pp.140-158. Morrissey (1983) in Worral F. «The Cradle Snatchers», Melody Maker, 3 September. Morrissey (1985) in Wilson, T. Granada TV («Grenada Reports»), February. Morrissey (1987) in Birch, I. «The Morrissey Collection», Smash Hits, 4 July. Morrissey (1992) in Lokko, A. «Fan-mail», Slitz, September. Morrissey (2004) in Simpson, M. Saint Morrissey (see below). Morrissey (2013) Autobiography, London, Penguin Classics. Simpson, M. (2004) Saint Morrissey, London, SAF.