Morrissey's Amateur Night

WHAT DO STING, Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, David Byrne and Bruce Springsteen all have in common? All are famously liberal pop stars that never performed at the Apollo in Harlem. Yet that's where Morrissey chose to launch a concert series to promote his album You Are the Quarry. Another perversely provocative move for the British singer, his five-night Apollo stint obtruded upon the legacy of James Brown and Motown, as if just to complicate our narrow view of pop music. This was, in fact, the ungentrification of popular culture. And that's been Morrissey's method ever since the Smiths reinvigorated British pop in the aftermath of punk.

Few critics have credited Morrrissey for his punk ethic. His elegant, idiosyncratic singing and Johnny Marr's melodic, eclectic guitar confounded most people's notions of what pop music could accomplish. Lyrics such as "England is mine/And it owes me a living" were puzzled at, even overlooked, anything but understood. Protest and distemper, an especially youthful mix, underscored Morrissey's most romantic longings. His songs were distinguished by the adventure of coming to terms with love and sex in thorny political circumstances. He examined the most private traumas in a public arena that punk and folk had reserved for political statement. (Pursuing pop star rather than hero status, Morrissey could sneer at showbiz self-righteousness, as when the Smiths refused to take part in Bob Geldof's "Do They Know It's Christmas?")

Because the expression of lonely romanticism was hardship enough, Morrissey preferred to make lyrical equivalents to the melodramatic social dissent of Britain's 60s Angry Young Man films. Post-punk acts of the late 70s and early 80s—from the Buzzcocks to the Au Pairs, X-Ray Spex to the Slits—also used sexual content, but none were as discreet or effectively insinuating as "Hand in Glove," "This Charming Man" or "How Soon Is Now?" That was the unique way Morrissey chose to emerge from specific cultural traditions—Oscar Wilde, Graham Greene, Shelagh Delaney, Elizabeth Smart, the Shirelles, the New York Dolls, the Jam, etc. Only the Pet Shop Boys and Public Enemy are comparably erudite and purposeful.

Each Smiths song was an outcry—though not an obvious political remonstration. Morrissey wasn't a teenager when he made those records; it is only an accident of commerce that the pop market was the only place for such freakish expression. It is unfortunate that reviewers and fans still view his work as adolescent petulance. The commonly accepted division between white and black pop was exposed and exacerbated by Morrissey's infamous quote, "Reggae is vile" and the controversial "hang the DJ" refrain of "Panic." Those alarming phrases stand in contradistinction to the dreads-wearing and pot-smoking of now fatuous one-worlders.

The Apollo appearances gesture toward clarifying the pop culture paradoxes with which Morrissey was always in conflict. In his own version of Amateur Night at the Apollo (remember the root word of "amateur" is "love"), Morrissey threw down a practical challenge to those fans who might be content with their elite cult status and to the venues of pop culture that habitually represent mundane restriction. Defying both camps, forcing them together, was a truly bold act—the kind the mainstream press was willing to acclaim when the Clash performed at the Times Square disco Bonds in 1980. Morrissey has never had such mainstream acceptance, which is why his popularity has always seemed so genuine rather than manufactured. He has been almost too successfully subversive.

No other pop artist has made charisma and politics so intriguing. His new album You Are the Quarry is the best-yet demonstration of this fact, since its politics are so openly—and yearningly—expressed. "I've been dreaming of a time when/To be English/Is not to be baneful/To be standing by the flag/not feeling/shameful, racist or partial." This isn't the simple clarion to brotherhood it might seem; it's an ode to personal freedom. But the song's exciting proposition is that Morrissey defines freedom as the ability to balance paradoxes. Now deliberately exiled in Los Angeles, this Manchester-born iconoclast blasts the most timid English social traditions—specifically those skinheads who pelted him at Glastonbury in '92 when he came on stage wrapped in the Union Jack. (Why couldn't they see the love?) He wishes for a national identity, knowing that such a claim is improbable—if not impossible—for a person of any sensitivity. It's always the sensitivities that catch him up.

Snagged by humanism as much as by his own arrogance, Morrissey's new album offers an inspired perspective on modern living. The California experience—with the dark-eyed allure of Mexico—has opened up the famous Limey hermit. Contemporary politics are so very complicated that Morrissey resurrects punk's great refusal as a way of being unbound by doctrine, dogma or nostalgia. "And I will die with both of my hands untied," goes the most trenchant line of "Irish Blood, English Heart." In that song Morrissey sings, "Spit upon the name Oliver Cromwell/And denounce the royal line that still salute him." It's probably the first pop song since Elvis Costello's "Oliver's Army" to refer to Oliver Cromwell, yet the song's ultimate ambivalence isn't likely to appease Costello's Irish pride. Morrissey's vitriol and consciousness reverberate more. Besides, Costello (a soul-music admirer who once had his own race-baiting controversy in 1979) never played the Apollo either.

Socially significant pop typically gets praised if it is banal like Rage Against the Machine. You Are the Quarry risks being misrepresented as personal, whiney pique. In the album's mellowest couplet, "Come Back to Camden" and "I'm Not Sorry," Morrissey lines up apology followed by defiance, summing up "There's a wild man in my head." Fact, the album's power comes from vividly reflecting the romantic and political anxieties the pop audience must face along with Morrissey. The album's title refers to himself (as media victim), but also to his listeners whose emotional lives are often chipped away and mined for commercial pop fodder. Not since the fierce and disturbing Your Arsenal has Morrissey so forcefully illustrated this aspect of the pop condition.

Of course, listeners must grow along with the artist. That hasn't been the case—to judge by many reviews that refer to the Smiths as a solace of the reviewers' teen years when their utmost concern was with popularity. Morrissey's politics (and the ammunition of his witty aperçu) always went deeper than that. Here, he sings about love in ways that are not placating but demanding. In "America Is Not the World," the word "love" is wily, seductive rhetoric, and in "The World Is Full of Crashing Bores," it's a last wish, an aspiration. In each song, it's sung sincerely. Hearing it revived this way, you rediscover what pop music does best—by realizing how rarely it treats love seriously.

At his best, Morrissey defines love as both a spiritual and social act ("You lounged with knees up and apart/And me and my heart... We just knew"). Adolescent rock cliche would limit those lines to being innuendo. But Morrissey commingles separateness and longing, desire and consciousness. For a white pop star to have taken his show to the Apollo is a similarly unifying act. Forcing listeners to understand that—without tying himself to an opportunistic issue—let Morrissey not only make art but also rousing politics. o