Spinozablue: An Eclectic Journal of the Arts

The songs of both these artists are generally perceived as music to slash your wrists to, and playing either of their records at a party signals its certain death (or yours). To their intensely loyal cult following, in the privacy of their bedrooms, they sing to each alone. And by making their anxieties public, these artists are Saviors to brethren of solitaries. Both are literary types; one is a novelist and poet, while the other as a librarian’s son was steeped in literature since youth. Yet both are not great poets, by the admission of one and despite the protestations of the other. Still, when they wrap their yearning around their words and make them sing, they are achingly lyrical. With a kind of duende (dark creative force) for a muse, both are poets of aloneness and longing, disaffection and death. And both have been away, for several years. One retired to a monastery, where he was given the name Jikan (Silent One), while the other has been living in monastic seclusion and silence. At the monastery, the former referred to himself as a bad monk on account of his other residence, in L.A. The latter, once regarded as quintessentially English, now resides in self-imposed exile in the same city

 

The Great Miserabilst

 

 

Stephen Patrick Morrissey, former front man of the seminal 80’s band, The Smiths, and currently a solo artist regarded as one of England’s most articulate lyricists, is one of L.A.’s two bad monks. As a singer-songwriter, Morrissey shares a prefix with terms like: morbid, moribund, morose etc… Dubbed The Great Miserabilist and Pope of Mope (among other less flattering or imaginative epithets) he was without a record label for as long as seven years, following the lackluster reception of his studio album, Maladjusted. Since then, he’s come back with two well-received new records, You are the Quarry and Ringleader of the Tormentors (although according to him, he’s never been away; it’s his listeners that are back).

Whatever the case, Morrissey was back in form, and both albums were works of heart. Musically more experimental, by his standards (with a flute solo, samples and electronic beats) and vocally more confident (full of gorgeous swells and trills) Quarry was a swishy affair, with 12 new unrequited love songs to life, indifferent lovers and, in keeping with tradition, the grave. Situating him in familiar territory. “Under slate-grey Victorian sky/ here you’ll find / despair and I,” he warbles plaintively in Come back to Camden, reminding those who strayed of his quietly harrowing emotional charm.

Lyrically, Morrissey is still the “bee’s knees” (as he once sang of himself): acid wit, intelligent, mournful and humorous at once. All filtered through “[his] self-deprecating skin and bones” as he croons on the searing I have forgiven Jesus in Quarry. With his penchant for titles that threaten to make the songs redundant, a cursory glance at the track list says it all; Irish Blood, English Heart, for example, is the name of the first released single from Quarry. Emotionally ambivalent and riddled with contradictions as ever, Morrissey is spurning sympathy in How could anyone know how I feel, while on another track, the misanthropic This world is full of crashing bores he desperately wonders why no one ever says to him “take me in your arms and love me.”

It’s like something straight out of one of Beckett’s tragicomedies: “Don’t touch me! Don’t question me! Don’t speak to me! Stay with me!” (Estragon, Waiting for Godot). Laugh till you weep. But, Morrissey has always been at his most beautiful when he’s pining, for love and understanding, a lost England, or life itself. (In an old Smiths song, The boy with the thorn in his side, he asks: … And when you want to Live/ How do you start? /Where do you go?/ Who do you need to know ?)

One wonders what would become of this poet of aborted passions if he were actually to get what he wants. Which partly accounts for the shock value of his latest offering, Ringleader. Much has been made of his uncharacteristically blunt sexual declarations and the candor with which he expresses them (the oft-quoted explosive kegs between his legs). And, it is disorienting to hear him finally giving himself a break and speaking plainly of desire -given his addiction to confessing in code, innuendo, and retractable hints. Now, he finally spells it out. There is someone. With legs. And he’s in between them. Gasp?!?

But, I suspect, what is equally affecting next to his trance-like exhilaration at finding love-sex is the number of times, and manner, in which he addresses ‘God’. Has Morrissey found faith, too? Did he always have it, and shied of uttering it, as yet another ‘love that dares not speak its name’? Dear God, he sings over a church organ with such clarity and transparency of heart, such naked emotion that the eyes well with tears, please help me.

For all his single-minded and long enduring despair, Morrissey seems an unlikely candidate for a spiritual seeker. Yet, despite himself his latest release, Ringleader of the Tormentors is another remarkable testament to his version of seeking and spiritual restlessness. (Nevermind, his sublimely staggeringly arrogance: forgiving Jesus on his previous album, and asking Him, mid-sex act on the current one, if this kind of thing has happened to Him).

In his own words, Morrissey’s still ‘turning sickness into (un)popular song’, and his capacity for contradiction remains undimmed. It’s the same old S.O.S/But with brand new broken fortunes he sighs on Life is a Pigsty over the bleak patter of falling rain, only to declare triumphantly: At Last I Am Born, in a march-like anthem of the same name. The pain, hasn’t really left him, however; it spills richly over from one song to the next.

On Ringleader, he calls it by it’s proper name — Can you stop the pain? — again and again, and with varying emotional inflection — menace, yodel, heartache — so that one suspects he experiences some form of voluptuous joy in the mere repetition of the word itself: ‘pain’. Characteristically, he remains death-haunted throughout Ringleaders; very likely, feeling most intensely when he suffers and seeing best through life’s illusions when longing for the end. “The future is ended by a long, long sleep” she sings, not unhappily.

Mercifully, the rest of the music on Ringleader is as robust, unpredictable and loaded as life, itself. Given all that seems to be going on, behind the scenes, ole Morrissey manages to (vocally) match this new music’s stride, having it appears found new life himself. At last he is born!

 

 

The Silent One

 

In 1994, that other great miserabilist, Leonard Cohen, retreated to a monastery in California (Mt. Baldy) for some five years. When he came back down from the mountain, he brought with him a luminous new album, simply titled 10 New Songs. (Asked why he left the monastery in an interview, he quipped: I’d washed enough dishes). Whatever the other benefits may have been, however, the retreat did wonders for his work.

As an album, 10 is perhaps more overtly spiritual than previous albums. On one song, Love Itself, he meditates on the light coming through the window: “In streams of light I clearly saw/ The dust you seldom see/ Out of which the Nameless makes/ A Name for one like me.” Later in that same song, the rays of Love that plunged into his room leave him spellbound: “All busy in the sunlight/ The flecks did float and dance/ And I was tumbled up with them/ In formless circumstance”.

Nonetheless, these ten new songs are suffused with this world’s charms, too. Back on Boogie Street, he sings “a sip of wine, a cigarette and then it’s time to go. I tidied up the kitchenette and tuned the old banjo.” Later in that same song, he shares with us this piece of secular spirituality: “So come, my friends, be not afraid/ We are so lightly here/ It is in love that we are made/ In love we disappear.” Yet on another track with metaphysical accents, That don’t make it junk, Cohen huskily confides this discomfiting truth: “I don’t trust my inner feelings — Inner feelings come and go.”

With previous albums such as New Skin for the Old Ceremony and Death of a Ladies’ Man, it is abundantly clear that Leonard Cohen, unlike Morrissey, never assumed the impossible position of celibacy. His love songs are addressed as much to the body as to the mind, and frequently depict him worshiping at the altar of Woman: “So I knelt there at the delta,/ at the alpha and the omega, / at the cradle of the river and the seas”.

Yet it seems the surfeit of Cohen’s relations leave him feeling just as marooned as Morrissey’s deprivation. “You win a while, and then it’s done — Your little winning streak/ And summoned now to deal/ With your invincible defeat,” he whispers hoarsely on one of the new songs, A Thousand Kisses Deep. This from the same man who named one of his books Beautiful Losers. The title of Cohen’s latest volume of poetry, The Book of Longing, may well apply to the entire oeuvre of Morrissey.

 

 

National Treasures

 

Eccentricities aside, both artists have come to be regarded as National Treasures, in Cohen’s Canada and Morrissey’s England. Over the decades, Cohen has garnered international respect and recognition — with doctoral dissertations and university courses discussing his work, including a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2008 — all of which he has accepted with both humility and grace.

Meanwhile, in 2006, Morrissey was named by BBC’s Culture Show as one of Britian’s top three Living Icons (in the company of ex Beatle Paul McCartney and David Attenborough) and, in 2004, was asked to curate London’s prestigious music and poetry festival, Meltdown. The ex Smith is not as gracious as Mr. Cohen, however, when it comes to appreciating those who appreciate him. Claiming not to have read anything written of him, including two books focusing on his influence, St. Morrissey and Songs That Saved Your Life, he is frequently dismissive even of his own fans.

Times have changed, and Morrissey’s ‘fans’ today are no longer the wan English wallflowers they were in the eighties, hiding behind their black turtlenecks and heavy glasses, and neither is he. Previously based in sunny Los Angeles, Morrissey has managed to attract an unlikely and considerable new fan base from the young Latino community, who are somehow susceptible to his brand of doomed romanticism. Likewise, those who appreciate Leonard Cohen are not just leftovers from his 70’s heyday but a whole new generation of young adults, with two recent tribute albums by contemporary musicians: I’m Your Fan (1991) and Tower of Song (1995).

 

 

Inhabiting an intensity

 

Morrissey’s and Cohen’s positions of authority stem from more than the sum of their introspective lyrics and singing voices. In spite of the numerous books of verse and prose Cohen has published over the past few decades, it is not strictly as a poet or novelist that he has made his mark. Delivered in his trademark, cigarette-ravaged, reassuring growl, Cohen’s words acquire another force altogether on his albums. Gloomy-doomy on the page, they take on new life when sung.

It is the same with Morrissey. “Sister I’m a poet” he wails, voice atremble, in a song of the same name. To hear the passion with which he stakes his claim, we should be mean to begrudge him; whereas in black on white, he tends to read like so much sparkling whine. Ultimately, they both move us because of an intensity they inhabit, an emotional profundity, and the earthly mysticism borne of living in close proximity to suffering and solitude. Or, in the words of another spiritual warrior, philosopher Nietzsche, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”

In that sense, Cohen and Morrissey are not merely despairing artists but artists of despair, and they have returned from the underground to share with us what they’ve seen. “Ring the bells that still can ring/ Forget your perfect offering/ There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in…/” Cohen coos in an old classic, Anthem. Similarly with Morrissey, in a Smiths song, There is a light that never goes out; and that light is all the more powerful on account of the darkness they’ve shared with us. With both back on the public stage, we realize just how much we have missed these brave witnesses and their poignant threnodies.

Photo of Leonard Cohen by Cory Doctorow. Photo of Morrissey from his myspace page. No author listed.

 

 — Yahia Lababidi

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* Link destinations within the article were chosen by Spinozablue.

 

Yahia’s book of Aphorisms has been revised, reissued, and expanded. You can purchase a copy of Signposts to Elsewhere at Janestreet press.

 

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