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, olé 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.

 

Leonard Cohen. Photo by Cory Doctorow

Photo of Leonard Cohen by Cory Doctorow

 

 

Morrissey

Morrissey, in 2008

 

 

 

 

 

 

–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.

 

Copyright ©2008 Spinozoblue and Yahia Lababidi. All rights reserved.
The mate­r­ial on this site may not be repro­duced, dis­trib­uted, trans­mit­ted, cached,
or oth­er­wise used, except with the prior writ­ten per­mis­sion of Spinozablue, Inc.

 

 

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