“We would all do the same as you if ever we had the nerve to” sang Morrissey in 1991 on one of his lesser regarded hit singles, “Pregnant for the Last Time”. The subject of this No 25 semi-smash is a woman who gleefully gets herself with child every time she alights on a new man. But these words are, I think, very appropriate for the peculiar position occupied by Morrissey and his detractors in politics and culture.
Recent events have coughed up a particularly prime example of Morrissey hitting a nerve years before anybody else in the pop sphere, getting castigated for it, and being justified in saying he told us so when it became horribly relevant.
Ten years ago he described footage of the treatment of animals in Chinese markets as “absolutely horrific” and that anybody who had seen it “could not possibly argue in favour of China as a caring nation. There are no animal protection laws in China and this results in the worst animal abuse and cruelty on the planet. It is indefensible.”
This statement was Morrissey’s reaction to the hullabaloo after an interview in The Guardian with the poet Simon Armitage in which he said, hotly, after watching animals being skinned alive: “You can’t help but feel that the Chinese are a subspecies.” In Morrissey’s view cruel treatment of animals makes you less than human, but this wording, robbed of its context and intent, was a gift to his many enemies.
That’s because Morrissey annoys people, and unlike most purportedly outspoken pop stars he often annoys the people pop stars aren’t supposed to annoy. What I’ve found fascinating is how many of the opinions he has expressed in his long career have become hot topics on the table of late. Immigration, animal rights, free speech, the denigration and demoralisation of the working class, the unhealthy news media. And with universal basic income sliding its legs ever further over the sill of the Overton Window, his famous declaration in song from 1983 “England is mine, it owes me a living” feels more apposite by the day.
In his own strange way, for how could it be other than strange, Morrissey was a post-liberal before anybody else really cottoned on, and this from someone regarded commonly as stuck in 1954.
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