Fash Morrissey

3,830 words

One of the most satisfying aspects of Morrissey’s recent drift into the populist nativist Right is the absolute butthurt from his shitlib fans. It’s glorious. They feel so betrayed. He didn’t just outrage their delicate bourgeois sensibilities. He thrust his fist through their ribcage, tore their heart out, and showed it to them still beating in his hands.

Morrissey just ruined their childhoods in the name of the white race, and I find that quite frankly hilarious.

You almost pity the poor bastards. Almost. Morrissey and The Smiths were the soundtrack of their teenage years. Morrissey’s music got them through some really tough times. That break up. Those lonely evening when Moz was the only one there to keep them company. Some of them have been buying his records for doing on four decades now.

But now shitlibs can’t like Morrissey anymore. Now that Morrissey is a race-woke Right-winger, their depraved and corrupt ideology requires them to deprive themselves of Morrissey and the enjoyment of his music for the rest of their lives.

Fascists like me get to keeping liking Morrissey while liberals have to burn all his records. Ha ha! Suckers!!!

“If Breitbart or Spiked can roll out your comments approvingly online you have fucked up.” Writes British comedian and lifelong Smiths fan Stewart Lee in his a Schadenfreude-inducing 2018 Guardian essay “How to Treat Morrissey? Stop Listening to Him.” “Suddenly, I just didn’t want Morrissey in my home anymore. And I couldn’t imagine any circumstances under which I would ever listen to him again.”

But get this part. Lee writes “I’ve got vintage psychedelic vinyl by actual murderers, and books of poetry by antisemites and paedophiles, who are hard to write out of literary history. And the increasingly reactionary comments made by Mark E Smith in his latter years will not tempt me to part with even the most unnecessary Fall compilation. But somehow, illogically and sentimentally, I held Morrissey to different standards.”

That’s quite . . . revealing. Is being (implicitly) pro-white really that much worse than those other things? Worse than pedophilia? Or more likely, it’s that Stewart Lee merely liked and appreciated those other guys but loved Morrissey. Morrissey was his friend through the years, and his music kept the teenager in him alive. And now Stewart Lee can’t listen to him anymore. Ha! I love it!!!

Lee’s article was a reaction to an interview Morrissey gave to his own website (Morrissey has no trust in the mainstream media anymore) where Moz got unusually and emphatically political. Among other things, Morrissey expressed support for anti-Islam activist Tommy Robinson and endorsed For Britain, a Right-wing populist party lead by Irish firecracker Anne-Marie Waters and other ex-UKIP members who were expelled from the party for wanting to take UKIP in a more ethnonationalist direction (more on them in a bit).

“Among other things . . .”

As for the “among other things” from the interview that broke Stewart Lee’s heart, here are most the “based” portions:

JOHN: You have been accused of supporting Brexit by the press. Why are they so concerned, do you think?

MORRISSEY: Accused is the correct word! It isn’t possible to be congratulated for supporting Brexit, is it? That should tell you all you need to know about the outstanding lack of neutrality within the British press. It’s all a pointless argument anyway because, as you’ve surely noticed, Brexit did not happen. The EU wouldn’t allow it to happen. It is now a dead issue. The people said Leave, but the EU said no. People wanted to leave the EU because of the complete erosion of freedom under EU rules, and the fair-minded majority now see in even more frightening ways how very much they are hated by the EU, not to mention the British political elite. How England is today is a country that is not leaving the EU. Hungary, Italy, Finland and Poland will leave before the UK is allowed to. A second referendum is muttered about but people don’t realize how a second referendum will see an even higher percentage of people voting Leave. What then? A third referendum?

JOHN: What are your thoughts on the upcoming UK elections?

MORRISSEY: They are local elections but people use their vote with national party figures in mind. UKIP is dead, and Nigel Farage aided their downfall by supporting Henry Bolton. Theresa May was always a Prime Minister uninvited. She is incapable of leadership. She cannot say her own name unless it’s written down on a cue card in front of her. I recall her speech on Eid al-Adhar, and how she referred to it as a “joyous celebration” . . . as millions of animals had their throats slit to mark the occasion. I wondered what kind of compassion she could possibly have. The answer is none. However, the Conservatives conserve nothing in modern Britain. In fact, they are the prime destructors of British heritage. Labour are no different from the Conservatives in that they do not object to FGM, halal slaughter, child marriage, and so on. There is no moral clarity with these people, and you shouldn’t vote in a certain way simply because you always have. Do you have the nerve to vote differently? If you have any concern for animal welfare, for example, you cannot possibly vote for either Conservatives or Labour, because both parties support halal slaughter, which, as we all know, is evil. Furthermore, halal slaughter requires certification that can only be given by supporters of ISIS, and yet in England we have halal meat served in hospitals and schools! UK law is pointless!

…
JOHN: London has become a murder capital recently.

MORRISSEY: London is debased. The Mayor of London tells us about ”Neighborhood policin’” — what is “policin’”? He tells us London is an “amazin’” city. What is “amazin’”? This is the Mayor of London! And he cannot talk properly! I saw an interview where he was discussing mental health, and he repeatedly said “men’el” . . . he could not say the words “mental health”. The Mayor of London! Civilisation is over!

JOHN: But why do you think so many people are being killed in London?

MORRISSEY: London is second only to Bangladesh for acid attacks. All of the attacks are non-white, and so they cannot be truthfully addressed by the British government or the Met Police or the BBC because of political correctness. What this means is that the perpetrator is considered to be as much of a victim as the actual victim. We live in the Age of Atrocity.

JOHN: Since you have so much to say on many subjects, why do you not appear on television interviews?

MORRISSEY: Haven’t you heard of people like Cathy Newman or Jo Coburn? They don’t discuss, they insult. If all fails they’ll conclude the interview by calling your grandmother a fat slob. Diverse opinion is banned in England, debate is over. The most offensive thing you can do in modern Britain is to have an opinion and to talk clearly. . . .

JOHN: Don’t you ever wonder if your views have held your career back?

MORRISSEY: Nothing I say is provocative. They are just facts.

Perhaps most surprising was Steven “The Queen Is Dead” Morrissey announced that he has been rethinking his hardline stance on the British monarchy and now considers them worthy of his company.

JOHN: With your views on the monarchy, why did you recently play The Royal Albert Hall, Alexandra Palace and even The London Palladium? Your mother was in the Royal Box, apparently?

MORRISSEY: Yes, my mother, whose name is also Elizabeth, was in the Royal Box. I think those halls belong to all of us. I also think you are asking me if I have softened towards monarchy?

JOHN: No, but, you’ve asked yourself, so go ahead!

MORRISSEY: Well, you know, even a passion to save the planet can start to tire out a bit. I am not fiendish where the House of Windsor is concerned. I resent being ordered to be in awe. I resent the assumption that I must be relentlessly engaged in being in awe of power and money. The House of Windsor represents the strictest social inequality, but I have, I think, expressed my opinion many times, and I don’t feel the need to go on about it, and I wish no ill to anyone. I have been invited to Buckingham Palace three times, did you know? Charles once sent a signed note. If I get a fourth invitation I will go. It seems rude not to! (laughs) I am certain I could persuade Anne that eating horses isn’t a nice thing to do.

Well, that was a curveball. Something tells me he won’t be getting a fourth invitation anytime soon.

It doesn’t really matter whether or not Morrissey meets any particular definition of “racist.” Who knows? Maybe in his mind, Morrissey does not fit his own personal definition of “racist” (the only definition that matters to him). The point is that he declared himself an enemy of the globalist elite and the Cultural Marxist agenda. Right-wingers are used to consuming art by people with whom they disagree politically but Lefties feel like they can never do the same. Their loss.

But what makes this Schadenfreude even better is that Morrissey is too big for the SJWs to take down, and he won’t just go away. So liberals are forced to endure that sense of betrayal over and over as Morrissey continues to dog whistle, doubles down, and reaffirms his commitment to the British people against the globalist elites and their foreign pets. It’s like Morrissey’s old liberal fans are being forced to watch their ex go out with cooler and better-looking people over and over.

Morrissey has been reported to have yelled “Bring Back Free Speech” onstage at a 2018 concert in Birmingham leaving liberal journalists spooked as to what he might mean be that.

But just last week, shit really hit the fan when Morrissey was photographed wearing a For Britain button and the media, Left twitter, and shitlib ex-fans are crying out in pain as they strike him.

For Britain

I, Travis LeBlanc, also endorse For Britain warts and all (yes, I am meddling in the politics of a foreign nation. Why let the globalists have all the fun?).

Let’s get the warts out of the way first. Anne-Marie Waters is an outspoken supporter of Israel. Morgoth’s Review has an excellent video on this subject. I’ll admit, that’s annoying, and I’ll say more on that soon.

But I am willing to look the other way on that because . . .

Anne-Marie Waters wants to abolish hate speech laws.

Not even “based” Nigel Farage is willing to go as far as calling for the abolition of hate speech (to my knowledge). Or if he is, it’s doesn’t appear to be making it the central issue it should be.

Abolishing hate speech would be half the battle for Britain. Social media would still be a serious problem but real-world activism is much more feasible in Britain than it is here in the US. For one, it’s geographically smaller and so easier to mobilize your most committed supporters around the country. Getting from Manchester to London is a lot less hassle than getting from Chicago to New York for most people.

Plus there is a large right-wing soccer hooligan presence in the UK that could crush any Antifa pansy into apple sauce.

Anne-Marie Waters is “naming the white.”

“I have had enough of (((anti-white hatred))). I really have had enough of it. I’ve had enough of having my skin color degraded and insulted at every opportunity. It’s from the (((United Nations))) down and I’ve had enough of it. . . . White people have absolutely nothing to apologize for. We have nothing to feel guilty about and Europe is our little part of the world every right to a homeland just like every other racial group on this planet.” — Anne-Marie Waters. Quoted from the Morgoth video mentioned above (parentheses added).

Now there’s a word for that, my friends. It’s called White Nationalism. So I can infer from the For Britain button which he wore only last week that Morrissey is now a White Nationalist. This . . . this feels like Christmas for me.

Granted Morrissey himself would and has strenuously denied this, and I expect him to continue to deny it in the future.

“I despise racism. I despise fascism.” Morrissey said in a 2018 post intended to clarify (and re-affirming his support For Britain, “I would do anything for my Muslim friends, and I know they would do anything for me.”

OK, I just wanna say right up front that I do not believe for one second that Morrissey has any Muslim friends. I just wanted to get that out of the way right off the bat. I mean, come on. Try to get a mental picture of that in your head. Try to imagine Morrissey hanging out with Mohammad and Abdul in their button-down polyester shirts and gold chains. They’ve got their incense and Arabic music blasting while Morrissey is over there trying to talk to them about Oscar Wilde. Give me a break, Moz. You’ve got about as many Muslim buddies as I have Canadian girlfriends.

Look, Morrissey is a singer. That’s his job. I realize that there are limits as to how far even Morrissey can go and still be allowed do his craft. I don’t expect Moz to start doing Mr. Bond covers any time soon. He’s already had to cancel a tour of the UK and Europe due to safety concerns. I don’t expect him to take a complete vow of poverty. But that’s fine. If he wants to limit himself dog whistling and supporting fashy race-woke political parties, that’s perfectly fine with me. I’m used to dissecting Morrissey’s words to find their deeper meaning.

How’s this for a dog whistle?

At his April 27th show in Toronto, Morrissey, completely out of the blue, named-dropped Faith Goldy. “I’m a Christian (????). I’m very well-travelled. I’ve heard of Faith Goldy.” The crowd erupts in a mix of cheers and boos. Morrissey continues “So have you. Listen, I’ve heard of her.”

You see, he’s not necessarily endorsing Faith Goldy. He’s just casually mentioning the random factoid he has heard of Faith Goldy. There are two clips of that on YouTube. One mentions the “Christian” (since when?) part and one doesn’t.

But ask yourself: what does it mean to have “heard of Faith Goldy”? Faith Goldy is known for exactly three things. You will never read a mainstream media article about Faith Goldy that does not mention these all three.

1. That Faith Goldy is the “Alt Right” chick who ran for mayor of Toronto.
2. That Faith Goldy appeared on a neon-nazi Daily Stormer podcast which resulted in her being fired from (((Rebel Media))).
3. That Faith Goldy recited the 14 words “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children” on a livestream with Millennial Woes.

Every article about Faith Goldy will, without fail, mention those three things. So when Morrissey says he’s “heard of Faith Goldy,” he is saying that he is aware of those three things. And then he deliberately chose not to speak disparagingly of her. Mind you, Morrissey is not known for restraining his opinion about people he doesn’t like. And yet Morrissey mentioned someone widely labeled “White Nationalist” by the media and deliberately chose not to insult her. I’m calling that a dog whistle. I’m thinking Moz is trying to tell us something.

Now you might say “Hey, he was in Toronto so it wasn’t totally out of the blue. He mentioned something specific about that town to build a rapport with the audience.” Maybe. And maybe he was going to insult her but was taken aback about how many people were cheering for Faith. But I doubt it. Morrissey didn’t have to bring her up at all. I’m calling that a dog whistle.

And check this out.

The other day, a friend of mine (the only person I’ve ever met who was an even bigger Morrissey fan than I am), went to one of Morrissey’s shows in New York and sent me this picture.

Morrissey plugging the populist and unofficially-but-implicitly Right-wing French yellow vests movement. Interestingly, The Daily Stormer formerly used that exact same picture for their banner. but I would put that down to coincidence. It is a really badass picture.

The Yellow Vests are not explicitly White Nationalist either, but one French poll found that 46% of Gilet Jaunes agree with the statement “immigration is organised deliberately by our political, intellectual and media elites to bring about the replacement of the European population with an immigrant population”
The Gilet Jaunes, by the way, have also been accused of anti-Semitism and not without justification. The same poll found that 44% of Gilet Jaunes believe there is a Zionist conspiracy on a global scale.

Moz, For Britain, and the whole Jew thing.

As I said, Ann-Marie Water’s support for Israel is a bummer. But then again, the fate of Israel is in the hands of the United States far more than it is Britain’s. So I’m not sure how much Anne-Marie Waters’ support or non-support of Israel really means in the grand scheme of things. So I’m not sweating it that much.

Maybe it’s just the price of doing business in hate speech Britain. Maybe shilling for Israel was a condition for some key supporter. But if that’s the case, if Ann-Marie Waters has some wealthy benefactor who is cool with her “naming the white,” being explicitly ethnonationalist, and calling for the abolition of hate speech laws, and all she has to do in return for his extremely generous support is say some nice things about Israel, I’m not going to tell her to look a gift horse in the mouth given the way the gameboard is looking at the moment.

Now, I’m sure there are going to be people who are to try to tell me how supporting Israel is unconscionable or how you can’t truly be White Nationalist or how you can never truly defeat anti-whiteness without naming the Jew.

Whatever. And who knows? Maybe there is no wealthy backer, and she’s a True Believer in Israel. If that’s the case, someone needs to sit her down with a bottle of red pills. Overturning hate speech and politically organizing as whites are vital priorities. When hate speech gets overturned, there will people naming the Jew calling out Zionists Left and Right both figuratively and politically.

Interestingly, For Britain has also adopted some of Morrissey’s pet issues. Morrissey has gone through a lot of changes a phases including a rockabilly phase that is perhaps best forgotten. But one thing that has remained constant throughout Morrissey’s career is that he has always been an uncompromising vegetarian to the extent that Morrissey will not allow meat to be served in venues when he is performing.
For Britain is the only party in Britain which has the abolition of halal and kosher meat on their platform. I suspect Morrissey may have made that request as a condition of his support. For more info on For Britain’s views on animal rights, here is Anne-Marie on the matter.

Coincidentally, Morrissey wrote a pro-Israel song which appeared on his 2017 album Low In High School. Is Morrissey a philosemite? Who knows? Maybe there was some tit-for-tat going on with For Britain. “You put my animal issues on the platform, and I’ll write a pro-Israel song.” This is all conjecture on my part. Just thought it was weird that Morrissey would all of a sudden start singing about Jews. Or is it?

Here’s a bit of trivia.

I just found out that Geoff Travis, head of Rough Trade Records and the guy who signed The Smiths, was Jewish. This is funny because Morrissey grew to loathe the man and blamed him for The Smiths’ commercial and professional underacheivement. Moz wrote some songs disparaging Geoff Travis which take on completely new meaning once you realize he’s singing about a Jew.

“Frankly Mr. Shankley” off The Queen is Dead was written about Geoff Travis.

Frankly, Mr. Shankly, this position I’ve held
It pays my way, and it corrodes my soul
I want to leave, you will not miss me
I want to go down in musical history

Yep. Working for Jews will do that to a man.

Oh, I didn’t realise that you wrote poetry
I didn’t realise you wrote such bloody awful poetry, Mr. Shankly.

It is indeed a scientific fact that Jews are incapable of writing decent poetry. How many great Jewish poets can you think of? You can think of tons of Jewish novelists, playwrights, historians, intellectuals, comedians, etc. but hardly any decent Jewish poets. That’s because it takes more than just a high verbal IQ to write good poetry. You also have to have a beautiful soul, which no Jew has.

Frankly, Mr. Shankly, since you ask
You are a flatulent pain in the ass
I do not mean to be so rude
Still, I must speak frankly, Mr. Shankly
Oh, give us your money

Well said, Morrissey. I feel that way about every Jew. “You’re a pain in the ass, now please return all the wealth that you’ve plundered from my people.”

And then there is the song “You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet, Baby” whose title was inspired by Geoff Travis’ response to Morrissey’s inquiries as to why The Smiths were not more successful despite having released classic record after classic record.

Today I am remembering the time
When they pulled me back
And held me down
looked me in the eyes and said
“You just haven’t earned it yet, baby”

The Irish

It’s been said that “the Irish are the blacks of Europe.” I dunno if that’s true, but they are certainly the blacks of British pop music because like African-Americans, the ethnic Irish of the UK have always culturally punched far above their weight given their relatively small numbers and outsider status.

While bands from London and the south of England have tended to be solidly Anglo-Saxon and skew middle class (they all met at art college), bands from the North, particularly Liverpool and Manchester, skew more Irish and working class. The Beatles were ethnic Irish. Manchester’s Oasis, the most commercially successful British band of the ’90s, were a bunch of ostentatiously working-class Irish Catholics led by brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher. Madchester legends Happy Mondays were a bunch of drugged-up Irishmen.

There are some notable exceptions in both directions. Happy Mondays’ crosstown Madchester rivals, The Stone Roses (surnames Brown, Squire, Mounfield, and Wren) as well as Mancunian elder statesmen Joy Division/New Order (surnames Curtis, Hook, Morris, and Sumner) were entirely Anglo-Saxon.

Likewise, there was also a significant Irish presence in London’s punk scene, most famously the godfather of punk himself Johnny Rotten (real name John Lydon) as well as Celtic punk band The Pogues who formed in London. The early ’90s shoegaze scene (London’s answer to Madchester) was flamboyantly Anglo–Saxon except for The Beatles of Shoegaze, My Bloody Valentine, who had relocated to London from Ireland.

If I were to stereotype the difference between Irish Brit bands and the Anglo Brit bands (it’s a White Nationalist publication, so why the hell not?), it’s similar to the white/black dichotomy in America.

Your Anglo-Saxon bands are the whites. They tend to take a more disciplined and schooled approach and have a tendency to being artsy-fartsy. They tend to be a little more muso. All the great artsy-fartsy concept albums from Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon to The Who’s Tommy to Radiohead’s OK Computer were all made by southern Anglo-Saxon bands. Hell, you might even throw in Disintegration (Screw you, I’m calling that a concept album) by The Smiths’ southern rivals, The Cure, lead by Robert Smith, a pasty-faced Anglo whose poofy hair rivaled even Morrissey’s.

The Irish Brit bands are the blacks. The Irish place less emphasis on technique and weedly-deedly guitar solos, but what they lack in technique, they make up for in soul and good, old-fashion Irish romanticism. Oasis’s southern Anglo rivals Blur included a classically trained pianist and a guitar prodigy. Man for man, Blur could play circles around Oasis, but they had none of Oasis’ Irish heart. Alan Wren and John Squire of The Stone Roses had more musical talent in their pinky fingers than the entirety of the Happy Mondays (who could barely play their instruments) combined but they had none of the Monday’s Irish joie de vivre or burning Celtic fire.

The Smiths are an interesting case. People like to think of The Smiths as “the definitive English band” but despite naming themselves after the definitive WASP surname, The Smiths were in fact 7/8 Irish (bassist Andy Rourke’s mother is English, but his father and the rest of Morrissey, Marr, and Joyce’s parents were post-war Irish immigrants).

The Smiths seemed to embody qualities of both the Irish and Anglo approach. They had a touch of English artsy-fartsy but didn’t go overboard with it, going into 15-minute soundscapes or extended jams. Like The Beatles, they kept things short and poppy. Guitarist Johnny Marr and bassist Andy Rourke were both very technical players whereas Morrissey had minimal singing experience before The Smiths, and drummer Mike Joyce was a journeyman drummer at best.

But The Smiths music should be interpreted as England from an Anglo-Irish perspective.

Of his childhood, Morrissey reminisced “I was a small fat child in a welfare house.” Money was tight and severe shyness limited his employment options.  Morrissey is full-blooded Irish, but he is also a lifelong Anglophile. Morrissey was raised by and grew up around Irish immigrants and was taught by Irish Catholic teachers. He was keenly aware of his ethnic identity growing up in 1960s Manchester and is quite proud of his Irish heritage.

But the old country of Ireland itself did never held much fascination. Morrissey was fascinated with the county of his birth: England. He loved its rich literary history, its 1950s kitchen sink dramas, its forgotten teen idols of days past.

Morrissey’s heroes as a youth were the Victorian playwrights like George Bernard Shaw and especially Oscar Wilde, an Anglicanized Irishman like himself, formidable wordsmiths who could out-clever the cleverest English wits. Bowie, naturally, and like everyone Morrissey’s age, the Sex Pistols changed his life. Although punk would be Morrissey’s last dance with modernity.

For many years, Morrissey was associated with the Left for many reasons. He was outspokenly anti-monarchy; he repeatedly called for the death of Margaret Thatcher; his strident vegetarianism and animal right activism were widely perceived as implicitly Left-wing; and Morrissey was widely presumed to be gay (again, perceived to be implicitly Left-wing).

Many tried to recruit or co-opt Morrissey into the gay rights movement, but Morrissey resisted such effort and strenuously objected to the characterization. Morrissey would not officially come out as bisexual (I guess?) until his long-await 2013 autobiography, 30 years after The Smith’s debut single. In it, Morrissey confesses to having had a doomed relationship with a man in the ’90s but then seriously considered settling down and having kids with a gal pal in the early ’00s but ultimately decided to stick to his original plan to remain single and be the last of famous international Morrisseys.

In the 2002 documentary The Importance of Being Morrissey, a friend of Moz’s says that Morrissey honestly does not know what sexual orientation he is.

Yet, there have been people have been accusing Morrissey of being Right-wing and racist almost from the beginning. I’m skeptical that Moz has been Right-wing from Day 1, but let’s look at the evidence.

Morrissey was complaining about negrophilia as far back as the ’80s. “I don’t think there’s any time anymore to be subtle about anything, you have to get straight to the point.” Morrissey said in a 1986 interview, “Obviously to get on Top of the Pops these days, one has to be, by law, black. I think something political has occurred among Michael Hurl and his friends and there has been a hefty pushing of all these black artists and all this discofied nonsense into the Top 40. I think, as a result, that very aware younger groups that speak for now are being gagged.”

It’s blunt, but I don’t think that statement is inconsistent with someone not considering themselves racist. Blacks were a microscopic minority in Britain at the time, and Top of the Pops was a prestigious British institution paid for by the taxpayers. If one group is being unfairly over-represented, why shouldn’t he complain?

Then there are songs like “Bengali In Platforms” where Moz tell an immigrant from Bangladesh “Shelve your Western plans. Life is hard enough when you belong here.”

But is that necessarily racist? Maybe Morrissey sincerely believes that Bengali would be happier in his own country and among his own kind. After all, Morrissey is merely a different ethnicity than most of England and still feels like an outsider. The Bengali, who is a different race, has even less chance of fitting in. In Morrissey’s mind, he’s just giving sound life advice: go home. You’ll be happier.

The Your Arsenal Era

As the ’80s moved into the ’90s, Morrissey’s music became less effete and homoerotic as Moz acquired a taste for macho started to butch up his image. He became fascinated with skinheads, soccer hooligans, boxers, soccer players, racecar drivers, and other roguish characters. Morrissey’s 1992 album Your Arsenal was the peak this fascination.

On Your Arsenal is an infamous song called “National Front Disco” whose ambiguous lyrics, neither explicitly condemning or condoning the NF included the line “England for the English.” It caused much controversy and speculation, wringing an explanation from the artist:

The ones who listen to the entire song, the way I sing it, and my vocal expression know only too well that I’m no racist and glorifier of xenophobia. The phrase “England for the English” [used in the song] is in quotes, so those who call the song racist are not listening. The song tells of the sadness and regret that I feel for anyone joining such a movement [as the far-right National Front].

Morrissey was apparently experiencing quite a lot of sadness and regret, close up and at leisure, for according to biographer David Bret (Morrissey: Scandal and Passion [London: Robson Books, 2004]), he was living at the time with a 20-something-year-old skinhead named Jake Walters who later appeared on the sleeve for “The More You Ignore Me, the Closer I Get.”

But deeper clues into Moz’s mindset are elsewhere on Your Arsenal. In “Glamorous Glue,” Morrissey senses that globalism and Americanization were destroying the British culture and identity:

I used to dream, and I used to vow
I wouldn’t dream of it now
We look to Los Angeles
For the language we use
London is dead, London is dead
London is dead, London is dead
London is dead, London is dead
Now I’m too much in love
I’m too much in love

This is a reference to gangsta rap which was then emerging out of Los Angeles and normalizing black American slang in middle-class homes all over the world, even in vitamin-D deficient England. As Morrissey lamented in an interview, “everything is informed by American culture – everyone under fifty speaks American – and that’s sad. We once had a strong identity and now that’s gone completely.”

A third Your Arsenal track worthy of examination is “We’ll Let You Know,” a ballad Morrissey sings from the perspective of a violent soccer hooligan. Hooliganism was still a serious problem in England at the time, so much so that English teams had recently been banned from playing in Europe for several years.

In “We’ll Let You Know,” Morrissey sings a few verses about the savage and cruel nature of hooliganism “We will descend, On anyone unable to defend themselves“ but then at the end, there’s twist:

We may seem cold, or
We may even be
The most depressing people you’ve ever known
At heart, what’s left, we sadly know
That we are the last truly British people you’ll ever know
We are the last truly British people you will ever know
You’ll never never want to know

Hooligans, unlovely as they may be, were the last people in England not yet incorporated into the globalist hivemind. Everyone else was eating McDonalds and watching Hollywood movies. Hooliganism was at least an authentic British pastime.

Now, Morrissey had little in common with these thugs and chads but maybe not nothing. Morrissey may have seen them as fellow outsiders and underdog antiheroes.

It should also be remembered that skinhead and White Nationalist organizations were often heavily anti-Irish, especially with the IRA still a very real menace. Obviously he would not be joining them, and if he did, he would not be staying long.

But in 1992 Morrissey sensed that something about the Britain he had grown up in, known, and loved was dying, and these characters (skinheads, hooligans, etc), were the only other people besides himself who could sense it too. They were the last holdouts. The last patriots of the England of old.

Also in 1992, a band called Suede emerged out of London and was billed by Melody Maker as the Best New Band in Britain. This was the beginning of the Britpop juggernaut that would dominate British music until the end of the decade. The songwriting partnership between Suede singer Brett Anderson and guitarist Bernard Butler drew comparisons to Morrissey and Johnny Marr, leading journalists to proclaim them “The New Smiths.” Morrissey was initially a fan and even covered a Suede b-side on his Your Arsenal tour.

However, as Suede’s popularity would soon come to surpass his own, he soured on the band. But Suede was just the beginning as a new wave of fresh-faced, hedonistic, and unmistakably heterosexual Gen-X Britpoppers was coming up, and Morrissey, the golden boy of the ’80s and last of the bedroom romantics, was looking increasingly like yesterday’s man.

Black-pilled, Morrissey would leave England for Los Angeles in the late ’90s and experience life in a post-white globalist paradise where he became briefly fascinated with Mexican Americans with whom he had quietly acquired a fanatical fanbase. In 1999, Morrissey embarked on a tour, Oye Esteban (Hello, Steve), and his 2004 comeback single “First of the Gang to Die” was about a Mexican street gang.

Morrissey’s popularity with Hispanics is a curious phenomenon. Like Morrissey, they are Catholics in an (ostensibly) Protestant country and might identify with Morrissey’s particular outsider ethos. But Morrissey would eventually lose interests in Hispanics. One might speculate about the effect living in a formerly-white city had on Morrissey’s worldview. Perhaps he’d had time to think about the future when his beloved Manchester and London (also his home for many years) would, like Los Angeles, also become formerly white. But as things would have it, developments in the old country became harder and harder for Morrissey to ignore, even from sunny California.

The Implicit Nationalism of Morrissey

There are a couple of ways in which you can say Morrissey has always been implicitly Right-wing.

First, as stated, Morrissey has always had contempt for modernity and has looked exclusively to the past for inspiration. His influences were Victorian wits, Charles Dickens, and old plays. Bowie was as modern as Morrissey could handle. Moz never jumped on a bandwagon in his life. He never dabbled in synthpop or soulless drum machines.

But The Smiths were also implicitly nationalist in an important way: Morrissey always wrote for a British audience. His songs made cultural reference to obscure towns in England and regional slang that Morrissey knew damn well would go over the heads of even the most Anglophilic American audiences. The Smiths made music like they didn’t give a damn if a single American bought it.

It was always raining in the world of The Smiths, and you could feel the dreary North Atlantic weather through the speakers. His music really transported you to the streets of Manchester.

The Smiths had negligible American and zero black influence. Nothing was “cool” or “awesome” or “dope.” Morrissey wrote like an aristocrat but from a working-class perspective. If he used street slang, it was of the homegrown (and usually archaic) British variety. The Smiths’ songs took place in a world where England was still unmistakably English and people still called each other “the bee’s knees” and whatnot.

A Word on ’90s Britpop . . .

A decade later, there would be the ’90s Britpop craze where a Smiths-style “by British, for British” approach became all the rage in indie music and band like Blur, Oasis, Suede, and Pulp were topping the charts singing in exaggerated British accents about soccer and going down to the pub. However, there is a significant difference.

Britpop was largely a response to the Seattle grunge explosion which had swept America and had temporarily made British bands deeply unfashionable stateside. British bands responded by tailoring the music more specifically towards their home audience. In many ways, Britpop was an economic necessity, and by the time Spice Girls came around, Britpop belonged to the corporations. It had strayed far from its indie roots until it was nothing more than a cynical marketing ploy.

However, The Smiths wrote for a British audience at a time when MTV was opening up the enormous American market to British bands and every idiot from Liverpool with a synth and a camera was getting on MTV and going platinum. And yet, The Smiths defiantly refused to make music videos (although they did make a handful after some severe arm-twisting from their label). The Smiths believed that the only television worthy of them was the prestigious British institution Top of the Pops. MTV could go to hell.

And The Smiths weren’t all concerned about selling albums either. While The Smiths had multiple UK #1 albums, it was the singles chart that Morrissey desperately wanted to conquer. That was the traditional British standard of who was and who was not a legitimate British pop star, not how many albums you could sell to Americans in the Midwest. The easy thing to do would have been to go chase dollars in America. But more than anything, Morrissey wanted to be loved by and his music enjoyed by his fellow countrymen.

But now those same people, the ones Morrissey has devoted his life to writing songs for and about, are in trouble. The rainy Northern streets Morrissey’s youth are now the scenes terror attacks. The tattooed boys from Birkenhead are gone and have been replaced by pedophilic Muslim rape gang members. There’s panic on the streets, but there’s not even safety in the towns anymore.

A wise man once said “I don’t want to be beaten to death by clowns.” And yet Clown World is upon us. But fear not. For while there may indeed be panic on the street of London, Dublin, Dundee, and Humberside, in those very same streets, there is also hope.

What can you say? Morrissey is taking a bullet for his people. Like his hero Oscar Wilde, he will be scorned and rejected by those people led by the Leftist media. But who cares? Morrissey has a huge Hispanic fanbase that doesn’t give a damn about their SJW bullshit.

But unlike Wilde who was persecuted for his degeneracy (he had a wife and kids, for Pete’s sake!), the Puritans of modern Britain want to burn Morrissey at the stake for his virtues. They seek to destroy him for his honesty and commitment to the truth as he sees it. For his courage to put what he believes ahead of chasing as much money as possible. For his loyalty to the country that nurtured him. For his devotion to the British culture that shaped and inspired him. For his commitment the British people whom he loves and celebrates in song and who in return gave him a career, comfort, and acclaim. Steven Patrick Morrissey did absolutely nothing wrong and everything right (although I’m not sure what the point of Southpaw Grammar was. Was that supposed to be prog?).

Anyway.

Like Oscar Wilde, Morrissey’s artistic legacy is of such unassailable quality he will almost certainly be forgiven eventually, even if posthumously. But I don’t think Morrissey will have to wait until death to be exonerated, as sooner or later reality is going to come along and prove Morrissey to be prophetic as he is poetic.