What would you say your favorite thing about Morrissey as a person is? (I'm just curious since you know so much about him)
I think my favourite thing about him is how true he is to myself. For instance, after years of people saying “oh, I hate Morrissey, he’s always so miserable,” he releases a song called Life Is A Pigsty containing lyrics like “and you can shoot me and you can throw me off a train, I still maintain, I still maintain life, life is a pigsty” and “Can you please stop time? Can you stop the pain?” and it takes a very rare kind of courage to be able to express that amount of pain when you know that people will laugh at you and dismiss you as an artist for it. In fact, he also went further and released a song a few years later called Something Is Squeezing My Skull in which he addresses stigma against mental illness directly, and says “I know by now you think I should’ve straightened myself out - thank you, drop dead” and I think that’s such a courageous and important thing for someone as public (and as publicly mental ill) as him to say. He’s also always stayed true to his roots - on the same album as Life Is A Pigsty he wrote a song called On The Streets I Ran which begins “a working class face glares back at me from the glass and lurches - oh, forgive me, on the streets I ran, turned sickness into popular song” and I think it’s so important that he’s acknowledging that most people who had the upbringing that he had don’t get to live the life that he’s living or anything near to it. I just think he’s a very genuine person and I’m really glad he’s not afraid to say the things that people need to hear.
