There are people to whom music doesnât matter. I often envy these people. My mom is one of them â sheâs not really concerned with music, poetry, movies, or anything in popular culture. She considers herself a whole, satisfied person without these things in her life, free from any aesthetic crutches.
I am not one of those people.
I needed music. I need music. From a very early age, I needed music to tell me I was okay. I needed it to tell me I was normal, I needed it to tell me I was weird, I needed it to confirm that Iâd be fine either way. I needed it in a dramatic way. I needed it in a mundane way, playing all the time in the background like wallpaper with a pattern youâve stopped noticing. I needed to identify with it, I needed it to make me feel complicated emotions Iâd never felt before; it could comfort me or repulse me, soothe me or force me to look outward, echo my own sentiments or expand my mind to fit new ones. Music (and the bands/people who made it) served as my mentor, my older sibling, my voice of reason and, at times, bad influence. When youâre an only child from a fractured family, you spend a lot of time in your room. Your hobbies can become your closest friends. Music became my savior and my most time-consuming, all-encompassing, money-draining pursuit. My savings account would be at least triple its current amount had I not been so obsessed with seeing bands and collecting their records. Perhaps I would have created more things of my own if Iâd not spent so much time fawning over the creations of others. My personality would have been entirely different if, early on in my youth, I had not blatantly lifted the clothes and mannerisms and styles of those I looked up to or had not read the books and watched the movies they had championed. For better or worse, art â this specific form of art, music â has been and continues to be a transformative force in my life.
At the very center of this were two bands, R.E.M. and The Smiths, and specifically two people: Michael Stipe and Morrissey. My first two real heroes, with now only the former still on the pedestal I built when I was around 11 or 12.
I moved to a new neighborhood and school district when I was in second grade, and became fast friends with a boy my age who lived one street over. Nathan and I shared a lot of the same interests, and as we started middle school, a deep obsession with those two aforementioned bands and frontmen (and, also, Depeche Mode and Dave Gahan). Nathan was gay before either one of us knew what that meant, and was often mocked for this â I was made fun of, too, but for reasons far less difficult for me than coming to terms with my sexuality as an adolescent. But, for our own reasons, we were outcasts, seeking comfort in our chosen art. This was conservative Georgia in the late â80s/early '90s, a time well before the Internet, before easily accessible media, when role models were fought for tooth and nail, with plans having to be made on how to save enough allowance for cassette tapes, older friends or siblings bribed to purchase things with âparental advisoryâ labels weâd smuggle into our rooms later. I can barely put into words what hearing (and seeing!) Morrissey for the first time did to us â did FOR us! For Nathan, in such an environment, Morrissey became a blueprint for queerness, the very first peek into the very POSSIBILITY of life as a grown man who wasnât either an alpha male jock, like all the ones at our school, or stern businessman with a briefcase, like all of our (step)dads. He was the first person to, with his mannerisms and his very existence, communicate to Nathan that it was perfectly fine (and cool even!) to, in the words of the bullies, âact like a girl.â And the magical thing is, he somehow simultaneously did the exact opposite for me! As a masculine tomboy, I saw in him a person so easily blurring the lines of both! He made me feel better about the qualities I had so often been told âwerenât ladylike.â We talked about him constantly. We dressed like him. It goes without saying that his music was playing in the background nearly every time we hung out. I remember my mom allowing me to stay up late to watch Johnny Carson the night Morrissey was on â I was 12, and I absolutely remember my mom getting angry, watching alongside me as Morrissey fans screamed over Bill Cosby (gulp) as he tried to talk. The next year, Morrissey was on Saturday Night Live, and my mom let me go over to Nathanâs house to watch it (our parents became very close friends as well). He taped it on their VCR as we watched, and we immediately played it back. We watched it probably every day for months. We didnât have the money to buy all of his back catalog, so an older kid in my youth group at church let me borrow his Smiths CDs, and I dubbed copies on my tape deck for us. I sat and hand-wrote the lyrics down on notebook paper, carefully transcribing from the liner notes as the tape recorded.
Itâs difficult for me to be eloquent here, and I always find it hard to convey these feelings to people who are, well, normal, who can hear a song and go, âThatâs nice!â and not have to immediately know its backstory, who wrote it, why they wrote it, what inspires them, what books they read, etc. Who donât feel their insides twist into knots when a turn of phrase meets a melody and the combination makes them feel understood in a way they never have, sets them at ease in a way that even the kind words of the closest relative couldnât do. That is absolutely how I felt the first time I heard The Smiths. When youâre 12, at least when I was 12, the last people you feel like you can talk to about your feelings are your parents; and for Nathan, doubly so, as I donât think he could even articulate his until Morrisseyâs lyrics shed some light on what heâd been going through. So, for us, this guy was so far from âjust a singerâ â he was a beacon, a mentor, he told us it was okay to be effeminate and okay to be masculine and okay that you didnât get invited to the parties because staying in your room reading books was more glamorous anyway. The world wasnât made for people like us and that should be worn as a badge of honor, not shame. Such a message was REVELATORY for a girl whose every male role model had let her down or left entirely and a boy who didnât want to play football or shoot guns.
The obsession continued and deepened, and in high school, became full on reliance. Who better to help me navigate the emotional minefield that is the teen years than Morrissey? I didnât drink, I didnât smoke, I didnât do drugs, I didnât âparty,â I didnât even so much as hold a boyâs hand until I was a couple weeks shy of 16 years old â all of the things that kids considered fun and did on a regular basis were so foreign to me, until I got home to my bedroom and was soothed by the voice of a guy who also did not participate in any of the above. I didnât really know anyone in real life who seemed to understand my plight more than the man whose voice was blasting out of my speakers.
To me, Morrissey was always absolutely the voice of the underdogs. The weirdos. The outcasts. The disenfranchised. Anyone who felt left out, let down, misunderstood, too sensitive, too sad. He was there to comfort us, understanding and empathetic to our needs while giving the finger to the system and the people therein who were keeping us down, shoving us into lockers, ripping the glasses off our faces and stomping on them in front of their domineering friends.
When someone writes songs as seemingly personal as Morrisseyâs, you tend to think you know them. And in my case, having read so many books about him (and now some BY him), I felt that way, to a degree. I like to think of myself as a rational person (perhaps after reading this far, you disagree), but I definitely felt a bit like I âknewâ him in the sense that Iâd picked up on words heâd frequently used (âvulgarâ and âvileâ were personal favorites), had working knowledge of the causes that were important to him, and certainly knew his favorite bands and movies and authors. Iâd even been lucky enough to meet him quite a few times, especially after moving to Los Angeles, where Iâd see him at restaurants and shows, and he was always cordial (if not downright sweet) to me every time we spoke. Of course Iâd heard stories about him âbeing a dick,â but that never bothered me, truly, only because I think thatâs kind of relative, and perhaps a lack of manners or catching someone on a bad day is a bummer, and the âtemperamental artistâ archetype exists for a reason. Sure, itâs ideal that someone you admire is nice to you should you ever interact, but a surly encounter would not cause me to write someone off completely. So, because of this, well, perhaps delusion, I was able to explain away certain statements, such as calling Chinese people a âsubspeciesâ while addressing animal rights, because I knew of his history of exaggeration when trying to get his point across about that subject in particular, the one perhaps dearest to his heart. (And I wonât pretend that white privilege didnât play a part; itâs undoubtedly and shamefully easier to conveniently ignore something when you arenât the target.) This personâs main place in my life thus far was almost as a therapist, so the possibility of him having anything other than the best of intentions seemed so unlikely. But the words became harder to parse, excuses harder to make.
Playing the contrarian for the sake of it isnât helpful (or even entertaining) in times like these. You arenât at the Algonquin Round Table. Youâre courting Stormfronters. Itâs not funny or charming. I donât expect every artist I look up to (or even every friend or acquaintance in my life) to share my exact same views, but when your band wears T-shirts supporting the Black Panthers yet you voice your support for the likes of Nigel Farage, how does the cognitive dissonance not paralyze you? You change lyrics to songs to slam Trump, yet you basically share his views on immigration? You imply that a gay teenager â arguably the demographic most deeply affected by your art â is at fault for the predatory behavior of an adult? Youâve told anyone who will listen that you were raised on feminist literature, yet you claim the female victims of Harvey Weinstein â a man who hired fuckinâ BLACK OPS to spy on his accusers to make sure they never came forward, so calculated were his plans â were just âdisappointedâ that their RAPES didnât result in career advancement?! WHO ARE YOU. Who is this person saying this? The very person who gave me the strength to stand against the establishment has become the establishment! The person whose voice soothed with empathy and compassion for outsiders like me has become someone I would have crossed the street to avoid. The bullied has become the bully. He has, for years now, exhibited the very closemindedness I thought he was trying to free us from.
Is it just an inevitability that the spoils of success will change a person? If you isolate yourself and invite no one into your circle who will ever question you, is this the result? Contempt for the very people who supported you for so long? A quality I used to admire in Morrissey was his steadfastness, but Iâve found as Iâve aged myself, standing by opinions for the sake of it, refusing to allow yourself to grow and change as more information becomes available, to never soften your heart and swallow your pride and apologize when youâve realized you might have been wrong about something â thatâs not admirable, thatâs cowardice. I appreciate it more when people admit they donât know enough about a subject to comment on it instead of making a statement just for attention.
My heart is broken. The man I looked to as an oasis of sensitivity in a desert of toxicity seems, well, just plain mean and vengeful now. I refuse to be cynical, and I refuse to be someone who says, âThatâs what you get for having heroes.â Perhaps the lesson here is just knowing when to let go. And that it was indeed the songs that saved my life, not the man.
