Morrissey, You are the Quarry
CD Review by John Demetry
Part TwoI'm, Slipping below the water line
I'm, Slipping below the water line
Reach for my hand, And, And the race is won
Reject my hand, And, The damage is done
--Morrissey, "I'm Not Sorry" from You are the Quarry
Morrissey's great art - never greater than on the new album You are the Quarry - signifies an extension of the artist's meta-phorical hand - and a challenge to the audience to respond. The stakes attached to that response are high - an emotional (read: spiritual) gambit. Morrissey risks so much - exposes so much - on the new album that this faith in the audience proves both devastating (frightful) and hopeful, an emotional whirl in the album's ecstatic rockin'-to-swooning tonal swings.
On the exquisite autobiography of "I'm Not Sorry," Morrissey constructs an existential epic out of pop-star solipsism:
On competing
Oh, when will this tired heart stop beating?
It's all a game
Existence is only a game
Such humbling perspective actually puts new weight on human interaction, as metaphorically represented by an artist's ethical quandary. Morrissey puts faith in the healing power of touch ("Reach for my hand"). Such signs of compassion prove the existence of Love. And Love's unpredictable drives require no apologies
I'm not sorry for
For the things I've done
And I'm not looking for
Just anyone
In the rhyming stanza to the one quoted at the beginning of this review, Morrissey eloquently, unforgettably accounts for gay despair:
I'm, Slipping below the water line, I'm, Slipping below the water line
The woman of my dreams, She, She never came along
The woman of my dreams, Well, There never was one
Morrissey answers this essential angst - the driving force behind his need to express and his capacity for compassion - by returning to a trope from his album "Your Arsenal". On that album, the English flute represented a cultural heritage to be confronted and reconciled. Now, at the end of "I'm Not Sorry," following his outsider's call - "There's a madman in my head" - the song's flute c allows for pure emotional release, resonating with History and his story.
Morrissey's musical sophistication - a rock scholarship (a quarry) mined for expressive felicity - restores the political essence to pop spirituality. This is exemplified by "The First of the Gang to Die."
The track's rock-a-billy throwback extends pop myth-making to a marginalized group (Los Angeles. Hispanics). Yes, it's ironic and satirical. Morrissey subverts rock's hetero-male legacy by satirizing the culture's homo-eroticizing of criminality. Morrissey croons whistfully:
Hector was the first of the gang with a gun in his hand
And the first to do time, the first of the gang to die, Such a silly boy
Now, Morrissey goes beyond the similar (still-necessary) critique of his classic song "The Last of the Famous International Playboys." With "First of the Gang," Morrissey celebrates the vitality and, as critic Armond White noted, "grace" of oppressed people. Morrissey finds ("reflect") spiritual value ("love") in the conditions of squalor, opening the song with the following challenge:
You have never been in love
Until you have seen the stars, reflect in the reservoirs
Through the intensified reflection of the song, Morrissey redefines love by radicalizing rock codes. Lust transforms into the cathartic (climactic, orgasmic) as the band's guitars and drums escalate to the final stanza:
And he stole from the rich and the poor and not very rich and the very poor
And he stole our hearts away
He stole our hearts away, He stole our hearts away
Morrissey draws out the final syllable of "away" into a Buddy-Holly vocalization: "away - a-hey - a-hey." Words transformed into music; cultural incisiveness transformed into emotional generosity: this is healing pop art. Morrissey vivifies human endeavor and imagination.
The soaring "How Could Anybody Possibly Know How I Feel" and the explosive "You Know I Couldn't Last" (the auto-critique that concludes the album) represent defiance and transcendence amidst "the squalor of the mind." That phrase closes "You Know I Couldn't Last" - Morrissey putting his career-obsessions under scrutiny and, finally, into expansive relief through a high-pitched moan.
The two songs pair up vivid symbols of oppression:
"You Know I Couldn't Last": So don't let the blue / The blue eyes fool you / They're just gelignite / Loaded and aiming right between your eyes
"How Could Anybody Possibly Know How I Feel": And as for you in your uniform / Your smelly uniform / You think you can be rude to me / And so you think you can be rude to me
These images of authority (white hegemony) should ring true to anyone living in America (as, now, does the Irish Blood, English Heart Morrissey). He makes a sexual, spiritual call on "You Know I Couldn't Last": "Someone please take me ho-ooooo-me." It answers the admission of difference - signs of the suppressed - on "How Could Anybody":
Everybody look
See pain And walk away
Morrissey seeks out a community of the "insane," the "crazy" (the marginalized, the oppressed) behind the radical rallying cry/warning/declaration of faith: The future is passing you by!
On the album's final song, Morrissey conquers "the squalor of the mind" - the careerism, the solipsism, the exploitation, the sexual/romantic frustration, the spiritual misdirection, the political inequity - with, as playwright Benjamin Kessler put it, "soul." It's called "soul" because it brings historical, spiritual resonance to the commoditized, secular realm of popular culture. It is a profound pop gesture.
In the three-track prologue that opens You are the Quarry, Morrissey establishes the political, spiritual context for the rest of the album's detailing of communication, love, and desire. He does so with Soul.
"America Is Not the World," the first track on the album, sustains the symbols of a culture (like track 2 Irish Blood, English Heart) by, as Kessler perceived, urging its radicalization from within:
In America, The land of the free, they said, And of opportunity, In a just and a truthful way
But where the president, Is never black, female or gay, And until that day
You've got nothing to say to me, To help me believe
In America
It's a deeply democratic vision, the kind possible through Morrissey's outsider perspective. It ties with that other great post-9/11 artwork: the reverence paid to Steven Spielberg's pop symbols - the flag from "Saving Private Ryan" to the moon from E.T. - book-ending Jim Sheridan's magnificent immigrant tale and AIDS benediction: "In America".
This represents a belief in the sanctity of a democratic symbol (the President) but urges its fullest representation through the special sensitivity of the oppressed (black, female, or gay). That sensitivity IS the source of America's greatness, as detailed in the rest of album's attentiveness to human intimacy and perseverance, spiritual connection and spiritual strength. Democracy: society organized according to the spiritual needs of its people, signified by the daily pursuit of happiness.
A choir-like chorus backs up Morrissey's final plea to his adopted home on "America Is Not the World", a catalogue of senses, sensitivities, and faith - a radical conception of social existence:
See with your eyes, Touch with your hands, please,
Hear through your ears, Know in your soul, please
For haven't you me with you now?
And I love you, I love you, I love you, And I love you, I love you, I love you
The album's peak of peaks reconciles this faith with gay desire, the culmination of the artist's crusade from "Yes, I Am Blind" to "He Cried." The new "I Have Forgiven Jesus" ranks as the most amazing song about gay experience I have ever heard (as German critic Sascha Westphal exclaimed, this album "justifies every hyperbole you can think of"). Like all great gay pop songs, it singles out the gay specifics - truths - for a revelatory universality: Truth. That metaphorical gift - the imagination - finds its cumulative cultural representation in Jesus Christ:
But Jesus hurt me
When he deserted me, but,
I have forgiven you Jesus
For all of the love
You placed in me when there's no one I can turn to with this love
Sexual desire and romantic longing, evidence of spiritual want and potential for fulfillment, is frustrated by daily toils, which consequently make the need more painfully felt. Morrissey concludes his deep-voiced calendar of daily drudgery and repression ("Monday - humiliation, Tuesday - suffocation," etc.) with the high-pitched revelation of desire:
Oh pretty one
Oh pretty one
In the most awesome conflation of the sacred and the profane this side of Brian De Palma's Femme Fatale, Morrissey sustains the meaning - the Truth - of symbol and feeling through the subversive gesture:
I was a good kid
Through hail and snow
I'd go just to moon you
I carried my heart in my hand
Do you understand, Do you understand
When Morrissey begs Jesus, Why did you stick me in self-deprecating bones and skin? / Jesus, do you hate me? the answers is implicit. The physical commingles with the spiritual so that we may Love. Morrissey synchs with, and then goes beyond, Mel Gibson's audacious defense of Catholicism in the film The Passion of the Christ to a new ritual, while still re-affirming faith. Morrissey has forgiven Jesus. And the race is won.
Originally published by
GayToday.comJune 21, 2004
