Representations of Disability in the Music and Persona of Morrissey

"IN OUR DIFFERENT WAYS WE ARE THE SAME": REPRESENTATIONS OF DISABILITY IN THE MUSIC AND PERSONA OF MORRISSEY Daniel Manco A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS August 2009 Committee: Jeremy Wallach, Advisor Becca Cragin © 2009 Daniel Manco All Rights Reserved iii ABSTRACT Jeremy Wallach, Advisor Disability studies, an interdisciplinary field of relatively recent provenance but growing prominence, investigates the social, political, economic, and cultural factors that contribute to definitions of disability as they emerge within specific but ever-shifting historical contexts. Cultural disability studies, a lively subfield, takes particular interest in the role that representations of disability across a variety of media play in shaping both individual and collective (architectural, attitudinal, educational, legal, and occupational) responses to the needs of disabled persons. Despite its centrality to human expression, however, music in general, and popular music specifically, have seldom attracted the attention of cultural disability studies scholars. This thesis seeks to help redress this omission in the cultural disability studies literature by examining representations of disability in the music and persona of Morrissey, singer and lyricist for the seminal 1980s indie rock group The Smiths and, in the two decades since their break-up, a successful solo artist in his own right. Borrowing concepts from music theory and psychoanalysis, I first consider the ways in which the paralinguistic elements of Morrissey’s music, and the discourse that has surrounded it, can be understood as representing disability and articulating a host of attitudes thereto. Then, taking my cue from the negative-image school of disability studies – which aims to identify, catalogue, and challenge pernicious stereotypes of disability that have served historically to devalue real disabled persons – I examine a number of songs penned by Morrissey which take as their subjects characters stigmatized by an array of corporeal differences. Subjecting these songs primarily to iv lyric analysis (thought not inattentive to the ways in which musical elements and, where relevant, music videos inflect these lyrics’ meanings), I discern an ambivalence toward disability in Morrissey’s work, an equivocation between loathing and loving, although I ultimately choose to emphasize the anti-ableist, progressive potential made available through his artistry. I conclude my analysis by considering the utility to Morrissey’s purpose of continually returning to tropes of disability in his work, and drawing from the insights of a number of disability theorists, I offer some general observations on the politics of Morrissey’s disability representation. v This thesis is dedicated to my late mother and father. vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost, I would like to thank my thesis committee members Jeremy Wallach and Becca Cragin for their patient and gracious oversight of a master’s level project whose length, I humbly acknowledge, exceeds that of many doctoral dissertations. My thanks go out as well to Esther Clinton for the helpful input she provided during the thesis review process. I am also grateful to the staff of BGSU’s Music Library and Sound Recordings Archives, particularly Bill Schurk, Morgan Rich, and Susannah Cleveland, for the welcome they unfailingly extended as on a near-daily basis I encamped myself in their midst, typically with two lok-mobiles full of books and a laptop computer in tow. I owe a further debt of gratitude to Eoin Devereux, organizer of “The Songs That Saved Your Life (Again): A Symposium on Morrissey” at Ireland’s University of Limerick, and to all those who traveled from near and far to present at or simply attend this event. The acceptance of my proposal to speak on the subject of Morrissey’s disability representation before this convocation of diehard Morrissey fans provided much of my motivation for investing the requisite time and effort in the work that these words preface. Finally, I would like to thank Morrissey himself for his more than twenty-five years of music-making and general provocation. His work has brought me such joy and inspiration as could never be adequately repaid. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION ……. .................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER I. AN INTRODUCTION TO MORRISSEY’S DISABILITY DISCOURSE AND A PRIMER ON DISABILITY STUDIES ............................................................... 8 CHAPTER II. PARALINGUISTIC AND DISCURSIVE REPRESENTATIONS OF DISABILITY IN AND AROUND THE MUSIC OF MORRISSEY AND THE SMITHS ……………………………………………………………...……… 42 CHAPTER III. DISABILITY STEREOTYPES AND THE POLITICS OF “NOVEMBER SPAWNED A MONSTER” ..................................................................... 82 CHAPTER IV. MORRISSEY’S REPRESENTATIONS OF DISABILITY IN THE WAKE OF “NOVEMBER SPAWNED A MONSTER” ................................................... 135 CHAPTER V. AN INQUIRY INTO THE FUNCTIONS AND POLITICS OF MORRISSEY’S RECOURSE TO TROPES OF DISABILITY ......................................... 165 CONCLUSION ……............................................................................................................ 207 WORKS CITED …. ............................................................................................................ 214 1 INTRODUCTION I was introduced to the music of Morrissey and The Smiths sometime in the autumn of 1990 by my older brother Donny. Three years my senior, Donny was a sophomore art student at a local college but continued to live at home with me, my parents, and a third brother, and my relationship with him remained close. His first year at college had seen Donny abandon his erstwhile predilection for George Michael and Janet Jackson in favor of the darker sounds of the likes of Depeche Mode and Nine Inch Nails. I was sixteen at the time, and while my musical tastes had long ago diverged from those of my peers – they listened to the New Kids on the Block and Bell Biv Devoe, I was partial to The Beatles and They Might Be Giants – I nevertheless had difficulty warming to my brother’s newfound musical interests; to be sure, I was no great fan of mainstream pop, but I still preferred my music with a bit more bubblegum. In particular, I was hard-pressed to comprehend the peculiar appeal that the music of Morrissey and The Smiths increasingly held for my brother. To my ears, this was exceedingly strange music; it sounded flat, tuneless and amorphous (qualities I discuss in the second chapter of this thesis) as it blared from the stereo system in his bedroom, within whose walls I would have preferred the reverberations to stay confined. Romanticized though it may sound, I can remember the precise moment that marked a sea-change in my attitude toward Morrissey’s music, when my puzzlement and dismissal began to transform into passion. I was in the passenger seat of my brother’s car; we had just finished running some errands and were returning home. En route Donny popped a cassette of The Smiths’ Strangeways, Here We Come into his car’s tape deck and, a few moments later, the opening sounds of “Death of a Disco Dancer” came percolating through his car speakers. 2 Almost immediately, my ears perked up: the slow introductory bass line sounded Beatle-esque to me, like something that could have appeared on The White Album; here at last was something in this alien music that I could latch on to. But if, to utilize a popular trope, I came for the instrumentation, I stayed for the voice. When, a few seconds into the track, Morrissey’s vocal entered the mix, my attention shifted from the guitar, bass, and drums and became riveted upon him. I found myself profoundly moved by Morrissey’s vocal delivery: it seemed to me to capture by turns weariness, bitterness, insouciance, rage, and sadness. But even more impressive than his vocal performance were Morrissey’s lyrics, which, now that I was paying them heed, struck me as unlike anything I had ever heard in popular song. “Love, peace and harmony / Oh very nice . / But maybe in the next world”: the sense of disappointed idealism, of informed cynicism in these words, sung repeatedly and with mounting assurance and passion, made The Beatles’ mantra of “All You Need Is Love” seem naively platitudinous. I immediately sensed in Morrissey’s words a kind of sincerity and honesty of which I had not previously known popular music to be capable. From that moment on I aggressively and hungrily consumed everything I could get my hands on both in The Smiths’ back catalogue and in the then-nascent Morrissey solo catalogue. I was fascinated by the complex, three-dimensional, and thoroughly impassioned worldview onto which Morrissey’s lyrics seemed to open a portal. I discerned in them a depth more akin to that contained in the poems, short stories, novels and plays I had been asked to read in my English classes than to any pop song in my ken – but these three-minute doses of rock pleasure were far more pleasant to digest than Shakespeare or Dickens. Moreover, the worldview that Morrissey seemed to be enunciating through his already prodigious and expanding body of work posed a clear alternative to that of the dominant culture. His derogations in song of a host of mainstream 3 practices, institutions, and beliefs – not just bromides about romantic love, but also employment,

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