Representations of Disability in the Music and Persona of Morrissey

Home , All You Need Is Me, Andy Rourke, Anything in Return, Attack Records, At KROQ, Barney Hoskyns

"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

Daniel Manco

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

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,

education, the church, the family, and government – struck me as incendiary in a somehow

meaningful, dangerous, and thus valuable way. And they were just what I wanted to hear. I was a shy, bespectacled, slightly overweight adolescent – uncomfortable, like so many at that age, in

my own skin. While I had my share of friends, I was far too interested in and successful at

academics, far too uninterested in and unsuccessful at athletics, and far too working-class to rank

very high in the social pecking order. I was, in other words, in many ways the quintessential

(even stereotypical) Morrissey fan, struggling with my sense of identity and belonging and gravitating toward a figure who seemed to understand how I felt. Morrissey’s songs effectively addressed my sense of adolescent alienation and helped me feel less alone in the world. His music both sustained me throughout my two final years of high school and then helped me maintain my bearings as I transitioned to a new life at a large state university hours away from my home.

Perhaps not coincidentally, as I made new friends at college and matured intellectually and emotionally into someone who was much more comfortable with himself, my interest in

Morrissey simultaneously waned. The last of his albums that I purchased during this first phase

of Morrissey fandom was the 1994 release Vauxhall and I. I did not even bother to seek out his

subsequent two album releases, Southpaw Grammar and Maladjusted, from 1995 and 1997 respectively. Moreover, the seven years between 1997 and 2004 marked a quiet period in

Morrissey’s career during which no new single or album was issued, and during this same interval I seldom found myself pulling out one of his or The Smiths’ CDs in order to revisit his music. Because of this mutual inactivity, I passed an entire decade for all intents and purposes sans Morrissey. 4

Then, in 2004, Morrissey returned to the music scene with the release of You Are the

Quarry; in terms of my personal biography, he could scarcely have chosen a more opportune time. In late 2003, my father had passed away following a harrowing six-year decline in health marked by a series of strokes, the onset of blindness, partial deafness, kidney failure, and heart attacks. I had been a graduate student in Bowling Green State University’s Popular Culture program in 1997 when the initial stroke event precipitating his deterioration occurred, but I immediately abandoned my studies in order to return to my home in Indiana and look after my ailing father. The experience of watching the man who throughout my childhood had been a strong and independent provider become increasingly frail and dependent on others, including myself, for the basic necessities of life was extremely painful; the trauma was compounded by the interruption and derailment that my father’s health issues posed to my own life plans. His eventual death came partly as a relief – both that his long ordeal of suffering had ended, and that my ability to once again do with my life what I desired had been restored – but his absence left a gaping hole in my emotional life. Morrissey’s album You Are the Quarry helped fill the void.

Replete with all the nostalgia, tenderness, rage, sadness, cynicism and optimism that had

characterized the best of his 80s and 90s work, Quarry effectively encapsulated the tenor of my

times. As it had done during my adolescence, Morrissey’s music was again proving to be of

great comfort. His artistry was back in my life, and it has been a consistent presence there ever

since. And while I have endeavored in this thesis not to let my love of Morrissey’s music

compromise the integrity of my scholarship, I am sure that my affection beams through on more

than one occasion.

Given the topic of this thesis – representations of disability in Morrissey’s work – I wish

to note here that, despite the dedication with which I had been parsing and ruminating over 5

Morrissey’s lyrics ever since becoming a fan (indeed, in high school, a small group of

likeminded friends and I had even tried, unsuccessfully, to convince an English teacher to

sponsor an extracurricular Morrissey Club, in which the man’s literary merits would be discussed

at regularly scheduled meetings), I had never fully appreciated the significant role that the body

plays in his work; not, that is, until returning to graduate school in the fall of 2007 and becoming

acquainted with cultural studies’ already extensive but growing scholarship on the body.

Commentators of varying stripe have noted often enough the discourses of class, race, gender,

and sexuality in Morrissey’s work,1 but they have been relatively silent on his discourse of the

body. And not without reason: many of Morrissey’s utterances disparage the body (“Young

bones groan / And the rocks below / Say ‘throw your white body down,’” he sings on The

Smiths’ 1985 single Shakespeare’s Sister) and valorize the mind (on his 2004 solo track “The

World Is Full of Crashing Bores,” he chides “lock-jawed pop stars / Thicker than pig shit /

Nothing to convey / They’re so scared to show intelligence / It might smear their lovely career”),

a salient perspective which seems to have compelled a similar critical disposition among his

commentators. Nevertheless, the more I considered Morrissey’s work in light of my growing

familiarity with and interest in the extant scholarship on the body, the more I appreciated how

critical the body has been to Morrissey’s artistry. This thesis, which considers representations of

the disabled body in Morrissey’s work, will hopefully shed some light on this underappreciated

facet of Morrissey’s contribution to the popular musicscape.

Because I am taking as my subject representations of disability, a few words are in order

here regarding my own ability status. I am not disabled (although, as a result of my reading in

1 Among the most interesting discussions of these topics in the scant academic literature on Morrissey are the chapters on Morrissey in Nabeel Zuberi’s Sounds English: Transnational Popular Music and Stan Hawkins’s Settling the Pop Score: Pop Texts and Identity Politics, as well as Julian Stringer’s article “The Smiths: Repressed (But Remarkably Dressed).” The best discussion of these topics in the popular literature can be found in Mark Simpson’s Saint Morrissey: A Portrait of This Charming Man by an Alarming Fan. 6

the disability studies literature, I am perfectly content to label myself “temporarily able-bodied”).

That is to say, I have no physical or mental impairments that in any way limit my life activities.

Indeed, I am probably in better health today than I have ever been in my life; I certainly cannot remember ever having felt so well. But that I can make this assertion is, I confess, in part a direct result of my encounter with disabilities: those of my father. Very shortly after he suffered his first stroke, I began embarking on major lifestyle changes. In my younger years, as I have noted, I had not at all been athletically inclined. In fact, I loathed sports and exercise. My diet was atrocious. I ate as my taste buds desired, not as nutrition experts recommended. But in response to my witnessing of my father’s diminishing physical condition, I retooled my poor diet and exercise habits. I began consciously and deliberately to eat healthily: reduced fats and sugars, more poultry, fish, and vegetables. I purchased a bicycle and began making regular, often grueling treks on it. I also bought a barbell, weights, and a bench and began weightlifting.

Those habits persist to this day, and I am well aware that they are now, as at the first, motivated in part by a desire to avoid – or at least to postpone as long as possible – the kind of debilitating physical changes to which my father was subject. I believe that, physically, my lifestyle is quite healthy. However, I also acknowledge that it results from the fact that I continue to harbor a certain anxiety toward the disabled body. Seeing my father’s steadily diminishing capacities made me fully aware of the vulnerability of my own body, and my response has been to attempt to immunize myself against threats to it through healthy living. Writing this thesis and thinking about some of the many issues surrounding disability has, at a personal level, been a kind of exercise in self-therapy, a cathartic confrontation with a realm of experience which was, in the final years of his life, my father’s experience, and which might some day, soon or late, be my own – which might, indeed, be any of ours should we live so long. This thesis is motivated in 7 part by the assumption, and the hope, that Morrissey’s discourse of disability inspires a similar confrontation among other members of his audience.

CHAPTER I: AN INTRODUCTION TO MORRISSEY’S DISABILITY DISCOURSE AND A PRIMER ON DISABILITY STUDIES

Introduction

Years prior to forsaking his first and middle names and ascending to international cult

pop-stardom, first as vocalist and lyricist for the seminal 1980s independent rock group The

Smiths1 and, in the twenty-plus years since that ensemble disbanded in 1987, as an accomplished

solo artist in his own right, Stephen Patrick Morrissey mounted the public stage under the pseudonym “Sheridan Whiteside.” It was not as a would-be pop idol, however, that Morrissey had adopted this distinguishing nom de plume; it was, rather, as a music journalist penning concert reviews in the unofficial capacity of Mancunian correspondent for the British music weekly Record Mirror (Bret Landscapes 16; Chalmers). Morrissey had sourced the penname

from the 1943 film The Man Who Came to Dinner, which he would cite in the early days of his

celebrity as topping his list of ten favorite films (“Portrait”). Cosmopolitan Sheridan Whiteside

is the central character of that film’s narrative: a critic and radio personality equally notable for

his arch wit, supercilious deportment, and domineering personality. While on a national lecture

tour that has deposited him momentarily in the parochial town of Mesalia, Ohio, Whiteside slips

on an icy step and appears to have broken his hip, leaving him wheelchair-bound and constrained

to straitened convalescence in the home of a local conservative businessman. During the tenure

of his confinement, the sharp-tongued Whiteside proceeds to wreak manipulative havoc in the

personal and professional lives of both his attendant staff and host community. When Whiteside

is finally given a clean bill of health and granted permission to continue his tour, he elects

1 Along with guitarist Johnny Marr, bassist Andy Rourke, and drummer Mike Joyce. 9

instead to feign continued infirmity, remaining in his wheelchair so that he can continue to

execute his social machinations uninterrupted.

Doubtless, Morrissey’s selection of the name “Sheridan Whiteside” as an early

pseudonym was overdetermined. The man who would go on to rail in song against rain-sotted,

humdrum towns that drag you down (“William, It Was Really Nothing”) would no doubt have

empathized with Whiteside’s profound aversion here to his temporary provincial lodgings.

Then, too, Whiteside’s caustic repartee bears striking similarity to that of Morrissey’s beloved

idol Oscar Wilde, and prefigures the vicious wit that Morrissey himself would come to evince

with seeming relish and ease – to the delight of more than one interviewer. However, what I

wish to emphasize here is the way in which Morrissey’s use of the Whiteside nom de guerre

introduces at a very early stage in the man’s career – one might even say, in its prehistory – a

discourse of disability which would continue to steep his oeuvre from its inception to the present.

After all, the singular image of Whiteside indelibly impressed by a viewing of The Man Who

Came to Dinner is that of a man ensconced in a wheelchair. As such, the film proffers a representation of disability of the kind that has lately been subjected to scrutiny by scholars working under the rubric of disability studies, an interdisciplinary field of relatively recent

provenance but still-increasing prominence; these scholars “examine the social meanings and

interpretations of disability, with emphasis on how cultural constructions and representations of

disability and disabled persons shape public and institutional responses to these conditions and people” (Ghaziani 276). Such scholars might object to the support that the egomaniacal figure of

Sheridan Whiteside lends to the well-worn stereotype of persons with disabilities as narcissistic

(“their reaction to their own disability becomes the proof of defects even greater than physical

ones. . . . People with disabilities, it seems, demonstrate a conspicuous resistance to reality, 10

taking flight into an active fantasy life where their disabilities justify special privileges” (Siebers

35, 40). They might take umbrage to Whiteside’s drawing, in his petulant callousness, on a

centuries-old legacy of “bold equations between external deformity and psychic immorality”

(Snyder and Mitchell Narrative 102). Moreover, they might point disapprovingly to the film’s

intimation that the purportedly disabled may well be malingering, selfishly feigning or

exaggerating incapacity in order to manipulate their companions and advance devious agendas –

a dubiety of which many unfairly suspected disabled persons are only too well aware (Wendell

12, 126; Garland-Thomson Extraordinary 14). On the other hand, scholars might note that in a

culture which seeks to marginalize or erase from view altogether those whose bodies are in some

way non-standard, the mere fact that The Man Who Came to Dinner presents a wheelchair-bound

figure as its protagonist – one who, for all his failings, nevertheless earns the viewer’s

begrudging affection – is cause for commendation. Moreover, they might applaud the film’s

tacit reminder that disability need not be either congenital or permanent; it can, like a broken hip,

be acquired and temporary, and thus far from delineating a domain of otherness, disability names

“a bodily condition and a social category [that] either now or later will touch us all. The fact that

many of us will become disabled if we live long enough is perhaps the fundamental aspect of

human embodiment” (Snyder, Brueggemann, and Garland-Thomson 2). In short, the figure of

Sheridan Whiteside supplies a lens onto many facets of Western culture’s conceptions of

disability. That Morrissey the pop music artist would return time and again to the trope of

disability was thus portended by his provisional adoption, as an aspiring music journalist, of the

“Whiteside” moniker.2

2 Morrissey would cryptically reinvoke the figure of Whiteside – now apparently transformed into a thespian figure (inspired, perhaps, by his ultimately performed disability) – on two separate occasions in 1987. The first occurred when the A-Side of the Smiths’ October single “I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish” was issued bearing the words “‘MURDER AT THE WOOL HALL’ STARRING SHERIDAN WHITESIDE” etched into its run-out 11

This thesis examines the discourse of disability presaged by Morrissey’s use of the

“Whiteside” penname and elaborated throughout the course of his pop music career, both in his

role as singer, lyricist, and frontman of The Smiths as well as during his ongoing tenure as a solo

artist. In this first chapter I provide a précis of some major themes to have emerged from the

disability studies literature. In my second chapter I consider the ways in which, at sonic and

paralinguistic levels (that is, apart from consideration of lyric content, but in terms rather of

sound, song structure, and manner of composition), Morrissey can be understood to have

engaged (equivocally) in a discourse of disability. In my third and fourth chapters I examine a

number of songs in whose lyrics Morrissey introduces, in either peripheral or central fashion,

subjects whose embodiment is characterized by difference. My analyses here will address not

only Morrissey’s lyrics – typically a privileged concern in discussions of Morrissey, considering

his wide acclaim as a lyricist – but also the ways in which his lyrics’ meanings are shaped by the

music to which they are set, as well as, where appropriate, the visuals (specifically, music

videos) that accompany them. Music video is, of course, a principal format through which

popular song reaches a mass audience on the contemporary music scene, and attention must thus

be given to the ways in which its imagery narrows, expands, or otherwise inflects the meanings

of a song’s words and music. I suggest that by virtue of the range of corporeal differences

represented in his work, as well as through the variety of attitudes evoked toward those differences, Morrissey invites his listeners to question understandings of and beliefs about the category of “disability.” I argue furthermore that the representations of disability limned in this corpus of songs, while problematic, defy easy assessment in terms of their moral probity. This is

grooves. The second came when The Smiths’ December single “Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me” was issued with “‘THE RETURN OF THE SUBMISSIVE SOCIETY’ STARRING SHERIDAN WHITESIDE” etched into the A-side’s run-out grooves and “‘THE BIZARRE ORIENTAL VIBRATING PALM DEATH’ STARRING SHERIDAN WHITESIDE” etched into those of the B-Side. 12

in part because Morrissey eschews didacticism in favor of posing questions whose resolutions

are left to the listener, but also issues from the fact that disability activists and scholars

frequently disagree over the proper stance to adopt toward a variety of contentious matters. In my fifth chapter I examine those sites in Morrissey’s oeuvre in which he treats not the disabled other but rather the disabled self: for a recurrent trope in Morrissey’s oeuvre is an often subtle identification with persons with disabilities. My analysis will take particular interest in the interface between Morrissey’s intimations of his own unconventional gender and sexual identities and cultural perceptions of the disabled male body as “weak, effeminate, and inimical to normative heterosexual versions of manly competence” (Serlin 54). Finally, I will consider the pros and cons vis-à-vis disability identity politics of the broad and troubled/troubling take on disability posed by Morrissey’s work.

An Introduction to Disability Studies: Historicizing Disability

Before any investigation of Morrissey’s engagement with a discourse of disability can be undertaken, it is first necessary to survey the conceptual terrain of disability studies – necessarily cursory and incomplete, given the constraints of space, yet sufficient to establish a workable theoretical and terminological basis upon which to proceed. Despite the relative youth of the field, academics working under the auspices of disability studies have already generated an enormous number of texts and precipitated a wealth of debates to which other scholars following in their wake are able to contribute. While all concerned parties share a general ethical orientation (toward greater awareness and understanding of persons with disability, for example,

and toward advocacy for social change), they have not agreed on the finer points of how such

goals can best be achieved. A core set of foundational concepts and terminologies are 13 nevertheless discernible in the disability studies literature. Several of the most pertinent to an understanding of the general disposition of disability studies and to a contemplation of

Morrissey’s discourse of disability are considered below.

One of the central projects of disability theory is to dispute any apprehension that would construe disability as a natural or static phenomenon, a category of human experience whose ontological status in the affairs of man and womankind has remained unchanged throughout history. Disability studies scholars have, on the contrary, consistently sought to historicize disability, tracing from the available evidence its ever-shifting configuration over the centuries and across cultures. Barnes, Mercer, and Shakespeare note, for instance, that the languages of certain non-Western societies lack any term for ”disability”; among the Punan Bah people (an indigenous group in Sarawak, Malaysia), non-normative bodies generally do not rate ignominy, while in Africa’s Masai culture, the physically impaired are free to participate in all community activities (14-15). Even in the preindustrial West, disabled persons knew an economic participation that they would subsequently have to struggle to recover; with industrialization,

“[t]he speed of factory work, the enforced discipline, the time-keeping and production norms

[emphasis added] – all these were a highly unfavorable change from the slower, more self- determined methods of work into which many handicapped people had been integrated” (Ryan and Thomas 101). The word “norms” here is pivotal. In Enforcing Normalcy, Lennard Davis demonstrates that such contemporary and taken-for-granted terms as “normal” or “average” and, contrariwise, “abnormal” are relatively recent inventions in Western discourse, emerging discernibly in their current semantic guises only in the mid-nineteenth century. Prior to the installation of the normal/abnormal dichotomy as hegemonic, Davis suggests, Western discourse had been in the thrall of the notion of “the ideal body,” as illustrated by the tradition in art history 14

of nude Venuses. Such representations articulate a mytho-poetic, apotheosized and deified body

which posits its “ideal” corporeality as, by definition, unattainable by mere humanity, since, as

Davis notes, “all members of the population are below the ideal” (Enforcing 25). For a likely culprit (or confederate) in the emergence of the new concept of the norm, Davis points to the rise in the early nineteenth century of the new branch of knowledge known as statistics, with its provision of apparently scientific justification of bourgeois hegemony via its championing of

moderation and middle-class ideology. Through its measurement of the distribution of human

features (e.g., weight and height) and subsequent identification of the physically average man,

statistics simultaneously worked to produce a morally average man, virtuous in his temperate

immunity to the debilitating extremes of human experience (luxuries, labors, diets, etc.). This

“average,” Davis points out, ironically became a new ideal, a status to be devoutly desired; it

instituted what Davis calls a “tyranny of the norm” (Enforcing 29), a coercive graphing of

humans under a bell curve which served as a template for what bodies should be. Under such

“normal distributions,” extremities, or deviations from the virtuous norm, became devalued. For

the non-normative disabled body, the change was significant; “in a society where the concept of

the norm is operative,” Davis writes, “then people with disabilities will be thought of as

deviants” (Enforcing 29).

Of course, certain traits along the normal distribution – such as extraordinary height and

extraordinary intelligence – would, paradoxically, under this originary view be as equally

devalued as short stature and lack of intelligence. Rather than coerce toward mediocre

“middling of desired traits” (Enforcing 33), a distinction had to be introduced into the system:

thus the bell curve came to be divided into quartiles, and these quartiles ranked according to

desirability. Those in the first quartile of intelligence (that is, those deemed possessed of low 15

intelligence), for instance, were regarded as inferior to those in the fourth quartile (high

intelligence). This represented a fusion of the newer concept of the norm “with the older concept

of ’the ideal,’” with one exception: the classical ideal, unachievable, lacked any imperative to

conform; the new model of ideal normality, however, did (Enforcing 34-35). Davis argues that

this imperative was supplemented by notions “of progress, human perfectibility, and the

elimination of deviance, to create a dominating, hegemonic vision of what the human body

should be” (Enforcing 35). (The influence of Darwin’s theory of evolution here is not to be

underestimated [Barnes 10]). It comes as no surprise, then, when Davis reveals that the key statisticians and their supporters in business and political discourse (including leftist politics)

responsible for the invention of the “normal” were virtually all eugenicists who defined as unfit

for procreation those who comprised members of nonstandard populations (Enforcing 30). And,

as Davis pointedly observes, this nonstandard population was an indiscriminate composite of all

those with allegedly undesirable traits: criminals, the dissolute, the poor, the sexually licentious,

and the disabled – those with physical as well as mental “defects” (Enforcing 35, 37). In

connection with criminality, Davis notes how Sir Francis Galton – the same man who divided up the normal distribution into quartiles – was also a pioneer in the creation of the modern fingerprinting system, which advanced the idea that the human body is standardized and contains a serial number, as it were, embedded in its corporeality. (Later technological innovations would reveal this fingerprint to be embedded at the genetic level.) Thus the body has an identity that coincides with its essence and cannot be altered by moral, artistic or human will. This indelibility of corporeal identity only furthers the mark placed on the body by other physical qualities – intelligence, height, reaction time. By this logic, the person enters into an identical 16

relationship with the body, the body forms an identity, and that indelible identity unalterably

positions the person on the normal curve (Enforcing 31).

Moreover, Davis asserts that this amalgam of undesirable individual variations was regarded as posing a threat to the health of the nation. (The connection in Morrissey’s work between nationality and disability will be discussed in the fifth chapter of this thesis.) For the national body to be fit – and in an industrializing society, fit, universal, and interchangeable workers with uniform physical characteristics were central to the national vision – its individual citizens had to be fit as well (Enforcing 36). The impulse toward elimination of a “defective class” (Enforcing 37) defined by a conflation of disability and a host of other non-normative traits with depravity would reach its culmination in the genocide committed by the Nazis during

World War II, but as Davis notes, Hitler could be viewed as having implemented the long- established theories of British and American eugenicists (Enforcing 38).

Faced with a legacy of a culturally-produced disability discourse whose history has been reconstructed by such scholars as Lennard Davis, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has usefully coined the term “normate” in order to name “the veiled subject position of cultural self, the figure outlined by the array of deviant others whose marked bodies shore up the normate’s boundaries” (Extraordinary 8). This normate is a social figure which accords definitive humanity; it is a mantle that when assumed endows its bearer with the authority to wield power

(Extraordinary 8). Of course, given the admixture of devalued traits (class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality) whose exclusion shores up the boundaries of “normativity,” the normate body emerges as an exceedingly narrowly defined rubric under which only a very small minority of people fall.

Garland-Thomson makes this point by invoking Erving Goffman’s observation that there is

“only one complete unblushing male in America: a young, married, white, urban, northern, 17 heterosexual, Protestant father of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight and height, and a recent record in sports. . . . Any male who fails to qualify in one of these ways is likely to view himself . . . as unworthy, incomplete, and inferior” (128). Of course, the exact terms of this description of the normate might vary across cultural and historical contexts, but the larger point remains unchanged. Moreover, Goffman’s severely gendered language points to a cultural legacy that intertwines femininity with disability, deviance, and inferiority (16, 19).

Exposing the normate’s constituent traits thus undermines Western culture’s tendency to think in terms of simple dichotomies and illuminates the interrelationships among social identities and their relationship to corporeal difference. A further political and strategic end in naming the normate is to reveal its impossibly narrow, thus fictive, character. This results in an inversion of the conventional discourse of the normal, whereby figures of otherness, though marginalized, become highly visible in their purported deviance – a situation which renders the normate natural, transparent, and unmarked (Extraordinary 8-9). Garland-Thomson supplements this strategy by referring to the corporeal difference subsumed under the label “disability” in all its manifestations as “extraordinary bodies” (Extraordinary 5), a designation which both registers the non-normativity of the disabled body and simultaneously preserves it from denigration via the positive connotations certain uses of the term “extraordinary” bears. In contrast, Susan

Wendell – like Garland-Thomson, a feminist disability studies scholar – uses the terms “rejected body” and “negative body” to name the cultural violence enacted on those features of bodily life, appearance, and experience “that are feared, ignored, despised, and/or rejected in a society and its culture” (85).

Garland-Thomson is one among many scholars who have pointed to the usefulness of

Erving Goffman’s stigma theory to disability studies, not least for its provision of flexible 18

terminology to help trace the complexity of a social process that brings together “stigmatizing”

subjects and institutions with “stigmatized” objects (for whom the devalued “stigma” represents

only one trait of a more complex individual) (Extraordinary 30-31). As delineated in Goffman’s

Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, stigmatization is a collective social

process in which certain human traits are deemed to be not merely different, but deviant – and

thus inferior and devalued. This operation works to define the contours and character of the

dominant group, which are propped up as neutral, normal, and legitimate (and which posit the

denigration of less powerful groups as just as natural and legitimate), obscuring in the process the artificial nature of the categories of inferiority and superiority alike. Social scientists have attributed the seeming universality of the stigmatization process to the human impulse to impose meaningful order on experience, to make their worlds seem knowable and predictable through the deployment of interpretive schemes, but as Garland-Thomson notes, the specific physiological traits relied upon to organize experience are far from inherent, innate, or universal, nor is their devaluation natural (Extraordinary 31). Goffman does note in his influential study, however, that stigmatized characteristics tend to fall into three physical and behavioral categories: first, “abominations of the body,” its varied physical disabilities, deformities, or anomalies; next, “blemishes of individual character,” individual behaviors such as addiction, unpredictability, and sexual improprieties; and thirdly and finally, “the tribal stigma of race, nation, and religion,” to which one could add gender (4). Crucially, such differences are not

merely perceived, they are assigned value – a fact which Garland-Thomson asserts could be

explained variously by the poststructuralist view that binary oppositions are always already

hierarchical; by the historicist view that parents, institutions, and media instill the stigmatization

process; or by the psychological view that stigmatization is motivated by the desire to project 19 unacceptable feelings and impulses onto less powerful groups in order to define one’s own identity and enhance one’s own self-worth (32). In any event, the phantasmic nature of this prototypical valorized Western body, the normate, emerges definitively from the recognition that it is a fiction produced only through the paring away of a number of stigmatized identities.

Social psychologists building on Goffman’s work have contributed usefully to his primary concepts and terminology. Edward E. Jones et al. employ the term “mark” to denote

“the range [of] perceived or inferred conditions of deviation from a prototype or norm that might initiate the stigmatizing process” (8). The designation helps underscore the distinction between actual characteristics and behaviors and the devaluation to which they are subject: certain traits render some subjects “markable,” the bearers of discrediting marks, while “markers” consist of those who perceive or infer the mark; although a “marking act” might well produce a “marked” person, this is not inevitable: “a marker may or may not convert a markable into a marked person” (8). In making this point, in distinguishing the body from the devaluation assigned to it, stigma theory and its proponents dovetail agreeably with the social model of disability.

Two Models of Disability: A History of the Medical and the Social Models

While there are numerous models of disability in circulation (Shakespeare 9), the social model preeminently orients the field of disability studies. To appreciate its importance, it is helpful to first understand the precedent model of disability to which it is principally opposed: the medical model of disability. Under the medical model, disability is construed as a problem that resides in the individual. Corporeal difference or impairment is seen as an inherently disabling; disability is viewed as a biological matter, with its relationship to the social environment bracketed out of view. Because disability is seen as biological, it is regarded as 20

properly the province of medical intervention (Siebers 25). Accordingly, doctors are granted maximal, almost God-like authority in addressing the problem of disability, demanding the deference of laypeople to their expertise and their institutional dependence on medical services.

The anomalous bodies of disabled persons are subjected to the medical gaze in a highly unequal relation of power, rendering disabled persons the dreaded, pitiable, tragic, and utterly dependent

“helped” at the mercy of valiant “helpers” (Johnstone 16-18). The resultant hierarchy has historically been deliberately shored up through the deployment of “neoplastic subterfuge”

(Cassuto 120) – for example, the use of arcane medical jargon to heighten the distinction

between the knowing “us” of the physician community and the ignorant “them” outside it.

Within this inequitable power relation, the disabled patient is seen as defective, and medicine’s goal is to fix the anomalous body, to cure it; that is, to normalize the abnormal. Where it fails in that project, the cultural authority of medicine is threatened. After all, medicine is predicated on an objectifying, scientistic third-person perspective which helps prop up the myth of control, the inviolable precept that human action is capable of securing the desired body through the prevention of illness, death, and disability (Wendell 93-94, 119, 121). Refusing to accept that a cure is unavailable, doctors may choose to make recourse to the “availability of a virtually unlimited number of treatments” which allow the myth of control to remain preserved because not disproved; patients who refuse to gamely pursue every suggestion are suspected of not desiring to get well (Wendell 97). In the face of medical inefficacy, patients who continue to claim pain or other symptoms are told that there is nothing wrong with them – that is, to trust medical authority over self-knowledge of the body – and therefore arouse suspicion that they are in some sense faking illness, or are mentally (as opposed to physically) ill (Wendell 123-124,

126). People whose disabilities go undiagnosed are often pressured to maintain a performative 21

façade of normality (Wendell 12). Thus, in the confrontation with disability, chronic illness, and

mortal illness, all efforts are made to vouchsafe the myth of control, while correspondingly neglected are “rehabilitation, pain management, and the quality of patients’ experiences, including their experiences of dying” (Wendell 94). Indeed, death, the most extreme example of loss of control over the body, and thus the ultimate sign of the failure of medicine and Western science to control nature, becomes stringently medicalized, managed by medical institutions, and hidden from view (Wendell 96). As a result, within medical discourse, interest in how to live with incurable suffering and limitation remains marginal, as reflected in the lower incomes and

prestige of medical personnel charged with rehabilitation and management of long-term illness

(Wendell 95, 137). (In the fifth chapter of this thesis, I consider the challenge that Morrissey’s work poses to the medical model of disability, particularly his 2009 single “Something Is

Squeezing My Skull.”)

The mid-1970s has been identified as the time frame in which Britain’s disability rights movement emerged, energized by its championing of a social model of equality to replace the medical model (Shakespeare 10-14). A key figure in this historical moment was Paul Hunt3, who argued in his 1966 essay “A Critical Condition” that the distinguishing features of disabled peoples’ experience derived from their marked position in society are fivefold: they are regarded

“as unfortunate, useless, different, oppressed and sick” (8). The disabled are seen as unfortunate in that they are thought to be unlucky, leading cramped lives of deprivation – deprived of opportunities for marriage, having children, homes, and cars, of wielding authority in the home and work environment, of independence and freedom of movement (8). In opposition to that presumption, Hunt argued that social status, attributes and possessions, although not without

3 The indebtedness of the emergent social model of disability to Erving Goffman’s stigma theory was registered in the title of an influential collection of essays that Hunt edited and to which he contributed: Stigma: The Experience of Disability, published in 1966. 22

value, should not be considered “absolutely indispensable for a completely human existence”

(10). He noted that disabled individuals who cope with and adjust to their circumstances in order

to achieve genuine happiness are “assumed to have wonderful and exceptional courage” (9) – a

defensive posture adapted by able-bodied people in which Hunt discerns two problems: first, this

devalues other disabled people who do not manage to achieve comparable satisfaction, and it

preserves the able-bodied observer’s original view of disability as altogether tragic (5). G.

Thomas Couser, a literary disability studies scholar, uses the term “rhetoric of triumph” to name

a similar narrative of “success in overcoming adversity” which comprises one of the restrictive

conditions under which the disabled autobiographer is permitted to tell his or her own story

(111). Other disability studies scholars refer to this story as an “overcoming narrative” in which

a disabled person learns to accept his or her limitations and find renewed joy and purpose in life.

Such a storyline emphasizes individual achievement over adversity, neglecting the political and social context; it also relieves the anxieties of non-disabled persons who may fear experiencing a comparable fate (Sandahl 584; Lerner and Straus 2). Moreover, the stereotyped heroic disabled figure that emerges in such narratives – labeled the “super cripple” by disability studies scholars

(Barnes 12) – promotes misguided beliefs about disabled persons’ abilities which can result in their being denied necessary services (Barnes 13). (Other stereotypes of disability that Hunt’s essay begins to introduce will be reviewed at some length in the third chapter of this thesis as a prerequisite to a critical appraisal of Morrissey’s use of disability stereotypes in his representations of disability.)

Ironically, Hunt goes some way toward promoting Couser’s “rhetoric of triumph,” arguing that disabled persons should attempt to live life as fully as possible while remaining mindful of their limitations, and that in so doing “[p]erhaps we can help prepare people for the 23

almost certain day when they themselves lose, at least in old age, some of the advantages that are

so highly valued” (5). In making such an observation, however, Hunt offers an insight that other

disability studies scholars have seized upon: namely, that “aging is disabling,” that “non-disabled

people . . . are temporarily non-disabled . . . that it is in their own direct interest to structure

society so that people with disabilities have good opportunities to participate in every aspect of social life” (Wendell 19). Indeed, some disabled persons and their allies invert the usual terms of otherness by characterizing the non-disabled population as TABs, Temporarily Able-Bodieds, a designation which registers its susceptibility to disablement and dependence due to ageing or to periods of illness, injury, and so on (Wendell 61).

Hunt goes on to point out that the disabled are perceived as “useless” due to their inability to contribute to the economic good of the community. This observation of Hunt’s is consonant with Linda McDowell’s observation that “the profound material changes that have taken place in late twentieth-century advanced industrial countries [have] transformed the nature of work and leisure and placed the body at the centre of concern for individuals and for society.

[The body] is both a motor of economic development, and a source of individual pleasure and pain. . . . [T]he shift from a manufacturing to a service-based economy has transformed the embodied worker from muscle power to part of a product for exchange. . . . In leisure activities, too, . . . . [t]he idealized desiring and desired body of late capitalism needs work on it to produce

a sleek and acceptable performance in an era that has seen the triumph of the cult of the fit body”

(36-37). Hunt’s response to the consequent devaluation of the disabled body is to caution against

elevating “the idea of work in our minds to the point where it dominates values that ought to

transcend it. . . . non-utilitarian values” (6-7). He also suggests that disabled persons, freed as

they are from the trappings of competition, can illuminate the essential aspects of work; that as 24 recipients of charitable support they furnish an opportunity to move beyond their impulse toward acquisition; and that they serve in the last instance as a reminder of mankind’s fundamental passivity in relation to a multitude of forces beyond its control (7). Hunt’s approach to this issue is glaringly at variance with those taken by later scholars of disability. It evinces a surprisingly unquestioning resignation to the exclusion of the disabled from economic life and starkly contrasts with the argument advanced by Kay Schriner, who asserts that “[t]he ability and opportunity to participate in the economic life of their communities are . . . central to the quality of life lived by disabled people” (642) and advocates “confronting and challenging the structural and attitudinal barriers that keep disabled people and other disadvantaged groups from being fully integrated into society” (653) through employment policies and practices that transform

“the societal conditions that create disadvantage for people whose individual characteristics are outside the societal norm” (653). The entirety of Schriner’s argument need not be rehearsed here, but its difference in tone and tactics from Hunt’s earlier (and no doubt overly romantic) work indicates not only the authors’ distinct historical moments, but also the range of attitudes and diversity of political strategies within the field of disability studies. This multiplicity complicates any straightforward assessment of the disability politics implicit in Morrissey’s work.

Hunt goes on to remark upon the ascription of difference and abnormality to disabled persons, noting that the pressure toward “unthinking conformity” and normalization exerted upon the disabled aligns them with other “deviants” such as Jews, racial minorities, homosexuals, as well as such “voluntary rebels” as artists, prophets, and philosophers (12). Hunt argues that the disabled “can witness to the truth that a person’s dignity does not rest . . . in his beauty, age, intelligence or colour” (12), and “that no difference between men . . . does away 25

with their right to be treated as fully human” (13). The disabled accomplish this work of

witnessing, Hunt suggests, in part by their symbolization through their own difference of all the

differences between human beings (13). (The symbolic capacity of disability will be further

discussed in the fifth chapter of this thesis.)

Hunt goes on to note that the disabled are oppressed through institutionalized

discrimination in such areas as hospitalization, employment, commerce, housing, and marriage

(14). He advocates challenging such oppression not by returning superciliousness with

superciliousness or resentment with resentment, but by modeling humane treatment of all human

beings (14). Finally, Hunt notes that the disabled are seen as “sick, suffering, diseased, in pain”

(16), as reminders of the specter of death which automatically become associatively linked with

evil; because, as he states, “[t]here is a definite relation between the concepts of health and

holiness” (16), bodily difference registers a moral failure, a kind of demonic possession.

“Contact with us throws up in people’s faces the fact of sickness and death in the world” (16),

Hunt writes; thus avoiding the disabled fends off “the disturbing reminders of unwelcome

reality” (16) and shores up the able-bodied person’s sense of his or her own moral rectitude.

(Hunt’s argument here tallies with my discussion in the third chapter of this thesis of the cultural figuration of disability as dirt and contagion, and of Morrissey’s intention in the “November

Spawned a Monster” song and video to force his audience into a confrontation with the anomaly of disability.)

One can clearly detect in Hunt’s essay a shift away from the medical model of disability, with its emphasis on the location of disability within the body and its emphasis on curing and normalizing the rejected body, toward the social model of disability. The social model – sometimes called the “minority model” (Mason et al. 58) to denote how persons with disabilities, 26

like other minority groups, have historically been denied rights, access, and protection – eschews

essentialist, reductionist, and biologically determinist conceptions in favor of regarding disability

as a social construction. The social model deflects attention away from the individual body and

its perceived physical or mental deficits in order to illuminate the context of a social environment

that excludes or fails to accommodate the person with disabilities (Shakespeare 29). It recognizes that the experience of disability is tied to social context and thus differs across

cultures and historical eras; Susan Wendell notes that in her urban Western Canadian society

“most people are not expected to walk further than that in the course of their daily activities. But

in some societies, in Eastern Africa for example . . . women normally walk several miles twice a

day to obtain water for the household . . . what is normal ability in urban Western Canada is

neither normal nor adequate ability in rural Kenya” (15). She returns to this theme in a later

passage:

While most non-disabled people in industrialized societies believe

that being able to perform the so-called “activities of daily living”

(a term used in assessment of disability), such as washing,

dressing, cooking, shopping, cleaning, and writing, by and for

oneself is a necessary condition of independence, and therefore

regard people with disabilities as dependent if they cannot perform

them, they do not recognize their own dependence on services,

such as the provision of the water that comes out of the tap, as

obstacles to their own ”independence.” (145)

Wendell’s referencing of modern urban infrastructure as an unnoticed but critical component of

the independence of the able-bodied, their socially constructed enablement, in Western society 27 suggests the role that access to technological services could play in deconstructing disability:

“[r]ather than disability being inescapable, it becomes a product of social arrangements, and can thus be reduced, or possibly even eliminated” (Shakespeare 29). (In the second chapter of this thesis I discuss the significance of technological prostheses to Morrissey’s disability discourse.)

This points to the fact that although attitudinal disadvantages such as those emphasized in Paul

Hunt’s pioneering work are of concern to disability studies scholars working from the social model (Schriner 643), emphasis is also placed on the “built environment” (Siebers 3) – for instance, unaccommodating construction of sports stadiums and arenas where navigation up stairs and among bleachers is difficult at best for wheelchair users, who ultimately find themselves consigned to substandard “wheelchair ghettoes” (Anderson 246) – as well as programmatic concerns, for instance, health care rationing which would exclude life-saving but costly medical procedures from the disabled on the grounds that their lives are not worth living

(Wendell 161-162).

At the heart of the social model of disability is the distinction between impairment and disability. This distinction was summarized in a 1974 publication from the British organization

Union of Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) titled Fundamental Principles of

Disability, which posited the following:

In our view, it is society which disables physically impaired

people. Disability is something imposed on top of our impairment

by the way we are unnecessarily isolated and excluded from full

participation in society. Disabled people are therefore an

oppressed group in society. 28

Thus we define impairment as lacking all or part of a limb,

or having a defective limb, organism or mechanism of the body;

and disability as the disadvantage or restriction of activity caused

by a contemporary social organisation which takes little or no

account of people who have physical impairments and thus

excludes them from participation in the mainstream of social

activities. (qtd. in Barton 286)

Because in this view disability is located not in the body but in a disabling environment, disability studies scholars can assert that locomoting in a wheelchair is only a disadvantage in a world of staircases (Young xii), while in a world in which none were ignorant of sign, Deafness would not be construed as a disability (Wendell 29). The impairment/disability dichotomy central to the social model of disability bears obvious similarities to the feminist analysis of gender as a social construction imposed on biological differences between males and females

(Wendell 5), and just as some feminist critics have questioned the implicit dualistic distinction between sex and gender, so have some disability studies scholars critiqued the separability of impairment and disability (Shakespeare 35-36). Nevertheless, the social model of disability, generative of debate, remains an accessible, useful, and thus valuable tool – for instance, for providing a political strategy (removal of social barriers), as well as for empowering the disabled to think of themselves differently and to mobilize for equal rights (Johnstone 21, Shakespeare

30).

The prejudice that would reduce a body to its stigmatized disability has been labeled

“ableism” by activists and academics within disability studies (Siebers 81). It is predicated on what Tobin Siebers calls the ideology of ability: “The ideology of ability is at its simplest the 29

preference for able-bodiedness. At its most radical, it defines the baseline by which humanness

is determined, setting the measure of body and mind that gives or denies human status to

individual persons. . . . [T]he ideology of ability makes us fear disability, requiring that we

imagine our bodies are of no consequence while dreaming at the same time that we might perfect

them” (8-9). Ableism and the attendant ideology of ability have become the objects of scholarly

critique as disability studies, organized around the social model, and emulating such precedent

approaches as Marxism, feminism, queer studies, and post-colonial studies, has struggled, with

some success, to establish a place in the academy (Shakespeare 30; Davis “Introduction” xvi-

xvii).

I want to reiterate here that while the medical and social models of disability are the most

discussed in the disability studies literature, they are not the sole models of disability in currency;

moreover, depending on the particular context, any model of disability, including the medical

model, may be recuperated by disability studies scholars and activists due to its perceived

strategic conceptual or political value. I have intended the preceding review of the disability

studies literature, in which I have erred on the side of being overgenerous if still inexhaustive, in order to trouble colloquial understandings of disability and to provide a sense of the political issues at stake in disability discourse prior to my examination of disability representation in

Morrissey’s work. I want also to assert that I am not claiming that Morrissey – who, despite having purportedly read widely in feminist scholarship (Rogan Severed 8, 84) and who thus may be familiar with some of the disability studies literature with which feminism shares much common ground – has produced his representations of disability with any of the preceding disability studies concepts specifically or explicitly in mind. What I do intend to assert, however, is that Morrissey’s representations of disability, whatever his intentions (or lack 30

thereof), both reflects many aspects of the disability discourse of the ableist society that

produced him, as well as affords an opportunity for that discourse to be interrogated and

potentially challenged.

Cultural Disability Studies and Its Neglect of Popular Music

Disability studies scholars have addressed social barriers as they have been erected in

architectural, attitudinal, educational, legal, occupational, and personal guises (Shakespeare 24), but have also turned their attention to representations of disability in artistic productions, motivated in part by a desire to “make visible the historical presence of disabled people, so often erased from the human record” (Mitchell and Snyder Narrative 44). Rosemarie Garland-

Thomson names the arena of this latter project “cultural disability studies” and suggests that the way in which disability has been figured in art “widely influences our collective thinking and practices” (“Foreword” xiii-xiv). In this spirit, Mitchell and Snyder have argued the importance to disability studies of “the analysis of preserved discursive and visual mediums such as literature, art, and film” for what they reveal about an ongoing discourse of disability, noting that

“[w]riters, painters, historians, filmmakers, like all of us, are subject to the limiting beliefs of their own historical moments, but whereas people with disabilities are often peripheral to domains outside of medicine, art persists in returning to portrayals of disability as a sustained preoccupation” (Narrative 45). Conspicuously absent from these authors’ list of probable sites of investigation is music. Indeed, musicians and music scholars have been relative latecomers in engaging the field of disability studies, with Joseph Straus’s 2006 article “Normalizing the

Abnormal: Disability in Music and Music Theory” and the publication that same year of the essay collection Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability In Music emerging as the first published 31

attempts to theorize the interrelationship of music and disability (Lerner and Straus 10). Even

still, the interest of extant work on disability and music has been primarily directed at Western

art music and television and film soundtrack music. For example, scholars have noted that

Ludwig van Beethoven’s life story is often cast in the rhetoric of triumph as the story of an individual who surmounted the disability of deafness to achieve immortalizing success, making his biography the most widely circulated “overcoming narratives” in existence (Cizmic 24).4

Popular music, and rock music in particular, however, have only rarely come under the purview

of disability studies. Rock music’s roots in the blues and country music genres would certainly

seem logical sites of investigation for disability studies, with the tradition of virtuosic blind blues

guitarists (Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willie Johnson) and country music’s tubercular

superstar pioneer Jimmie Rodgers offering their own overcoming narratives (Witek 193;

Porterfield 279). The pertinence of disability to rock music, on the other hand, would appear at

first blush to be more questionable; indeed, the name “rock and roll” itself is thought by some to

have originated as a euphemism for the exuberant exercise of (presumably hale) bodies engaged

in sexual discourse (Osgerby 94). Moreover, the prototypical (male) rock star body has been

constructed as supremely able: Petra Kuppers, a performance studies scholar and disability

activist, notes that “[m]asculinity and its construction and the convention of the body beautiful

are both at stake in the representation of men in . . . rock” (192), and she speaks of the seemingly

invincible “hypersexual figure of the rock star, out to corrupt young girls. . . . The figure refers to

a voraciousness which deals with music, drum sticks, young female groupies, cocaine and guitars

4 This particular overcoming narrative was succinctly referenced in the title of Morrissey’s 1993 live album Beethoven Was Deaf. Issued just as Morrissey was experiencing increasing international success and massive drawing power at live performances (his appearance at the Hollywood Bowl had recently sold out in record time [Rogan Albums 190]), thereby confirming that the dissolution of The Smiths had not eventuated in the demise of his own professional music career, the album’s title may be read as indexing, in tongue-in-cheek fashion, Morrissey’s own narrative of overcoming. 32

in similar fashion: they are all consumed by the wild hero . . . a law unto himself” (192). Indeed,

the figure of a corporeally incomplete rock star body is so anomalous as to become the subject of

jokes (e.g., Def Leppard’s drummer Richard Allen, who lost an arm in a car wreck on New

Year’s Eve, 1984 – “probably the one thing about Def Leppard just about everyone knows”

[Klosterman 187]).

Mitchell and Snyder argue that “[w]hile other identities such as race, sexuality, and

ethnicity have pointed to the dearth of images produced about them in dominant literature,

disability has experienced a plethora of representations in visual and discursive works.

Consequently, disabled people’s marginalization has occurred in the midst of a perpetual

circulation of their images” (Narrative 6). Precisely the opposite would appear to be true of rock

music, where images of race, sexuality, and ethnicity have abounded, but disability seems to be

kept out of view. Where in rock history are representations of disability to be located? The

work of Morrissey offers an entry to this relatively unexplored avenue of investigation.

Disability in Morrissey’s Childhood Biography and Early Career

The ensuing chapters will examine Morrissey’s perpetual recourse to the trope of

disability in his work for The Smiths and as a solo artist, but first, recalling the figure of Sheridan

Whiteside who inaugurated this chapter, I wish to briefly plumb further the biography of

Morrissey’s youth as a means of contextualizing the interest in disability that would become

apparent in his adult work. The available record suggests that, in certain crucial respects, as a lad

Morrissey himself displayed, if anything, an able-bodiedness at striking odds with the cinematic

incapacitation of his alter-ego Sheridan Whiteside. Discussing in a 1984 interview his youth as a

poetry-loving boy in working-class Manchester, where the “idea that one is born simply to work, 33

so if you don’t you must be of no value to the human race” reigned, Morrissey, then aged 25,

recollected that “the one thing that saved me in spite of my uncommon perversions . . . was my

ability at athletics. I was a model athlete and they are the treasured students who can get away with anything” (Van Poznack 38). To be sure, in the first year of his celebrity as vocalist for The

Smiths, Morrissey’s gangly frame belied his history of athletic prowess, inspiring such disparaging comments from journalists as Biba Kopf’s characterization of the singer as “thin and

frailbodied” (44) and Elissa Van Poznack’s observation that “[i]n a tight white jumper, he looks

tremulously thin and the ultra-high pollen count is making him struggle for breath.” Morrissey

would subsequently recall of this era that “in the days of yore I was extremely undernourished”

(Nine). However, Dave Harper, who had served as The Smiths’ chauffeur and PR man, recalled

that even in those years Morrissey had been “immensely strong” (Bret Scandal 121), even though his diet had seemed to consist only of cake. Harper disclosed that on one occasion, while helping Morrissey move out of his London flat on one occasion, he had attempted without success to lift the singer’s iron dumbbells from the floor, whereupon Morrissey picked them up effortlessly with one hand (Bret Scandal 121).

His athleticism or physical strength notwithstanding, however, the youthful Morrissey did know at least one form of physical impairment and the attendant social difficulties it posed: myopia. In Johnny Rogan’s biography Morrissey and Marr: The Severed Alliance, a childhood friend reports that as early as age 13 Morrissey was extremely self-conscious about wearing the eyeglasses that his nearsightedness necessitated and seldom donned them (64), while in his later teen years Morrissey’s stubborn refusal to wear his spectacles eventuated in deepening social isolation: “[h]is myopia made it difficult to distinguish people beyond the radius of a couple of feet, and, by that time, any words of greeting would be strangled in the back of his throat. 34

Dumbstruck, he would look away in shy embarrassment” (80). This experience with visual

impairment during these formative years – a self-fulfilling cycle wherein the social stigma of wearing eyeglasses discouraged their being worn, which in turn fomented further social isolation

– may well have influenced the perspectives on disability that would find enunciation both subtle and explicit in his popular music career.

Other, less concealable aspects of Morrissey’s corporeal peculiarity have elicited comment. Music journalist Mark Simpson, for example, describes his first exposure to

Morrissey via a 1983 performance of “This Charming Man” on the British music program The

Tube in the following striking manner:

Without warning, this pale, emaciated James Dean double, clearly

much more in need of my fish-fingers and chips than I was and

wearing some woman’s blouse, a plastic necklace, a pair of jeans

two sizes too large, and a head three sizes too big, leaped out at me

with his mouth open. . . . There he was, blouse billowing, junk

jewelry jiggling, economy-size Adam’s apple bobbing, and his

skinny arm windmilling a poor, abused bunch of gladiolus [sic] . . .

like a floral mace. (Saint 8-9)

Simpson’s recollection registers Morrissey’s impact as effected as much through his physical

dimensions and comportment as through his words and music. Those corporeal features

described as having impressed the most are ones notable for their marked difference: gaunt

frame, large Adam’s apple, and oversized head. An emphasis on the last physical trait is reprised

in an observation by author Douglas Coupland following a 2006 interview with Morrissey: “His

head (this is really weird, and I hope it doesn't go outside the boundaries of taste) is enormous. 35

It's like a huge Charlie Brown parade float head. I walked into the bar to meet him and I saw this guy across the room with this massive head and I thought to myself, 'Man, that's one massive head,' and it was Morrissey.” No reference to any of these physical anomalies is made in the scant biographical information available on Morrissey’s formative childhood years, but they offer an intriguing, if entirely speculative, set of possible reference points for the interest in the rejected body that is apparent in Morrissey’s lyrical and musical work.

To be sure, corporeal difference does seem to have held considerable fascination for the young Morrissey. Biographer Johnny Rogan has unearthed the following germane insight into young Morrissey’s interests:

Steven was obsessed with garish British monster magazines.

Copies still exist with the carefully written “Steven Morrissey aged

11 years” scrawled across the cover. The titles, Movie Monsters

and Quasimado’s [sic] Monster Magazine were appealingly low

budget affairs, full of bloody gore, but laced with potted

biographies of actors Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre and Peter Cushing,

as well as dramatic re-creations of the Frankenstein and Dr Jekyll

and Mr. Hyde tales. (Severed 56)

That obsession, Rogan indicates, survived into Morrissey’s later teen years:

Surprisingly, Morrissey was still engrossed in monster magazines

and . . . regularly scoured second-hand bookshops . . . Ellis [a

friend of Morrissey’s] recalls his particular passion for Phantom Of

The Opera ephemera. The myth of the bitter, disfigured musician

who lives in isolation, yearns hopelessly for love, yet still manages 36

to control his subterranean world and accept his wretched

existence, clearly struck a chord with the young misanthrope. The

preoccupation with outsiders, criminals and so-called “monsters”

would prove a recurring theme in Morrissey’s written work.

(Severed 75)

Indeed, the influence of Morrissey’s youthful fascination with the cinematic macabre can be discerned at various junctures in the musical oeuvre of his adulthood – for instance, in The

Smiths’ 1987 track “Death at One’s Elbow,” where Morrissey advises a loved one “don’t come to the house tonight / Because there’s somebody here who’ll take a hatchet to your ear” and warning that upon arrival, “you’ll slip on the trail / Of all my sad remains.” It is there, too, in the eerie sound effects on and the weirdly sinister orchestration of his 1991 solo track “The Harsh

Truth of the Camera Eye,” discussed in the third chapter of this thesis. It is worth noting in connection with Morrissey’s youthful interest in cinematic monsters that, according to Fatimah

Tobing Rony, a filmmaker and professor of film and media studies, the monstrous figure of horror cinema is “interstitial . . . not just physically threatening, but also cognitively threatening: its existence threatens cultural boundaries” (161). Rony asserts as well the linkage between classic horror films like King Kong and early anthropological ethnographies whose “interest in indigenous peoples as Primitive was closely allied to the study of ‘sociological’ types such as the prostitute, the criminal, the ethnic immigrant, laborers, homosexuals, and the Irish. All of these marginal groups were seen as deficient both morally and intellectually” (171). Rony’s discussion of the discomfiting hybridity of the cinematic monster links up with my discussion in the third chapter of this thesis of the way in which the promotional video for Morrissey’s

“November Spawned a Monster” single plays on the figuration of disability as cultural dirt, the 37

anomalous and taboo. Moreover, her recognition of the nexus between cinematic monsters and

socially marginalized groups anticipates my discussion in the fifth chapter of this thesis the ways

in which Morrissey’s interest in the monstrous disabled body relates to questions of nationality, religion, class, gender, and sexuality.

Significantly, in The Smiths’ first years of success, Morrissey would famously accessorize himself in ways that pointedly invoked disability and the rejected/negative body.

Chief among these is the oft-remarked-upon hearing aid that he frequently sported during live performances, including televised ones. This accoutrement has been perceived by some as a reference to the theatrically emotive (and hearing impaired) Fifties singer Johnny Ray, who himself had worn a hearing aid and who in his own time had been dismissively labeled the

“Prince of Wails” and the “Nabob of Sob” (Rogan Alliance 33, 185) in a way that prefigured the press’s derisive labeling of Morrissey (much to the singer’s consternation) as the “Pope of

Mope” (Importance). (In the third chapter of this thesis I discuss the concept of “transgressive resignification,” defined as “[t]he embrace of denigrating terminology [that] forces the dominant culture to face its own violence head-on because the authority of devaluation has been claimed openly and ironically” [Mitchell and Snyder Narrative 35]. By embracing the identification posited by the press between his own persona and that of Ray, Morrissey can be understood as robbing the intended stigmatization of its power. Moreover, given Ray’s rumored homosexuality

[Simmonds 257] and Morrissey’s own ambiguous sexuality, his sporting of the hearing aid can be read as an acknowledgement of the linkage in the cultural imaginary between disability and deviant sexuality, discussed at greater length in the third chapter of this thesis). Morrissey himself, however, would subsequently obfuscate the Johnny Ray connection. To one interviewer he explained the hearing aid as a ploy “to gain audience sympathy” (Poznack 36). Elsewhere he 38 suggested that the hearing aid had been donned as an expression of solidarity with a deaf fan who had written to Morrissey in order to express her admiration (Rogan Alliance 185-186); he asserted, “I did it to show the fan that deafness shouldn’t be some sort of stigma that you try to hide” (Bret Scandal 52). (My reference to Morrissey’s dubiously divergent explanations of the hearing aid accessory affords me the opportunity to make a critical point here regarding my use of interview data in this thesis. I do not mean to suggest that any of Morrissey’s public utterances cited herein provides unmediated access to the artist’s inmost thoughts and feelings.

Rather, published interviews are produced at the intersection of agendas – including those of journalist, editor, and subject – that are often in conflict: a fact which Morrissey himself thematizes in such solo tracks as “Journalists Who Lie” and “You Knew I Couldn’t Last,” from1991 and 2004 respectively. Morrissey in particular is a media-savvy interviewee; Paul A.

Woods, editor of a collected volume of Morrissey interviews, states that “[a]lmost as much as his tightly honed and wittily confrontational songs, Morrissey has made an art form of the personal interview throughout his singularly turbulent career” [7-8]. Morrissey has even conceded his self-conscious concern to deploy strategic self-representations toward the end of creating particular public personae, stating in a 1987 interview that “[i]f I don’t work at being Morrissey so many hours a day – if I stop at say, five in the afternoon, to do something else – then I don’t think everything would be as significant, as strong as it is. I have to work at being who I am”

[qtd. in Bret Scandal 100].) Morrissey’s conflicting explanations vis-à-vis the hearing aid only serve to further render enigmatic its import. Should the hearing aid be read as simply an exotic and slightly shocking embellishment of fashion, with no forethought as to its meaning? Or should it be understood as a crass exploitation of cultural attitudes toward disability (or, rather, is

Morrissey summoning up those attitudes for interrogation)? Was it part of an effort to embrace 39

at least a portion of the disabled community in his fan base? Was it an attempt to make visible a

disability (deafness) which, in the absence of prosthetics designed to “correct” it, is able to elude

detection? This interpretation derives some credence from the fact that Morrissey brandished a

more conspicuous body-worn hearing aid – as opposed to the modern behind-the-ear variety –

wherein a wire conspicuously connects the ear mold to a battery pack stored in a pocket. (In the

fifth chapter of this thesis I suggest that Morrissey’s interest in representations of corporeal

difference stems in part from their ability to serve as proxy representations for Morrissey’s own experience of the invisible disability of mental illness).

The controversial significance of Morrissey’s hearing aid is augmented through its reciprocal relationship with a second accessory frequently worn by Morrissey and remarked upon by commentators: spectacles. Whatever social discomfort his myopia may have entailed during Morrissey’s youth, eyeglasses became almost de rigueur in Morrissey’s ensemble in the early days of The Smiths. Morrissey’s juxtaposition of the stigmatized (and stigmatizing) hearing aid against the more common and less (but still) stigmatized/stigmatizing spectacles points to the pervasiveness of disability, its multiplicity of dimensions, its construction along a continuum of ability (Davis Enforcing 165) as opposed to categorical absoluteness. Moreover, print references to the eyewear repeatedly and pointedly refer to them as “NHS [i.e., National

Health Service] spectacles” (Simpson Saint 16; Bret Scandal 49, 52; Leboff), a labeling which indexes their history of unstylishness with attendant social ramifications: “In wider social life the wearing of NHS spectacles was considered to cause social humiliation and to be stigmatising. . . .

NHS glasses were, as a social product, believed to not need to be styled, but to provide

‘adequate’ function” (Bichard, Coleman, and Langdon 624). Morrissey himself claimed innocence regarding the discourse stirred by the eyewear, telling one interviewer, “It was a 40 complete accident – I wore NHS spectacles, which I still do so it wasn't a mantle or a badge – and suddenly I saw all these people who didn't need to wear spectacles doing so in imitation of

The Smiths and bumping into an awful lot of walls. Other bands have tours sponsored by Levi's

– maybe we should find a large firm of opticians” (Leboff). Morrissey’s protest notwithstanding, it is doubtful that the accessory appeared on his face without calculation. It is worth noting, in any event, that during the 1980s Thatcher’s conservative government restructured the National

Health Service toward the goal of increasing privatization, achieved “the phasing out of NHS spectacles and optical services (by July 1986), except for children and poor people (on a voucher basis)” (Leathard 45). In that historical context, Morrissey’s conspicuous wearing of the eyewear might well have been read as an indirect endorsement of continued governmental support and accommodation for its disabled citizenry, a quietly stated desire to prevent additional social barriers from being erected that would further bar persons with disabilities from full participation in society. This was, after all, the man who decreed in the opening lines on the 1984 Smiths track “Still Ill,” that “today . . . life is simply taking and not giving / England is mine, it owes me a living.”

Conclusion

But my analysis has already strayed from a consideration of Morrissey’s prehistory and ventured toward a tentative preview of representations of disability during the years of his celebrity. I have devoted a majority of this chapter to staking out the conceptual terrain of disability studies. My intention in these final pages has been to peruse Morrissey’s biographical record, including the prehistory of his youth, in order to identify some possible personal motivations inspiring and explaining his later interest in representing disability in his musical 41 output. In the fifth chapter of this chapter I will return to the question of the motivations impelling Morrissey’s disability discourse, but with somewhat less emphasis on the minutiae of his personal biography and a greater interest in disability’s capacity to speak to larger issues of class, gender, sexuality, and so on. Moreover, I have begun prematurely to conduct lyric analysis. Lyrics will receive their due share of attention in later chapters, but in the next, I first want to consider primarily the music of Morrissey and The Smiths, and the ways in which it engaged a discourse of disability at the level of sound, song structure, and manner of composition.

CHAPTER II: PARALINGUISTIC AND DISCURSIVE REPRESENTATIONS OF DISABILITY IN THE MUSIC OF MORRISSEY AND THE SMITHS

Introduction

Although alternate names (including “Smithdom” and “Smiths’ Family” [Rogan Severed

142]) had initially been considered, Morrissey ultimately chose the name “The Smiths” for the now-legendary band that he formed with guitarist Johnny Marr in 1982. While a number of alternate hypotheses have been proposed (Rogan Alliance 142), the most commonly accepted wisdom has it that The Smiths’ prosaic and unassuming band name was selected to serve as an express antidote to the pretentiously grandiose titles of such contemporary outfits as Orchestral

Manoeuvres In The Dark; as Morrissey explained to an interviewer’s query, “It was the most ordinary name and I thought it was time the ordinary folk of the world showed their faces” (qtd. in Goddard 20). “Smith,” however, is not exclusively a surname but is also a common noun meaning “[o]ne who works in iron or other metals” (OED), as in “blacksmith” or “ironsmith” – an appropriate designation, given the band’s working-class affinities (Stringer 22). While guitarist Johnny Marr and bassist Andy Rourke may have thrashed steel strings as drummer

Mike Joyce pounded on copper cymbals, Morrissey himself manipulated the more ethereal medium of language – hence his frequent characterization as a “wordsmith” (e.g., Black; Morley

“Ringleader”; Veltman). That language is his raison d’être is a point that Morrissey has taken pains to assert, as in the following excerpt from a 1984 television interview:

Working class, the only thing that you could possibly do was

woodwork, and obviously when you left school you would, you

know, go into a factory or something. There was no question of

being artistic or reading books. . . . I remember at one point, one 43

instance, all the pupils were asked to write about their favorite

book, and I, I wrote about the dictionary. And I remember I was

virtually expelled for being so obstreperous and perverse. . . . I

used to write furiously and I was just really nailed to the

typewriter, and I was just swimming in paper and all kinds of

introspective things like that. I wasn’t exactly your average

teenager . . . but . . . the words that I write [are] principally why

I’m here. I mean, I’m not here to dissect insects or do anything

like that. I’m here principally because I write. (Still Ill)

Faced with Morrissey’s literary self-construction – one that has been abetted by music journalists

and critics – to begin an exploration of Morrissey’s discourse of disability by largely ignoring the

lyrical content of his work would seem to fly in the face of good sense. And yet, as McClary and

Walser have asserted, “many analyses of popular music rely too heavily on the lyrics. This

should come as no surprise: the verbal dimension of a song is much more readily grasped and

discussed in terms of meaning. . . . Yet it is not at the service of text that much popular music is

constructed” (285). (Indeed, as the ensuing discussion will remind, in the case of the artist

presently under discussion, the music is generally written by a collaborator separately from, and

without awareness of, Morrissey’s lyrics.) McClary and Walser warn that excessive focus on

lyrics to the detriment of music partakes of “a tendency to cover up or keep at arm’s distance the

dimensions of music that are most compelling and yet most threatening to rationality” (286). Not

wishing to duplicate that distancing act, but desirous rather to confront the threat as directly as

possible, I begin my inquiry into representations of disability in Morrissey’s work with an examination of music, not words. 44

Organicist Discourse and Its Dark Underside, Disability

I first turn for assistance in this project to the work of music theorist Joseph N. Straus.

His 2006 article “Normalizing the Abnormal: Disability in Music Theory” is premised on the provocative notion that “the history of disability and the history of music can be seen as intertwined in mutually reinforcing ways. . . . Music, like other products of culture, may be understood both to reflect and to assist in constructing disability, as it does with concepts of race, gender, and sexual orientation” (119-120). Straus illustrates his argument that “language about music and music itself may be understood both to represent and to construct disability” (114) through analysis of the relationship between emergent conceptions of normality, abnormality, and disability in the nineteenth century and the “narrative trajectory” (114) of contemporaneous musical works and their attendant critical discourse. Although Straus’s musicological disquisition is concerned exclusively with Western art music, I shall argue that his general conceptual approach to the discursive nexus of music and disability is portable and can be fruitfully applied to popular music as well – most pertinently, to the music of Morrissey and The

Smiths, latent meanings of which can be thrown into relief by Straus’s work.

Strauss initiates his argument with reference to the concept, much bandied about in philosophical and linguistic circles, of “embodiment” (also known as “experientialism”): the contention that our understanding of the world comes to us via the knowledge acquired through the intimate – direct, concrete, and physical – experience of our bodies. Straus notes that music theorists have adapted the notion of “embodiment” to their own purposes, arguing that bodily experience, the source of knowledge, is also the source of music’s meaning; that music thus encodes bodily experience; and that when listeners decode music, they do so in embodied terms

(121-122). In other words, Straus says, “we make sense of music, we understand it, according to 45 patterns of bodily perception, activity, and feeling” (122). Historically, the connection between music and embodiment has been reflected in the “organicist” tradition of music criticism – originating in the early nineteenth century and persisting into the present – wherein a musical work is likened to a living organism, typically the human body. Through the lens of organicism, the parts of a musical composition, rather than being mechanistically assembled, are understood as growing from a shared germ or taproot from which the whole coherently develops (136-137).

Espousing a philosophy less than congenial to the ratiocinative impulse of music theorists, organicists posited that “[t]he organic work of art . . . resists intellectual scrutiny. Like a vivisection, the dissection of music . . . for analytical purposes would amount to an act of cruelty” (10). On the organicist view, the life and spirit of a piece of music could not be calculated as the sum of its reductively isolated parts; rather, its power obtained at the level of form. (Some organicists even anthropomorphized musical forms as autobiographically narrating journeys though life.) Further hostility to the intervention of the music theorist ensued from the precept that the organic work of art was the issue of a composer in a unique and unconscious communion with nature, a communion that compelled him to create and that remained of necessity unavailable and inscrutable to the analyst (Clark and Rehding 10-12).

Although properly belonging to the discourse of Western art music, there is evidence to suggest that Morrissey would subscribe to an organicist description of popular music, particularly his own. A number of his commentators, too, would likely join him in this mystifying project. Simon Reynolds introduces a retrospective essay on The Smiths by reflecting that “the quality of their . . . bod[y] of work” derived from the notion that they

“somehow caught the zeitgeist of their decade . . . by rejecting everything that defined eighties pop,” including “synthesizers and drum machines” (1). In making this statement, Reynolds 46

recites a commonplace in critical discourse on The Smiths whereby their reversion (novel in the

context) to a traditional lineup of instrumentation requiring the manual engagement of arms,

hands, fingers, and legs is contrasted to the regnant production apparatus of cold, lifeless,

programmed, simulational electronica. Music journalist O’Hagan reinscribes that valorization in

the following hyperbolic passage:

[T]he Smiths almost single-handedly reclaimed and revitalised the

ailing tradition of the guitar-driven, four-piece rock group. . . . To

put the extent of their achievement into context, you need only

remember that they arrived at a time . . . when the new synthesised

pop of Boy George and Wham! ruled the charts, and . . . sample-

based dance music first began crossing into the mainstream and

rock music seemed to be fighting a desperate rearguard action.

Organicist overtones can be discerned here in O’Hagan’s diction, in which popular music is figured as a debilitated, disabled body, sapped of vitality (as evidenced by its stigmatized dependence on electronic prostheses, about which more will be said below) but ultimately resuscitated by The Smiths’ life-saving intervention.

That The Smiths (and, in the post-Smiths era, their frontman’s solo career) breathed new life into popular music because their music was somehow more organically, able-bodiedly alive is a viewpoint Morrissey himself has suggested in interviews. He averred in a 1984 interview

with Neil McCormick that “I really do want to be an influence. I really do want people to listen

and . . . respond because I can’t see anybody in popular music who’s . . . attempting to say

anything . . . everybody seems entirely mute to me” (33); he went on to declare, “I [say] things that people in daily life find so very hard to say . . . it’s like scraping open nerves” (31). 47

Contrasted, then, against the disabled “muteness” of their compeers, The Smiths under

Morrissey’s directorship emerge as normate soothsayers with the power to stimulate intense

experience via their nearly palpable monopoly on realism. Seven years later, Morrissey’s

rhetoric had changed little; asked by interviewer Stuart Maconie how he would like to be

remembered , Morrissey responded, “I’d like people to say that I wrote with blood, not ink”

(130), a statement which attributes a kind of fleshliness to his body of work. To be sure, the

preceding comments refer explicitly to Morrissey’s wordsmithing, but Morrissey can be

understood to have more generally identified the music of The Smiths with nature and life

through the introduction of flowers (usually gladiolas or daffodils) as personal accessories

(stashed in a back pocket) or as stage props (Bret Scandal 12, 37, 49). “Flowers are virtually as

important as the sound system” (qtd. in Bret Scandal 37), Morrissey once opined, homologizing

these symbols of regenerative nature (Mark Simpson writes of their having sprayed “petal jism”

[Saint 85]) with The Smiths’ sonics. Morrissey explained the presence in abundance of flowers at a gig at Manchester’s Haçienda Club by asserting they had been “symbolic . . . as an antidote to the Haçienda . . . it was so sterile and inhuman. We wanted some harmony with nature [and] to show some kind of optimism in Manchester, which the flowers represent. Manchester is semi- paralyzed still” (qtd. in Rogan Severed 158). Again, Morrissey figures The Smiths as combatants against disability (here paralysis) through their distinguishing alliance with nature.

In demonstrating Morrissey’s compatibility with an organicist view of popular song, I have thus far figured him and The Smiths as putative heralds and defenders of the (re)normalized body of popular music. However, I want to suggest ways in which their musics, on the contrary, evoke the concept and experience of disability. In order to do so, I will return to Straus’s insight into the connection between music and embodiment. He notes that “[j]ust as the concept of the 48 normal depends on an often-unarticulated concept of the abnormal, the concept of the praiseworthy organic (the symmetrical body) depends on the concept of the disabled organic (the deformed, disabled body). Disability is the dark and largely unexplored underside of organicism” (137). In order to identify musical sites at which the presence of this dark underside can be detected, Straus refers to the work of Lakoff and Johnson. He cites Lakoff and Johnson’s discussion of metaphor, wherein the metaphorical figure of speech, far from being mere linguistic flourish or embellishment, emerges as “the inescapable means by which we map knowledge across the domains of physical embodiment and abstract conceptualization” (122).

Straus quotes Lakoff and Johnson at some length:

Metaphor pervades our normal conceptual system. Because so

many of the concepts that are important to us are either abstract or

not clearly delineated in our experience the emotions, ideas, time,

etc.), we need to get a grasp on them by means of other concepts

that we understand in clearer terms (spatial orientations, objects,

etc.). This need leads to metaphorical definition in our conceptual

system. (qtd. 122-123).

Lakoff and Johnson contend that metaphors can be categorized into a limited number of “image schemas,” which they define as

recurring, flexible patterns of our embodied interactions with our

environments. They are the result of both the way we are

structured physically as embodied organisms and the structure of

our environments that permits only certain kinds of interactions

with those environments. Moreover, they . . . make it possible for 49

us to have ordered experiences that we can make sense of. Image

schemas . . . are essential to our ability to have any meaningful

experience at all, since they give us recurrent patterns and

structured processes that we need to survive and flourish in our

world. (qtd. 123)

Straus notes that some of the image schemas identified by Lakoff and Johnson – in particular

CONTAINER, BALANCE, CENTER-PERIPHERY, FORCES, and SOURCE-PATH-GOAL1 – have been discerned by musicologists as germane to their enterprise, and have identified them in standard music theories and in music’s melodic, harmonic, and formal organization. However, as Straus’s critique points out, the literature of experientialism and its adaptations in music theory have been rather narrowly predicated on the experience of some posited normate body.

They have been coercively universalizing insofar as they ignore the variety of bodies and the differences that bodily varieties make (123-124). By way of example, Straus points to the related image schemas of BALANCE and VERTICALITY . The former “involves our felt sense of an upright posture in which forces acting on us are organized around a central axis so that we remain upright, relatively in control of our actions, able to function effectively, and feeling somewhat stable” (qtd. in Straus 124), while the latter involves “our felt sense of standing upright . . . the vertical orientation of our bodies” (qtd. in Straus 124). Straus notes that while the experiences these image schemas index are widely shared, they are far from universal; the habitual posture of many people is neither upright, balanced, nor vertical, and indeed, everyone occasionally experiences imbalance and loss of verticality, the disabled complements to Lakoff and Johnson’s normate image schemas. Straus postulates that because these experiences of abnormal bodily states are generally available, and since (per experientialism) we understand the

1 Image schemas are usually written in capital letters (Straus 123). 50

world through our bodily experience, it stands to reason that our understanding should be

inflected by the experience of disability, and that this inflection should be reflected in music and

its surrounding discourse (124-125).

Such a reflection can be illuminated with respect to the organicist emphasis on form.

Straus cites two traditions of conceptualizing musical form. In one, form is regarded as a

CONTAINER, “an arrangement of bounded spaces that contain musical content (themes and/or

harmonies)” (126). Straus relates this notion of musical form to the embodied image schema

FORM IS A CONTAINER; in that connection he discerns that musical form is at bottom

communication about human bodies, and that either may be conceived of as well-formed or

deformed – that is, able-bodied or disabled (126). In the other tradition, form is regarded as a

norm, a conventional arrangement of musical elements. While the idea of form as normative is

not an embodied image schema, it raises the prospect of formal abnormality – which, Straus

suggests, signifies disability; moreover, the two conceptions of musical form mutually inflect

one another such that form emerges as a kind of “conventional mold” or “normative container”

(127). The perception of form as a normative container eventuates in what Straus designates as a

“conformational” approach, while the emphasis on the unique shape of the individual work is labeled the “generative” approach (127). An alternate way of conceiving of these unique shapes has been to regard them as “deformations,” sites at which the CONTAINER of form has been ruptured or distorted, its boundaries transgressed. And, of course, Straus is not unaware of the resonance of such a designation: “use of the term deformation simply makes explicit what is already implicit in any conformational theory of musical form: a musical form, understood as a normative container, is a metaphorical human body, and thus formal deformations can be understood as bodily disfigurements” (130). 51

Disability and Unconventional Song Structure in the Music of Morrissey and The Smiths

While Straus discusses the idea of musical deformation in the context of Western art music, specifically the Sonata form, I want to transpose his argument onto the realm of popular music – for it is in the realm of popular music, perhaps more so even than anywhere in Western art music, that a conformational approach to musical production obtains. This apprehension of popular music achieved legitimacy in the seminal writings of Theodor Adorno. The following passage from his essay “On Popular Music” makes the point plainly enough:

A clear judgment concerning the relation of serious music to

popular music can be arrived at only by strict attention to the

fundamental characteristic of popular music: standardization. The

whole structure of popular music is standardized. . . .

Standardization extends from the most general features to the most

specific ones. Best known is the rule that the chorus consists of

thirty-two bars and that the range is limited to one octave and one

note. The general types of hits are also standardized; not only the

dance types, the rigidity of whose pattern is understood, but also

the “characters” such as mother songs, home songs, nonsense or

“novelty” songs, pseudo-nursery rhymes, laments for a lost girl.

Most important of all, the harmonic cornerstones of each hit – the

beginning and the end of each part – must beat out the standard

scheme. This scheme emphasizes the most primitive harmonic

facts no matter what has harmonically intervened. Complications

have no consequences. This inexorable device guarantees that 52

regardless of what aberrations occur, the hit will lead back to the

same familiar experience, and nothing fundamentally novel will be

introduced. (302)

To be sure, Adorno’s work on popular music has been criticized as “prejudiced, arrogant, and uninformed” (Paddison 201). Moreover, commentators have noted its historical limitations

(over which Adorno himself, of course, had no control): the popular music from which Adorno’s cogitations were extrapolated, what he termed “jazz,” was in fact most likely the commercial dance band music of the late 1920’s and early 1930’s (Paddison 209-210); Adorno philosophized without exposure (or access) to what today is understood to be jazz in any of its guises, let alone the blues, country, rock and roll, or hip hop. However, it is questionable whether Adorno’s views would have been much altered with the benefit of such exposure; even a scholar concerned to recuperate popular music from Adorno’s blanket denunciations concedes in passing the “stock formulae of rock music, ballads, etc.” (Paddison 215). The plural “formulae” is critical here, for

I do not mean to suggest that rock music, or any genre of popular music for that matter, is stringently bound to some singular and inviolable formal template. Nevertheless, if musical form as CONTAINER refers to “an arrangement of bounded spaces that contain musical content

(themes and/or harmonies)” (Straus 126), then in popular music those “bounded spaces” can be understood in terms of verses, choruses, middle eights, and instrumental (in rock music, guitar especially) solos; and while in any rock music song text these basic formal units may be constellated within a range of possible permutations, the expectation is that most of these elements will be present in some configuration in any conventional, well-formed song text.

Certainly the presumption of formal regularity in popular music is a premise underlying much of 53

the critical discourse remarking upon the structurally aberrant work of Morrissey and The

Smiths.

One reviewer, for example, has written of The Smiths’ eponymous 1984 debut LP that

“[o]n the surface, the Smiths' sound wasn't radically different from traditional British guitar pop

— Johnny Marr's ringing, layered guitars were catchy and melodic — but it was actually an

astonishing subversion of the form, turning the structure inside out. Very few of the songs

followed conventional verse-chorus structure, yet they were quite melodic within their own

right” (Erlewine). This point is underscored in the reminiscences of John Porter, producer of The

Smiths, who recalled of the recording of that album’s track “This Charming Man,” “It was incredibly linear at first . . . The introduction was about 28 bars and rambled. The Smiths were

never a verse/chorus/middle eight band. Because there were no choruses, it was difficult and I

couldn’t get the hang of it. Then we knocked a few bars off and it all came together” (178).

Straus, in his discussion of musical form as signifying the experience of embodiment, notes that

“the sense of a formal unit as a container is perhaps most strongly felt just at the moments when .

. . its exterior shell is breached, or when the container is suddenly forced to change shape under

the pressure from its internal contents” (129). The music of The Smiths (and Morrissey) are a

case in point: that conventional rock song formation is so often invoked in commentary that

notes how The Smiths deviated therefrom testifies to the Durkheimian that the norm is defined

through its deviations. And while Porter’s excisionary interventions into “This Charming Man”

can be read as an anxiety-driven effort to normalize the abnormal body – as a quasi-medicalized

impulse to surgically remove excess flesh from the deformed body of the undisciplined song text

– the net effect on The Smiths’ work was limited, given the unconventional structures that were

to characterize it to the end. That is, the structural deformity that was evident at The Smiths’ 54

inception was also there at its conclusion. Thus about “Paint a Vulgar Picture,” a track off The

Smiths’ final 1987 studio album Strangeways, Here We Come, Simon Goddard has written, “It

takes several rotations of Marr’s knotty arrangement – repeatedly changing in key every other

verse from D to B and back again – to grasp the essence of his melodic intent. Only after

repeated listening can one start to appreciate the song’s ambitious foundations and its confusing,

unconventional off-bar chord changes. ‘I was always intrigued by how Johnny came up with

that,’ says [producer Stephen] Street, ‘because it was very clever, the way it bridged back and

forth, but very odd as well’” (267). Goddard’s statement here – “knotty” invokes the corporeal

image of gnarled limbs – links the non-normativity of musical structure to the embodied

experience of disorientation, only countered through the stabilizing foothold established through

multiple listenings. (In a conformational gesture toward normative rock convention, however,

“Paint a Vulgar Picture” does feature a guitar solo from Johnny Marr, only the second to appear

on a Smiths recording [Goddard 266[. The first guitar solo of The Smiths’ career was featured

on the 1986 single “Shoplifters of the World Unite,”2 where it had “caused an outcry among

Smiths purists who feared their worst suspicions about [Marr’s] rock god ambitions were coming

true” (Goddard 248). In other words, Smiths fans, valuing the abnormality of the band’s song

forms, sought to police the oeuvre’s boundaries in order to keep normalizing effects out.3 The

2 During the session in which “Shoplifters of the World Unite” was recorded, Marr, still recuperating from injuries suffered in a car crash earlier in the month, wore a fitted neck brace. Simon Goddard reports that “[a]s the patron saint of self-styled ‘disability chic,’ Morrissey was particularly taken with his writing partner’s medical accessory, to the point where he expressed something approaching envy that he couldn’t have one himself. ‘He thought it was my best fashion statement,’ laughs Marr, ‘It was, “At last! He’s got it together!”’” (247). 3 The wariness of Smiths fans toward guitar solos can be further explained with recourse to anthropologist Wendy Fonarow’s observation that “[t]he guitar solo is eschewed in indie because it is likened to masturbation. . . . Behaviors that are perceived as self-focused or self-indulgent are equated with inappropriate sexual expression . . . and subject to censure” (220). This reading of the sexual politics of guitar soloing is predicated on a recognition of the phallic symbolism of the guitar. Affirming this nexus, performance theorist Philip Auslander has discussed the centrality of the guitar to “the physical vocabulary of cock-rock,” wherein a guitarist (nearly always male) slings his instruments “down between [his] legs so that it point[s] straight out at the crowd in a phallic display employed . . . since the earliest days of the blues” (201). Fonarow, however, rejects so uncomplicated an equation between the guitar and the expression of virtuosic phallocentric sexuality. Instead she reads the guitar as “a potent image of the 55

recurrence, then, not to say ubiquity, of deformity in The Smiths’ song structure enables Andrew

Warnes to speak generally of “cathartic Smiths songs that abandon, or threaten to abandon, the

conventional verse-chorus-verse pop structure” (140), and which thereby participate in the

representational construction of disability. And as the policing function performed by fans makes plain, one additional point Straus offers about structural deformity in the context of

Western art music is applicable in the present context: “It is a paradox worth pondering that . . .

[f]ormal deviations, which are dealt with harshly in real life when manifested as bodily deformities, may be prized within art, and sonatas with ‘deformations’ are often the most interesting and expressive ones. In this sense, sonata deformations are not ‘culturally

stigmatized bodily differences’ . . . so much as they are culturally valorized [emphasis in

original] bodily differences” (130-131). Indeed, in The Smiths’ work – and, arguably, in much

of the indie rock genre upon which the band exerted influence (Simpson Saint 191) – formal

deviations function as marks of vital individuality and authenticity against a grounding

musicscape of bland, predictable sameness.

While numerous examples could be cited to illustrate the band’s penchant for non- normative musical form, I will single out for analysis here The Smiths’ 1984 track “Miserable

Lie.” In terms of song structure, “Miserable Lie” eschews the traditional verse-chorus formula of pop music convention; its nearly four and half minutes of sound is best described as yielding an ABC structure. The harmonic progression of the song’s introductory four bars of sluggish, even somnolent instrumentation consists of bright, arpeggiated major key chords

union of male and female forces,” the former suggested by linearity of the guitar’s neck and head, the latter by its curvaceous body and, on an acoustic guitar, the sound hole (219-220). Taken together, Fonarow’s and Auslander’s readings of the sexual symbolism of the guitar suggest that Morrissey’s guitar-based rock (and indie rock generally), with its characteristic disavowal of the guitar solo, draws upon the androgynous potential of the instrument while de- emphasizing its capacity to express heterosexual braggadocio. In the fifth chapter of this thesis I discuss at some length the connection between disability and androgyny/gender nonconformity in Morrissey’s oeuvre. 56

(tonic/dominant/subdominant) which, once Morrissey’s voice, commencing in the lower reaches

of his register, joins the proceedings after two and a half beats of the fourth measure, repeat

virtually unchanged (save for the addition of an cymbal crash in the eighteenth measure of this opening section where none would otherwise appear) for the ensuing twenty measures. Against

this unchanging harmonic background, Morrissey’s vocal line struggles to find a foothold. Its

melody is phrased so as to repeatedly assert a general movement upward in pitch, but despite

such efforts, it never quite settles into a discrete melodic figure. Morrissey’s fragmented lyrics

seem ill-fitted to the almost hypnotically repetitive harmonic structure, and as this introductory A

section moves toward its close, Morrissey repeats words and phrases as if attempting to assert

control and mastery over the unruly musical text: “There’s something against us / It’s not time /

It’s not time / So goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.” Far from being tamed, however, the

song at this point undergoes a radical shift, a reformation which is also a deformation. Without

warning or transition, its tempo metamorphoses from lethargy to mania. Its harmonies sour from

bright major tonalities to menacing minor ones. Morrissey’s voice shifts from its low into its

mid-range, and his delivery gains in a stridency commensurate with the music – or rather, vice

verse, since Morrissey’s words “I know” anticipate and apparently initiate the violent transition

after two and a half beats of the final measure of the major-keyed A section. Joyce’s heavily

syncopated drums attain increased prominence in the mix, punctuated by frequent cymbal

crashes and drum rolls, as Rourke plays an angular but infectious bass line and Marr picks

frenetically at his guitar. As he had begun to do as the song’s A section had drawn to its close,

Morrissey continues here in the B section to fill the musical space with lyrics that either repeat

themselves or approximately repeat each other through parallelisms – for instance, “You have

destroyed my flower-like life / Not once, but twice / You have corrupt my innocent mind / Not 57

once, twice.” It is as though, on the one hand, Morrissey, struggling to fill the measures

allocated to his voice, resorts to recycling words and phrases to achieve that end; on the other

hand, however, his use of the truncated “corrupt” instead of the correct “corrupted” indicates the

ill-fit between his overly ambitious scansion with respect to the available temporal space. (The disjunction of music and lyrics characteristic of Morrissey’s work is discussed in greater detail below.) After more than a minute of uninterrupted versifying, Morrissey momentarily pauses as

Marr bends a guitar string to introduce a four-measure break in which he plays a guitar figure

whose syncopated rhythm pushes uneasily against the underlying beat laid down by Joyce’s pulsating drums. When Morrissey returns to introduce the song’s concluding C section, his voice has swooped up into an unexpected falsetto, which he does not abandon for the remainder of the track. This final section of the song features Morrissey melismatically crying repeated mantras of desperation (e.g., “I’m just a country mile behind the world,” “take me when you

go”), protracting his fractured intonation of the final words of some of these phrases to the point

where they become plaintive wails altogether divorced from language. Throughout the C

section, Marr’s increasingly frenetic guitar breaks punctuate the proceedings, and Joyce’s drums

embellish certain bars with more frequent drum rolls and cymbal crashes. After more than two

minutes proceeding in this mode, the song draws to an abrupt close as Morrissey, still in falsetto,

asserts a final time, “I need advice, I need advice.” Not only in its eschewal of conventional pop

song structure, then, its radical internal disjunctures in terms of key, tempo, and pitch, but also,

as will be elaborated below, in its awkward fit of lyrics to music, “Miserable Lie” can be

understood as intimating at its structural and sonic levels disabled embodiment.

The proclivity for non-normative song structure persisted beyond The Smiths’ 1987

disbandment and has continued to infuse Morrissey’s solo work – a fact to which the artist makes 58 satiric allusion on his 1992 single “We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful,” whose lyrics were inspired by Morrissey’s bitter perception of the cynical, back-stabbing jealousy stirred up among his Mancunian musical compeers upon discovering that one of their own had met with stardom. Sung from the perspective of said envious confrères, the song concludes with the following lyrics:

You see, it should’ve been me

It could’ve been me

Everybody knows, everybody says so

They say, “Oh, you have loads of songs

So many songs, more songs than they can stand

Verse, chorus, middle eight, break, fade – just listen!”

“Verse, chorus, middle eight, break, fade”: Morrissey offers here a synopsis of normative rock song structure, but he invokes it not to praise it but to bury it – for while rote adherence to the formula has left his detractors wallowing in obscurity, willful repudiation of the same has brought Morrissey international recognition. That the Top 20-charting (Brown 182) “We Hate It

When Our Friends Become Successful” itself does not fit comfortably into the normative verse- chorus-middle-eight mold heightens the irony of its import, but not everyone was pleased with the song’s irregularity: in the NME, Andrew Collins, invoking images of blindness and physical depletion, charged that the song’s “double-bluff ‘Ha ha ha ha ha ha’ non-chorus scores a direct miss, and the sound of five men bashing around in the darkness in search of a tune merely drains you of the will to live” (qtd. in Rogan Albums 185).

Deprived, following the demise of The Smiths, of his longtime songwriting partner

Johnny Marr – a guitarist known for his for his “fondness for . . . inventive arrangements [and] 59 hungry experimentation” (Rogan Severed 288) – indications are that Morrissey endeavored to maintain in his solo work the deformational character with which his work had come to be associated. Stephen Street, who had worked with The Smiths and who co-wrote and produced

Morrissey’s debut solo album Viva Hate, offered the following insight: “[H]e really inspires me .

. . his timing’s totally different to anyone else. I’d write a song, thinking, ‘that’s the verse, that’s the bridge and that bit’s the chorus.’ ‘Disappointed’ is a perfect example because he chose to sing over the little bridge bits and I had to chop it and change it all around. He’s really very special” (qtd. in Brown Meetings 144). Vini Reilly, who played guitar on Viva Hate, offers his concurring recollection: “We put in these very straightforward arrangements . . . and when

Morrissey came in to put down his guide vocals, we suddenly realized that he was treating the middle eight as a chorus, and the chorus as a middle eight. He’s put vocals in the most peculiar places. His phrasing is weird and often you’d have to change the arrangement to fit in. But it worked. . . . Morrissey’s musical input was huge” (qtd. in Rogan Alliance 292). Moreover, and not to belabor the point, Clive Langer – who co-wrote and co-produced Morrissey’s 1990 single

“November Spawned a Monster” and 1991 album track “Mute Witness” as well as co-produced the 1991 single “Pregnant for the Last Time,” all songs which take non-normative bodies as their subject matter, and are discussed in some detail in the next chapter – offers the following insight into Morrissey’s creative process as a solo artist:

The way he works is, um, you give him the music, he then decides,

you know – in my mind, I’d decided what the chorus was gonna

be, what the intro was or whatever. He’ll probably sing over the

intro, leave the verse, you know, and the chorus will be a re-intro, 60

and the re-intro will be a chorus, and, uh, so he makes up his own

musical plan over the top of what you’ve given him. (Jewel)

Like Reilly, Langer limns Morrissey as prime mover in the reformation/deformation of the

formal structures of his song texts. Moreover, to reiterate the relevance of all this to a discussion

of disability, because music can be understood as encoding corporeal experience, per Straus,

ruptures and distortions of the CONTAINER that is musical form bespeak ruptures and

distortions of the CONTAINER that is the human body; thus the malformed song betokens

malformed corporeality. The perennial appearance of unconventional song structures in

Morrissey’s oeuvre, then, both as a Smith and as a solo artist, translates as the habitual

emergence into view (or into audition, rather) of representations of disability 4

Disability and Division of Labor in the Music of Morrissey and The Smiths

The testimonies of Street, Reilly, and Langer bear witness to a fundamental and almost

antagonistic disjuncture between words and music in Morrissey’s oeuvre. The explanation for

this phenomenon during Morrissey’s solo career as a consequence of the singer’s active

engagement with and refashioning of the musical materials furnished by his collaborators is plain enough in the statements cited above. During his career with The Smiths, however, the creative process appears to have been characterized by an alternate process, wherein responsibility for words and music were more sharply separated. Smiths bassist Andy Rourke tersely shed light on that process in a 1984 interview, declaring, “Well, Morrissey's lyrics we hear after we've put the

4 Although cognizant of the problems entailed in too easily equating illness with disability (Wendell 19-22), I would therefore suggest that the preceding discussion of song structure in Morrissey’s work adds resonance to his claim on the 2006 album track “On the Streets I Ran” to having “turned sickness into popular song” – or “unpopular song,” as Morrissey revises the line in its second iteration. 61

music together, so they don't inspire the music at all. I suppose it compliments it” (Hoskyns).

Producer John Porter described The Smiths’ modus operandi with greater elaboration:

So the process seemed to me, as I recall, they would come in with

a couple of riffs, we would make a song, we would track it a few

times, and then I’d put it together, then Mike and Andy would

probably go upstairs and watch TV or whatever. And Johnny and I

would throw guitars at this thing for the rest of the day, and . . .

then I would make a copy of it at the end of the day and go drop it

off through Morrissey’s letterbox or whatever. And then he would

come in subsequently with his notebook and stand in front of the

mic and just . . . (mimics flipping through a notebook ) . . . sing.

(Under Review)

The disconnect between words and music facilitated by this manner of composition is audible throughout Morrissey’s discography. For instance, on the title track of The Smiths’ 1986 album

The Queen is Dead, Morrissey fantasizes about trespassing onto the grounds of Buckingham

Palace. During an imagined confrontation with the monarch, he is informed that he cannot sing, to which he rejoins, “That’s nothing, you should hear me play piano.” Given the temporal and rhythmic constraints under whose duress he must intone the lyric, he ends up rushing through it in deadpan fashion, delivering it with none of the cadence with which it would no doubt be imbued in ordinary speech, not even with the benefit of a logical pause between “nothing” and

“you.” Biting off the final word of the line, he delivers the word “piano” with a sustained “o”; the emphasis lain there upon rewrites the normal pronunciation of “piano” by stressing the final syllable rather than the customary penultimate “a.” Music and words do not fit; the former 62

subordinates and deforms the latter. A second example of this phenomenon, this time taken from

Morrissey’s solo work, is the 1994 track “I Am Hated for Loving.” After hurriedly enumerating

the humiliations suffered on account of his amorousness (“anonymous call, a poison pen, a brick

in the small of the back again”), he immediately segues into the observation, “I just don’t belong

/ To anyone – I am mine.” However, his intonations of the verb “belong” and of the prepositional phrase (“to anyone”) that completes its meaning are separated by two measures that feature a sprightly guitar figure. Their temporal separation of the two halves of the bifurcated verb phrase obscures the unitary meaning of the line, cordoning off “I just don’t belong” as a discrete semantic unit and, somewhat perplexingly, lumping together “To anyone – I am mine” as a separate semantic unit. The confusion engendered by the caesura in the line is heightened by the guitar figure of the intermediating two measures, whose lilting character contrasts with and undermines the sobriety of Morrissey’s lyric. In short, words and music here are once again at loggerheads with each other, the latter deforming and reforming the comprehensibility of the former. This fact has not gone unnoticed by critics. An unknown reviewer presciently noted upon the release of The Smiths’ 1984 single “What Difference Does It Make?” that “Morrissey

has trouble making his words scan the lines, his big ideas scurry around for one little tune; a

clumsy trait that is bound to be touted as his trademark” (“What Difference Does It Make?”).

The mismatch is further analogized in the following passage culled from a contemporaneous

review of The Smiths’ debut album: “Morrissey's words are rather like his clothes - they're

sombre, curiously old-fashioned and they don't quite fit. And, at times, the tunes seem barely

attached to the guitars that chime like clockwork underneath them” (Ellen). Such comments

testify to the creative dynamic that underwrote The Smiths, a dynamic that was neatly

summarized by producer Kenny Jones, who recollected, “I would have to say . . . right from the 63

beginning, it was The Smiths and Morrissey, or the band and Morrissey, and together the

combination was The Smiths” (Under Review). Jones’s self-correction here points to the

chimeric nature of “The Smiths”: the unitary authorship that that designation implies ultimately

conceals an underlying fracturedness, an internal division of labor, with Marr, Rourke, and Joyce

engaged in one kind of smithing and Morrissey separately engaged in another. But perceiving

the alienation implicit in such discourse about The Smiths and attending to the audible traces of

their alienated creative process both work to undermine the organicism of the music: for if an

organicist conception posits music as lifelike work not mechanically assembled but developing

coherently from a shared seed, The Smiths’ modular approach to composition (replicated in

Morrissey’s solo work) lends their work a decidedly inorganic cast.

Technological Prostheses and the Disability Discourse of Morrissey and The Smiths

I have suggested, then, that in its deformations of song structure, and in the ethos of

estrangement between words and music, Morrissey’s oeuvre can be understood as a popular

music site in which representations of disability and intimations of inorganicity are implicit.

Initially I made these points as contrasts to the discourse attendant upon the emergence of The

Smiths, in which the band is limned as supremely able resuscitators of the ailing field of popular music. (By way of additional illustration, asked about The Smiths’ role in the revivified career of English chanteuse Sandie Shaw, whose cover of The Smiths’ “Hand in Glove” became her first Top 30 hit in more than fifteen years [Bret Scandal 14], Morrissey impishly declared, “The word ‘revived,’ in terms of Sandie’s career, is quite brutal, because it implies that she was, you know, an emotional wreck and we, we operated on her – which is almost true” [Arsenal].) Part of the perceived vitality of The Smiths in critical discourse, I have suggested, derived from the 64

band’s opposition to drum machines and synthesizers and their reliance upon the traditional guitar-bass-drum rock lineup. Asked whether the synthesizer had killed pop music, Morrissey told interviewer Barney Hoskyns in 1984, “It's been directly responsible. . . . The synthesiser

should be symbolically burned. . . . They become instruments that do not involve connection

with human beings . . . you can literally put them in a room and they'll play on their own, so it's

really quite strange. I prefer music by people who really have to play it, and who really have a

burning desire to play it. It's a world where human beings have no place whatsoever, and I've

really got the interests of the human race at heart.” In a sense, the disablement and inorganicity

suggested by The Smiths’ and Morrissey’s unconventional song structures and synthetic mode of

composition is obscured – one might even say, partly normalized – by the foregrounding of able-

bodied musicianship that requires physical engagement and manual dexterity; in this regard,

Morrissey can be seen to have participated in a cultural logic that medicalizes disability,

construing it as something that can – and where possible, must – be controlled and combated so

that “normal” ability is (nearly) restored. However, I wish to return to this notion of The Smiths’

able-bodied musicianship in order to complicate it; that is, in order to show that its postulation is

predicated upon a kind of subterfuge. I mean to do this by invoking what disability studies

scholars have referred to as “cultural narratives of the prosthesis” (Iverson 65) through which the

binary opposition of nature to technology is imagined. Mitchell and Snyder have defined

prosthesis in the following manner:

In a literal sense a prosthesis seeks to accomplish an illusion. A

body deemed lacking, unfunctional, or inappropriately functional

needs compensation, and prosthesis helps to effect this end.

(Narrative 6) 65

On this view, such prostheses as glass eyes, bionic arms, and cochlear implants – technological devices of varying degrees of sophistication – enact what Mitchell and

Snyder call “a judgment that . . . is always already profoundly social [and] a false recognition: that disabilities extract one from a social norm or average of bodies and their corresponding (social) expectations” (6). Obedient to a historically contingent and socially produced concept of the normal, prostheticization endeavors to bring bodily insufficiency and variance “within a regime of tolerable deviance. If disability falls too far from an acceptable norm, a prosthetic intervention seeks to accomplish an erasure of difference all together; yet, failing that, as is always the case with prosthesis, the minimal goal is to return one to an acceptable degree of difference” (Mitchell and Snyder

Narrative 6-7). In other words, cultural narratives of prosthesis do not follow the social model of disability in order to locate disablement in the built environment – defined broadly by Mitchell and Snyder to include not only architecture and infrastructure but also “mythologies, images, and characterizations about disability” (Narrative xiv) – but rather find natural culpability in biologically based bodily lack which they attempt, always incompletely, to normalize with recourse to technogical appurtenances that seek to restore wholeness and sufficiency.

Transposing this discussion of prosthesis into the popular music realm, and specifically into the germane context of The Smiths’ instrumentation, with its narrative of able-bodied musicianship, the cultural logic of prosthesis can be discerned in the way the band and its boosters self-consciously opposed the group’s guitar-bass-drums lineup to the prevalent use elsewhere in pop music production of such electronic instrumentation as synthesizers, sequencers, and drum machines. I want to argue that these latter are stigmatized in part for their 66

implicitly prosthetic function as compensation for some inherent lack or insufficiency in the

musician’s body. Smiths biographer Johnny Rogan, for example, writes of early eighties

“inveterate poseurs, who hid musical impoverishment [emphasis mine] behind programmed

synthesizer pop” (Severed 152). Such attitudes or aesthetic dispositions can be seen to both

reflect and recirculate the anxieties posed by the threatening specter of the disabled body. They

exemplify Mitchell and Snyder’s assertion that “[i]n order to dissociate one’s disability from

stigmatizing associations, disabled people are encouraged to ‘pass’ by disguising their

disabilities. Prosthetic devices, mainstreaming, and overcompensation techniques, all provide

means for people with disabilities to ‘fit in’ or to ‘de-emphasize’ their differences” (Narrative 3).

When defenders of able-bodied musicianship discursively strip away the technological

prosthetics of disfavored bands, they expose the reviled, incapable/disabled, posing/passing insufficiency underneath.

A 1984 interview with Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr published in the Record Mirror is

prefaced with author Simon Mills’ caveat that while he is no great fan of The Smiths, he was

nevertheless pleased to discover, as he notes in ableist-inflected language, that Marr “shared my hatred of today's faceless, synthetic popsters and convinced me that his group were intent on injecting something realistic and worthwhile into the top forty.” Marr’s kindred aesthetics are apparent in the following quote:

No, we would never use a Linn-Drum or a drum machine. The

only use a synthesiser would be to us would be for string parts and

we'd rather use real strings – any other sound I try to achieve with

the guitar. Having said that, I've just finished working on the

guitar part for the new Quando Quango record which is totally 67

electrofunk. Although their sound is totally alien to me I enjoyed

the challenge. (Mills)

The image posed here is that of the unaided (because able-bodied) musician vehemently resisting

(because he need not capitulate to) the prosthetic assistance afforded by modern musical technologies. Even when a brief extracurricular foray into a electronically marked musical area is noted, the language deployed is recuperative, limning Marr as an outsider trespassing onto unfamiliar and unexplored terrain but more than up to the challenge of navigating its topography with pleasure.

However, further scrutiny into the claims of self-sufficient, unassisted able-bodiedness surrounding The Smiths’ musicianship reveal their fundamental disingenuousness. Perhaps the most credible pretension to musical non-prostheticity is that which could be achieved by the unadorned human voice heard in a face-to-face context. This is because the presence of even the most rudimentary of instruments, however simple their technology, can be regarded as a prosthetic intervention. As Jennifer Iverson has observed regarding the mapping of the nature/technology binary onto acoustic/electronic instrumentation, “[a]coustic music also uses machines of course, but acoustic instruments are not fetishized as technological in the same way as electronic instruments. . . . The time that has passed since the invention of acoustic instruments has naturalized them” (64). Of course, the electric bass and electric guitar utilized by The Smiths are both self-evidently electric (not acoustic) instruments, but in much of the music of The Smiths and Morrissey’s solo work, their sounds have not been subjected to heavy processing – reverb and delay appear with regularity, but distortion (a guitar effect whose designation resonates with the disabling connotations of deformation) is rarer. What results are the bright, clean, “jingle jangle” (Rogan Severed 274) sonics that have become closely associated 68 with Morrissey and The Smiths (and indie rock in general). And because such jangle has folk music (read: earthy, acoustic) connotations – indeed, Marr was accustomed to utilizing open folk guitar tunings (Bannister 71) – The Smiths’ and Morrissey’s reliance on the highly technologized prostheses of processed, electric instruments remained veiled. One might say, following Iverson, that decades of the use of electric guitar and bass in the rock genre have naturalized those instruments as well, their profoundly technological character emerging most clearly when modified through conspicuous processing.

But the use of technological prostheses is far more pervasive in The Smiths’ oeuvre than has thus far been suggested. Their 1983 recording of “This Charming Man” – the band’s second single, and the first to garner real national and international attention (Bret Scandal 45-46) – is an illustrative case in point. Biographer Johnny Rogan reports that the guitar and bass parts for this track had actually been, for all Marr’s protestations against drum machines, recorded on top of a pre-programmed Linn drum, which was erased at the end of the session once Mike Joyce’s drums had been overdubbed (Severed 179). That the Linn drum sound does not appear in the final issued single does not detract from the fact that it played an instrumental role in its production; rather, its ultimate excision points to the anxiety that recourse to prosthetic assistance engenders, registering as it does a fundamental insufficiency of the body. Moreover, “This

Charming Man” bore the hallmark of what would come to characterize many of The Smiths’ and

Morrissey’s solo recordings: multiple overdubbed guitar tracks. In a 1990 interview for Guitar

Player magazine, Johnny Marr reflected back on his erstwhile aversion for technology, even as he simultaneously described its pivotal use at an early date on the recording of “This Charming

Man”: 69

The Smiths were quite a purist group, and I was a great believer in

traditionalism. Just plugging a Gibson ES-335 into my trusty

Fender Bassman or Twin Reverb was romantic. But now I

understand that when technology is used by someone with taste,

you can have tasteful results. Whatever makes for a more

interesting end result, I'll use. . . . I'll try any trick. With the Smiths,

I'd take this really loud Telecaster of mine, lay it on top of a Fender

Twin Reverb with the vibrato on, and tune it to an open chord.

Then I'd drop a knife with a metal handle on it, hitting random

strings. I used that . . . on "This Charming Man" [from The

Smiths], buried beneath about 15 tracks of guitar. . . . There are

three tracks of acoustic, a backwards guitar with a really long

reverb, and the effect of dropping knives on the guitar – that comes

in at the end of the chorus. (Gore)

In other words, the sounds heard on the recording of “This Charming Man,” achieved only by

virtue of the recording studio’s advanced technological prosthetics, are attributed to the creative

capacities of merely four bodies – of four self-sufficient musicians: three instrumentalists, one

vocalist – when, in fact, those sounds’ reproduction (no: at best, approximation) in real time

would require (assuming Marr’s ultimate tally of 16 guitar tracks is accurate) a 19-member band

wielding not only vocal cords, drums, electric guitars, and electric bass, but metal-handled knife

as well.

Indeed, so extensive was The Smiths’ reliance on studio technology to craft their songs

that in order to be able to reproduce the sound of their recordings in live performance, The 70

Smiths found it necessary to enlist (ultimately, for only a brief duration) a fifth member, guitarist

Craig Gannon. Gannon had originally joined the group as a bassist, temporarily replacing Andy

Rourke (who at the time was wrestling with heroin addiction), but upon Rourke’s reinstatement as a Smith, Gannon was asked to stay on (Bret Scandal 69-70). According to biographer Johnny

Rogan, “Johnny already had the considerable burden of approximating live the multi-track, wall- of-sound, guitar displays concocted in the studio, and this process would prove more challenging than ever with the release of their new album [The Queen is Dead]. It was intended that Gannon should beef up The Smiths’ sound and prevent Marr from spreading himself too thinly” (Alliance

244). In essence, Gannon was recruited to serve as a flesh-and-blood (as opposed to mechanically technological) prosthesis who functioned in part to conceal, in situations of live performance, the limitations of Marr’s two-armed body, which would have been exposed by the audible chasm between studio recording and concert performance. Visually, however, Gannon’s presence on the stage served to remind that The Smiths’ sound had been achieved only with the considerable assistance of studio technology; that it was indeed this very same prosthetic dependence which had necessitated and justified Gannon’s addition to the band. Gannon’s eventual dismissal from The Smiths has been attributed to a variety of motivations – his unsociability, hedonism, laziness, clumsiness, and inferior musicianship, for example (Rogan

Alliance 257, 259-260) – but it is arguable that The Smiths ejected Gannon in part because of the too-obvious nature of his prosthetic function. His presence suggested a lack in the band’s original four-man lineup; much like the spectacles that a school-aged Stephen Patrick Morrissey had been too embarrassed to wear in front of his peers, Gannon indexed the corporeal limitations of the founding Smiths. It was as if the guitarist were bringing about a realization of the sentiment augured in the lyrics of The Smith’s 1984 track “What Difference Does It Make?”: 71

“now you make me feel so ashamed because I’ve only got two hands.” With Gannon as prosthesis removed, The Smiths could resume their project of passing – of professing a self- sufficiency which obscured their intimate dependence on technology.

Of course, the entire preceding discussion of prosthesis in musical production has failed to adequately acknowledge that the playback mechanisms through which popular music is delivered – whether the medium be vinyl, cassette, compact disc, mp3, radio, or internet – all constitute technological prostheses without which popular music would cease to exist altogether, at least in anything like its present guises. These means of transmission have been so naturalized by the passing of time and forces of habit that audiences (as well as artists) fail to fully recognize their technological dependence on networks of media distribution for the music that they consume. Susan Wendell has noted philosophically that in contemporary Western societies, a sense of one’s own able-bodiedness hinges on a nescience toward one’s utter dependence on modern urban infrastructure (145). In a similar vein, virtually all popular musicians in all recording (and most performing) contexts demonstrate through their reliance on technology the fundamentally insufficient functionality of their bodily selves, but ignorance of this fact allows the illusory boundary between ability and disability to remain intact. The Smiths were not unique in this regard, although they are arguably distinguished by the complex and contradictory ways in which, as the preceding discussion has shown, they engage in a discourse of disability, one that is further elaborated in what follows.

Morrissey’s Voice and Its Implications for His Disability Discourse

In my discussion of The Smiths’ trademark “jangly” guitar sound, I suggested that the general absence on Smiths recordings of processed distortion effects – a deformation of sound 72

waves which, since sound has a palpable “sonic materiality” (Wallach 45), a “material presence”

(Wallach 37) that ensues from “a succession of vibrations in air molecules emanating from a

source” (Wallach 36), amounts to an analogue of corporeal disfigurement, which is tantamount

in the cultural imagination to disability – contributes to a sense of the band’s able-bodiedness. I

would like to apply a similar logic to another instrument within The Smiths’ lineup: Morrissey’s

voice. Inevitably, in doing so I must invoke Barthes’ 1977 essay “The Grain of the Voice.”

There Barthes famously distinguished between the pheno-song – a neologism designating “all

the features which belong to the structure of the language, the rules of the genre . . . in short,

everything in the performance which is in the service of communication, representation,

expression, everything which it is customary to talk about”(295) – and the geno-song, a

neologism which names the undervalued unique attributes of the individual voice, “the volume

of the singing . . . the voluptuousness of [language’s] sound-signifiers . . . in a very simple word .

. . the diction of the language” (295). At the interface of these two theoretical oppositions exists

what Barthes calls “the grain of the voice” (294), a product of “the very friction between the

music and . . . language” (297). Barthes argued that it is toward the grain of the voice, and not

the wonted pheno-song, that music criticism ought to turn its attention, since it is the voice’s

grain that seduces the listener to pleasure, what Barthes calls “jouissance” (295). Barthes asserts

that listening to music entails a “relation with the body of the man or woman singing . . . that . . .

is erotic” (299): erotic precisely because the grain is “the materiality of the body speaking its

mother tongue . . . the body in the voice as it sings” (299). In other words, the grain of the voice

transmits the fleshliness of the vocalist. And while Barthes illustrates his argument with

reference to two Russian cantors, his concepts and terminology have been taken up by scholars

of popular music. Simon Frith, for example, concurs with Barthes in acknowledging that “the 73

voice is a sound produced physically, by the movement of muscles and breath in the chest and

throat and mouth; to listen to a voice is to listen to a physical event, the sound of a body. . . . [I]t

gives the listener access to it without mediation” (Performing 191). Arrogating Barthes for purpose of his own rock music scholarship, Frith claims furthermore that “the pleasure of rock texts . . . has always derived from the voluptuous presence of voices” (Sound Effects 164); he exemplifies his argument with reference to Elvis Presley, who sang “more sensually, more

voluptuously than any other rock ‘n’ roll singer” (Sound Effects 165). Frith’s insistent equation

here between pleasure and voluptuousness, with the latter term connoting ampleness and

unrestrained sensuality (ergo able-bodiedness), would seem to foreclose – or at least greatly

diminish – the possibility of pleasurable singing issuing from the impaired body of a disabled

vocalist. To be sure, Frith’s language with its ableist resonance might obtain its greatest validity

in the context of Western art music, where, as Laurie Stras notes, “the voice is trained, like an

athlete’s body, to maximize both achievement and endurance while simultaneously avoiding

either accidental or long-term damage. . . . [A] singer whose voice is perceived to be damaged

can, at the very least, expect that perception to be remarked upon as a detriment” (174). In

contrast, however, Stras notes that in many genres of popular music, gravelly, hoarse voices –

“indicative of passions, suffering, disease, malfunction, abnormality” (173); indexing, in other

words, bodily damage and trauma that “leaves its traces at sublinguistic levels” and whose

affective import is received “through the instantaneous communicative channels of the senses”

(176) – is often highly prized as a marker of “authority, authenticity, and integrity” (174).

Ironically, the value assigned to the authenticity of vocal trauma leads many singers to

performatively (dis)simulate such pathologized disruption of the voice (Stras 174), a

phenomenon which calls to mind Lerner’s observation that deformations in musical form are 74

often valorized, not stigmatized. Stras cites the blues genre as the popular music site par

excellence where damaged voices are most prevalent and valued; blues singers, she proposes,

“are defined by voices in which physical suffering is almost palpable” (179).

It is significant to note in this regard that Julian Stringer identifies as one of the signal

characteristics of Morrissey’s voice the fact that “he studiously avoids the kind of ‘blue’ or

‘dirty’ notes associated with Afro-American vocal traditions” (19). In light of Stras’s linkage of

blues singing with bodily suffering, Stringer’s observation is of a piece with a larger observation

that could be made about Morrissey’s voice: that it generally lacks the pathologized disruptions

suggestive of trauma, injury, and impairment.

Linking Morrissey’s customarily unbluesy pitch to representations of disability also

serves to reshape considerations of the contentious issue of race as it pertains to Morrissey’s

career.5 Indeed, legendary rock writer Robert Palmer, reviewing The Smiths’ eponymous debut

album for The New York Times, announced, “Morrissey’s voice is one of the richest in modern

pop” and hailed the way “his vocal lines swoop and dip and flow, describing graceful

arabesques,” thereby ascribing a suppleness and fullness to Morrissey’s voice that would seem to

satisfy Simon Frith’s apparent criteria for positive valuation. Twenty years later, an online

review of Morrissey’s solo album You Are the Quarry struck a similar note, lauding,

“Morrissey's voice and phrasing . . . have become so rich and distinguished that he can now truly

5 Perhaps the most cogent discussion of the racial politics of Morrissey’s music appears in Nabeel Zuberi’s Sounds English: Transnational Popular Music. There Zuberi observes that in the popular press, “any questionable references [Morrissey has] made in songs about Asian immigrants, black music, Americanization, National Front youth, and football (soccer) hooligans” as well as “[c]ontentious interview statements about reggae’s being vile, the negative effects of the Channel/Euro tunnel and the decline of Englishness” (18) have led to his being either “vilified as a racist ‘Little Englander’ or defended as an artist whose music seriously investigates what it means to be British or English” (20). Zuberi is concerned to show, however, that Morrissey’s version of Englishness, far from being either straightforwardly conservative and racist or progressive and anti-racist, is in fact politically conflicted in its various relationships to gender, class, race, ethnicity, and region. What I want to emphasize here is that, in addition to the identity categories addressed by Zuberi, Morrissey’s racial politics can be understood to resonate with disability implications as well. 75

be called the greatest pop singer since Elvis Presley” (Bergstrom), suggesting a magnified

plenitude which might well meet with Frith’s approbation, but which, keeping in mind Stras’s

argument, does not sonically communicate the presence of bodily impairment.

Indeed, in other respects Morrissey’s vocal style conveys a sense of discipline, control, and shapeliness that would seem to invoke the materiality of the bourgeois normate body.

Stringer writes, “Journalists remark upon his upper-crust voice. His method is to use very clipped, precise enunciation. His singing strains for ‘correct,’ clear diction. . . . often. . . . [w]hat

we get . . . is restraint and calm, qualities very familiar from all the relaxed, controlled interviews

he has given journalists” (20). But such qualities of Morrissey’s singing voice as have thus far

been enumerated here are complemented by a rather different set of vocal techniques in

Morrissey’s repertoire. In addition to the above vocal stylings, Stringer notes as well that

Morrissey’s “voice uses a number of indulgent or excessive traits that are redundant to the job of

simply getting the words across” (19). Two such traits identified by Stringer are “the use of wild

falsetto” (20) and “an emphasis on breathing that is so misjudged as to force his singing to cave

in on notes held for a long time” (20). Stringer’s description of these as “parodic artistic ticks

[sic]” (20) proposes a body whose muscularity is out of control, whose physical apparatus is both

prone to disquieting irruption into keening registers as well as inadequate to the task of

delivering its lines in measured, competent fashion. Indeed, at more frenetic musical junctures,

Morrissey’s voice registers an unruly, ill-controlled materiality that, in its service as counterpoint

to the rich, warm, stringent and meticulous tenor for which he is otherwise noted, shifts radically

away from the moderateness of the normate body toward the out-of-control and uncontrollable

disabled body (see my analysis of “Miserable Lie” above).

Disability and Morrissey’s Bricoleur Approach to Song Composition

I would like to conclude this chapter with a brief consideration of the pertinence of

Morrissey’s manner of lyrical composition to his discourse of disability. In order to

contextualize my comments, I will make recourse to a discussion to Lacanian psychoanalysis as

articulated by Lennard Davis in Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. As

Davis notes there, Lacan identifies the originary, primordial experience of the body as that of the

corps morcelé, or fragmented body: that is, the infant first experiences his or her own body as an

aggregation of unintegrated parts or pieces, an “assemblage of arms, legs, and surfaces”

(Enforced 138). Lacan assigns the term imagos to these primary representations and images of

fragmented body parts, and argues that a monadic self is only constructed through a process of

enforced unification of said fragments via “the hallucination of a whole body” (Enforced 139):

when, during the mirror phase, the child misrecognizes the merged, incorporated image reflect

there as herself, she has effectively donned an armor against the chaotic, fragmented body.

However, Lacan suggests, because children first know their bodies as aggregations of discrete

objects, as adults they can never fully perceive their bodies in a completely integrated fashion.

As a result, in a specular, face-to-face confrontation with the disabled body – “a direct imago of

the repressed fragmented body” (139) – the subject experiences not cognitive dissonance but

rather uncanny cognitive resonance with the repressed, primitive state of fragmentation that it calls to mind. This is particularly true, Davis argues, when the disabled person encountered is missing limbs or body parts, but he asserts that the principle holds even when one encounters those with impaired senses (which point to missing or impaired bodily parts), as well as those with mental illnesses; mental illness, after all, is widely conceived of as a disintegration or breakdown of “normal” body chemistry, it is associated with both irregular behavior and broken, 77

fragmentary language production, and its pathologies are frequently attributed to the fragmented

and chaotic nature of life in “modern” society (142-143). In all its guises, then, the disabled

body constitutes a threatening reminder of incompleteness, “an unwanted reminder that the ‘real

body,’ the ‘normal body,’ the observer’s body, is in fact always already a ‘fragmented body’. . . .

The disabled body, far from being the body of some small group of ‘victims,’ is an entity from

the earliest of childhood instincts, a body that is common to all humans” (140).

Davis’s deployment of Lacanian psychoanalysis to account for the anxiety felt when a

disabled body appears as a “disruption in the visual field” (142) can be usefully applied to the

music of Morrissey, although, given the medium in which he works – popular music – the

alternate phrase “disruption in the auditory field” captures the appropriate modality. A

consideration of Morrissey’s oeuvre reveals it to be marked by fragmentation at several different

levels. First, taking his corpus of work as a whole to be a metaphorical body, it can be

understood as fragmented into eras (Smiths-era, solo era), albums, (The Smiths’ The Queen is

Dead, the solo Vauxhall and I), and individual songs (”Cemetry Gates,” “I Am Hated for

Loving”). This kind of corporeal fragmentation is, of course, not unique to Morrissey, although

his frequent reliance on, for example, unconventional song structure suggests that here and there

his artistic body of work is characterized by limbs or organs (i.e., individual songs) that are

distinguished by structural difference, and that in a sense his corpus can thus be conceived of as

temporarily or partially (not globally) impaired. However, I want to apply Davis’s discussion of the Lacanian corps morcelé to the level of individual songs, and in particular to the nature of their lyrical composition. Treating each song’s lyric text as a body unto itself, many of them can be seen to evoke fragmentation and the attendant threat of a return of the repressed. While in many songs the lyric text reads as a fairly coherent whole, in other tracks, a piecemeal 78 composition is apparent. For instance, the lightly conversational verse that concludes The

Smiths’ 1985 single “Shakespeare’s Sister” – “I thought that if you had an acoustic guitar / Then it meant that you were / A protest singer / Oh, I can smile about it now / But at the time it was terrible” – bears little discernible relation to the preceding verses’ tortured preoccupation with thoughts oscillating between suicide and an impending rendezvous with a loved one. On the

1984 track “Pretty Girls Make Graves,” the lyrical fragmentation is even clearer. In the extended musical coda that follows the verses’ disquisition on sexual inadequacy and incompatibility,

Morrissey can be heard languorously intoning the words, “Hand in glove / The sun shines out of our behinds.” These had been the opening words of The Smiths’ debut 1983 single, “Hand in

Glove,” which had failed to chart high, and according to Johnny Rogan, these lyrics’ appending here represented “Morrissey’s continued bid to impose [the song] on the public’s consciousness as revenge for not buying the single” (Severed 195). (In a similar vein, the 1984 track “The

Hand That Rocks the Cradle” concludes with lyrics paraphrased from Al Jolson’s “Sonny Boy”

[Rogan Severed 177] and 1986’s “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others,” itself a song about corporeal difference, concludes with a paraphrase of lyrics culled from Johnny Tillotson’s “Send

Me The Pillow You Dream On” [Goddard 198].) But if in “Pretty Girls Make Graves”

Morrissey’s lyric had pointedly, even ostentatiously borrowed from his own prior composition, elsewhere Morrissey’s musical borrowings are not so transparent. Morrissey’s adaptations of source material originally penned by others appear to be legion, and their identification has become something of a cottage industry among Morrissey fans. The catalogue of his borrowings need not be rehearsed here in their entirety, for a few will suffice to make the point. There is, for example, the recurring phrase “a jumped-up pantry boy who never knew his place” from The

Smiths’ 1983 single “This Charming Man,” which was lifted practically verbatim from dialogue 79

featured in the 1972 film Sleuth (Goddard 57). Similarly, the lines “I dreamt about you last night

/ And I fell out of bed twice” from the 1984 Smiths track “Reel Around the Fountain” were taken

from the 1961 film “A Taste of Honey” (Goddard 79).6 In connection with this particular

borrowing, Morrissey declared in a 1986 NME interview, “Obviously most people who write do

borrow from other sources. . . . They steal from other’s clothes lines. I mentioned the line ‘I dreamt about you last night and I fell out of bed twice’ in ‘Reel Around The Fountain,’ which comes directly from A Taste of Honey, and to this day I’m whipped persistently for the use of

that line. . . . Just because there's one line that's a direct lift people will now say to me that 'Reel

Around The Fountain' is worthless, ignoring the rest of it which almost certainly comes from my

brain” (Pye). Morrissey’s 1991 solo track “Found Found Found” features lyrics (“I do believe

that the more you give your love . . .”) that appear to have been appropriated with minor

emendation from Noel Coward’s “If Love Were All” (Rogan Albums 173). The point to be

made from such examples is that despite their putative status as Morrissey’s own coherent,

original works, once one is acquainted with Morrissey’s reference points, such songs as those

cited above – and many more could be marshaled to make the argument – emerge as

Frankensteinian chimeras combining extant verbal fragments with Morrissey’s own contribution.

That fans and critics bristle at the revelation of the cobbled nature of Morrissey’s song lyrics is

no doubt overdetermined; but what I want to suggest is that the revulsion and ire that ensue from

an informed confrontation with such lyrics can partly be attributed to their status as an imago, in

6 Not only did Morrissey appropriate snippets of cinematic dialogue for his lyrical compositions, but certain Smiths and solo Morrissey tracks incorporate audio samples from film soundtracks, sound effects libraries, and so on. For example, the 1985 Smiths recording of “Rubber Ring” features samples taken from both an obscure EP that had been distributed to accompany a 1971 book titled Breakthrough: An Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communication with the Dead, as well as a 1969 EMI audio recording of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (Goddard 177-178). The introduction to the 1987 Smiths track “Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me” features the sound of an angry crowd provided courtesy of a BBC sound effects LP (Goddard 279). And Morrissey’s 1994 solo track “Spring-Heeled Jim” features samples from Karel Reisz’s 1959 documentary We Are The Lambeth Boys (Rogan Albums 204). 80 auditory form, of the repressed, primordial fragmented body. On this view, these lyrics serve at a certain level as an unwelcome reminder that the stable unity and of the able-bodied linguistic subject is a fiction. This postulation can be discerned as a subtext in the lyrics of the 1985

Smiths track “Cemetry Gates.” Here Morrissey addresses, among other subjects, the question of plagiarism. Ascribing plagiaristic tendencies to a friend who accompanies him on a stroll through the titular cemetery, Morrissey offers his companion the following advice:

If you must write prose/poems

The words you use should be your own

Don’t plagiarize or take on loan

There's always someone, somewhere

With a big nose, who knows

And who trips you up and laughs when you fall

Morrissey’s diction here is significant: he limns the plagiaristic scene as a confrontation between a synecdochized (and thus corporeally fragmented) big-nosed logomach and someone whose lyrical integrity, once proven fallacious and illusory, results in the metaphorical collapsing of his/her body – a disruption of VERTICALITY, to refer back to one of Lakoff and Johnson’s embodied image schemas (Straus 124). Morrissey immediately follows these lines with the revelation of the unexpected discovery of yet another instance of plagiarism:

You say ‘ere long done do does did’

Words which can only be your own

And then produce the text from whence it was ripped

Some dizzy whore, 1804 81

The violent, rending (“ripped”) characterization of the textual borrowing in this passage resonates jarringly with the perturbation posed by fragmented corporeality, while the pilfered fragment itself – “ere long done do does did” – constitutes the essence of meaningless linguistic fragmentation, a quasi-schizophasia suggestive of mental illness. Moreover, it is worth noting, by way of conclusion, that several lines in “Cemetry Gates” purported to be Morrissey’s own utterances as he and his friend perambulate through the cemetery grounds – “All those people, all those lives, where are they now? / With loves, and hates, and passions just like mine / They were born and then they lived and then they died / Seems so unfair, I want to cry” – are taken with only modest paraphrasing from the 1942 film The Man Who Came To Dinner. In that film, very similar lines are spoken by Ann Sheridan’s character, the actress Lorraine Sheldon, to an audience consisting of the (big-nosed) Jimmy Durante (playing a comedian named Banjo) and

Monty Woolley’s wheelchair-bound Sheridan Whiteside – the source of Morrissey’s pen name in his early forays into music journalism. In this reading, then, “Cemetry Gates” poses (partly through its intertextuality with The Man Who Came To Dinner ) a complex matrix of difference, disability, and incompletely suppressed/repressed fragmentation, both corporeal and linguistic.

CHAPTER III: DISABILITY STEREOTYPES AND THE POLITICS OF “NOVEMBER SPAWNED A MONSTER”

Introduction

Turning from my discussion in the previous chapter of the ways in which the music of

The Smiths and Morrissey the solo artist, and the discourse that has surrounded the music, can be understood as representing disability and articulating a host of attitudes relative thereto, I begin in this chapter to undertake a consideration of those song lyrics in which Morrissey addresses explicitly the subject of the disabled other. To be sure, in considering the meaning of these lyrics, my analysis will also necessarily consider the ways in which the lyrics’ musical accompaniment, and where applicable, the music videos filmed to promote the songs in question, work to shape that meaning. Nevertheless, going forward, it is the lyrics – which, after all, are the source of much of Morrissey’s renown – that will occupy the fore of my analysis. I begin with an inventory of the most common stereotypes of disability as they have been identified by scholars working within the negative-image school of disability studies. Next I consider a number of songs penned by Morrissey both during his years with The Smiths and as a solo artist in which he makes passing reference to disabled persons, noting along the way where common disability stereotypes are deployed and with what effects. Finally, I consider Morrissey’s 1990 single “November Spawned a Monster,” which constitutes the artist’s best-known and first direct engagement in song with the subject of disability. I argue that although the lyrics, music, and music video for “November Spawned a Monster,” while occasionally ambiguous in their signification, can be understood as invoking pernicious disability stereotypes, there is evidence 83

to suggest that Morrissey does not intend to reinforce these stereotypes, but rather, that he invokes them in order that they can be interrogated and rejected.

The Negative-Image School of Disability Studies: Cataloguing Disability Stereotypes

In a survey of the wide-ranging and ever-expanding body of critical scholarship that disability studies in the humanities has brought to bear on images of disability in various media – literature and film particularly – disability study scholars David T. Mitchell and Sharon L.

Snyder identify five recurrent and overlapping but analytically separable and methodologies

(Narrative 15-40). In the negative-image school, scholars comb the representational archives in order to identify and interrogate those pernicious stereotypes that have served historically to

devalue people with disabilities by limning demeaning and reductive portraits that fail to do

justice to the reality of their human complexity. In the cognate social realist school, scholars

emphasize the need for “openly politicized image[s] of disability” (Narrative 24) – that is, more

direct, accurate, and adequate depictions that are fully attentive to the disabling role of the social

(physical, attitudinal) environment – and scour the representational documentary record to

recover instances of the same. In the new historicist school, scholars seek to historicize representations of disability by tracing their shifting configurations across time and culture and situating these in the discursive matrices of disability as they relate to their respective historical moments. From the biographical criticism perspective, scholars identify authors and artists who

were either disabled themselves or intimately involved with disabled people and interrogate the

ways in which disability identities and experiences impacted their creative endeavors,

collectively yielding “an imaginative refuge for alternative ways of seeing” (Narrative 34).

Finally, scholars adopting a transgressive reappropriation perspective explore the way artists 84

have tapped the subversive potential of the devaluation hyperbolically assigned to disabled figures by ironically, openly, and authoritatively embracing the terms of disability stigmatization in order to deflectively force the dominant culture to confront its own violence directly. While all five of these methodologies inform this thesis to varying degrees, it is the negative-image school that seems to have most colored the perspectives of those critics who have found grounds

for censure in such disability-themed lyrics of Morrissey’s as “November Spawned a Monster”

and “Mute Witness,” (Bret Landscapes 102, Bret Scandal 135, Rogan Albums 152, 172), and so it is to an elaboration of the tenets of the negative-image school that this chapter – which, as

noted, considers representations of disability in Morrissey’s lyrical canon – turns. This

accomplished, I will have established a conceptual foundation upon which to mount an

evaluation of Morrissey’s work: those respects in which it can be regarded as retrograde and

ableist, and those in which it can be understood as progressive and anti-ableist.

Scholarly work conducted from the negative-image perspective has been predicated upon

the notion that the demeaning images of disability circulated in literature, film, television

(telethons, news presentations), textbooks, the print and other media are inherently disabling

because they (re)produce dehumanizing public attitudes toward disabled people which in turn

find expression in the architectural, institutional, legal and other barriers erected to foreclose the

disabled from full participation in society (Gartner and Joe 1-3). The work of taxonomizing

circulating stereotypes of disability pioneered by such early theorists as Paul Hunt (see the first

chapter of this thesis) have since been taken up by subsequent disability studies scholars.

Despite the historical range of their inquiries, despite the disparate cultural arenas subjected to

consistent investigation (literature, film, television, etc.), and despite the failure of homogeneous

terminology to emerge from their work, a degree of consistency can nevertheless be discerned in 85

their conclusions. Thus, while the following adumbration of eleven recurrent disability stereotypes is taken from sociologist Colin Barnes’ 1992 study of media portrayals of disabled persons in Britain, its points of overlap with the work of other disability studies scholars are multiple, as I hope to indicate:

1. The Disabled Person as Pitiable and Pathetic: Per Barnes, media perennially pose

disability as synonymous with illness and suffering, Accordingly, disabled persons are

repeatedly limned as pitiable, passive, and overtly dependent, their tragic neediness allowing the

fundamental bounty, benevolence and sensitivity of (non-disabled) others to emerge plainly into

view. Barnes suggests moreover that such depictions – patronizingly sentimental rather than

genuinely compassionate in a way that might usefully alter public perceptions – are complicit

with the medical model of disability in their location of the “problem” of disability in the

individual body and in their presentation of life with impairment as a tragic and life-shattering

experience which eventuates in social isolation (7-10). This figuration of disability described by

Barnes is consonant with the short story writer, novelist, and essayist Leonard Kriegel’s

discussion of the Charity Cripple in literature (34-37).

2. The Disabled Person as an Object of Violence: Barnes notes that in media

representations – as in life – disabled people are subject to frequent and violent abuse at the

hands of the non-disabled. On fictionalized television programs, Barnes reports, disabled

characters are over three times more likely than non-disabled characters to be dead by the show’s

end, extinguished most often by forces of good (e.g., the police) due to the recurrent linkage of

disability to criminality. Barnes suggests that the violence habitually perpetrated against

disabled persons in the media not only shores up the equation of disability with helplessness and 86 dependence, but also accords with the eugenicist view that the solution to the “problem” of impairment is the route of violence and elimination (10-11).

3. The Disabled Person as Sinister and Evil: In his essay “A Critical Condition,” disability activist Paul Hunt had noted that “[t]here is a definite relation between the concepts of health and holiness” (16). Barnes notes that the flip side to this moral equation – the linkage of disability to sin, the sinister, the monstrous, the criminal, the violent; in a word, evil – is a persistent feature of disability characterization, one that poses “a major obstacle to disabled people’s successful integration into the community” (11). Leonard Kriegel names the figure that this stereotype produces “the Demonic Cripple” (34) and adds that the evil attributed to this disabled figure is thought to result from “a pervasive sense of absence [that] forces each of them to plot and scheme and burn with the need for revenge. . . . trying to bend the world’s will to his own” (34-35). Historian and disability studies scholar Paul Longmore, surveying representations of disability in film and on television, concurs, noting that too often “[d]eformity of body symbolizes deformity of soul” (66). Echoing Kriegel, Longmore offers the following cogent observation:

Giving disabilities to villainous characters reflects and reinforces,

albeit in exaggerated fashion, three common prejudices against

handicapped people: disability is a punishment for evil; disabled

people are embittered by their “fate”; disabled people resent the

nondisabled and would, if they could, destroy them. (67)

Longmore goes on to discuss the related characterization of disabled persons as “monsters,” marked by loathsome and fear-inducing physical disfigurements which index “disfigurement of personality and deformity of soul” (68). Like the criminal characterization, Longmore notes, this 87

mode of disability representation suggest that disability entails “the loss of an essential part of

one’s humanity. . . . the individual is perceived as more or less subhuman” (68). Longmore buttresses his argument here by invoking the authority of Erving Goffman, who had argued in

Stigma: Notes on Management of a Spoiled Identity that “[b]y definition, of course, we believe the person with a stigma is not quite human” (5).

4. The Disabled Person as Atmosphere or Curio: Barnes asserts that in many media texts the inclusion of disabled characters serves the function of atmospheric enhancement. Whether heightening a narrative’s aura of danger, enigma, or privation, or adding nuance to a production’s visual impact, such incorporations of disabled characters work to attenuate the humanity of disabled persons by diminishing them to the status of mere oddities, objects of

“lewd fascination” exhibited to satisfy the drives of what Barnes terms “disability voyeurism”

(12).

5. The Disabled Person as Super Cripple: In my first chapter, I briefly discussed what G.

Thomas Couser terms “the rhetoric triumph” (111) and what other scholars dub the “overcoming narrative” (Sandahl 584; Lerner and Straus 2) – storylines in which “the disabled person is assigned super human almost magical abilities” or in which, “[a]lternatively, disabled individuals, especially children, are praised excessively for relatively ordinary achievements”

(Barnes 12). Longmore refers to such storylines as “dramas of adjustment” (71): according to his explication, in one adjustment scenario, maladjusted, bitter and self-pitying disabled characters confront internal issues of self-acceptance and emotional reconciliation in order to live meaningfully and productively and to enjoy normal friendships and romances – a narrative

which places responsibility for disability on the individual and disregards social prejudice; in a

second scenario, “God or nature or life compensates handicapped people for their loss, and the 88

compensation is spiritual, moral, mental and emotional” (71). In either case, the disabled persons who either learn to accept and work around or else transcend their impairments earn the designation of what Barnes calls “super cripples” (13). Barnes critiques this “super cripple” stereotype on several grounds. First, the “super cripple” figure promotes inaccurate beliefs about the abilities of disabled people which might result in their being denied needed services.

Furthermore, an inordinate emphasis on disabled achievement implies that acceptance into the community requires overcompensation on the part of disabled persons – a psychologically

stressful demand with attendant health ramifications. Finally, the inordinate emphasis on

disabled achievement implicitly devalues the experiences of “ordinary” people (able-bodied and

disabled alike) as inconsequential (12-13). If, as I suggest in the song analyses that follow,

Morrissey can be charged with deploying most of the disability stereotypes enumerated in this

overview of the negative-image school literature, he can equally be credited with pointedly

avoiding and thereby refuting other disability stereotypes; the stereotype of the Disabled Person

as Super Cripple is, as will be suggested, one such stereotype.

A variation of the super cripple, one valorized by Leonard Kriegel, is the figure he names

the Survivor Cripple:

The Survivor Cripple is not demonic and he is not the object of

charity. At the same time, he assumes that his wound has given

him certain prerogatives, has set him apart, has denied his

“ordinariness.” His endurance is attractive . . . for it is constructed

around his understanding of the limitations it has imposed on him.

. . . He has been ennobled not by his condition but by his

willingness to accept the condition as his own. (38-39) 89

The emphasis here is not on the attainment of compensatory superhuman abilities, nor on the approximation of normate ability, but on the “virtue” of stoic acquiescence and long-sufferance.

Kriegel positively evaluates the figure of the Survivor Cripple, locating its appeal in its emblematization of modern human experience:

By definition, any man with a wound is an outsider; but in our

century he discovers that he is an outsider in a world that possesses

growing doubts about its insiders. His condition exemplifies what

has become the human condition . . . It is as if his presence

announces to the reader, “This is what I must live with. And if I

must, then you can. For are we not brothers beneath the wound?” .

. . And modern man does not wish to shield himself from

endurance; he wishes, instead, to embrace it, even if in embracing

it he must embrace the crippled’s wounded body, too. No longer

as isolated as he once was, the cripple now discovers that he does

not have to claim a singularity beyond the comprehension of other

men. . . . Endurance in the face of an indifferent universe is the

sole meaningful defiance man can claim. And in this picture, the

cripple discovers that he is [as] well-equipped to “run” the race as

any other victim of time or circumstance. (38-40)

Kriegel thus discerns in the figure of the Survivor Cripple a representational site in which both the stigma assigned to disability and the barrier erected between the normate and rejected bodies are exposed as fictions, blurring if not dissolving altogether. 90

6. The Disabled Person as an Object of Ridicule: Barnes notes that the representation of disabled characters in many contemporary media texts as sources of amusement for the non- disabled is merely the most recent incarnation of centuries-old practice. He warns that the mockery of disability sabotages the desire and efforts of disabled persons to be taken seriously, as well as enervates their self-esteem and self-confidence. He points out that while all sections of the community are occasionally subjected to ridicule by popular humorists, disabled persons are disproportionately disadvantaged since so few positive images exist to offset the negative, and because disabled persons lack adequate resources, legal or otherwise, to defend themselves against ridicule (13-14).

7. The Disabled Person as Their Own Worst and Only Enemy: Media portrayals of disabled persons frequently depict their subjects as beset by a self-pity which obstructs the pathway to normal functioning; the implication, as summarized by Barnes, is that disabled individuals “could overcome their difficulties if they would stop feeling sorry for themselves, think positively and rise to ‘the challenge’” (14). (Thus this stereotype, like the “super cripple” stereotype, overlaps with Longmore’s discussion of “dramas of adjustment” [71]). Barnes attributes the prevalence of this mode of disability representation to the medical model of disability. Its individualistic approach to disability eventuates in a “psychology of impairment” whereby “disabled people’s legitimate anger over” ableism is pathologized as “self destructive bitterness arising out of their inability to accept the ‘limitations’ of impairment” (15). In short, disabled people are made to bear the blame for ableism.

8. The Disabled Person as Burden: Related to the view of disabled individuals as pitiable and pathetic, this stereotype posits the disabled person’s needs as fundamentally different from those of the non-disabled person and portrays the meeting of those needs as unacceptably 91

draining on the resources of “normal” society. At best, the effect of such portrayals, Barnes

argues, is to increase sympathy for families and caretakers ”burdened” by disabled wards while

doing nothing to inspire empathy with disabled persons themselves; at worst, it fosters the

eugenicist mindset which believes that society would be improved were disabled persons eliminated altogether (15-16).

9. The Disabled Person as Sexually Abnormal: “Hitherto disabled people have, with few

exceptions, been portrayed as incapable of sexual activity,” Barnes asserts, pointing out the dire

corollary to this perceived sexual impotency: that the lives of disabled people are not worth

living (16). Barnes assails the accuracy of this stereotype, observing that while certain ‘normal’

sexual activities may be hindered by impairment, the range of alternate sexual behaviors

available may remain rather large, and thus the equation of disability with impotence speaks

more to the able-bodied world’s lack of knowledge about sex than to its knowledge of disability.

One significant variation on the theme of disabled sexuality is the notion that disabled persons

are sex-starved or sexually degenerate; mental illness in particular is connected with sexual

perversion. (While this thesis, apropos of the content of Morrissey’s disability representation,

follows the lead of most disability studies scholarship in its preoccupation with representations of physical impairment, in the fifth chapter I consider the ways in which Morrissey’s disability discourse engages in questions of mental impairment as well.) Moreover, Barnes notes, representations of disabled sexuality overwhelmingly focus on the male experience; at the rare

sites where disabled women are represented, they are limned as asexual (16-17). An explanation

for this phenomenon can be found in the idea that disability is equated with physical lack, as is

femininity, which, after all, is associated in the psychoanalytic imagination with the castrated

male (Siebers 173). This leads to “the discursive equation of femaleness with disability” 92

(Garland-Thomson Extraordinary 19): both female and disabled bodies are deemed inferior,

deviations from a naturally superior physical norm, and full participation in public and economic

life is foreclosed to both. Because femaleness is equivalent to disability, to speak of disabled

female sexuality is to speak in tautologies. Disabled male sexuality, on the other hand, affords

an opportunity to explore the theme of emasculation, because, as scholars have noted,

“[d]isability is . . . characteristically linked with effeminacy” (Nussbaum 48). Indeed, as

Longmore observes, “[m]ore than one male character with a disability refers to himself as ‘only

half a man’” (73).

Barnes does note, however, that male figures who bear “certain relatively mild

impairments” evoke “the image of the partially ‘wounded male’” to which the attributes of

unusual bravery and particular sexiness are assigned (17). Partially wounded females, however,

are not accorded comparable glamor (17).

10. The Disabled Person as Incapable of Participating Fully in Community Life: Barnes notes that disabled persons are underrepresented in – indeed, virtually absent from – mainstream popular culture. When they do appear, he points out, they are rarely shown to be productive, fully-integrated members of their communities (17). (This latter point may result from the fact that disabled persons are perceived, in most cases incorrectly, to be globally incapacitated, completely incapable of achieving ”normal” functionality in any form [Wendell 19]). In the rare instances where they are presented, they tend to be of lower social status, often unemployed and subjected to patronizing attitudes on the part of their able-bodied cohorts. Barnes notes that disabled persons seldom appear in non-fiction films and television programs that do not deal specifically with disability. They are also largely absent from mainstream advertising, a gesture which fails to acknowledge their role as consumers alongside non-disabled persons in the 93 marketplace. In sum, these tendencies, if they do not outright encourage, certainly do nothing to discourage the view that disabled people are lesser human beings who should remain unintegrated into the larger community (17-18).

11. The Disabled Person as Normal: In his survey of disability representation in literature, Paul Kriegel identifies a figure which he names the “Realistic Cripple”: a character whose impaired condition is neither extraordinary nor allegorical; he or she is neither defined by his or her disability, nor does he or she inspire “disgust and bewilderment, for he is neither approved nor condemned” (37). Barnes observes the growing prevalence of such figures in media texts as well – disabled characters posited “as ‘ordinary’ or ‘normal’ – people who just happen to have impairments” (18). While Barnes notes that such portrayals are potentially helpful to the project of furthering integration of disabled persons, he is not ignorant of the limitations that inhere in them. He points out that disabled characters tend to be marginal to the narratives in which they appear; that they are unrepresentative, in terms of sex, age, and race, of the disabled population as a whole; that the disabilities represented are biased toward those that are easily visually represented – for instance, by the presence of wheelchairs and guide dogs.

Moreover, the use of “suitably glossy young disabled actors” in such representations amounts to the normalization of disability which fails to effect change in the meaning that disability holds for non-disabled persons (18). Additionally, to present disabled persons as “normal” amounts to a tacit denial of impairment (with attendant negative psychological ramifications) and an assault on the political value of disabled identity – a topic to which I return in my fifth chapter.

According to Mitchell and Snyder, the paramount theme that recurs in the negative-image analyses of such scholars as Barnes, Kriegel, and Longmore is that of absolute solitude. They make the following observation: 94

[I]ndividual isolation [is] the overriding component of a disabled

life. . . . By depicting disability as an isolated and individual affair,

storytellers artificially extracted the experience of disability from

its necessary social contexts. . . . Because representations of

disability tend to reflect the medicalized view that restricts

disability to static impairment entombed within an individual, the

social navigation of debilitating attitudes fails to attain the status of

a worthy element of plot or literary contemplation. (Narrative 19)

As a corrective to the disabling imagery that he inventories, Barnes advises that media

organizations begin to circulate imagery which, first, recognizes and investigates the complex experience that disability and disabled identity entail, and second, promotes the material integration of disabled persons in the mainstream community’s economic and social activity.

Barnes advocates the sensitive avoidance of language which casts disability in terms of abuse – such dehumanizing and objectifying phrases, for instance, as “the blind,” “the deaf,” “the crippled,” “invalid,” “afflicted,” “sufferer,” and “victim.” Barnes furthermore urges that portrayals of disabled people acknowledge the social and environmental barriers encountered daily; that such portrayals avoid depicting disabled persons solely as recipients of pity and charity; that portrayals of disabled individuals limn them with complex, unique, and multidimensional personalities; that correlations between impairment and evil be studiously avoided; that disabled persons be presented as objects of neither curiosity nor ridicule; that

disabled persons not be sensationalized as either the perpetrators or victims of violence; that

disabled persons not be portrayed as possessing compensatory super-abilities; that disability not

be portrayed as a condition that can be overcome given the will and proper attitude; that disabled 95 persons not be shown to be sexually abnormal; and that media representations of disabled individuals accurately reflect the composition (in terms of sex, race, gender, age, etc.) of the disabled population as a whole (19-23).

Cameo Representations of Disability in Morrissey’s Lyrics

Having thus elaborated a number of disability stereotypes (as identified by Colin Barnes and corroborated by other authorities such as Leonard Kriegel and Paul Longmore) that have recurred in the representational archive over a variety of media (and centuries), I turn now to a consideration of the use of these stereotypes as they have appeared in a medium largely overlooked by disability studies scholarship: popular music. Specifically, I now turn to the representation of disability in the lyrics of Morrissey, in his output for both The Smiths as well as his own solo career. It should be noted at the outset, however, that the appearance of a disability stereotype in any one of Morrissey’s lyrics is not automatic cause for remonstrance of the politics of his disability representation, for although his disability references do in some instances appear to unironically invoke disability stereotypes in supportive, retrograde, ableist fashion, in other cases, he can be understood as deploying disability stereotypes with satiric intent, to expose them for interrogation and, ultimately, reproof.

While it would not be until his early years as a solo artist – specifically, a two-year period inaugurated by the April 1990 release of his single “November Spawned a Monster”— that

Morrissey would engage the topic of the disabled other1 directly and at length, references to and representations of disabled persons make occasional appearances beginning with The Smiths’ earliest work. In fact, one of the first songs penned after the formation of The Smiths – Johnny

Rogan suggests it may even have been composed prior to the enlistment of any members beyond

1 I will defer discussion of Morrissey’s discourse of the disabled self until the fourth chapter of this thesis. 96 the initial nucleus of Morrissey and Marr (Albums 18) – and issued as a B-side of the band’s debut 12-inch single of “This Charming Man” is “Wonderful Woman”: an ironic title, inasmuch as the song’s lyrics characterize this titular female as having “ice water for blood” but “neither heart nor spine,” an image of corporeal deficiency that posits metaphoric disability as ensuing from an insufficiency of moral character. Morrissey’s lyric demonstrates the moral shortcomings of this “Wonderful Woman” with reference to the violence she importunes against the persons and property of the disabled; in it she declares both “I’m starved of mirth / Let’s go and trip a dwarf” and proposes“just to pass time / Let us go and rob the blind.” One is tempted to suggest that these lyrics play for humor, with the disabled serving as their punch lines, invoked (in the manner admonished against by Barnes) both as objects of ridicule and as victims of imagined violence; certainly, the lyrics read that way particularly on the printed page. But if that be the case, it must be deemed a particularly dark form of humor at work, with the music providing a shimmeringly somber, minor-key accompaniment, as Morrissey delivers the lyrics with deadpan listlessness, generally in the lowest tones of his vocal register. Joke butts or not, these two figures of disability appear in the song only briefly and in passing, without any effort to construct them as individuals with multidimensional personalities; rather, they are pat stereotypes of the pitiably helpless disabled person whose sole function is to index and magnify the cruel selfishness of the “Wonderful Woman” of the song’s title.

On the 1986 Smiths track “Frankly, Mr. Shankly,” Morrissey narrates, against a breezily jaunty, music-hall-inspired backing, a resignation letter in song, decrying the debilitating effects of an employment position that “pays my way” but “corrodes my soul”; forthrightly yearning for an alternative, more affirmative lifestyle, Morrissey as narrator cites cinematic and musical fame as possible routes thereto, but also allows, “sometimes I’d feel more fulfilled / Making Christmas 97 cards with the mentally ill.” This latter line derives a certain absurd black humor from the radical otherness of its card-makers’ medically-inscribed disability, and from the farcicality of wishing to voluntarily commune with them. At the same time that it makes disability the butt of its lyrical joke, however, it also suggests that the company of the disabled is preferable to, and somehow more welcoming than, that of the narrator’s work colleagues. Of course, “the mentally ill” here are only briefly marshaled in and hastily marshaled out, never allowed an opportunity for the slightest characterization. Moreover, in tandem with the line which immediately precedes the reference to the mentally ill – “I’d rather be famous / Than righteous or holy / Any day” – the lyric works to reinscribe the equation of health with holiness noted in Paul Hunt’s 1966 essay “A

Critical Condition,” and thus of disability with the sinister and evil. That thematization is tacitly extended when this lyrical passage concludes with lines that suggest by their contiguity that fraternizing with the disabled renders one susceptible to contagion: “I want to live and I want to love,” Morrissey sings, “I want to catch something that I might be ashamed of.” That disability would be linked to contagion (a theme reprised below in my discussion of “November Spawned a Monster”) constitutes a reinscription of extant cultural stereotypes: of disabled persons as perpetrators of violence, of the anxiety provoked and vulnerability invoked by the sudden appearance of the corps morcelé. It is small consolation, perhaps, that contagion here in

Morrissey’s lyric inspires not anxiety but rather desire, and thus participates in a subtle rewriting of cultural codes. Given the levity of the lyrics themselves (e.g., “Frankly, Mr. Shankly, since you do ask / You are a flatulent pain in the arse”) as well as of their musical accompaniment, the conclusion that must inevitably be drawn is that disabled figures are being ridiculously invoked here for comedic purposes (drawing on the stereotype of the Disabled Person as an Object of

Ridicule). 98

Morrissey would again ally himself with disability on his solo track “Yes, I Am Blind,”

issued as the B-Side to his 1989 single “Ouija Board, Ouija Board.” Against a somber and

sparsely orchestrated background of drums, piano, and bass, Morrissey acceptingly posits in the

song’s opening lines his own condition of blindness – metaphoric, to be sure, and pertaining to

his powers of moral evaluation and predilection – as a marker of lack and deficiency: “Yes, I am

blind / No, I can’t see / The good things, just the bad things / . . . / There must be something

horribly wrong with me.” This statement is followed by a call for the restorative power of

divine intervention (“God come down if you’re really there / Well, you’re the one who claims to care”) which presages the one which would be made on Morrissey’s next single release,

“November Spawned a Monster.” However, by the song’s end, Morrissey has abandoned his erstwhile penitent tone and instead asserts his own idiosyncratic capacity for moral clarity as a superior kind of vision over the standard morality against which he has been made to feel inferior: “Yes, I am blind / But I do see / Evil people prosper / Over the likes of you and me always.” In short, Morrissey accepts that he has been socially constructed as morally blind, but he retroactively ironizes his earlier suggestion that something is wrong with him by pointing out

that it is normative morality which is defective: for as he goes on to sing, “Little lamb on a hill /

Run fast if you can / Good Christians, they want to kill you.” Although Morrissey might rightly

be charged here with self-servingly exploiting the real and politically fraught condition of

blindness for purposes of his own sermonizing, he can be modestly credited with demonstrating

the way in which the stigmatizing ascription of blindness, even if only in a metaphorized sense,

can be deployed for the purposes of shoring up the normativity of sightedness, while

simultaneously troubling the integrity of the line that divides them and the validity of hierarchy

that valuates one term over the other. Then again, however, as Lennard Davis has argued, the 99

age-old tradition of connecting blindness and insight inherently denigrates disabled persons in

that it patronizingly ascribes “noble,” “heroic,” and “special” qualities to disability (Enforcing

106). As such, it participates in the construction of the “super cripple” figure discussed by

Barnes, with all its attendant difficulties.

Disability in the form of a speech impediment receives a nod in the title of another of

Morrissey’s 1989 solo tracks, the B-Side to his “Last of the Famous International Playboys” single titled “Lucky Lisp.” The lyrics to this song are among the most inscrutable in Morrissey’s oeuvre, so certitude of interpretation is difficult. While the song title appears to be a nod to Cliff

Richards’ 1965 hit “Lucky Lips” (Rogan Albums 160), it is possible that in Morrissey’s revisioning “lisp” represents a coded reference to homosexuality, since homosexuals are widely stereotyped as evidencing these tell-tale sigmatisms. Moreover, Morrissey’s reference at one point in his lyric to a “nine-leaf clover” possessed by the titular lisper draws on the folk wisdom that non-normative structure in this form of plant life is an auspicious herald, and helps account for the otherwise unexplained good fortune of the song’s addressee, whose speech, it should be emphasized, is similarly non-normative. This tantalizing nexus of non-normative sexuality, speech impediment, and fortune (or misfortune) is, arguably, further alluded to in Morrissey’s

1994 solo track “Billy Budd.” The song’s title – but precious little else – is taken from Herman

Melville’s novella of the same name, and despite the otherwise seeming unrelatedness between the two texts, the latter can be fathomed in order to shed light on the former. The title character of Melville’s novella, set in the late 18th century, is a handsome, charismatic, well-liked – and speech-impaired – sailor impressed into service aboard the British vessel the HMS Bellipotent.

When fellow shipman John Claggart unjustly accuses Budd of conspiracy to mutiny, Budd’s speech impediment prevents him from countering the baseless charge, so he responds instead by 100

dealing Claggart a spontaneous and deadly blow. Despite general agreement about Budd’s moral

blamelessness, the sailor is nevertheless hanged to shore up the appearance of strength among

naval officers, to enforce discipline, and to suppress mutinous impulses. Scholars have noted the

homoerotic sensibility Budd inspires among his fellow shipmen (Sedgwick 217), a situation that

lends credence to an interpretation of Morrissey’s “Billy Budd” as engaging the subject of

homosexual desire. In this light, several of the song’s lines – “everybody’s laughing / Since I

took up with you / Things have been bad / . . . / I took my job application into town / Did you

hear they turned me down? / Yes, and it’s all because of us / And what was in our eyes“ – would

seem to index the social devaluation and institutionalized discrimination that homosexuality

incurs in heteronormative society. In the song’s concluding lines (“I would happily lose both of my legs / . . . / If it meant that you could be free”), Morrissey suggests, perhaps only half- seriously, that he would undergo disabling amputation if that sacrifice could in some way redress

the disabling treatment suffered by his putative partner, whose speech-impaired literary

namesake had been similarly penalized not so much for his own demerits but in order to preserve

the existing power structure. The lyric seeks, undoubtedly with some comic intent, to link one

form of (physical) disability – leg amputation2 – with another kind of disability – the disabling

societal attitudes which stigmatize non-normative sexual desire as though it were a disqualifying sign of functional incompetence – and fancifully imagines that the acquisition of the former might result in the negation of the latter. That the song resorts to such a non-political solution,

rather than explicitly denounce and call for radical reform of existing social practices, might

2 It bears mentioning at this juncture that the word “legless,” slang for “very drunk,” appears in the lyrics to Morrissey’s 2006 B-Side track “Christian Dior.” Here Morrissey envisions an alternative life for the famed fashion designer of the song’s title, one in which, rather than spending his days in disciplined pursuit of his craft, he would instead have “have run wild / . . . / Reckless and legless and stoned / Impregnating women / Or kissing mad street boys from Napoli / Who couldn't even write their own name.” By positing the bisexuality of the title character and characterizing him as “legless” – a word which, whatever its functional meaning here, resounds with overtones of disability – the resonance of this lyric connects, as “Lucky Lisp” and “Billy Budd” arguably do, disability and non- normative sexuality. 101

rankle disability and LGBT activists alike, though its absurdly comic tone constitutes a tacit

acknowledgement that the proposed solution is no solution at all. In any case, Morrissey might

well be lauded for presenting here an implicit affirmation of non-normative sexuality which,

posed from a first-person perspective, works to magnify the injustice of derisive homophobic

social attitudes and practices.3

Disability appears once again in Morrissey’s 2004 single “First of the Gang To Die,” which takes as its subject a Los Angeles Latino street gang (“pretty, petty thieves”), one of whose criminal members (the titular, charismatic, and prematurely slain Hector), despite his

indiscriminate thieving, nevertheless successfully “stole all hearts away.” Issued fifteen years

after “Billy Budd,” “First of the Gang To Die” nevertheless finds Morrissey still reliant upon

tropes of disability and extending the politically ambivalent trend established by the cameo

disability representations already cited: evoking hackneyed images of disability in ways that can

yet be understood as attempting to pose a challenge to ableism, Lyrics in the song’s verses

delineate the milieu in which the gang conducts its activities: “You have never been in love /

Until you’ve seen the stars / Reflect in the reservoirs,” “Until you’ve seen the sunlight thrown /

Over smashed human bone,” or “Until you’ve seen the dawn rise / Behind the Home for the

Blind,” Morrissey alternately sings. These descriptions seek to evoke a certain romantic, squalid

beauty by commingling tropes of nature and culture, life and death. The appearance of “the

Home for the Blind” here startles, not only because a residence for disabled persons represents

no common motif in popular song, but also because the strange beauties Morrissey describes all

3 Impaired speech makes an appearance as well on the B-Side of Morrissey’s 2004 single “Let Me Kiss You.” Titled “Don’t Make Fun of Daddy’s Voice,” the song’s lyrics are archly ambiguous in meaning, though the song’s chorus seems to suggest that some violent incident (perhaps sexual in nature) eventuated in vocal pathology: “Don’t make fun of Daddy’s voice,” Morrissey sings, “because he can’t help it / When he was a teenage boy / Something got stuck in his throat.”

102

rely on the faculty of sight, and would therefore be unavailable to that Home’s residents.

Moreover, the tension maintained between segregated isolation and simultaneous marginalized community signified by the Home for the Blind captures in miniature the predicament of

Hector’s street gang, linking up through its rhetorical flourish the analogous social positions inscribed by ableism, racism, and classism. (As Paul Hunt had pointed out in 1966, “it’s not

hard to see the analogy between a racial ghetto and the institutions where disabled people are put

away and given enough care to salve society’s conscience” [15].) There are political implications, to be sure, in the deployment of disability here as atmosphere, curio, or scenery, a diminishing gesture which partakes of ableist prejudice in its failure to acknowledge the full humanity of the disabled subject. However, understanding the presence here of the Home for the

Blind not as a narrative prosthesis whose function is to shore up the transparent normalcy of hegemonic normate, society, but rather as a synecdochic figure of the larger process of social inequality which establishes the conditions under which the song’s blighted narrative takes place, may go some way toward mitigating such objections.

Disability Takes Center Stage: The Release of “November Spawned a Monster”

Any discussion of representations of disability in Morrissey’s oeuvre must take as its centerpiece the solo track “November Spawned a Monster.” Its release inaugurated a two-year period in which Morrissey’s interest in corporeal difference, signaled by the cameo representations of disability that had marked his work up to that point, as well as by his sporting of the hearing aid prop and NHS spectacles, would become a frequent focus of his art. As such,

“November Spawned a Monster” – and those songs dealing with other varieties of corporeal non- normativity that would follow in its wake – afford richer opportunities to examine attitudes 103 toward disability in Morrissey’s work, particularly as they mount challenges to the ableist society that produced the prejudices Morrissey represents and interrogates; moreover, my analyses of

Morrissey’s extended representations of disability that comprise the remainder of this chapter and the entirety of the next will provide a basis for my discussion in my fifth chapter of the ways in which Morrissey’s representations of disability hold the political potential to address issues pertinent to a variety of socially marginalized identities.

“November Spawned a Monster,” which takes as its subject matter a young physically impaired girl, her own attitudes toward her disability, and the attitudes theretoward of the putative abled-bodieds around her, including Morrissey as singer/narrator, was first issued as a single in April 1990 and subsequently included on a number of compilations including Bona

Drag (1990), Suedehead: The Best of Morrissey (1997), and ¡The Best of! Morrissey (2001).

The song has also been a recurrent fixture in Morrissey’s live performances, as reflected by its inclusion on the 1991 VHS release Live in Dallas as well as on the live albums Beethoven Was

Deaf (1993) and Live at Earls Court (2005). Moreover, a promotional music video produced for the song’s release was not only broadcast contemporaneously but has since been issued on the video collections Hulmerist (1991) and ¡Oye Esteban! (2000). The video achieved an even higher profile when it was included in a 1994 episode of the animated MTV show Beavis and

Butt-head titled “Blackout!”; not surprisingly, the titular cartoon characters voiced their thoroughgoing disapproval of the clip (with Beavis’s performance of a spit-take registering his own personal revulsion). More will be said about the video below; suffice it to say at this point that Beavis and Butt-head’s antipathy is all toward the person of Morrissey in this video. Indeed, they chide him: “Get up off the ground and stop whining, you wuss,” Butt-head admonishes, to which Beavis appends, “Get up, stand up straight, quit acting like a wuss, quit whining, go out 104

and get a job and some good clothes” – sentiments frequently directed against the disabled

persons the song’s lyrics take as its subject (see the discussion of the stereotype of the Disabled

Person as Their Own Worst and Only Enemy above). Initially, however, public reaction to the controversial song was of a different, more contradictory character. Some objected that the song

tastelessly lampooned disabled persons in a way that both reflected and reproduced the

prejudices of ableist ideology, while others defended Morrissey with the insistence that the song

mounted rather a compassionate portrayal of the fraught character of disabled identity (Bret

Landscapes 102-103; Brown 166; Rogan Albums 151-152). A careful analysis of the track’s

music and lyrics, as well as of the accompanying music video, suggests that there is much in the

song’s ambivalence – and in the ambivalence of all Morrissey’s disability-themed songs – to

recommend both points of view.

The track opens with the sound of a heavily distorted electric guitar. (I suggested in the

previous chapter that a distorted guitar, through its disfigurement of the electric guitar’s ”natural”

acoustics, can, particularly given the context of the clean guitar sound that typifies Morrissey’s

usual musical accompaniment, be understood to encode the corporeal difference associated with

disability. Here, given the subject matter of “November Spawned a Monster,” that suggestion

seems particularly apt.) Inflected with slight tremolo, the guitar’s tuneless sonic barrage issues

from a rumbling, low frequency register that shatters the precedent silence. As this initial

auditory assault recedes, a sustained pedal-tone of higher pitch but lower volume can be

discerned in the audio background. Against this droning backdrop a second blast of distorted

guitar shears across the soundscape in recapitulation of the first. In the space of these first six

seconds of the track, then, an atmosphere of ominous foreboding is established. The bellowing

guitars constitute a leitmotif suggestive of some fearsome, inchoate beast ineloquently baying its 105 minacious displeasure. The appearance of the drone, a musical effect associated with the indigenous music of non-Western cultures, works to heighten the nascent sense of exoticism, primitivism, and menace (Bannister 47, 53, 122). As such, the song’s introduction interpretively pre-frames the subject matter of the lyric content that follows, casting its vignette of a child born with disability in portentous terms of otherness.

Nor does the track’s brooding character much relent as its musical arrangement develops.

The second blast of distorted guitar in the song’s first few introductory seconds is followed by the introduction of an eight-note, arpeggiated guitar figure that consists of only four pitches, two of those being the tonic (G) separated by an octave, the other two being the dominant (D) and the subtonic (F). The restricted range and number of notes within this guitar figure impart an ambience of claustrophobic constraint, even imprisonment, that accords well with the physical and social dependence that the lyrics will limn as characteristic of their wheelchair-bound protagonist’s experience. The minimalist guitar figure also lends the music a modal quality, sketching a skeletal melodic palette whose resonance is evocative of the pre-modern and the exotic non-Western (Bellman xii; Pisani 230, 232; Hyer 727). In tandem with the drone, then, the guitar figure thus stakes out the disabled subject matter of “November Spawned a Monster” as primordial terrain, suffusing the track with a primitive otherness that borders on the pre- human, by implication less than human. The sense of otherness and exoticism is furthered by the introduction, upon the first repetition of this arpeggiated guitar figure, of a percolating percussive pattern of bongoes. It recurs, with variation, throughout much of the song, posing a polyrhythmic counterpoint that is once again evocative of the pre-modern, non-Western cultures

(Lipsitz 110-113). Moreover, it is helpful to note here that in “Normalizing the Abnormal”

Joseph Straus invokes Lakoff and Johnson’s image schemas both of SOURCE-PATH-GOAL 106

versus BLOCKAGE – and, alternately, of BALANCE – in order to account in embodied terms

for the musical convention which holds that, regardless of whatever disruptive or disabling chromatics intervene to disrupt or add diverting interest, a musical work that begins in the tonic achieves maximal resolution – read normalization and containment of the threat of disablement – by also concluding on the tonic (138-145). That the guitar figure under discussion begins on the tonic but concludes on the subtonic (rather than return to the tonic) engenders, then, a discomfiting sense of irresolution which can moreover be understood to encode meaning suggestive of corporeal obstruction or imbalance – a germane observation, given the subject matter of the song. Finally, it bears noting that this guitar figure is repeated with little variation throughout much of the song, working to mitigate any sense of harmonic progression or musical development and redoubling the listener’s presentiment of stasis, of insistent, almost maddening sameness. Such terms constitute the hallmarks of disability experience as limned by “November

Spawned a Monster.”

After eight bars of musical introduction featuring the full band – including second guitar,

electric bass, and drum kit – Morrissey’s voice intones the opening lyrics of the song’s A section.

These are addressed to the disabled child who serves as the song’s subject matter. “Sleep on and

dream of love,” he advises her, “because it’s the closest you will get to love.” Morrissey’s

intonation in these lines is breathy and restrained, as if gentleness were required in order to not

bring undue harm to his frail addressee. Or perhaps so as not to wake her: by portraying the

child as asleep, Morrissey both heightens her semblance of vulnerability – maximizing her

suitability for receipt of his auditors’ pity – but also extends her disability by depriving her this

image of voice or even consciousness, over and above the impairments with which she was

born. Moreover, by rhyming “love” with “love” in this introductory couplet, Morrissey posits 107

and phonetically underscores the stultifying experience of disability in much the same way as

elements of his musical accompaniment do. The repetitive character of the rhyme is, to be sure,

obscured by the protracted enunciation of the second iteration of the word “love” over three

measures, as Morrissey’s voice wanders over several pitches. His wandering and prolonged

delivery of the word simulates the restless but ultimately futile pursuit of love he envisions for

the disabled child. A caesura interposed in the middle of the second of these three measures not

only indexes the exhaustion that would exact its toll from love’s vain pursuit (so tiresome as to

require a pause for breath) but also punches a hole in the middle of the word “love,” obliterating

it even as Morrissey draws it out as an object of fascinated but unremittingly removed

contemplation.

It is worth a moment’s pause here to consider the character of the love that Morrissey is

foreclosing to his disabled protagonist. While a number of typologies of love have been

advanced, the present discussion draws on the comparatively nuanced terminology bequeathed

by the Ancient Greeks, whose language confers at least seven separate words whose distinct

meanings are collectively indiscriminately covered by the single English signifier “love.” The

first kind that bears mentioning in the present context is storge, which describes the natural affection that stems from familiarity, and which subsumes the filial love between parent and offspring (Whitbeck 187). In disability studies discourse, this category of love is perhaps most often at stake, if only implicitly, where scholars interrogate the ways in which prenatal screening for birth defects and other forms of physical and cognitive impairment – and the impact that the results of said screening bear on the decision whether or not to abort the fetus – are shaped by the social construction of disability, which has the considerable influence of a heritage of eugenicist thinking (Hubbard; Saxton). In a society where accurate information about disability experience 108

were more readily available, where ableist prejudice were less prevalent, and where accessibility

and available opportunities for those with corporeal and cognitive difference were expanded,

Susan Wendell argues, the incentive to abort fetuses augured to fall outside the contours of the

normate body would be considerably reduced (154-155). Other scholars have noted, however,

that those disabled children who are born into this world are more likely to be abandoned, passed

over for adoption, and subjected to sexual and physical abuse (Barnes, Mercer, and Shakespeare

103). In “November Spawned a Monster,” Morrissey’s diction implies that the titular disabled

child has indeed been abandoned. He rhetorically orphans her through the song’s title, which

locates the child’s provenance not with reference to any maternal or paternal forebear, but rather with reference to a month of the year. That the month specified is one that symbolizes “death, decay, silence and loneliness” (Fulk 62) – the withering of the natural environment, the shortening of days, and the approach of winter’s chill – is apposite to Morrissey’s portrait here of disability experience. To be sure, the child’s mother does make a sonically spectacular appearance in one passage of the song discussed below. Apart from that rather remarkable minute, however, no reference to the disabled child’s parents is made whatsoever: a kind of orphaning by omission.

Following the ten measures of the A section , the song modulates for eight bars from minor to major tonality, as Morrissey transitions from blunt declaration of his addressee’s

ineligibility for love to an expression of mingled pity, repugnance, and ministration. “Poor

twisted child,” he sings, “so ugly, so ugly / Poor twisted child / Oh hug me, oh hug me.” The

quatrain offers a textbook example of repetition. Not only does the third line repeat the first, but

both the second and fourth line each consists of two iterations of a shorter phrase. Moreover, in

a flourish of production, a heavy echo is applied to the entire quatrain with a half-measure delay, 109

with the result that in the caesura in both the second and fourth lines, as well as in the space that

follows each line, haunting reprises of Morrissey’s exclamations (“so ugly,” “oh hug me”) are

prominent in the audio mix. The regnant sense (evoked by the recurrent minimalist guitar figure)

of unremitting sameness, of constraint and circumscription, is thus furthered, buttressed by the

presence of piercing guitar double stops grouped in pairs which repeat at intervals of a measure

throughout the eight bars of the quatrain. Nor is Morrissey’s choice of words here unimportant.

“Poor” implies deficit and lack on the part of Morrissey’s disabled subject, and connotes the

singer’s attitude of piteous condescension toward her. His use of the adjective “twisted” to

describe her is semantically double-edged; applied to the non-disabled, the word would ascribe qualities of perverse cruelty – the implication being that this disabled child, by dint of her very existence, is in some way sinister, perhaps because her existence is a menacing affront to the integrity of the normate body. Applied to the aberrant body, however, the term has a more literal significance, describing its othering physical contortions. It is this different corporeality that prompts Morrissey to bewail the child as “ugly,” invoking the ableist gaze to register his subject’s transgression in the realm of visual aesthetics. Moreover, as the past participle form of the verb “twist,” “twisted” subtly works to absolve Morrissey’s disabled protagonist of the active, agential provocation the word connotes in its sense of perverse cruelty, intimating instead that her condition is a consequence of her passive subjection to the agency of some external force. In a few short lines, the child will name her culpable persecutor.

First, however, Morrissey’s voice gains in stridency commensurate with his musical accompaniment (cymbals crash while the guitar rings out distorted power chords) as he embarks on the song’s C section (one hesitates to call it a chorus, since the lyrics and melody differ in each iteration): 110

One November spawned a monster

In the shape of this child

Who later cried:

"But Jesus made me, so

Jesus save me from

Pity, sympathy

And people discussing me"

A frame of useless limbs

What can make good

All the bad that's been done?

Morrissey’s deployment here of the emotion- and value-laden word “monster” seems, even

moreso than his earlier use of “twisted,” deliberately provocative, especially in view of the

prominence bestowed by its placement as the final word of the song’s title, where it is

encouraged to linger in the memory. But what response is it engineered to provoke? Perhaps a

querying of the semantics of the word itself. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson notes that “[a]lthough

the term has expanded to encompass all forms of social and corporeal aberration, monster

originally described people with congenital impairments. As departures from the normatively

human, monsters were seen as category violations or grotesque hybrids” (“Integrating” 261).

The Oxford English Dictionary Online affords a spectrum of additional definitions of “monster,”

ranging from the relatively benign “a malformed animal or plant,” to the more suggestive “an ugly or deformed person, animal, or thing,” to the outright incendiary “a person of repulsively unnatural character, or exhibiting such extreme cruelty or wickedness as to appear inhuman” (a

meaning closely aligned with one denotation of the word “twisted” discussed above); at the 111

opposite end of its valuative ambit, “monster” can also mean “outstanding, extraordinarily good;

remarkably successful.” Johnny Rogan suggests that the use of the word “monster” arguably constitutes an outrage that eclipses whatever noble intentions Morrissey might profess (Albums

152). I suggest that by invoking so loaded a term, Morrissey issues an implicit invitation to

interrogate language – always a critical issue when considering the interests of disabled persons

(Wendell 77-81) – and, in turn, to confront our own views on, and prejudices toward, disability.4

For lest the listener forget who is being designated a “monster,” Morrissey reminds us

that it is “a monster in the shape of this child.” The two poles of this phrase generate dissonance

in their juxtaposition, with “child,” in its connotations of unblemished purity, serving as

incongruous foil to the usual notion of “monster,” demanding resolution in the mind of the

listener. Morrissey pointedly mediates the two poles with reference to his subject’s “shape,”

placing the body and its difference at the center of the tension between monster and child. He

then goes on to quote from this child (using the past tense of “cry,” summoning both its

meanings as a tearful lamentation expressing grief and pain, as well as its sense of a rallying call

to action), reporting her ascription of responsibility for her condition to Jesus Christ, and

repeating her petition that Jesus deliver her from her position as the object of her social

environment’s discourse and pathos. Her plaint registers a second kind of love that is foreclosed

to her, one perhaps best captured by the ancient Greek term philia. Often translated as

“friendship,” philia is a complex signifier that can be understood to denote a loyalty to friends

and community predicated on mutual recognition and reciprocity (Konstan 9, 69). In a culture

4 Discussing “November Spawned A Monster” in a 1990 Vox interview, Morrissey’s circumspect diction demonstrates his awareness of the disabling power of language. Confronted with the reactions of those who deem disability unsuitable subject matter for pop music, Morrissey replies, "It's that attitude that excludes those people who are inverted commas, italics, whatever, less fortunate than the rest of us. They think they're being protective but they're not, they're being insultive (sic). They're the type of people who will condemn me for even considering writing a song about a person who is, inverted commas, incapacitated etc." (Brown “Bona”) 112

that construes disabled persons as globally impaired, utterly dependent, incapable of offering anything in return for the care they demand, and thus, as Barnes notes, incapable of fully participating in community life, true philia is not extended to persons with disabilities. By finding fault in her social environment (“pity” and “sympathy” marking sentiments that, however well-intentioned, are based on a patronizingly reductive devaluation of their objects, one that

draws, as Barnes has noted, on the medical model of disability), the disabled protagonist of

“November” tacitly espouses a critique of disability discourse congruent with the social model of

disability most consistently advanced by disability studies. To be sure, by locating the solution

to her handicap outside of social relations, in a transcendent realm of deific omnipotence, her

critique veers from those espoused by most disability studies scholars and activists. Of course, it

would be unreasonable to expect a child to be able to articulate a nuanced analysis of the social

position of disabled persons. But given that society devalues the perspectives of both children

and the disabled (Wendell 146), the mere fact that Morrissey gives his disabled child protagonist

a first-person voice is noteworthy. Of course, in so doing, he implicates and inculpates both

himself and his listeners, for with each performance (live or recorded) of the song, singer and

auditor engage in reconstituting the disabled child (“poor twisted child”) in just the kind of

discourse she rails against.

Moreover, even as Morrissey quotes the disabled child’s grievance, he blurs the line

between her voice and his own. The lyric sheet that accompanies the compilation album Bona

Drag, on which “November Spawned a Monster” was collected – and which was released, it is

worth noting, some six months after the single itself, for which no lyric sheet was provided –

place open quote in front of the words “But Jesus made me” and a close quote after the words

“people discussing me.” However, for those auditors without access or recourse to the lyric 113

sheet, or who would decline to see a lyric sheet as the final arbiter of meaning, the question of

where the child’s quoted words end and Morrissey’s own begin would seem to be a matter of

some uncertainty. The significance of such indeterminacy would be equally unclear. One

possible implication is that Morrissey’s lyric thereby underscores the way in which ableist

culture refuses disabled persons the opportunity to articulate their own points of view (Wendell

120); in its encounters with disability, normative hegemony seeks to curtail and contain disability

phenomenology’s emergence into discourse, cutting that voice short and reasserting its own

authoritative perspective. Alternatively, Morrissey’s lyric might be understood to be blending

his own subjectivity with that of the disabled child about whom he sings. This latter possibility –

that Morrissey is suggesting an identity between himself and his disabled subject – is an avenue of investigation that will be explored more fully in my fifth chapter.

“A frame of useless limbs”: these words, if understood as uttered by the song’s disabled protagonist, signify her internalization of the Western objectification of the body, which, proceeding from the Cartesian dichotomy of mind and body, locates the seat of identity in the mind and derogates the body as something lesser, something other (Siebers 7); they also echo ableist ideology, which defines corporeal merit as synonymous with the ideal functioning of the

normate body and dismisses deviations therefrom as commensurately without worth. Of course,

if understood as uttered by Morrissey, the words mean much the same thing. The rhetorical

question that follows them, and which concludes the verse – “what can make good all the bad

that’s been done?” – lingers in memory, inviting listeners to interrogate how the disabled child’s

grievances might be redressed, as a descending five note musical figure, beginning with the

subtonic and descending to the tonic, brings the musical arrangement to an 8-bar musical break. 114

With the introduction of a high-pitch siren-like wail in the final four bars of this break

(each of the siren’s two pitches, performed on electric guitar, occupying the duration of one

measure), the song musically communicates a sense of urgency/emergency to the disabled girl’s situation, while simultaneously raising the specter of medicalization to which, as has been noted, disability has historically and often detrimentally been subject (see my discussion of the medical model of disability in the first chapter). A brief drum fill transitions the break into a reprise of the song’s A section, in which Morrissey poses the following question:

And if the lights were out, could you even bear

To kiss her full on the mouth, or anywhere?

That the second verse begins with the conjunctive “and” serves to remind the listener that the question being posed here is a continuation of the querying initiated at the conclusion of the first

C section, and suggests retroactively that the intervening eight measures had been a time for rumination. If anything, however, the question posed here is more insistent and confrontational,

abandoning the abstractions of “good” and “bad” to engage the listener’s own subjectivity

(“you”) directly. His interrogative attempts to bracket out the ableist gaze by posing a scenario

of lightlessness, hence invisibility, and proceeding to ask whether the listener even then would

wish to kiss the disabled child. (One supposes that Morrissey’s query here pertains to the

disabled child once she has achieved sexual maturity, lest his question be perceived as resonating

with pedophilic import. Of course, the presumption that the listener’s response – given the stereotype of disabled persons, women in particular, as asexual – will in any event be “no” somewhat mitigates the tension sparked by the question.) A third type of love is now under consideration: eros, characterized by the passionate, procreatively driven desire for physical

intimacy (Crosby 94). That a sexual union of bodies is now being contemplated is underscored 115

by the homonymy of “bear” and “bare.” As Morrissey references the disabled girl’s lips, his

voice is throaty and as full as the kiss he proposes; as he considers other parts of the body that

might be kissed (“anywhere?”), his voice softens to a near hush, as if both to index circumspectly

the delicacy of the erogenous zones being invoked as well as to mark an aghast recoil at the

unthinkable prospect. The unanswered question (although the answer is, of course obvious) is

punctuated by a melismatic intonation across two measures of an emotive “Oh!”

A repeat of the B section (“Poor twisted child…”) propels the song into its second C section, which evidences minor rhythmic and melodic variation – specifically, the phrase “shape

of this child” is intoned with greater rapidity, while the word “of” is pitched a step higher,

lending the passage a sense of heightened urgency – as well as significant lyrical variation.

Rather than quote the disabled child’s appraisal of her situation (as had originally been done),

here Morrissey underscores the restrictions placed upon her, characterizing her as one “who must

remain / A hostage to kindness and the wheels underneath her,” repeating this latter line for

emphasis. The lyric locates the protagonist’s oppression at two sites. First, there is the wheelchair in which she is habitually stationed. Colin Barnes has noted that “phrases like

‘confined to a wheelchair’ or ‘wheelchair bound’ are inappropriate. Wheelchairs empower rather than confine – they are a mobility aid just like a pair of shoes” (21). Presumably

Morrissey’s lyric is not articulating technophobic sentiment here, but rather is lamenting by proxy of the wheelchair those physical impairments that keep the disabled protagonist installed there. As such, these words, whether announcing the sentiments of the disabled girl, of

Morrissey, or of the ableist culture at large, work to devalue the disabled body, identifying it

(and not the disabling social environment) as the locus of disability. The other target of

Morrissey’s lyrical vilification here is “kindness”; of whom – family? Caretakers? Medical 116 practictioners? Society at large? – goes unsaid, but in Morrissey’s canon, kindness is seldom an unironically lauded virtue. (Recall that “Yes, I Am Blind” features the sardonic lyric, “Good

Christians, they want to kill you.”) Perhaps, then, Morrissey has in his crosshairs here the patronizing disdain for disabled persons that inversely manifests itself in a weak, self- congratulating masquerade of kindness. Perhaps, however, Morrissey is more straightforwardly impugning unironic kindness. In this view, his rebuke deploys “kindness” (upon which the disabled individual is, in ableist culture, necessarily reliant) as a vehicle through which the hegemonic ideal of independence can tacitly, by virtue of its absence, be apotheosized. The implications of this for disability politics are problematic. On the one hand, greater independence (that is, increased access and opportunity) for disabled persons through a restructuring of the built and attitudinal environments is one of the primary goals of disability activism. On the other hand, too great an emphasis on the value of independence serves to idealize narratives of overcoming, wherein self-sufficient, super-cripple protagonists establish unrealistic expectations regarding the abilities of disabled persons – a fact which, as has been noted, may result in disabled individuals’ being denied essential services. As a counterpoint to this oppressive mode of thought, some scholars have sought to promote the concept of universal interdependence. As feminist political scientist Joan Tronto has written,

The simple fact that care is a fundamental aspect of human life has

profound implications. It means, in the first instance, that humans

are not fully autonomous, but must always be understood in a

condition of interdependence. While not all people need others’

assistance at all times, it is a part of the human condition that our

autonomy occurs only after a long period of dependence, and that 117

in many regards, we remain dependent on others throughout our

lives. At the same time, we are often called upon to help others,

and to care, as well. Since people are sometimes autonomous,

sometimes dependent, sometimes providing care for those who are

dependent, humans are best described as interdependent. Thinking

of people as interdependent allows us to understand both

autonomous and involved elements of human life. (qtd. in

Wendell 149)

The assertion made by some disability scholars that persons who are recipients of care simultaneously supply forms of care, including emotional care, goes some way toward promoting this concept of interdependence (Wendell 150). Moreover, it suggests the presence in disability experience of a degree of that reciprocity on whose basis philia can rightfully be claimed by disabled persons.

Morrissey concludes this section by describing his disabled protagonist as “a symbol of where mad, mad lovers / Must pause and draw the line.” In so doing he returns to the theme of the refusal of eros to persons with disabilities, deploying language that accords well with Judith

Butler’s discussion in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” of the discursive production of sexed (and, therefore, sexualizable) bodies:

The forming of a subject requires an identification with the

normative phantasm of “sex,” and this identification takes place

through a repudiation of which produces a domain of abjection, a

repudiation without which the subject cannot emerge. This is a 118

repudiation without which creates the valence of “abjection” and

its status for the subject as a threatening specter. (3)

The line haltingly drawn here in Morrissey’s lyric marks the boundary that shores up Butler’s

posited “domain of abjection,” that realm of unsexed, unsexualized bodies that repels the sexed and sexualized subject. Morrissey’s lyric tacitly acknowledges the fuzziness and variability of that boundary, thus pointing to its arbitrariness; presumably some other individual perceived as a viable sex partner by the most libidinous of “mad, mad lovers” would, to a less wanton observer, be deemed abject and thus sexually unthinkable. Unfortunately for the disabled protagonist of

“November,” she symbolizes, in Morrissey’s account, a constituent by any measure of Butler’s repudiated domain of abjection, someone whose very existence poses a threat that must be forestalled.

This second C section is followed by the same descending five-note figure that concluded the first, but rather than lead the song’s arrangement into a repeat of the eight-measure musical break, it instead drives the song toward a remarkable minute-long interlude. Cymbals crash five times before the drum kits take a momentary reprieve. A distorted power chord rings out and fades into silence. The rumbling, low-frequency guitar sonics that introduced the song flash a brief reappearance as an ambient flute begins to play softly over arpeggiated guitar line. Faint at first, but mounting in volume, the guttural, gurgling, wordlessly chattering sound of a female voice – courtesy of Canadian singer-songwriter and actress Mary Margaret O’Hara (Rogan

Albums 152) – can be discerned in the mix, simulating the harrowing sounds of a mother giving birth.5 Her outlandishly bizarre prattle inspires an admixture of compassion, laughter, and

fascinated revulsion. It both draws on and reinscribes several stereotypes of disability

5 Morrissey said of O’Hara, “she's the oddest most eccentric person I've ever met, I went into the vocal booth and said 'Just simply give birth,’ which she most expertly did, while I stood behind with a mop and a bucket” (Brown “Bona”). 119

simultaneously: the Disabled Person as Pitiable and Pathetic; the Disabled Person as Sinister and

Evil; the Disabled Person as Atmosphere or Curio; and the Disabled Person as an Object of

Ridicule, to name four. Moreover, the grotesquely prelinguistic character of her pained gibberish

limns a portrait of a maternal figure who is subhuman, bestial. As such, it posits the disability of

the song’s protagonist as a matter of heredity, thereby participating in a medical discourse of

disability which locates disability’s source indelibly in the body, neglecting the impact of the

social environment.

The return of the droning sustained pedal contributes to the impression of mounting

drama and exotica. A steady tattoo is beat on a drum as the music builds in intensity and

volume. A harmonica bends the notes of three ascending pitches.6 The crescendo steadily increases until a cymbal crash announces a reprise of the song’s arpeggiated guitar introduction, although its setting is more cacophonous in this iteration, augmented as it is by keening

harmonica and O’Hara’s continuing whoops and shrieks. In short order the second guitar, drum

kit, and electric bass rejoin the proceedings.

Morrissey’s voice is pitched higher and produced more breathily as he urgently reprises

the song’s first A section, singing, “So sleep and dream of love / ‘Cause it’s the closest you will

get to love.” The ensuing third B section eschews Morrissey’s customary allocution to the “poor

twisted child” in favor of seven intonations of the word “oh,” each sung in a descending two-

note phrase which suggests both the softly tranquilizing repetition of a lullaby and the despairing

6 Harmonica breaks feature prominently in The Smiths’ 1983 track “Hand in Glove,” which, as the band’s debut single, had announced their birth as a recording entity. Johnny Rogan suggests that in utilizing the instrument, The Smiths knowingly paid homage to The Beatles, whose own debut single “Love Me Do” had featured similar harmonica breaks (Severed 163); here on “November Spawned a Monster,” the instrument announces a different, more prodigious birth, that of the song’s disabled protagonist. Its bluesy inflection invokes the vulgar carnality associated with that genre (Podell 35) perhaps in order to draw attention to the physical difference of the disabled girl. 120 resignation of one so overcome by pathos that words fail. Then, too, the words of the song’s third and final C section depart significantly from either of its two precedents:

That November

Is a time which I must put out of my mind

Oh, one fine day, let it be soon,

She won’t be rich or beautiful

But she’ll be walking your streets in the clothes

That she went out and chose for herself

That Morrissey omits the word “monster” from this final section marks a movement away from his wonted causticity of tone, albeit one catalyzed in part by his intention to repress the thought of the disabled girl’s birth. Such a purpose indexes the anxiety that the existence of disabled persons induce in the temporarily able-bodied. As Susan Wendell has written,

In . . . societies where . . . [the] promise to control nature is still

widely believed, people with disabilities are constant reminders of

the failures of that promise, and of the inability of science and

medicine to protect everyone from illness, disability, and death.

They are ‘the Others’ that science would like to forget. In the

societies where there are strong ideals of bodily perfection to

which everyone is supposed to aspire people with disabilities are

the imperfect ‘Others’ who can never come enough to the ideals;

identifying with them would remind the non-disabled that their

ideals imply a degree of control that must eventually elude them

too. (63) 121

Indeed, Morrissey concludes the song with the image of his disabled protagonist asserting a degree of control, if only a modest one. That Morrissey does not foresee wealth for her is presciently consonant with a January 2008 British charity report which found that low employment levels, education discrimination, and insufficient benefits among the UK’s disabled populated resulted in their being twice as likely as the non-disabled population to suffer economic hardship; indeed, the rate of poverty among Britain’s disabled population had only increased over the previous ten years (Smith). That neither does Morrissey augur pulchritude for her testifies to the perdurability of socially constructed norms of beauty predicated on the fiction of the normate body. However, Morrissey does aspire to see her achieve two aims: walking in public, and selecting her own clothes. The second of these goals is credible enough; it implies a minimal degree of agency whereby the disabled girl, even if she has had no say in her corporeal figuration, can at least elect to ornament (and conceal) it is as she prefers, thereby attaining a measure of control over, or influence on, the ableist gaze. However, the first of these goals puzzles. Because Morrissey is vague on the precise details of the disabled girls’ embodiment – a vagueness which, it is worth noting, exploitatively invites the listener to uneasily imagine her in the most unsettling of terms – it is impossible to say whether the act of “walking” (which here I assume Morrissey intends the listener to understand literally, as a technique of the normate body) is something that, through physical therapy, surgical intervention, prosthesis or physical aid, she could be plausibly expected to approximate, or whether in wishing her this fate (and soon, at that), Morrissey is steering her toward “super cripple” aspirations, subjecting her to the unrealistic expectation that she might someday achieve a normative manner and degree of mobility. 122

In any event, Morrissey’s pointed use here of the phrase “your streets” serves to

personally engage the listener in a way reminiscent of the second B section (“could you even

bear”), positing the disabled girl as a member of the listener’s community and subtly inculpating

the auditor with the responsibility for confronting the reality of her existence – even if, just a few lines earlier, Morrissey himself had resolved to banish her from consciousness. Finally, rather than conclude with the five-note descending turnaround that had punctuated its two precedents, this final C section instead terminates with a truncated three-note figure (the first, second, and fourth notes of the precedent figures) that brings the song crashing to an abrupt halt. This unexpectedly brusque conclusion to the song, which stops a whole step short of its anticipated tonic destination, leaves the listener with a sense of tension unresolved, of questions unanswered, of progress thwarted. The final fifteen seconds of the track that ensue consist primarily of feedback and the rumbling tremolo of distorted guitar: a clamorous and discordant coda during which time the unsettled listener is invited to reflect upon the variety of emotions stirred, issues raised, and challenges posed over the preceding five minutes of song.

“November Spawned a Monster”: The Music Video

The preceding discussion has sought to elucidate the representational meanings of disability posed by “November Spawned a Monster” through a careful consideration of the song’s music and lyrics. It bears reminding, however, that the song reached a wide swath of its audience through the vehicle of its accompanying music video, a digested version of which, as has been mentioned, was included in a 1994 episode of the popular animated MTV series Beavis and Butt-head. As such, I will conduct an analysis of the music video in order to ascertain how its visual imagery inflects the significations of the song’s words and music. I begin with 123

reference to the work of Andrew Goodwin, who has identified three possible relationships between the imagery proffered by music videos and the songs that they accompany: 1) music videos can simply illustrate the story by visualizing them in a fairly straightforward and literal manner; 2) music videos can amplify the song lyrics’ meaning by appending new layers meaning not available through any reading of the song itself; and 3) music videos can evince disjuncture

between image and lyrics by posing visuals that are either unrelated to, or that in some way

(intentionally or otherwise) contradict or undermine, the song lyrics (86-88). The mode of

signification most closely approximated by the music video for “November Spawned a Monster”

is the second, what Goodwin terms amplification. To be sure, in an artistic decision consonant

with the song lyrics’ failure to explicitly detail the physical appearance of their disabled

protagonist, the “November” video eschews the illustrative mode of visualization by refusing to

visually depict the “monster” of the song’s title – an elision which leaves the viewer free to

imagine the most frightening figure possible. The clip is, in fact, essentially a performance

video, albeit one shot without benefit of musicians or instruments; rather, Morrissey himself is

the sole player here, lip-synching the song’s lyrics throughout its duration and punctuating them

with a repertoire of gestures. The video metaphorizes the non-normative corporeality of the

song’s disabled girl through the location of its shoot: California’s Death Valley, primarily the

site known as Mushroom Rock (Bret Scandal 135). Several of the video’s shots dwell upon the

alternately rippling, pockmarked, and craggy topography of this extraordinary landscape,

evincing a fascination with its distinctive contours that parallels Western culture’s fixation, when

in disability voyeurism mode, with the othered contours of the rejected body. Moreover, this

alien terrain serves to exoticize disability in a way consistent with the othering musical elements

– drone, polyrhythm, modal guitar figure – discussed above. As Morrissey traces his hand over 124

the surrounding terrain in certain shots (for instance, at 1:54 and 2:05), it appears to crumble at

his touch in cascades of stone and dust, pointedly suggesting the fragility and fragmentation of

this metaphorical non-normative body. That this desolate landscape is attractively photographed, particularly when framed so as to admit glimpses of the piercing blue sky overhead, could be

seen to suggest that a comparable beauty might perhaps be discernible in the non-normativity of

the rejected body. While some disability studies scholars have argued that notions of beauty are

deeply implicated in relations of power, that aesthetic discourse buttresses extant unequal social

relations, and that the aestheticization of disability accordingly obscures the social oppression

experienced by actual persons with disabilities, philosopher and disability studies scholar and

activist Anita Silvers alternately contends that, within the context of art discourse that prizes the

shock of the new, positing the disabled body as beautiful valorizes otherness as originality and as

such works to undermine those hegemonic prescriptions that inform normative socio-political

relations (229-230, 241-242).

Then again, the inhospitability of this sun- and heat-scorched environment – a pair of

long aerial shots at the 0:13 and 0:18 marks frame Morrissey as an insignificant speck of life

against its vast wasteland – could be understood to signify not non-normative corporeality but

rather the hostility and harshness of the social environment experienced by the disabled girl,

subject as she is to its patronizing kindness, exclusionary chatter, and sexual abjection. Indeed,

the Mushroom Rock to which Morrissey clings in many of the video’s shots suggests in its

phallic contours the monolithic power of patriarchal, ableist society; this reading tilts the video’s

construction of disability away from the medical model’s preoccupation with the negative space

of the rejected body toward the social model’s attention to the disabling environment. 125

The music video opens by fading into a shot that pans from Morrissey’s diaphonously black-shirted mid-torso toward his head. Synchronous with the introductory shear of resounding bestial guitar, Morrissey’s lolling chin rolls up off his chest as the singer trains his eyes upward toward his left. This flourish produces a neck-baring gesture which, as ethologists have suggested, comprises a universal sign of submissiveness (Lott 87), an apt gesture given the association between disability and powerless captivity that the song’s words and music postulate.

The motion also discloses that on the underside of the brim of the straw cowboy hat that

Morrissey sports atop his head are affixed four black, bold block letters spelling the word

“VILE.” This word, with its connotations of both physical repugnance and moral depravity, capsulizes the stigmatization imposed on disabled persons by ableist prejudice. However, rather than serve as an endorsement of this derogatory signification, the boldness with which the word is bluntly asserted suggests that Morrissey is engaging here in what Mitchell and Snyder call

“transgressive resignification”:

As opposed to substituting more palatable terms, the ironic

embrace of derogatory terminology has provided the leverage that

belongs to openly transgressive displays. The power of

transgression always originates at the moment when the derided

object embraces its deviance as value. Perversely championing the

terms of their own stigmatization, marginal peoples alarm the

dominant culture with a canniness about their own subjugation.

The embrace of denigrating terminology forces the dominant

culture to face its own violence head-on because the authority of

devaluation has been claimed openly and ironically. Thus, the 126

minority culture deflects the stigmatizing definition back on to the

offenders by openly advertising them in public discourse. The

effect shames the dominant culture into a recognition of its own

dehumanizing precepts. What was most devalued is now righted

by a self-naming that detracts from the original power of the

condescending terms. (Narrative 35-36)

Mitchell and Snyder suggest in this passage that for transgressive resignification to occur, the ironic embrace of stigmatizing terms has to be effected by a member of the devalued minority culture. That the emblazoned hat casts its shade over Morrissey’s own body here points to an identity between Morrissey’s own corporeality and that of his disabled subject, one that grants him the provisional artistic license to posit disability’s characterization as “VILE” not in order to promote that derogation but in order to question its validity and attenuate its authority. That identification is also suggested by the hearing aid that Morrissey wears in this clip, an accoutrement reprising the iconography which garnered him such attention in the early days of

The Smiths (although the behind-the-ear model he sports in the “November” video represents, it should be noted, a more modern version of the device than the body aid which he had customarily worn years previously). To be sure, the camera does not fixate or linger on the prosthetic device in any of the video’s shots, but Morrissey himself draws attention to it by occasionally fingering it (at the 1:48 mark and 5:06 marks). Its presence reminds the alert viewer of Morrissey’s onetime profession of solidarity with his reported hearing-impaired fan and thereby suggests that, whatever its ambiguities, with “November” Morrissey is declaring a similar sympathy. (Morrissey’s identification with disability will be explored further in the fifth chapter of this thesis.) 127

Indeed, that the project motivating Morrissey’s “November” video is to “force the

dominant culture to face its own violence head-on” (Mitchell and Snyder Narrative 35) is suggest by other examples of the music video’s imagery. Shots at the 0:16, 1:32, and 1:41 marks, for instance, depict Morrissey kicking at Death Valley’s earthen floor, sending up clouds of dust. At the 1:34 mark, a tracking shot brings the camera gliding past Morrissey’s oncoming figure; he shields his eyes from the sun in anticipation of the camera’s approach and, just as it draws nigh, flings a handful of dirt and stone toward the lens. This confrontational gesture is reprised at the 5:01 mark, where a brief shot finds Morrissey squatting down, raking a hand across Death Valley’s floor, sending up a quantity of earth and stone. Collectively such shots achieve germane resonance when decoded with reference to Mary Douglas’s influential study

Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Although Douglas’s work is not a treatise on disability specifically, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson finds Douglas’s work of considerable interest to disability studies. I quote Garland-Thomson’s discussion of the value of

Douglas’s work at some length:

Douglas speculates about the relativity of dirt in ways that can be applied

to the cultural meaning of disability. Dirt, she observes, is “matter out of

place . . . the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of

matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements”. . .

. Dirt is an anomaly, a discordant element rejected from the schema that

individuals and societies use in order to construct a stable, recognizable,

and predictable world. . . . This cultural intolerance of anomaly is one of

the most pervasive themes in Western thought. . . . Douglas’s

interpretation of dirt as anomaly, as the extra-ordinary, can be extended to 128

the body we call “disabled” as well as to other forms of social

marginalization. Like dirt, all disability is in some sense “matter out of

place” in terms of the interpretive frameworks and physical expectations

our culture shares. Visible physical disability lies outside the normative

ordering system and can only be included and comprehended under

Douglas’s classifications of “aberrant” or “anomalous,” categories that

accommodate what does not fit into the space of the ordinary . . . .

Because cultures do not tolerate such affronts to their communal narratives

of order, what emerges from a given cultural context as irremediable

anomaly translates not as neutral difference, but as pollution, taboo,

contagion. (Extraordinary 33-34)

Within Douglas’s conceptual framework (as recontextualized by Garland-Thomson), then,

political significance can be discerned in the very act of Morrissey’s release of a single, and

accompanying music video, that takes as its novel subject the experience of a disabled person:

“November Spawned a Monster” emerges in this view as an artistic and commercial effort that

planted a sizable clod of cultural dirt into the terrain of the popular musicscape. Within the

music video itself, this transgressive act is visualized in the shots of Morrissey kicking up dirt or flinging it at the camera – by implication, at the viewer. It is helpful to note here that, as

Garland-Thomson observes, one coping mechanism identified by Douglas as a means whereby cultures respond to the existence of the anomalous – of cultural dirt – is outright avoidance of anomaly: avoidance through enclosure, exclusion, regulation, segregation (Extraordinary 35).

By writing and recording “November Spawned a Monster” – with its querying lyrics that seek to

personally engage the listener and interrogate his or her own response to disability – and by 129

filming the accompanying music video – which catapults clouds of dirt toward the viewer’s gaze

– Morrissey works to undermine the strategies of avoidance and segregation that help preserve

the devaluation of disfavored cultural categories. Consonant with Morrissey’s transgressive

resignification of the descriptor “VILE,” listeners and viewers are forced to confront the violence of their prejudices.

It has already been noted that the hearing aid worn by Morrissey in this video figuratively allies him with the disabled population. A second remarkable accessory sported by Morrissey in this clip, and one that achieves a similar end, is the adhesive bandage that the singer sports over his left nipple. In the episode of Beavis and Butt-head in which the “November” video was featured, the band-aid was singled out for special attention by the chortling, titular commentators:

Butt-head: Whoa, did you see that? He had a band-aid on one of

his boobs.

Beavis: Really? Why?

Butt-head: Maybe he was like, trying to shave the hair off his

chest, and it’s like . . .

Beavis: Ow! Don’t say stuff like that, Butt-head. Ow!

Butt-head: Why not, Beavis? It’s like he shaved off his nipple.

Beavis: Ow! Ow! Stop it!

Beavis recoils at the spectacle of the adhesive bandage, ostensibly because it invokes the specter of pain, but other viewers might evince similar reactions to it because, to revisit a discussion undertaken in my second chapter, it presents an image of corporeal lack and incompleteness which suggests the corps morcelé of Lacanian theory, “the repressed fragmented body” that 130

threatens “the hallucination of a whole body” (Davis Enforcing 139). Other meanings, however, can be plumbed from the accessory. Perhaps the masking of a teat can be taken to signify the severance from nurturance and support, both maternal and communal, experienced by the song’s disabled protagonist. This interpretation would seem to garner support from the final shot of the video, which depicts Morrissey sprawled out alone on the desert floor, eyes closed, his arms fallen lifelessly back and to his sides. This image constitutes a reprisal of the pietà motif that has

been frequently revisited in centuries of Western and Christian art, but in this iteration, the

supportively cradling Virgin Mary of custom is conspicuously absent; Morrissey, his

performatively fragmented body standing in for the mortally wounded Christ figure, is left to

suffer and expire in isolation. (To be sure, Morrissey gesturally mimics Christ throughout the

video, his arms repeatedly extended to his sides in cruciform fashion. In so doing, he both

signifies the divinity whom the disabled protagonist of the song blames for her existential agony

and to whom she appeals for aid, as well as intimates a certain parity between Christ and that

disabled protagonist, sacrificial lamb that she would seem to feel herself to be, threatened with

immolation on account of humanity’s prejudicial shortcomings.)

Far-fetched though it may seem, Morrissey’s bandaged nipple could also be decoded to

produce a further germane interpretation: Morrissey might well be alluding here the biological

vestigiality of the male breast, which serves no function as does the female breast – i.e., to

produce and deliver milk to nursing infants (Schiebinger 49). Its presence on the male body

suggests that all men with nipples are, comparable to the disabled girl of the song’s lyrics,

possessed of at least one “useless” limb. By covering over the nipple, Morrissey participates in

the culturally endemic project of repressively denying the non-ideal body, while simultaneously

indexing (for those astute enough to discern) the fact that the ideal, normate body is a myth. 131

Moreover, he points to the inherently intersexed character of the male body, with its non- functional traces of the female body. Such a reading is of a piece with other transgendered elements whose codings are present in the clip: Morrissey’s diaphanous black top, “neither shirt nor blouse” (Bret Scandal 135); his distinctly mascaraed eyes; his carefully manicured quiff (a trademark of Morrissey’s iconography, to be sure, but one particularly remarkable given the punishing environment in which it is being maintained here); and his camp mugging for the camera – more than once Morrissey places one hand behind his head in imitation of a pin-up model’s posturing (including, not accidentally, during his enunciation of the word “beautiful” at the 4:54 mark). The stereotypical linkage between disability and non-normative sexuality, I wish to stress, is not irrelevant here.

The hearing aid and adhesive bandage are not the sole means through which Morrissey performatively embodies disability in the “November” video. His manic, flailing, tantrum-esque dancing (at the 1:29 and 3:35 marks particularly) evoke the uncontrolled and uncontrollable body of disability, for example. Moreover, two tracking shots (one begins at 1:37, the other at 3:50) in the clip, the first one shot from a high angle to accentuate the singer’s diminution, find Morrissey stripped to his mid-torso, hands thrust in his pockets, one shoulder slumped lower than the other, and his head reared back and to the right, with an apple thrust in his mouth. It is, to say the least, an eccentric posture whose disarray and contortion suggests the non-normative configuration of the rejected body. The apple in the mouth evokes the iconography of a roasting pig – a particularly disturbing image, one presumes, for an artist who is an outspoken vegetarian, and who famously titled a Smiths song and album Meat Is Murder – and issues a distinct suggestion of the dehumanizing violence (both literal and metaphorical) visited upon the rejected body of disability. It is also, it must be admitted, a strangely comic image whose humor arguably 132 undercuts the seriousness of Morrissey’s critique; so too does the slow-motion image of

Morrissey running his lips along the edge of a chocolate bar (at 3:44), reimagined as a musical instrument, during the harmonica wail that concludes the song’s minute-long “birthing” interlude. This jarring moment serves to remind the viewer of the constructed nature of

Morrissey’s performance in the clip, and tacitly warns against regarding any position seemingly espoused by Morrissey here as one he endorses. Indeed, all performativity appears to be arrested at the video’s 5:04 mark: here, as the song’s last word (“herself”) still rings out, Morrissey is shown casually seated on Death Valley’s dirt floor, absent-mindedly adjusting his hearing aid, and expectantly attending to some figure off camera – presumably the video director, Tim Broad.

The brief shot has a behind-the-scenes, outtake feel to it that works to expose the fictiveness of the five minutes of footage that have preceded it.

To be sure, within those five minutes’ duration Morrissey performs multiple subject positions. That he variously performs the subject positions of disabled person, of Jesus Christ, of absurdist comedian, and of cultural provocateur has already been noted. In addition, during the song’s “birthing” interlude, Morrissey performs the subject position of the disabled protagonist’s mother. This segment depicts Morrissey writhing in apparent agony on the desert floor, one hand on his belly, his tongue lolling out of his mouth, his body seemingly wracked by paroxysms of pain. At the 3:22 mark, he even appears to be lip-synching her unintelligible gurgles. Jerky, handheld camerawork adds to this imagery’s sense of immediacy. Elsewhere Morrissey performatively embodies the narrator of the song’s lyrics. In this mode, he registers through his gestural repertoire the narrator’s opposing emotional valences: both sympathetic outreach (he embraces Mushroom Rock, slowly and somberly swaying back and forth, his face cradled in his palm or cheek gently rested upon his fist) as well as defiant rejection (during the lyrics that 133

describe the sexual revulsion felt by “mad, mad lovers” at the sight of the song’s disabled

protagonist, Morrissey repeated thrusts out both open hands to the camera, therewith signaling a

demand for halt, emphasizing interposed distance, and obscuring his own visage, a gesture which

thus forecloses the visibility of his facial expression and eyes, thereby severing a primary means

– for the sighted, at least – of intimacy and interpersonal connection [Izard 412-413]).

Conclusions

“November Spawned a Monster,” then, constitutes Morrissey’s highest-profile, most

direct, elaborate, and explicit engagement with the subject of disability to date – and the song

and video emerge, in my analysis, as discursively complex terrain. I have sought to argue that

Morrissey’s aim here is to provoke an interrogation of cultural perceptions of and attitudes

toward disability; he seeks to incite a confrontation with cultural dirt, with “matter out of place,”

by utilizing, for instance, lyrics that target the listener in second-person address. However, by

invoking stereotypes of disability (of disabled persons as pitiable and pathetic, as objects of

violence, as sinister and evil, as “super cripples,” as objects of ridicule, as burdens, as sexually

abnormal, as incapable of participating fully in community life), while his aim may simply be to

lay these out for review, by refusing expressly to either praise or condemn them, Morrissey

consequently opens up a space for their reinscription. Ambiguity also ensues, it should be noted,

from the use of polysemic signifiers. Does the song’s minimalist, repetitious guitar figure, for

instance, seek to evoke a sense of imprisonment within the impaired, negative body? Or does it

rather suggest the inhospitable, limiting, disabling character of the social environment? Does the video’s Death Valley location suggest the menacing otherness of disabled corporeality, or does it instead connote the inhospitability of ableist society? In any event, the cards may have been 134

stacked against Morrissey’s representational project from the first. Colin Barnes argues that media portrayals of disabled persons should “[s]hun one dimensional characterisations [and]

[w]herever appropriate portray disabled people as having individual and complex personalities

with a full range of emotions and activities” (22). Rendering such well-rounded characterization within the limited duration of a pop single is a tall order. Anita Silvers even suggests the folly of such a dictate: “Disabled people sometimes protest that art rarely reflects the lumpy, bumpy, dumpy realities of their lives. But relatively few artistic works about any subject are so very realistic. . . . [F]idelity to the real is no criterion by which to judge art. . . . [T]he reality of disability is no more natural, and no less a social product, than is the depiction of disability in literary, dramatic and visual art” (231) – or, she might well have added, in popular music.

135

CHAPTER IV: MORRISSEY’S REPRESENTATIONS OF DISABILITY IN THE WAKE OF “NOVEMBER SPAWNED A MONSTER”

Introduction

“November Spawned a Monster,” the analysis of whose music, lyrics, and promotional

video comprised the core of my third chapter’s subject matter, constitutes Morrissey’s highest-

profile direct engagement with the subject of disability, but it is by no means the only one. In this chapter I consider six subsequent entries in the Morrissey songbook that address variations on the theme of corporeal non-normativity foregrounded by the precedent of “November.”

Through my analyses of these six songs’ music, lyrics and, where applicable, music videos, I argue that, in the wake of the watershed moment represented by the release of “November

Spawned a Monster,” each ensuing musical exploration of a previously uncharted variety of bodily difference implicitly lobbies for an increasingly expansive conception of disabled identity.

I argue furthermore that Morrissey’s continued ironic deployment of disability stereotypes works to evoke ableist prejudices so that they can be interrogated, with an eye toward undermining them. I conclude the chapter with a discussion of Morrissey’s 1990 B-Side “At Amber,” in which the lyricist posits an identification between himself and a disabled character; this final analysis paves the way for the investigation I undertake in my fifth and final chapter, where I consider Morrissey’s discourse of the disabled self.

Variations on Disability: “Mute Witness” and “The Harsh Truth of the Camera Eye”

A second track that rates inclusion in Morrissey’s corpus of disability-themed songs is

“Mute Witness,” the fourth of eleven tracks on the artist’s 1991 album Kill Uncle, issued a scant

11 months after the single release of “November Spawned a Monster.” At a brief 33 minutes in 136

duration, Kill Uncle was neither a critical nor a commercial success (Rogan Albums 163, 167-

168), but it did bear witness to Morrissey’s fascination during this period with the subject of physical impairment. “Mute Witness” adumbrates the communicative difficulties that proceed from an encounter between an aphonic1 woman who seems to have been witness to – or who

may have been the victim of; the lyrics are pointedly unclear on this matter – some unspecified

crime and the officers at a London police station to whom she attempts to report this crime. The

parties’ mutual antagonism is cleverly reflected in the musical arrangement. The song opens

with the sound of a piano whose treble keys punch out eighth notes in two groupings of three and

one grouping of two. Although the sonorities produced do not constitute triplets, pitch and

tempo nevertheless interact here to create a sense of conflict and tension between the triple-time impulse of the piano (joined by electric guitar in the song’s fourth measure) and the duple time of the song’s overall meter. A similar contentious musical dialogue occurs from measure to measure as in one bar drums, in unison with electric bass, pound out between one and six beats in irregular syncopated patterns, while in alternating bars a single bass piano key pounds out either a single note riposte, or none at all (as in the eighth measure). These leitmotifs can be understood as musical characterizations of the figures in Morrissey’s lyric, with electric bass and drum representing the constabulary interlocutors and the bassy piano signifying their mute respondent, stinting in her communication where she manages to communicate at all. The asymmetry of the call and response is furthered by the fact that the bass piano appears in the first

beat of each bar in which the electric bass and drum appear, suggesting a confused overlapping

1 While aphonia or muteness may emerge as a symptom anatomically based in laryngeal pathology, psychoanalytic tradition has long gendered muteness as a psychosomatic symptom of the hysteria that befalls a woman in the aftermath of some traumatic incident (Colton, Casper, and Leonard 21; Caper 12). That Morrissey fails to specify the character of the titular witness’s muteness here may be seen to reflect his ableist refusal to do considerate representational justice to disability; alternatively, it may be attributed to the lyricist’s knowing and satiric replication of the indifference of the song text’s obtuse officers. 137

of communicative efforts that fail to coordinate in an effectively organized manner. Indeed, the drum-and-bass call spills over bar boundaries to begin prematurely in the final beat of the song’s

tenth bar, usurping time that by established precedent rightly belongs to the bass piano alone. At

the song’s thirteenth measure, the bass piano disappears altogether, opening the way for drum

and bass to usurp the fourteenth bar all unto themselves. By the sixteenth bar drum and bass are

beating out eighth notes in time with the treble piano. The musical drama enacted by this

instrumental interplay registers the occlusion of the mute woman’s hopes for communication

with the self-important and insensitive police.

The call-and-response musical motif returns as Morrissey introduces his lyric by

announcing the presence of “Your poor witness / Crying so loudly on the floor.” His invocation

of the word “poor,” repeatedly used to characterize the disabled child of “November Spawned a

Monster,” here as there patronizingly stereotypes the titular character as pitiably and pathetic.

Moreover, Morrissey’s use of the possessive “your,” drawn out emotively, reductively objectifies the mute woman as a species of property; though putatively addressed to the authorities being petitioned by the mute woman, the pronoun can also be understood as simultaneously directed toward the song’s auditor, working to personally engage members of the listening audience and ascribing to each a share of responsibility for the witness’s welfare. Although at this early juncture in the song text no lyric has yet disclosed the fact of her muteness, the song title itself

makes clear enough that such is indeed the condition of this squalling witness – in which case the

detail of her clamorous wailing is rendered ironic and interjects an understated humor; that she is

located on the floor (recalling to mind images of Morrissey rolling around on the desert floor in

the “November Spawned a Monster” video) suggests the wretched state to which she has been

reduced, a result of the fact that, as Morrissey goes on to state twice (for emphasis), “she is only 138

trying to tell you what it was that she saw” (the word “only” testifying here to Morrissey’s

sympathetic view that her modest desire to be understood is eminently reasonable). Whether it is

the thing she has witnessed that so aggrieves her, or whether blame lies in the inability of the

police to understand her efforts at communication, or whether it is some combination of the two,

is and will remain unclear.

The song builds in rhythmic intensity as drums, bass, and piano beat out a steady eighth-

note pattern and guitar plays a two-note, siren-like riff (a musical motif previously deployed in

“November Spawned a Monster”) which casts an air of life-or-death emergency over the

proceedings. Morrissey’s lyric goes on to describe the mute woman’s ascent from the floor to

the table atop which she now stands, “with her small arms flailing”; the description of her arms

as diminutive is a deprecating detail, and the image of them flailing, even if understood as a

consequence of trauma compounded by frustration, nevertheless reinscribes the disabled body as

one that is out of control. Still, Morrissey goes on to assert of the police authorities – and,

implicitly, of the listening audience – that “you feel such compassion in your soul / For your

mute witness.” It is a congratulatory remark, one that celebratorily (and ironically) lauds the

compensatory tenderness of those who observe the mute woman’s futile overtures toward

sympathetic connection. By this juncture the song’s intensity has eased up, its steady tattoo of eighth notes momentarily abandoned in favor of the erstwhile irregular syncopation as

Morrissey’s lyric circles back to reprise its opening lyrical statement; in this second iteration, however, the word “mute” substitutes for “poor,” implicitly equating the two terms and once more framing non-normativity as just cause for pity. It also affords an opportunity for the virtuous benevolence of the non-disabled to be tried and proven, as Morrissey proceeds to describe his protagonist as “testing the strength of our patience” (the inclusive “our” 139

indiscriminately encompassing police officers, music listeners, and Morrissey himself).

Morrissey retreats momentarily from his sanctimoniousness to recollect, twice, that the mute

witness is “only trying to tell you what it was that she saw.”

The song’s rhythmic intensity picks up once again as electric bass returns to its steady

eighth note pulse and drums pound out a driving rock beat while Morrissey describes the mute

witness’s resumed attempts at communication. “Now see her pointing to the frisbee,” he sings,

“with a memory so fuzzy / And her silent words / Describing the fright of last night.” The unforeseen slant rhyme of “frisbee” and “fuzzy” introduces a discordant frivolity into what

should be grave proceedings, and the reference to so mundane an instrument of leisure as a

frisbee as an inscrutably relevant object in a drama of trauma serves to reinsert a comedic levity

into the song’s otherwise somber emotional palette. It bears noting here that the question of

whether Morrissey is deploying humor in order to supportively reinforce the dismissive attitude

of the ableist police officers toward the titular witness, or whether he is more subversively

challenging the listener to interrogate his or her own conflicted, culturally-shaped reactions to the

remarkable scene, is a difficult matter to settle, but one that strikes at the heart of Morrissey’s

representational politics. In my fifth chapter I consider the ambiguous politics of Morrissey’s

disability representation in greater detail; for the moment, I wish to emphasize the progressive

potential in Morrissey’s work, the space his disability discourse opens up for challenging ableist

prejudice – here, for instance, the stereotype of the Disabled Person as an Object of Ridicule.

Morrissey’s use of the phrase “silent words” in the above-cited lyric in order to

characterize the mute woman’s gestures betrays the audist bias of a hearing and speaking

establishment which favors the morphemic orientation of an auditory mode of communication

and can only understand other modes of communication in equivalent terms (Davis Enforcing 140

172). A turn of phrase which thus participates in “an ideology of containment and a politics of power and fear” (Davis Enforcing 4), “silent words” works in concert with her physical or psychological pathology to silence the mute woman. To be sure, a certain amount of information is finally communicated by the mute witness, as indexed by Morrissey’s quoting of the police

officer’s disapproving remark, “4 a.m. Northside, Clapham Common / Oh God, what was she doing there?” By expressing exasperation at the mute woman’s promenading in public, and a notorious gay cruising area at that (Bret Scandal 140) – a detail which again links disability and sexual ”deviance” and raises the possibility that the crime in question may have been an incident of gay bashing – the police officers lend support to the stereotype of the Disabled Person as

Incapable of Fully Participating in Community Life; arguably they also implicitly seek to circumscribe the ambit of disabled persons so as to prevent such specimens of cultural dirt from becoming matter transgressively out of place.

Having deduced, with difficulty and with disapprobation, the mute woman’s whereabouts the previous night, but not her motivations for being there, Morrissey’s police officers propose a different means of communication in order to elucidate further details of her story: “Will she sketch the answer later? / Well, I will ask her / Now dry your tears, my dear.” That the answer being sought here is not what the mute woman has witnessed or undergone at Clapham

Common, but rather what she had been doing there, projects a concern which places the mute woman under some suspicion of culpability. Such suspicion, however, is tempered with dismissive nonchalance, since the answer will be sought at some unspecified subsequent time, and since the entire passage is moreover capped with the formally tender and polite but detachedly consolatory suggestion that she dry her tears. (The words “my dear,” sung breathily and over a momentary cessation of the song’s erstwhile rhythmic intensity, would seem to 141

convey a certain compassion on the part of the police officers. However, the disjuncture

between their fleeting tender sentiments and predominantly callous demeanor speaks to their obliviousness, even as it permits them to bask in their own magnanimity.)

This expression of sentiment is followed by a seven-measure passage that features a female voice and flute singing/playing a four-note musical motif six times, hovering over the sobbing mute witness like a benevolent choir of angels (as though, much as had been suggested in the “Jesus” passage of “November Spawned a Monster,” celestial aid rather than environmental support were necessary for her succor) while an electric guitar mimics her wailing in the audio background. An eight-bar musical break follows in which an electric guitar careens between two pitches, again evoking the emergency signal of a siren. Morrissey’s voice returns in the eighth bar of this musical break with the announcement, “Now see her mime in time so nicely / It would all have been so clear / If only she had never volunteered / Your taxi is here, my dear.” It is difficult to miss the supercilious tone in this concluding lyric. The compliment paid to the orchestration of the mute woman’s earnest gestures patronizingly aestheticizes her attempts at communication and functionally obliterates the urgency of her effort to convey meaning. Indeed, the police opine that she ought never to have proffered her story in the first place, sweeping her out of their presence, like so much cultural dirt – matter out of place – as they hasten her to her taxi. The concluding expression of the previous verse – “my dear” – is repeated, but seems much more perfunctory here, accompanied as it is by no abatement in the rhythmic intensity of the musical accompaniment, which seems complicit with the police in wishing to expedite the mute woman’s exit. The female voice returns to the mix, this time without flute accompaniment, in order to intone its four-note motif throughout the track’s musical coda. It is joined in the final eight bars of the song by a synthesizer’s modulation 142

between two notes, one per measure, reprising in decelerated fashion the siren-like guitar of the preceding musical break. A two-beat drum roll brings the track to an abrupt conclusion, interrupting the four-note motif of the female voice after its third note, conveying, much as had been done on “November Spawned a Monster,” a jarring sense of premature termination – and intimating that, the generally buoyant and happy feel of the song’s coda (conveyed through its energetic, steady, driving rhythm and lilting vocal line) notwithstanding, perhaps the mute

woman’s insistent pleas for understanding had been too cavalierly dismissed, her discharge too

hastily ordered.

“Mute Witness” is not the only of Kill Uncle’s songs to take as its subject matter the

rejected body. The album’s eighth track, titled “The Harsh Truth of the Camera Eye,” while not

directly addressing the subject of disability by most definitions of that term, nevertheless does

explore the anxieties induced when one’s own corporeality falls short of the cultural

prescriptions of the normate. Reflecting the influence of Morrissey’s childhood fascination with

horror cinema, the song opens with a sinister soundscape of mysterious percussive effects ping-

ponging between the track’s right and left channels, punctuated here and there by unexplained

rattles and clangs; a ghostly, whistling peal accompanies and is overlain at intervals with the

eerily reverberating sound of a camera’s shutter. The song’s music properly commences after

thirty seconds, but the discomfiting sound effects just described recur throughout the track,

augmented during its final two minutes by disconcerting guitar feedback. The song’s tempo is

slow and dirge-like, with shuffling drum work establishing a foundational triple meter while a

plodding bass line generates tension by delineating a contrasting duple meter. Moreover, the

track’s B-sections feature the addition of triplet notes performed on simulated calliope, thereby

invoking the mystique of the circus. Its sonority works to equate the feigned mirth of the lyrics’ 143

protagonist before the camera lens with the circus traditions of human acrobatics and animal exhibition and taming (Stoddart 59-60, 80, 89). The historical linkage between the circus and the freak show, with its display of non-normative bodies, is not irrelevant here either (Stoddart 22); in this light, the track works to effect what Garland-Thomson, borrowing from disabled photographer and writer David Hevey, terms “enfreakment,” that process “that elaborately foregrounds specific bodily eccentricities [and] collapses all those differences into a . . . single amorphous category of corporeal otherness. . . . an icon of generalized embodied deviance”

(Freakery 10). To be sure, the protagonist here is universalized as an individual of unspecified sex; the social humiliation attendant upon baldness registered in the song’s opening lines

(“Churchillian legs / Hair barely there”) suggests a male subject, although the hysterical outburst augured later in the song – “Laugh with us all now here if you can / Then take the pictures home and scream” – constitutes female-coded behavior. (The ambiguous sex of the song’s protagonist is, of course, nothing new in the representation of the rejected body.) In any event, the song’s subject is singularly terrorized by the invasive gaze of the camera. The depth of its penetration

(“My so-friendly lens / It zooms into the inner you,” Morrissey sings – and such terms as

“friendly,” as has been previously noted, are typically deployed sarcastically in Morrissey’s work) is encoded in the intimate, hushed, almost whispered delivery of Morrissey’s vocal throughout most of the song. His tendency here to draw out a small number of syllables over relatively long durations (“hair barely there,” for instance, is intoned over two measures) reflects the excruciating passage of time experienced by the song’s protagonist under the scrutiny of the lens. Part of the terror of the camera’s gaze, the song suggests, derives from its purported ability to access one’s own essence (“the inner you”) despite the fact that the exteriority captured does

not at all jibe with one’s own preferred sense of self (“telling you all that you never wanted to 144

know / Showing you what you didn’t want shown”). The lyrics nevertheless suggest that the

“inner you” is revealed through “eyes [that] signal pain,” thereby indexing the anxiety that “the pain of smiling” cannot obfuscate and, on the contrary, works to instigate. In any event,

Morrissey’s lyric here suggests that the camera’s infiltration “tells the harsh truth / And nothing but,” an assertion which naturalizes cultural constructions of normate beauty as an inherent property of the body – although these lines arguably reflect the protagonist’s epistemological suppositions, or those of his or her social environment, and not Morrissey’s own. Regardless, the lyrics conclude with Morrissey wistfully voicing the protagonist’s earnest desire:

Oh, I don’t want to be judged anymore

I don’t want to be judged

I would sooner be loved

I would sooner be just blindly loved

The use of the word “blindly” here in reference to unconditional love serves as a reminder of the pervasive use of disability as metaphor in everyday parlance (although in this context at least, disability is given a positive connotation). More to the point, however, these final lines represent a plea for unqualified acceptance that takes no account of the non-normativity of the recipient’s body; it is a plea whose sentiment the disabled protagonist of “November Spawned a Monster,” and no doubt many disabled persons, would share.

“Pregnant for the Last Time” and “You’re the One for Me, Fatty”

A little more than one year would elapse between the release of Kill Uncle and that of

Morrissey’s 1992 follow-up studio album, Your Arsenal. In the interim, however, in July of

1991, Morrissey issued a single (not issued on any collection until the September 1997 release of 145

the compilation Suedehead: The Best of Morrissey) titled “Pregnant for the Last Time.”2 Like

“November Spawned a Monster” and “Mute Witness” before it, “Pregnant for the Last Time” once again evinces Morrissey’s fascination during this period with women whose bodies deviate from the hegemony of the normate.3 Upon its release, “Pregnant for the Last Time” comprised,

in tandem with those two precedents, a triptych of similarly-themed songs whose divergent

exemplifications of the rejected body encouraged an expansive conception of disability. Despite

the differences among the impairments each song treats, certain themes recur across the tracks

under discussion. The principal of “Pregnant for the Last Time” is, like the disabled protagonist

of “November Spawned a Monster,” limned as a kind of captive to the (always dubious)

kindness of strangers, as the following passages culled from the song suggest:

Sick at noon for the last time

And who is gonna clean up?

Would you be so kind?

......

Bad advice for the last time

And people being nice for the very first time

Also in common with the protagonist of “November,” Morrissey’s pregnant subject here finds

her body to be subjugated to the withering, othering gaze of the surrounding community (instead

of “people discussing me,” however, here “everybody’s staring / At the strange clothes that

you’re wearing”). Like the “frame of useless limbs” described in “November,” the protagonist

2 Women’s rights activists in the United States and United Kingdom fought to achieve government recognition of pregnancy as short-term disability in order to prevent sex discrimination in the workplace and secure job and benefits protection (Stetson 264-268; Smart 83-84). 3 This fascination had been presaged years earlier on the track “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others” from The Smiths’ 1986 album The Queen is Dead. That song’s lyrics marvel at the corporeal heterogeneity of the female population and features the refrain, “Some girls are bigger than others / Some girls are bigger than others / Some girls’ mothers are bigger than other girls’ mothers.” 146

of “Pregnant” is objectified as thingly, regarded as public property subject to invasive “pokes

and prods.” Like both the protagonist of “November,” incapable of walking, and the mute

subject of “Witness,” with her “flailing arms” and hysterical gesturing, the body of the pregnant

protagonist is portrayed as out of control, characterized by indecorously voracious appetite

(“chips with cream for the last time”), gustatory transmogrification (“corned beef legs”), and unruly spillages that recall the figuration of the disabled body as matter out of place (“phlegm lapels”). But the similarities largely terminate there. For while the disability limned in

“November” had been expressly congenital, and the origins of the aphonia described in “Mute

Witness” were left unspecified, the maternal condition described in “Pregnant” is, self-evidently, an acquired one. Too, while the deformity of the disabled protagonist of “November” had,

barring the fantastic transformation imagined in its concluding lines, evoked permanency of

impairment, while the perdurability of the impairment in “Mute Witness” had been left unclear,

the disability of “Pregnant” is manifestly a temporary one (even if, in the case of the song’s

libidinous protagonist, recurrent). Moreover, if disability is widely regarded as a dehumanizing

deviation from the norm (one that yields a “monster”), pregnancy troubles that view by

comprising not only a routine feature of human life, but in fact, a prerequisite to the perpetuation

of the species. Similarly, if impairment is widely construed as emerging against one’s will

(“Jesus made me”), pregnancy challenges that conception by being, in most (but not all)

instances, voluntary.

Perhaps the singular innovation introduced by “Pregnant” into Morrissey’s burgeoning

discourse of disability lies in this: that if stereotypes render disabled persons as asexual, or

repugnant to the sexual drive, pregnancy is, on the contrary, a mark of sexual desirability and

experience. Indeed, in “Pregnant for the Last Time,” it is precisely its signification of a history 147

ofsexual desire and activity that enables the pregnant body to inspire envy, as the following refrain makes clear:

But then you see someone new and you want someone new

So you have someone new, I don’t blame you

We would all do the same as you

If ever we had the nerve to

The word “nerve” in the first iteration of the refrain implies that the pregnant woman’s heightened level of sexual activity would be available to her envious onlookers had they only the courage to seize it; the substitution of “chance” for “nerve” in the second iteration of the refrain, however, causes the forbidden prize to recede tantalizingly from grasp, suggesting that the disability of pregnancy is a sign of privileged access to sexuality unavailable under the

restrictions of moderateness imposed by bourgeois morality. Her transgressively freewheeling

sexual abandon finds expression in the song’s rollicking, uptempo rockabilly arrangement – a genre whose breaches of racial and gender boundaries (Bertrand 61) is associated, in the cultural

imaginary, with a certain liberatory power, as captured in Bob Dylan’s famous remark regarding

Elvis Presley’s early rockabilly sides for Sun Records: “Hearing him for the first time was like

busting out of jail” (qtd. in Sounes 27). Motivated in part by envy, then, the desire of the

community, although it outwardly claims to be embracing the pregnant woman (she is dubbed

“the people’s friend”), is in actuality to contain her excesses, to subject her unruly body to

hegemonic control, and to keep its contours within those ordained by the fictional strictures of

the normate body; it takes solace, in other words, in the prospect, captured in the song’s title, that

there will be no more pregnancies for the lyrics’ protagonist. (Tellingly, the word “pregnant”

appears only in the song’s title, nowhere in the song’s lyrics. The elision makes the word 148

conspicuous in its absence; it also bespeaks the extent of destabilizing power the word

“pregnancy” wields as a signifier of both unspeakable desire and unspeakable abjection.)

Indeed, the imperative to reign in the protagonist’s sexual wantonness even instigates the

intervention of medical authority: “And the doctor said / Don’t nod your head until June.” This

latter lyric highlights the cultural propensity to inscribe corporeal non-normativity within the

medical model of disability.

A music video was filmed to accompany and promote the release of “Pregnant for the

Last Time” as a single. However, with reference once again to the taxonomy advanced by

Andrew Goodwin, the relationship between imagery and song in the “Pregnant” video is one of

disjuncture (88); that is, its visuals – which depict Morrissey and his band on tour in Germany,

ambling about the streets of Berlin, that city’s architecture sharing screen time with intercut shots

of Morrissey in live performance – are unrelated to the song lyrics. Therefore, discussion of this

video will be deferred until the conclusion of my fifth chapter, where the significance of two of

its shots to Morrissey’s discourse of disability – the first appearing at 0:27, when a smiling

Morrissey holds open his unbuttoned shirt to reveal the word “SINGER” scrawled above his left

breast, the second appearing at 2:02, where the shirt that falls off both shoulders to Morrissey’s

waist reveals the word “VOICE” emblazoned in script across his chest – will be explored.

Morrissey’s subsequent studio album Your Arsenal, released in July 1992, features a

track that reprises the subject matter of the previous year’s “Mute Witness” inasmuch as it

depicts a female Londoner whose embodiment departs from the normate; here, however, it is not

an aphonic woman in Clapham Common but a corpulent woman4 from Battersea who constitutes the protagonist of “You’re the One for Me, Fatty.” (This track was issued as a single the same

4 Morrissey’s evocation of the image of obese womanhood had commenced in the earliest days of The Smiths, when it was his wont in live performance to sport, in addition to NHS spectacles and hearing aid, an “Evans Outsize Shops blouse” (Bret Scandal 39). 149

month as the album’s release.) The addition of this species of non-normative corporeality to

Morrissey’s cadre of disability-themed songs enlarges the scope of bodily difference explicitly portrayed in the artist’s oeuvre and thereby tacitly advocates for a more expansive and inclusive

definition of disability. Moreover, Susan Wendell has pointed to the large body as a site at

which the social construction of disability can be exposed:

One of the most crucial factors in the deconstruction of disability is

the change of perspective that causes us to look in the environment

for both the source of the problem and the solutions.

It is perhaps easiest to change perspective by thinking

about how people who have some bodily difference that does not

impair any of their physical functions, such as being unusually

large, are disabled by the built environment – by seats that are too

small an too close together, doors and aisles and bathroom stalls

that are too narrow, desks and tables that are too low (or chairs that

cannot be adjusted for height), the unavailability or expense of

clothing that fits or of an automobile that they can operate

comfortably. Of course, many people regard large people as

unfortunate or (if they are fat) weak individuals whose abnormality

creates their problems,5 which in itself illustrates the strength of

the cultural demand that everyone meet body ideals. Nevertheless,

5 In a discussion of “You’re the One for Me, Fatty,” Johnny Rogan offers a biographical context within which to frame an understanding of the song’s meaning, noting that as an adolescent Morrissey held little sympathy for the overweight “and was wont to blame them for over-eating” (Albums 186). This suggests that, at least in his youth, Morrissey had subscribed to an ableist view of corporeal difference predicated on the frequently problematic medical model of disability, whereby the problem of disability resides in the individual and not in his or her social environment. 150

although they are subjected to stigma, stereotypes, and cultural

judgments, they are not surrounded by the same aura of

hopelessness and pathology that many cultures project onto people

with illnesses and injuries, nor does it seem as plausible that they

should be kept out of public life. This makes it somewhat easier to

see how the built and social environments create disability by

failing to accommodate bodily difference. (46-47)

In “You’re the One for Me, Fatty,” the burden of the deconstructive work enabled by the figure

of obesity as discussed by Wendell in the above-cited passage falls exclusively on the listener;

that is, Morrissey’s lyrics, as my analysis will show, engages the subject of obesity in only the most superficial of ways. Moreover, not all disability studies theorists discern the same political potential in the figure of obesity. Cultural historian Sander Gilman, for instance, has characterized disability “as a litmus test for the limits of what disability can and should be”

(517). His investigation of the matter raises far more questions than it furnishes answers.

Gilman notes that the American with Disabilities Act’s definition of impairment (which is substantially similar to the legal definitions established in the UK, Canada, and Sweden) as “a state that substantially limits major life activities” (514) would seem to apply to the experience of some overweight people, who suffer the “discriminatory effects of architectural, transportation, and communication barriers” (514) as well as “relegation to lesser services, programs, activities, benefits, jobs, or other opportunities” (515). However, Gilman takes the

World Health Organization’s definition of impairment as “abnormality of structure or function at the organ level” (515) as a basis for questioning the felicitousness of obesity’s fit. He questions, for instance, whether obesity is itself the impairment or rather is the result of impairment. In 151 other words, what organ is impaired – the body entire? The circulatory system? The digestive system? Or is it the mind that is impaired, and is obesity a consequence of mental illness? Does obesity index a lack of willpower, or is it genetically programmed? And in any event, are not definitions of what it means to be overweight or obese culturally and historically variable (515)?

Gilman troubles the definitional boundaries of disability by engaging in philosophical and legalistic inquiry. I propose that Morrissey’s body of work can be interpreted as accomplishing a similar end by virtue of succeeding the treatment of unequivocal disability in “November

Spawned a Monster” with musical explorations of a wide variety of other, nonconforming physiques.

“Fatty” opens with a crash of cymbals and bright, major-key arpeggiated guitar work.

After four measures the snappy, syncopated chorded vamping of a second guitar enters the fray.

Two measures later, the energizing rumble of a drum roll propels the track into the A section, which inaugurates the lyric. “You’re the one for me, fatty / You’re the one I really, really love,”

Morrissey sings here, his earnest declaration of affection transforming the usually pejorative word “fatty” from an instrument of derogation to a term of endearment (a language game which calls to mind the strategy of transgressive resignification discussed above in the context of the

“November” video). From its bright, major key origins the song next slips momentarily into somber minor key harmonies as Morrissey’s lyric contemplates the prospect of future separation and discord: “And I will stay / Promise you’ll say if I’m in your way.” The latter lyric derives humor from the ambiguity of its meaning. On one hand, it restates the platitudinous vow lovers might deferentially make not to restrict each other’s agency in any way. On the other hand, it also conjures up an image of the overweight body demanding extraordinary space as it makes its passage (and reproduces in the process the stereotype of the Disabled Person as an Object of 152

Ridicule). Perhaps significantly, however, Morrissey posing here as love-struck narrator humbly defers to the overweight body’s right of passage, rather than assert his perquisite to remain unmoved. These lines are then repeated, with the addition of the word “ever” before the phrase

“in your way,” emphasizing the narrator’s complaisance; moreover, the final “way” is amended with a hiccupy “a-hey,” an embellishment which calls to mind the vocal stylings of Buddy Holly

(Bret Scandal 179) and allies the song with that progenitor’s legacy of boy-loves-girl pop standards (e.g., “Everyday,” “Peggy Sue”). Indeed, were it not for the peculiar inclusion of the word “Fatty,” Morrissey’s song text might well pass as one of Holly’s own compositions. Two interpretive possibilities then arise: “You’re the One for Me, Fatty” can be understood as claiming this tradition of carefree romantic whimsicality for the rejected body of the overweight; alternately, it can be understood to appropriate this bathetic musical tradition in order to derisively play on stereotypes of the obese as warm, friendly, and blithely happy in their

“unreceptive[ness] to the realities of the world” (Gilman 514).

As the introductory A section concludes, the song transitions into its first B section or verse, characterized by minor key harmonies laced with a walking bass line and punchy chordal guitar accents. Referencing a dreary district of London (Bret Scandal 251), Morrissey twice sings the line, “All over Battersea, some hope and some despair,” with the minor harmonies indexing said despair and the major chords into which these lines resolve, returning the song to its bright major key chorus, representing the hope. The harmonies of the song thus work to underscore the lyrics’ implication that the love of, and for, the narrator’s overweight beloved is a panacea for despondency. A repeat of the chorus, then of the verse, followed by a truncated version of the chorus (with minor variations in rhythm and inflections of pitch throughout) leads the track into a twelve-measure musical break, the first eight of which feature a guitar solo over 153

the minor key (despairing) harmonies of the verse, and the final four of which banish the despair

with bright major harmonies that recall the song’s chiming introduction, this time embellished with the sound of guitar feedback and a rumbling guitar roll that propels the song into its final, modified chorus. Here the melody of Morrissey’s vocal line soars blissfully above that of its previous incarnations, while any erstwhile references to potential future discord are banished in favor of several iterations of the Hollyesque “a-hey.” The song ends optimistically on a ringing

guitar’s major chord.

A music video issued to promote the release of “You’re the One for Me, Fatty” as a

single consists primarily of footage of Morrissey, attired in blue jeans and a red shirt with a

metallic sheen, accompanied by musicians whose rockabilly stylings appear altogether

appropriate to the song’s retro character, miming performance of the track. Interspersed

throughout the clip, however, are several shots that portray a brief narrative which visualizes the

romance of the song’s lyrics, exemplifying Goodwin’s illustrative mode of music video (86). A

slim, well-manicured man in a suit is first shown carrying a bouquet of red, white, and pink

flowers to the door of a home. He knocks, and the door is opened by a heavyset blond woman in

a flower patterned dress, holding an open bag of potato chips. Like his, her face is all smiles as

she eats a chip and takes the bouquet of flowers, which she smells (an ordinary response, no

doubt, but one which in this context underscores, along with the chip-eating, the woman’s

sensual appetite). She mouths indecipherable words and mimes a kiss; the two are then shown

holding hands as they travel to Battersea Park (Gatenby 84), where they lie basking in the sun,

her head on his chest. He lays out a blanket and other items from a vintage-looking picnic basket

and feeds her strawberries as she lies prostrate with her head rested on his knee. She is next

shown producing a cookie from a cookie jar shaped in the likeness of a portly Mammy figure. 154

The archaic racist image is a striking one whose import mystifies: does it perhaps mark the song as enunciating clichéd values and fantasies of a bygone, overidealized era? Or does it invite the reader to regard the regnant prejudices against obesity as kindred to, and no less regrettable than, the once more virulent expressions of racism? In any case, the “Fatty” of this video narrative is next shown picking up and again sniffing the flowers she has been given, one of whose petals she plucks and pops in her mouth with a smile. This is an over-the-top image that suggests that the voraciousness of this woman’s appetite is so great as to know no bounds. Again, however, its ultimate significance eludes; is the viewer invited to laugh derisively at the shot, or to take exception to the puerile stereotype depicted?

In the final shots of the video, the couple, having left the park, is shown sitting on concrete steps at the end of an alleyway, separated by a handrail that bisects its length. The man sticks his head through its bars, and his lips engage his partner’s in a kiss. It is an image that suggests the cultural divide between normative and rejected bodies, and that registers the effort that must be exerted on the part of the former in order to connect with the latter (reversing the placement of onus usually inscribed in ableist representations of disabled persons as maladjusted). The result – a tender, affirmative image of affection – seeks to place an unironic cap on the video and suggests that, despite the preceding provocative camp stereotypes of jovial sensuality and voracious appetite, normative and negatively valued bodies can indeed bridge the cultural gap that separates them. However, this conclusion;s ability to do so successfully is seriously limited, if not sabotaged altogether, by the egregiousness of the stereotypes that populate the video’s nearly three minutes of imagery. This is perhaps especially true for the clip’s female viewers; they are apt to be particularly conscious of the pressures exerted upon women by weightist society to conform to the ideal of a thin body type, and thus may find little 155

incentive to construe the video’s deployment of hackneyed imagery as seeking to undermine

hurtful stereotypes through satire.

“It’s Hard to Walk Tall When You’re Small” and “At Amber”

The next song I wish to investigate was first issued as a B-Side to Morrissey’s May 2004

single “Irish Blood, English Heart.” (The track would be released some six months later on the deluxe edition of Morrissey’s You Are the Quarry album, and a different recording of the track would be issued a year after that on the DVD single “Redondo Beach”/”There Is A Light That

Never Goes Out”). Titled “It’s Hard to Walk Tall When You’re Small,” the song deals with yet another variety of bodily difference, that of diminutive stature. The height of the song’s protagonist (to whom Morrissey’s lyrics give first-person voice) is left vague, although the verse which finds the protagonist complaining, "I burst into public bars / And I throw my weight around / And no one can even see me” suggests that his stature (this character is presumably, though not definitively, male, given the aggressiveness of the behavior exhibited in the lyrics) perhaps falls under the rubric of dwarfism, itself a category variously and somewhat arbitrarily defined (Adelson and Hall 287-297). In any case, the song invites the listener to reflect that that subset of ableism termed heightism leads to a social milieu that in both its built environments – given the height of tables, chairs, urinals, toilets, doorknobs, and so forth – and attitudes works to disfavor those with the corporeal non-normativity of unusual shortness.

Morrissey is specifically concerned in this song to treat “one of the great twentieth – century cultural clichés about short stature: the Napoleon complex. . . . [T]he . . . notion of a small male overcompensating for his stature with wildly aggressive and reckless ambitions . . . has had as firm and white-knuckled a grip on cultural perceptions as any idea the altocracy has 156

come up with in its centuries-long celebration of height” (Hall 181-182). The Napoleon complex

is, to be sure, a disability stereotype, but it is one which affords Morrissey the opportunity to

once again examine the cultural equation of disability with emasculation. The compensatory

aspect of the protagonist’s personality is reflected here in the song’s raucous musical

arrangement in its introduction and first and second A sections or verses. Here an aggressively driving drum beat and insistent walking bass lay the rhythmic foundation over which a guitar plays chords in a glowering minor key. Morrissey, singing from the perspective of the song’s short-heighted protagonist, intones his menacing open lines: “I can kill standing still, it’s easy / I can scare with a stare, it’s easy” – a posture of intimidation which is reprised in the song’s second verse: “I attack from the back, because it’s easy / I can assail, while wearing very nice

jewelry.” The reference to jewelry suggests ornamentation, ostentation, and affectation, themes which are tacitly elaborated in the B sections or choruses into which each A section or verse transitions. Marked by a shift to major harmonies, the choruses thus musically reflect the protagonist’s momentary abandonment of his erstwhile menacing pretense; the psychological

transformation is indicated as well by the lyrics, in which the protagonist, addressing an auditor

named “Ringo,” suggests that, despite his sporting of “disciplined style,” nevertheless “it’s hard

to walk tall when you’re small,” because “when you’re small / You walk as if you’re falling.” In the song’s second chorus, this final line is amended to “you spend your life crawling” and, in the third and final chorus, to “you’re bound to look appalling”; all three variations of the lyric register (in embodied terminology) the experience of marginalization and abjection incurred by the non-normativity of short-heightedness, and introspectively denote the vulnerability undergirding the short-heighted protagonist’s displays of hostility. When Morrissey asserts at the conclusion of the musical break which leads into the song’s final chorus that “success is just 157

a mess,” he articulates the widespread cultural perception (born out by some psychological and sociological research) that economic and social success are negatively correlated with short- heightedness (Hall 182-183)6

Morrissey also uses vocal register to inflect his portrayal of his short-heighted

protagonist’s dual personalities. In the passage midway through the track where he repetitively

laments that “no one can even see me / no one can even see me / no one can even see me /

nobody can see me / no one can see me,” Morrissey’s voice swoops up into a high falsetto. It is

a feminized vocal mannerism which “connote[s] a feminization of expression” (Whiteley 32) and

thus works to undermine the protagonist’s erstwhile pretense to machismo. It reemerges in the

coda to the song, in which his former antagonism again inverts and becomes a plea for friendship

and sympathy:

So compadre, please do this for me

Compadre, please weep for me

Compadre, compadre

Please weep for me

The use of the word “compadre” suggests that the speaker is Latino, a possibility corroborated by

his switch from the precedent hailing appellation “Ringo” to “Gringo” in the introduction to the song’s final chorus. This implication potentially complicates an understanding of the protagonist’s social circumstance, suggesting that his marginalization due to corporeal difference

may be compounded by ethnic difference. In any case, it indicates that disability is but one

6 An alternate reading of the lyric could align this track to others in the Morrissey canon – “You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet Baby,” “We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful,” “You Knew I Couldn’t Last,” among others – in which the perils and shortcomings of success in the entertainment industry are explored by Morrissey. On such a reading, a certain identification between Morrissey (the successful pop star) and the diminutive protagonist in whose persona, as has been noted, he sings from a first-person perspective becomes apparent. That Morrissey deploys various figures of corporeal difference in order to speak indirectly about his own fraught, socially marginalized identities is a notion taken up in some detail in the next chapter. 158

dimension of social hierarchization; as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson notes, “the representational

systems of gender, race, ethnicity, ability, sexuality, and class mutually construct, inflect, and

contradict one another” (“Integrating” 258). “It’s Hard to Walk Tall When You’re Small”

provides a case in point.

I want to conclude this chapter, and build a bridge to the next, by considering “At

Amber,” a song that Morrissey released as the B-Side to his October 1990 single release

“Piccadilly Palare.” This issue date places it at approximately the midpoint of the releases of

“November Spawned a Monster” and “Mute Witness.” (The song received wider exposure when

released on the September 1998 compilation My Early Burglary Years.) I propose that the track

be regarded as a kind of addendum to “November,” one that elaborates another facet of

Morrissey’s conception of disability. The lyrics are addressed to an “invalid friend,” to whom

Morrissey is purported to be speaking via phone “from the foyer / Of the Sands Hotel.” It is a

dialogue in the second person voice, in which the “invalid” (an inexact designation which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary Online, could range from temporary illness to

permanent physical incapacitation; Colin Barnes furthermore notes that the term also contains

the pejorative sense of not being valid, of lacking authority and efficacy [21]) is referred to as

“you”; as such, the lyrics alternately construct the listener both as voyeuristic eavesdropper to a

conversation of which he or she is not part, as well as the addressee of Morrissey’s lyric – that is,

listeners are invited to identify as Morrissey’s invalid addressee.

Against an airy musical backdrop that feels light and agile despite its dense layering of

guitars (mimetically reproducing, perhaps, the sound of convivial banter surrounding him in the

environs he is about to describe), Morrissey’s voice sounds weary, lethargic and monotone; a

recurrent feature of the song’s melody is a movement toward rising pitch which frequently 159

resolves with a re-descent toward lower pitch, evoking a sense of reduced, depleted energy

incapable of sustaining the higher pitches. Morrissey details the mundane complaints of his

existence: being stuck in a hotel “where the men and the women are acquainted quite well” – an

understated acknowledgement of sexual profligacy which prompts Morrissey in the second verse

to amend his description of the hotel to a place “where the slime and the grime dwell.” Given

Morrissey’s longstanding reputation for celibacy and alienation from heteronormative romantic

couplings (Rogan Severed 210), Morrissey’s aversion to the dalliances in the environs to which

he has temporarily been transplanted is unsurprising. Moreover, given his reputation as an

abstainer (Rogan Severed 214-216), nor is his antipathy toward the “drunkards [who] keep on

drinking” – indulging in the sensual pleasures of intoxication. Other minor inconveniences disgruntle: “And oh my room is cold / I’m disputing the bill / I will sleep in my clothes”;

Morrissey wearily intones the last line as a faint gesture of defiance. Such ruminations culminate in the following curious lines:

And I cannot, or I do not

And oh, my room is cold

And I envy you never having to choose

To express envy for disabled embodiment, a condition abjected by cultural valorization of the normate body, is a remarkable sentiment, one that begs many questions. What is it that

Morrissey cannot, or does not do? Does the line reference his professed decision to be celibate?

If so, is Morrissey envying his invalid friend’s construction as asexual by cultural stereotypes of disability, a construction which renders any question of sexual agency on his (or her) part moot?

Or does Morrissey more generally covet what he perceives to be the serenity that the enforced 160

isolation of the stereotypical experience of disability would facilitate? These questions are

unanswered, perhaps unanswerable, but they agitate.

They agitate not only the song’s listener, but Morrissey’s disabled addressee within the lyrical diegesis as well, whose retort Morrissey reports with renewed vocal vigor over a seven- measure refrain (its iteration following Morrissey’ declaration of envy being the second and final of the song). The first, third, and fifth measures of this refrain receive added disruptive emphasis through the deployment of two sets of stressed triplets played by electric bass reinforced by cymbal crashes (musically representing, perhaps the sound of a phone receiver slamming down into its cradle as described in the lyrics). The second and fourth measures feature processed sounds that resemble nothing so much as howling wind ricocheting rapidly between the track’s right and left channels. Against this disconcerting musical backdrop, Morrissey allows his disabled friend to interject his/her (the gender is never specified) voice:

And you, my invalid friend

You slam the receiver when you say

“If I had your limbs for a day

I would steam away”

These lines are significant in that they permit this disabled character to articulate a voice of moral conscience, its might reinforced by the passage’s sonic aggression. However, by attributing such covetous sentiment to his disabled friend, Morrissey reenacts the ableist tradition of deploying the figure of disability in order to shore up the normalcy and superiority of the normate body. Moreover, the invalid friend’s deflection of Morrissey’s envy back at him by 161

expressing the rejected body’s desire to be transfigured into the normate body perhaps seems complicit in the cultural ideology of ability7.

The words do seem to affect Morrissey, who retreats in the song’s final verse from the

aspersions previously cast on his fellow hotel patrons: “It’s not lowlife,” he concedes, “it’s just

people having a good time.” The song’s lyric concludes with Morrissey extending words of

affinity toward his offended phone partner: “And oh my invalid friend / Oh, my invalid friend” –

the second iteration of the line features a pause before the word invalid, as if to underscore his or

her disjuncture for corporeal normativity – “In our different ways we are the same.” Morrissey

lingers on the “m” sound that caps the lyric, as if reluctant to relinquish or sever the sense of

connection he has just attempted to build. The final two measures of the musical passage then

play out, and the song terminates with a discomfiting shift to a minor key, as guitar and keyboard

ring out haunting, hanging notes that gradually fade until wiped away altogether by the sound of

a processed “whoosh.” The net effect is that, despite the decisiveness of Morrissey’s concluding

lyrical resolution, musically the song ends with a sense of uncertainty. It invites the listener to

query Morrissey’s final proposal. In what way is he like his invalid friend? Is it in their social

isolation? Do they both long for a different experience of the body – his friend for Morrissey’s

experience of “normal” mobility, Morrissey for the other patrons’ casual experience of sensual

pleasure and conjugation? Most important, how does Morrissey’s conception of disability

sustain the tension between difference and identity that the song’s concluding line proposes? It

is a tension, after all, encoded in the song’s very title; asked about its significance in a 1998 radio

7 It is worth noting that not all disabled individuals reject the prospect of medical cure as oppressive coercion toward normalization. Susan Wendell, who lives with myalgic encephalomyelitis, observes that while “the drive to find ‘cures’ for disabilities can be seen, by those who appreciate disabilities as differences, to be as much an attempt to wipe out difference as an effort to relieve suffering . . . I want to have more energy and less pain, and to have a more predictable body; about that there is no ambivalence. . . . Perhaps the best summary of my attitude toward ‘cure’ is this: I would joyfully accept a cure, but I do not need one” (83-84). 162 interview, Morrissey explained, “In England traffic lights are red, amber, and green . . . and amber is being in a state of flux, neither going nor stopping, it's somewhere in the middle”

(“KCXX Interview”). The song title therefore captures a state of liminality, of in-betweenness – between mobility and immobility, ability and disability, normativity and negativity; it indexes the pause that the lyrics’ concluding line posits between identification and difference. That tension will be explored further in the chapter that follows.

CONCLUSIONS

In this chapter I have sought to demonstrate that while Morrissey’s aim in his disability- themed songs may be to provoke an interrogation of cultural perceptions of disability and confront the violence of ableist culture, by invoking a range of hackneyed stereotypes and failing explicitly to either praise or condemn them, Morrissey inevitably opens up a space for their reinscription. With this interpretation I find myself sympathetic to the following argument made by Johnny Rogan:

As with so many songs in the Morrissey canon, from ‘Suffer Little

Children’ onwards, ‘November Spawned a Monster’ presents the

type of slippery ambiguities that the songwriter appears to relish.

In pop terms, this is a dangerous but courageous tactic, easily open

to misinterpretation. There will always be people who insist

‘November Spawned a Monster’ is a sick or offensive song, and

it’s no use telling them that their critical faculties are not

sophisticated enough. They have a point. In such circumstances

what Morrissey says in interviews about his intentions are only of 163

passing consequence. In the end, it is the song that matters and, for

some the use of the word ‘monster’ [is] proof enough that

Morrissey’s love of outrage outweighs whatever noble intentions

he may claim. (Albums 152)

Nabeel Zuberi makes a similar claim in his consideration of representations of race and

nationalism in Morrissey’s music:

As a studious fan I want to concede to Morrissey the escape clause

of irony – that he doesn’t really mean it, and he’s just provoking

the Brits to think about the past, juggling the images, sounds,

notions and potions of our collective memory. This is the

attraction of tricksters. Listening to the songs repeatedly suggests

that Morrissey is a ventriloquist, posing different voices against

each other. You’re never very sure which voice belongs to him.

On the other hand, the ambiguities of this kind of queer English

tricksterism also leave me frustrated. I sometimes feel that it’s

about bloody time the English got beyond irony as a device to deal

with their limited repertoire of the national. As much as an ironic

mode has the potential to critique certain versions of history, irony

can serve to evade realities and new possibilities as it takes apart

the same decaying body of national cultural concerns again and

again with its blunt scalpel. (64)

What Zuberi says about Morrissey’s discourse of race and nationalism applies equally well to

Morrissey’s representations of the disabled other – indeed, Zuberi’s concluding (and rather 164 graphic) surgical metaphor seems particularly apt to the disabling inscription of corporeal difference within an atomizing medical model. But in order to more fully understand the significance of Morrissey’s representations of disability, it is first necessary to appreciate his motivations for returning so frequently to the trope of disability in his work. These motivations comprise the subject of the next chapter.

165

CHAPTER V: AN INQUIRY INTO THE FUNCTIONS AND POLITICS OF MORRISSEY’S RECOURSE TO TROPES OF DISABILITY

Introduction

In a 1990 interview, journalist Len Brown, citing the fact that disabled figures had populated the lyrics of both “November Spawned a Monster” and “At Amber,” asked Morrissey whether this pair of songs had been inspired by a single, real-world referent. "No,” Morrissey replied, “if you're a genuine artist you have a very powerful . . . vision of most situations, whether or not they're painful, as in my case they most often are. I don't have to know people.

It's a matter of understanding many extreme situations in life. And if you see someone in what we oddly refer to as an unfortunate situation, someone who's wheelchair bound, if you're very perceptive and sensitive you can fully imagine the lifelong frustrations of constantly being discussed by other people, and constantly having people being irritatingly kind to you” (“Bona”).

Morrissey’s cavalier arrogation of the authority to speak on behalf of disabled persons here would undoubtedly be deemed problematic by those disabilities studies scholars who are

“[g]uided by the assumption that people with disabilities need to write their own stories in order to counteract the dehumanizing effects of social representations and attitudes. . . . Given the presupposition that the ‘able-bodied’ could never adequately dramatize the encounters between disability, personal experience, and ‘unaware’ social policies, what motivates these stories is the pressing need for true-life verification that disability provides a specific and distinct perspective of its own” (Mitchell and Snyder “Introduction” 9-10). Morrissey, as putatively able-bodied author of lyrics that lay assured claim to the legitimate enunciation of the experience of disability, emerges in this view as tin-earedly ableist in his artistry; despite implicating himself in a solidarity with disabled persons, he effectively reinscribes their silencing and marginalization 166

by presuming to voice their experiences without consultation. In the first chapter of this thesis I

suggested that the default action of the contemporary popular musicscape is to disavow disability. Morrissey is therefore noteworthy for his interest in deploying images of disability as both figure and ground in his apportionment of that musicscape. However, his professions of sympathetic comprehension notwithstanding, Morrissey becomes vulnerable to charges of exploitation when one recollects that “[w]hile everyday practical discourse is disturbed by

anomaly, aesthetic discourse revels in the shock of the new” (Silvers 230). With this precept in

mind, Morrissey’s eschewing of commercial in favor of artistic success – as articulated in his

assertion that “I don’t want plaudits for examining a new subject, but I will say that even coming

across a pop record with a reasonably unique situation is in itself interesting. . . . I never believed

that sitting on top of the pop arena was a nice place to be. . . . I think there’s always a danger in

trying to give an audience what it wants. I think it’s more interesting to give an audience

something it might not want” (Brown “Bona”) – lends credence to the inference that disability

figures so prominently in his work not because Morrissey has any particular concern for the lives

of real disabled persons, but rather because as a popular music subject matter, disability is

supremely novel. That this is politically problematic is neatly summed up by Susan Wendell’s

statement that “[i]t is not uncommon for a difference to be valued for being exotic and

interesting, even as the people who embody it or are associated with it are kept on the outskirts

of society” (66). To be sure, the jurisdiction of Morrissey’s artistic license in this realm of

disability representation might be somewhat recuperated were it demonstrable that in some way he could claim first-hand knowledge and experience of disabled subjectivity. It was this line of

reasoning that partly motivated my brief consideration in the first chapter of this thesis of

potential sites of Morrissey’s own non-normative corporeality (impaired eyesight, etc.) as 167 motivating factors behind his perennial recourse to images of disability. In this chapter I explore further the rationale(s) undergirding Morrissey’s interest in repeatedly revisiting figures of disability in his work. I simultaneously consider the political implications of the manner in which he treats disability.

Morrissey and the Invisible Disability of Depression

Although this study of disability representations in Morrissey’s work has followed the lead of most work in disability studies by privileging disability in its visible manifestations of non-normative corporeality, disability is, as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has noted, “an overarching . . . category that encompasses congenital and acquired physical differences, mental illness [emphasis added] and retardation, chronic and acute illnesses, fatal and progressive diseases, temporary and permanent injuries, and a wide range of bodily characteristics considered disfiguring, such as scars, birthmarks, unusual proportions, or obesity”

(Extraordinary 13). It thus behooves me to consider the pertinence of mental impairment to

Morrissey’s discourse of disability. Lennard Davis notes that while mental illness may become visible through its manifestation in unusual physical behaviors and communications, it “is by definition not related to the intactness of the body” (Enforcing 142), and therefore may elude detection in ways that other forms of disability do not; thus mental illness joins deafness, chronic fatigue, autism, diabetes, and dyslexia as one of a number of forms of “invisible disabilities”

(Siebers 100). Thus, if a credible claim to disabled subjectivity is to be ascribed to Morrissey, it need not be predicated on the basis of readily apparent impairment. As Davis reminds, however, the presence of mental illness may be traced through its communicative expression. In this regard, the morose character of many of Morrissey’s songs – for which the British press dubbed 168

him “The Pope of Mope” (Bret Scandal vii) – emerges as key. Mark Simpson pithily summarizes the reaction of many to the man’s musical saturninity: “Oh God, Morrissey . . . he’s soooo depressing” (Saint 141). The conclusion at which one might ineluctably arrive – that

Morrissey, as author of such dispiriting lyrics, must himself be depressed – is one that has been borne out not only by the professions of his intimates (Importance), but by Morrissey himself, who has openly confessed to experiencing bouts of depression at least as early as his teenage years (Rogan Severed 90, 97); its continuance into his adulthood leads biographer David Bret to characterize Morrissey’s life experience as one of “near-permanent depression” (Scandal 195).

Nor is Morrissey alleged to be “depressed in the colloquial sense of being merely unhappy”

(Reuning 55); rather his depression is limned in the clinical sense as a “debilitating illness” characterized by “major depressive episodes” attended by such “additional symptoms” as

“feelings of worthlessness or low self-esteem . . . recurrent thoughts of death with a specific plan for committing suicide. . . . withdrawal and hopelessness” (Reuning 55, 57). With these parameters in mind, an armchair diagnosis of clinical depression for Morrissey is aided by the singer’s admission to a bout of “deep depression” in the early 90s, and his acknowledgement

“that things had been so bad at one stage that he had not left the house for weeks” (Bret Scandal

201); then too, Len Brown writes that “[t]here had even been rumours of a suicide attempt in the mid-Nineties (Meetings 213).

This apparent experience of clinical depression perhaps accounts for the repeated references to sickness and illness throughout Morrissey’s oeuvre. To be sure, such terms are sometimes deployed in colloquial speech in order to signify weariness, as when Morrissey sings to the addressee of his 1995 solo track “The Operation,” “Everyone I know is sick to death of you,” or to the addressee of his 2008 single “All You Need Is Me,” “You bang your head against 169

the wall and say you’re sick of it all.” Occasionally, Morrissey’s references to sickness seem

hyperbolically deployed to denote general loathsomeness; thus Morrissey declares on the 1984

Smiths track “Rubber Ring” that “the passing of time / And all of its sickening crimes / Is

making me sad again,” while on the 1990 solo track “Journalists Who Lie” he decries members

of the press who “make their name / By spreading sickening lies.” Elsewhere Morrissey’s

allusions denote nausea, often resulting from the overconsumption of alcohol, as when Morrissey

instructs “drink, drink, drink and be ill tonight / From the one you left behind” on the 1987

Smiths track “Unhappy Birthday,” or when he sings ,“You’re drunker quicker and you’re sicker

even quicker” on the 1990 solo track “Tony the Pony.” But often Morrissey references sickness

and illness in order to describe the health of body and/or mind. “I’m so sick and tired, and I’m feeling very sick and ill today,” he sings on “What Difference Does It Make?” from The Smiths’

1984 eponymous debut LP. “You said I was ill / And you were not wrong,” he circumspectly avers on the 1984 Smiths track “These Things Take Time.” On the 1995 solo track “Southpaw,” which according to Johnny Rogan “reads like an exercise in self-therapy” (Albums 228),

Morrissey evokes the specter of depression with such lyrics as the following: “You were a boy before / You became a man / I don’t see the joy / . . . / A sick boy should be treated / So easily defeated.” But perhaps the most conspicuous treatment of sickness in Morrissey’s early oeuvre is to be found in the track “Still Ill” from The Smiths’ debut LP. Although the sickness referenced here by the word “ill” is never explicitly specified, one of the track’s lyrical passages

– “there are brighter sides to life / And I should know because I’ve seen them / But not very often” – suggests by its glumness that Morrissey may well have had depression in mind when penning the song (although another lyric – “Under the iron bridge we kissed / And although I ended up with sore lips / It just wasn’t like the old days anymore” – suggests that some form of 170

sexual dysfunction or loss of sexual appetite may instead be at issue). In any event, the refrain

“Am I still ill?,” followed by the baleful exclamation “Oh no!” registers not only the chronic

nature1 of Morrissey’s ailment and his displeasure at the same, but also the indeterminacy of the

boundary that separates the ill person from the well, the rejected body from the normate;

otherwise Morrissey would assert his illness with a declarative statement, not question it with an

interrogative. Moreover, while journalist Will Self argues that the lyrical passage “Does the

body rule the mind / Or does the mind rule the body / I dunno” serves to signify Morrissey’s

intellect by “encapsulating 200 years of philosophical speculation in a single line” (165), I

propose that understanding “Still Ill” as an exploration of the experience of depression

encourages different reading of these indecisive words, since clinical depression, understood “as

a breaking up of ‘normal’ body chemistry” (Davis Enforcing 142) – that is, as being based in the

neurochemistry of the body – facilitates the inference that the body presides over the mind in a

way that subverts the traditional view of the mind as separate from and superior to the body

(Wendell 86).

But it is not only in music that Morrissey has divulged his depression. Asked by

journalist David Keeps in a 1992 interview whether he suffered from depression, Morrissey gave

the following response:

Yes, I do. I am depressed most of the time. And when you’re

depressed, it is so enveloping that it actually does control your life,

you cannot [emphasis in original] overcome it, and you cannot

take advice. People trying to cheer you up become infuriating and

almost insulting. It’s all a part of that “pull-yourself-together”

1 The thematization of chronic sickness introduced by “Still Ill” was playfully reprised in the title of Morrissey’s 1992 music video compilation The Malady Lingers On. 171

approach, isn’t it? Depression is very, very powerful. You can’t

simply go to a nightclub and have a quick Miller draft light, or

whatever you call it, and come out of it.

Certain facets of Morrissey’s apparent disability in the form of depression – isolation,

helplessness, revulsion at others’ gestures toward succor – bear a striking resemblance to his

description of the experience of congenital deformity in “November Spawned a Monster,” while

his reference to the “‘pull-yourself-together’ approach” to self-cure acknowledges the stereotype

of the Disabled Person as Their Own Worst and Only Enemy, as discussed in the third chapter of

this thesis.

The inference to be made from all this is that Morrissey’s fascination with tropes of

physical disability stems from their capacity to render visible (at least in the imagination of the

listener) the experience of the kindred yet hidden disability that is the mental illness of clinical

depression. Susan Wendell has written that “it is hard to describe the invisible reality of

disability to others without feeling that you are constantly complaining and asking for sympathy”

(27); Morrissey may be seen to use the disabled figures of such songs as “November Spawned a

Monster,” “Mute Witness,” and “It’s Hard to Walk Tall When You’re Small” in order to render

in visual terms his own experience of chronic invisible disability.

To be sure, engaging in such a strategy is not without its ethical hazards. As Susan

Wendell has written, “we know that living with disabilities is different for people with different

disabilities, such as paraplegia and blindness, and different for people whose disabilities are

readily apparent compared to those whose disabilities can be hidden. . . . It is therefore important

not to assume that people with disabilities identify with all others who have disabilities or share a

single perspective on disability (or anything else)” (70). By rhetorically collapsing one variant 172 of mental disability (depression) with a variety of physical disabilities, as I am suggesting

Morrissey may be doing, important distinctions among the varieties of disability experience are necessarily overlooked; a nuanced knowledge, understanding, and appreciation of disability is threatened as a consequence. But as Wendell goes on to assert, “Nevertheless, much of the risk of obscuring differences among people with disabilities also comes from choosing categories upon which to build analyses or politics. . . . [A]ll categories mask some differences, although some categories mask fewer differences than others” (71). Therefore, even if Morrissey were to restrict his disability representation to the category of depression – the one on which, available sources suggest, he is most qualified to speak with the authority of personal experience – his articulation would be rendered from a position that could not be presumed to speak for all clinically depressed persons; for the category of “people with depression” masks such differences as gender, race, class, sexual identity, and age, to say nothing of the varieties and severities of depression that might be experienced. Individuals who occupy positions along these axes of identity different from those occupied by Morrissey himself have different experiences of the world, and different interpretations of whatever experiences they have. In short, the project of drawing boundaries of group identification is one shot through with multivalent political consequences. This issue will be taken up again below, but for the moment I wish to return to

Morrissey’s discussion of his own experience of depression. Specifically, I wish to consider a song in which Morrissey articulates his experience both of depression and of his subjection to medicinal regimes intended to cure it.

173

“Something Is Squeezing My Skull” and the Cognitive Authority of Medicine

In the same 1992 interview with David Keeps cited above, Morrissey, asked about his

feelings toward Prozac and lithium, declared, “I’ve tried them. A lot of extreme things happen to

you on them, which sometimes cannot seem to be worth it, because I don’t want something that’s

going to effect [sic] me in any way other than to perhaps cure me. I don’t want anything that’s

going to make me different. But having said all this, I function very well.” Nearly seventeen

years later, the sentiments expressed in this passage of the interview would be thematized in the song “Something Is Squeezing My Skull,” the opening track of Morrissey’s 2009 album Years of

Refusal. In keeping with the dominant tone of the album (the recommendation to “Play Very

Loud” appears on the back cover of the album, just below the producer credit and recording

location), “Skull” is a sonically raucous affair, replete with power chords churned out from

fuzzily distorted guitars, bashing drum work, and boisterously belted vocals. The aggressiveness

of the music can be seen to signify at multiple levels of meaning: as a reflection of the severity of

the illness that besets Morrissey as narrator; as a reflection of the harshness of the deleterious

effects that the medical interventions to which he is subject produce; and as a reflection of the

strength of Morrissey’s resistance against this medicinal regime imposed upon him. Morrissey’s

work of resistance can be understood as beginning with the song’s opening lyric. Over the

syncopated riffing of a metalesque guitar in a minor key that modulates into major tonality after

two measures, Morrissey declares “I’m doing very well / I can block out the present and the past

now.” Instead of being regarded as an unsolicited confession on Morrissey’s part, his lyric’s

profession of current wellbeing and an orientation toward the future can be understood as the

rejoinder to the unstated but inferable inquiry, “How are you feeling today?” His as-yet

unnamed interlocutor will by song’s end be revealed as his physician (referencing a series of 174 pharmaceuticals and therapies, Morrissey implicitly divulges his addressee’s identity via his repeated protests of “don’t gimme anymore” in the song’s dramatic final minute). In this light, it is worth noting an observation made by musicologist Maria Cizmic on the clinical encounter:

. . . [T]he generic question: How are you feeling? [i]n daily

conversational practice . . . often functions as a convention of

address rather than as an actual line of inquiry. In the context of

illness and hospitalization, the question’s casualness can become

an ironic “feigned solicitude”. . . . At the same time, though, this

question can open a crucial door to address how someone feels

[and] highlights the absurdly large epistemological gap between

those who feel pain and those who do not. Even doctors and

nurses, the very people who study and treat diseased bodies and

who know on a certain level even more than [the patient] what is

going on her own body, have severely limited access to the actual

physical sensations of her flesh. (27)

That is, the response to the question “how are you feeling?” has the potential to constitute what

Cizmic calls an “autopathography” (24). This is a genre of personal illness narrative whose value resides partly in its ability to “critique the medical establishment and . . . medical master narrative that privileges doctors’ authority, medical jargon, technology, and the unrelenting search for a cure” by counterposing “a way for individuals to reclaim their physical experiences in their own voices. . . .The ameliorative response to the medical establishment’s master narrative is an attention to patients’ voices and bodies” (Cizmic 24-25). “Something Is

Squeezing My Skull” can thus be understood as an autopathography in music. Through it, 175

Morrissey seeks to assert the validity of his own voice and experience over and against what

Susan Wendell calls “the cognitive authority of medicine in the doctor-patient encounter” which

“gives far more weight to the doctor’s metaphysical stance, undermining the epistemic confidence of patients in the importance of their bodily experiences. When that happens, patients cease to expect acknowledgment of their subjective suffering or help in living with it.

This can leave them not only isolated with their experience but feeling obliged to discount or

ignore it, alienating them further from their own bodies” (120).

In the song’s second verse, Morrissey more stridently proclaims the authority of his own

voice. “I’m doing very well,” he once more asserts, adding, with a hint of prideful

accomplishment, “it’s a miracle I even made it this far.” The line that follows is a somewhat

startling and cryptic non-sequitur: “The motion of taxis excite me / When you peel it back and

bite me.” A moment’s reflection unpacks the sexual connotations of the line, conjuring as it does

the image of backseat fellatio (presumably the “you” in this line refers then to someone other than the physician otherwise being addressed in the song’s lyrics). But the covertness of the language here, which clearly refers, whatever its specific denotation, to the experience of

embodiment (“motion,” “bite”), has political implications, inasmuch as it works to reclaim the

physical sensations that Morrissey, figured here as patient, undergoes. The effect is to invert the

normal doctor-patient power relation; here it is not the physician engaging in the “neoplastic

subterfuge” (Cassuto 120) of arcane medical jargon in order to mystify the patient into

disciplined subjugation; rather, it is Morrissey’s own occult utterance which keeps the putative

omniscience of his physician/interlocutor at bay.

Elsewhere in the song Morrissey’s staging of resistance is less understated. The lyrics

that conclude the introductory verse, for instance, assert, “I know by now you think I should 176

have straightened myself out / Thank you, drop dead.” The first half of this line not only belies

the veracity of Morrissey’s original claim to wellbeing but also acknowledges the pernicious

notion that normalizing oneself away from disability is an uncomplicated matter of readjustment,

the view which finds expression in the stereotype of the Disabled Person as Their Own Worst

and Only Enemy. Morrissey’s indirect confession here of continuing illness controverts the

cognitive authority of medicine and its quest for control of the body, while the implicit

stereotype of the Disabled Person as Their Own Worst and Only Enemy seems incompatible

with medical establishment’s assumption that its heroic interventions alone can produce desired

bodies free from illness, disability, and death (Wendell 93-94, 121). These dual antagonisms,

however, achieve resolution through the premise that when healing practices fail in their efforts

to normalize the rejected body, responsibility for the negative body devolves to the patient, who

is suspected of not wanting to get well (Wendell 97-98). Bristling against such inculpation,

Morrissey seeks temporary relief via his curt dismissal of his interlocutor with the proposal of his or her immediate death; musically, the minor key tonalities achieve parallel relief via the song’s modulation to the bright G major chord that opens its chorus.

“Something is squeezing my skull,” Morrissey sings here, “Something I can barely describe / There is no hope in modern life.” (In a subsequent iteration of the chorus, the latter two lines are amended to “Something I can’t fight / No true friends in modern life.”) With this chorus, Morrissey attempts to articulate the experience of mental impairment, the difficulty of which is directly acknowledged by the lyric (“barely describe”) and indirectly by the inexactness of his language (“something”). Given the misguided cultural tradition of understanding mental illness as a consequence of the “fragmented nature of ‘modern’ life” (Davis Enforcing 142), one might reasonably conclude that the sensations of cranial pressure to which he endeavors to give 177

voice are a symptom of Morrissey’s own sickness, presumably depression. However, the middle

eight goes on to suggest otherwise. Here, the drum abandons its erstwhile raucousness to play a

more subdued pattern, while electric guitar and bass limit themselves to one strum or pluck per

measure. In a comparatively more restrained voice framed by mostly minor-key harmonies,

Morrissey sings the following lines:

Diazepam (that’s Valium)

Temazepam

Lithium

HRT, ECT

How long must I stay on this stuff?

Morrissey’s enumeration of a list of medicines and treatments prescribed to him discloses these to be the actual source of his discomforting sensations. His aside to the listener – “that’s

Valium” – tenders the more widely circulated trade name of the antianxiety medication

Diazepam (Panksepp 500) and serves as an indirect acknowledgement of the confusing terminology pointedly deployed by the medical industry. Temazepam is another antianxiety drug that also alleviates insomnia (Maddocks et al. 115, 117) while lithium is commonly used to treat both the manic and depressive episodes of bipolar disorder (Delgado and Zarkowski 253-

255). As if these signifiers were not, with their exotic sounding names, sufficiently alienated

from the patient’s epistemic standpoint, Morrissey concludes his list with two acronyms whose

truncated signifiers further abstract medical technology from the patient’s material reality. ECT, or electroconvulsive therapy, is the electrical inducement of seizures for the therapeutic effect it has been shown to have in treating certain disorders including depression (Nahas et al. 522-525).

HRT stands for “Hormone Replacement Therapy,” and its mention here in “Skull” introduces 178 themes of sex and gender into the song. For men with low levels of testosterone, testosterone administration has been shown to enhance both mood and sexual function (Swaab, Kruijver, and

Hestiantoro 48). HRT is more closely associated, however, with the alleviation of depression in menopausal women via the administration of estrogen (Marcus et al. 44-47) and with the administration of estrogen, progesterin, or progesterone to postmenopausal women to replace the hormones the ovaries no longer produce (Hormones 378). HRT is also used with transgendered and transsexual persons in order to produce the secondary sexual characteristics of the desired gender; intersex persons may receive HRT in order to confirm or alter the gender that they have been assigned (Hormones 378). By making cryptic reference to HRT, Morrissey tacitly evokes all these associations, reinscribing once again the articulations among disability (in this case, mental illness), gender nonconformity, and sexual non-normativity, all of them subject to the policing activity of medical authority.

One imagines that Morrissey’s recital of his history of medical regimens invokes a series of attempts at normalization, not a constellation of simultaneous efforts. Such a reading accords well with Susan Wendell’s observation that “People with disabilities or incurable illnesses often find that long after they have accepted the conditions of their bodies, their friends and acquaintances want them to continue looking for cures. . . . frequently because of a frantic desire not to be forced to believe that the body cannot be controlled. . . . To turn down a suggestion is to risk the judgement that you do not want to get well” (Wendell 97). The rhetorical query with which Morrissey concludes the middle eight – “How long must I stay on this stuff?” – registers his refusal of this oppressively ensnaring logic. The concluding minute of the song registers that refusal more forcefully. The band resumes its former boisterousness as Morrissey half sings, half chants his protests: “Don’t gimme anymore / . . . / Please don’t gimme anymore / . . . / You 179

swore you would not gimme anymore / . . . / Oh, you swore, you swore, you swore / You swore

you would not gimme anymore, gimme anymore, gimme anymore, gimme anymore, gimme

anymore, gimme anymore, gimme anymore, gimme anymore.” As Morrissey’s pleas grow more

insistent, so does his musical accompaniment. His band mates begin shouting “hey!” on the

second and fourth beat of each measure, lending a punk feel to the song’s conclusion; the drums

transition first into drum rolls, and then into bashing thrashes on each beat of the measure. The

forcefulness of Morrissey’s delivery, and that of his musical accompanists, indexes the strength of his opposition to the medical model of disability and the cognitive authority of medicine; the song concludes with a final drum paradiddle punctuated with a cymbal crash, after which a final distorted guitar chord rings out, accompanied by the surprisingly triumphant sound of synthesized strings.

Disability and Individual Isolation

It must be openly acknowledged, however, that the subject of mental illness comprises

only one possible motivating factor impelling Morrissey’s repeated use of disability imagery in

his work – one of the more exculpating factors that can be cited, to be sure, but perhaps not the

most persuasive. In much the same way as in the first chapter of this thesis, where I excavated

the Morrissey-Sheridan Whiteside nexus in order to establish the early provenance of

Morrissey’s discourse of disability, I want now to turn to the first in a series of letters that

Morrissey wrote in the early 1980s to a Scottish pen-pal named Robert Mackie. The two had

met by way of a “Musical Tastes” advertisement in the British music weekly Sounds (Bret

Scandal (24), and in his first undated missive to Mackie, Morrissey had the following to say: 180

Dear person,

So nice to know there's another soul out there, even if it is in

Glasgow. Does being Scottish bother you? Manchester is a lovely

place, if you happen to be a bedridden deaf mute. I'm unhappy,

hope you're unhappy too.

In poverty,

Steven (“Morrissey Letters”)

The reference to “bedridden deaf mute” here indicates once again that the trope of disability was found appealingly useful by Morrissey at an early juncture in his career. However, in this context it can hardly be argued that Morrissey is invoking a disabled figure for any politically progressive purpose. Rather, Morrissey’s words here seem to unironically invoke a number of the disability stereotypes described in chapter three of this thesis, including the Disabled Person as Atmosphere or Curio, the Disabled Person as an Object of Ridicule, and the Disabled Person as Incapable of Participating Fully in Community Life. This latter stereotype is of particular interest in the context of Morrissey’s letter to Mackie, since Morrissey seems to be suggesting that his native Manchester has little to offer in the way of interest, and that the city is thus most suited to those who anyway are, according to the stereotype, unable to commune properly with their physical and social environments. In that respect, this private utterance links up with

Morrissey’s more public appropriation of the Sheridan Whiteside pseudonym – whose disabling

injury, it will be remembered, transpires in the distressingly provincial stopover town of Mesalia,

Ohio. (It links up as well to his sporting of the hearing aid prop beginning in the early days of

The Smiths, since that device signified, of course, the deafness that Morrissey references here in

this early missive.) In this light, then, it is well worth noting that dissatisfaction with his 181

environs has been a recurring theme in Morrissey’s work. It has already been mentioned, for

instance, in chapter three’s concluding discussion of the explicitly disability-themed track “At

Amber,” where Morrissey decries the inebriation and sexual profligacy of his fellow hotel

patrons. In the 1984 Smiths track “Nowhere Fast,” moreover, Morrissey laments, “Each

household appliance / Is like a new science / In my town,” registering the uncouthness of his

home ground in a way that echoes the sentiment expressed in the above-cited correspondence

with Robert Mackie. Similar sentiment crops up as well in the 1988 solo track “The Ordinary

Boys,” which finds Morrissey excoriating “ordinary boys / Happy going nowhere / Just around

here, in their rattling cars” and “ordinary girls / Never seeing further / Than the cold, small

streets that trap them”; Morrissey follows these derogations of his social and physical

environment by soliloquizing, “you were so different / You had to say no / When those empty

fools / Tried to change you / And claim you for the lair / Of their ordinary world.” Morrissey’s

recurrent self-figuration as an outsider and outcast mismatched with his environment – a

perennial displacement pithily summed up on the 2006 solo track “On the Streets I Ran” by his

plaintive query, “Oh, dear God, when will I be where I should be?” – helps account for the

appeal that the trope of disability held for the singer, stereotypically signifying as it does the

sequestering mismatch between the individual and his or her surroundings. Indeed, Mitchell and

Snyder note that “[w]hat stands out in the analyses of the negative-image school is the

importance of plots that emphasize individual isolation as the overriding component of a disabled life” (Narrative 19). My analysis in chapter three of Morrissey’s disability-themed

songs and videos – particularly “November Spawned a Monster,” but also “Mute Witness” and

“It’s Hard to Walk Tall When You’re Small” – identified recurrent thematization of alienation 182

both consistent with this assertion by Mitchell and Snyder and supportive of the analysis just

elaborated.

Nation, Religion, Class, Gender, and Sexuality: Disability as Metaphor for Social Abjection

The cause of the isolation that pervades the Morrissey persona as it has developed throughout his quarter-century career exists along numerous axes, to be sure. One source of this isolation can be ascribed to Morrissey’s national and religious identity. That is to say, his

parents, Peter and Elizabeth Morrissey, were native Dubliners who had emigrated from Catholic

Ireland a few years before Steven’s birth due to that country’s worsening economic recession,

inflation, and unemployment. While employment may have been forthcoming upon the

Morrisseys’ arrival in England, the Mancunians among whom they installed themselves “all too frequently betrayed a brutally undisguised racism” against the influx of Irish immigrants, sometimes advertising accommodations and employment opportunities with the dehumanizing proscription “No Irish, No Coloureds, No Dogs” (Rogan Alliance 32). In the context of such hostility and overt prejudice, Irish émigrés newly arrived in Manchester cultivated and maintained close-knit, mutually nurturing bonds with one another, a strategy of self-preservation fortified in Morrissey’s youth as additional family members on both his mother’s and father’s sides continued to leave Ireland and settle in Manchester (Rogan Alliance 36). This childhood model of Anglo-Irish bonding would later be replicated within The Smiths musical group itself, consciously or unconsciously: that is, following some initial experimentation with personnel, in its final configuration, the members of The Smiths all shared a common identity as “the children of Irish Catholic migrants” (Zuberi 9). Moreover, describing the band’s relational dynamics in a

1984 television interview, Morrissey limned a portrait of intragroup solidarity counterposed 183 against an inimical external world homologous to that of the immigrant enclave he had known as a youth in Manchester, proclaiming that Marr, Rourke, and Joyce constituted his “only friends” in the music industry and, in fact, in the world (Still Ill).

It is reasonable to conjecture that the abiding but never-sated quest for attachment and belonging that figures so prominently within Morrissey’s work owes something to this seminal experience of transnationality and exile, this germinal condition of young Morrissey’s nuclear and extended families. Morrissey would later confess the importance of this aspect of his background to a music critic from the Irish Times:

I grew up in a strong Irish community. I was very aware of being

Irish and we were told that we were quite separate from the scruffy

kids around us – we were different to them. . . . It was always odd

later on with the Smiths when I was described as being ‘extremely

English’ because other people would tell me I looked Irish, I

sounded Irish and had other tell-tale signs. (qtd. in Rogan Albums

274)

The experience of growing up with the dual (and detectable) stigmas of Irishness and

Catholicism in Protestant England may well have informed Morrissey’s use of figures of disability, because in them Morrissey likely discerned figures of utmost social abjection; indeed,

Mitchell and Snyder have characterized disability as “the master trope of human disqualification” (Narrative 3). Their blunt scholarly assertion is not irrelevant to my own observation that Morrissey is concerned at multiple junctures in his lyrical output to assert (or question) is own humanity. For instance, the 1985 Smiths single “How Soon Is Now?” features a refrain which asserts “I am human and I need to be loved / Just like everybody else does.” 184

Moreover, on the 1986 Smiths single “Bigmouth Strikes Again,” in which the lyricist addresses

the controversy inspired by his not-infrequent incendiary pronouncements in the press, Morrissey

asserts “I’ve got no right to take my place with the human race.”2

As a “master trope of human disqualification,” however, images of disability are

empowered with the versatility to act as proxies for the articulation of a variety of forms of social abjection. Nationality and religion have already been identified as two forms of social abjection relevant to Morrissey, given his family’s Irish Catholic background in the context of Anglican Manchester. Another form of social abjection pertains to

Morrissey’s class background. Morrissey grew up in a working-class household (Rogan

Severed 36), and in songs and interviews Morrissey has continued to acknowledge his class origins. Indeed, Morrissey has opined that the project of popular music is steeped in a working-class ethos:

I find people who’re quite artistic and creative crawl from dreadful

conditions, where[as] people who’re cushioned in life tend not to

produce anything dramatically artistic. To me popular music is

still the voice of the working class, collective rage in a way, though

seldom angst ridden. But it does really seem like the one sole

opportunity for someone from a working class background to step

2 This lyric is followed with the observation, “Now I know how Joan of Arc felt / As the flames rose to her Roman nose / And her hearing aid started to melt.” This lyric links Morrissey’s felt subhumanity with both disability (the reference to a hearing aid works to figure Morrissey, who had become famous for wearing the prosthetic, as disabled martyred saint) and androgyny (that is, Morrissey, biologically male, likens himself to Joan of Arc, biologically female; moreover, film studies scholar Robin Blaetz, in the introduction to her study of representations of Joan of Arc in American cinema during wartime, describes the “virgin warrior” as having “crossed and blurred the boundaries between male and female behavior . . . thus reveal[ing] the artificiality and permeability of the lines delineating sexual difference” [9, 29]).

185

forward and have their say. It’s really the last refuge for articulate

but penniless humans. (Kopf 48)

Given this assertion, and inasmuch as the project of popular music is one in which

Morrissey has himself of course been engaged, it comes as little surprise that working-

class imagery recurs throughout his oeuvre. Nabeel Zuberi was moved to remark in 2001 that “Morrissey’s particular fascination with the white English working class can be charted through record sleeves, songs, videos, and the visuals of his gigantic concert stage backdrops” (35). And in the years since Zuberi’s pronouncement, Morrissey’s preoccupation with his working class roots has continued unabated. His 2006 solo track

“On the Streets I Ran” found him asserting that “a working-class face glares back / At me from the glass,” a lyric that registers his continuing affiliation with the working class despite decades of pop stardom. Then too, his 2008 single “All You Need Is Me” (which was also included on his 2009 album release Years of Refusal) finds the singer recollecting (with a degree of apparent autobiographical dishonesty, both with respect to his own youthful corpulence and the degree of his family’s destitution) that “I was a small, fat child in a welfare house.” But some of Morrissey’s most explicit and impassioned articulations of his experience of the social abjection of the working class have been reserved for interviews.

In a 1999 article in The Irish Times, Morrissey reflected on the “basically evil and brutal” education he had received from Manchester’s St. Mary’s Secondary School. “All

I learnt was to have no self-esteem and to feel ashamed without knowing why. It’s part of being working class, the pathetic belief that somebody else, somewhere knows better than you do and knows what’s best for you. You’re supposed to grow up blindly 186 respecting the police and the judicial system. It’s part of keeping the working class in their place” (Boyd). Nor, in Morrissey’s view, had his social abjection due to class affiliation subsided with adulthood, celebrity, and wealth. In the same interview,

Morrissey reflects on the 1994 court case in which ex-Smiths drummer Mike Joyce had successfully sued Morrissey and Marr for a higher percentage of royalties from sales of

Smiths recordings. Still smarting at Justice John Weeks’s characterization of him as

“devious, truculent, and misleading,” Morrissey states, “What he said is on record for all time, regardless of what I do in my life: if I’m ever sued in my life in the future, all people will have to do is refer to this judge’s words and I will lose all . . . I was working class and I was made to feel like a peasant” (Boyd).

However, it is important to note that Morrissey has not always limned himself as so cozily ensconced as a member of the working class. In a 1984 interview with Ian

Birch, for instance, Morrissey discusses his longstanding and well-known admiration for the Victorian wit Oscar Wilde: “It’s a total disadvantage to care about Oscar Wilde, certainly when you come from a working class background. It’s total self-destruction almost. My personal saving grace at school was that I was something of a model athlete.

I’m sure if I hadn’t been, I’d have been sacrificed in the first year” (14). This disclosure suggests that masculine athleticism worked as a marker of virility that compensated for some manner of lack that would have otherwise worked to deleterious effect in

Morrissey’s life in a working-class milieu. That the lack in question is the effete sexuality implied by Morrissey’s appreciation of Oscar Wilde is indicated by the words that immediately precede the above-cited quote: “He [Wilde] married, rashly had two children and almost immediately embarked on a love affair with a man. He was sent to 187

prison for this” (14). Later in the same interview, Morrissey expanded on his own

performative identification with Oscar Wilde, underscoring the latter’s incongruity in the

heterosexist context of a particular historical moment: “as I became a Smith, I used

flowers because Oscar Wilde always used flowers. He once went to the Colorado salt

mines and addressed a mass of miners there. He started the speech with, ‘Let me tell you

why we worship the daffodil.’ Of course, he was stoned to death” (14).

Morrissey’s own ambiguous gender and sexuality constitute well-trod if still

unsettled ground,3 and it is unnecessary to rehearse their outlines here in any detail (to do

so would be beyond the scope of the present project in any case). But a broad portrait is not out of order. As early as a 1983 interview with Dave McCullough, Morrissey expressed his attitude toward gender in the following way: “I’m very interested in gender [emphasis in original]. I feel I’m a kind of prophet for the fourth sex. The third sex, even that has been done and it’s failed. . . . It sounds trite in print but it’s something close to ‘men’s liberation’ that I desire. . . . I just want something different. . . . I’m bored with men and I’m bored with women. All this sexual segregation that goes on, even in

rock ‘n’ roll, I really despise it” (17). Later, in a 1985 article titled “Morrissey Answers

Twenty Questions,” the artist, asked whether he is gay, responds in part, “I don’t

recognize such terms as heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual and I think it’s important that

there’s someone in pop music who’s like that. These words do great damage, they

confuse people and they make people feel unhappy so I want to do away with them” (12).

3 At least, this statement is true of the popular press; Mark Simpson’s Saint Morrissey: A Portrait of This Charming Man by an Alarming Fan includes a particularly insightful discussion of Morrissey’s gender and sexuality discourse from a non-academic perspective. Scholarly work on this aspect of Morrissey’s music and persona, and on Morrissey generally, remains scant. The chapter on Morrissey in Stan Hawkins’s Settling the Pop Score: Pop Texts and Identity Politics is worth consulting vis à-vis Morrissey’s gender and sexual politics, as is, to a lesser degree, the essay “The Smiths: Repressed (But Remarkably Dressed)” by Julian Stringer. 188

Morrissey’s resistance to conventional gender and sexual categories found

expression not only in his interviews but in his art as well. His youthful obsession with

the 70s proto-punk cross-dressing band The New York Dolls – whose “fuck you gender-

fuck . . . was troubling and transgressive precisely because it wasn’t neatly explained in

either a commercial or a political sense” (Simpson Saint 76) – was echoed in Morrissey’s own donning of an outsized woman’s blouse in the early days of The Smiths (Bret

Scandal 39). Moreover, while his lyrics frequently address questions of romance, gender

is seldom specified. “The lyrics I write are specifically genderless,” Morrissey has asserted, “I don’t want to leave anybody out” (qtd. in Bret Scandal 40). Hence the

preponderance of ambiguously gendered names is Morrissey’s songs: “Oh Glenn, don’t

come to the house tonight / Because there’s somebody here who really, really loves you,”

he sings in The Smiths’ 1987 track “Death at One’s Elbow,” while on his 2006 solo

single “In The Future When All’s Well” he pleads, “Lee, please stand up and defend me.”

In contrast to these examples, however, in one of his lyrics, Morrissey deliberately and playfully confuses gender identities – the 1987 Smiths single “Sheila Take a Bow”:

Take my hand and off we stride

You're a girl and I'm a boy

Take my hand and off we stride

I'm a girl and you're a boy

Not coincidentally, the cover artwork for this particular single featured a photograph of the transsexual Warhol star Candy Darling on its cover. “To be able to inflict Candy

Darling on the record-buying public was a perfect example of my very dangerous sense

of humour,” Morrissey subsequently recalled (qtd. in Bret Scandal 85). 189

Morrissey’s ambiguous gender and unspecified sexuality (a thorny issue somewhat sidestepped by the singer’s years of avowed celibacy [Simpson Saint 3]) would be eccentric (in the etymological sense, outside the center) in most any social context, but is certainly so in the context of Morrissey’s working-class background.

Morrissey’s marginalizing gender and sexual politics afford the artist yet another reason to deploy images of disability in order to articulate his sense of estrangement from the social. The trope of disability acquires even greater utility in this regard when one recollects that a frequently deployed stereotype of disability entails the figuration of the

Disabled Person as Sexually Abnormal.4 Disability is equated in the cultural imaginary with physical lack; so too of course is female corporeality, which psychoanalysis identifies, after all, as a castrated male body. Because femaleness is thus discursively linked with disability, to speak of disabled female sexuality is to speak in redundancies.

(It is interesting to note that the corporeal figures who populate Morrissey’s songs and videos – “November Spawned a Monster,” “Mute Witness,” “Pregnant for the Last

Time,” “You’re the One for Me, Fatty” – are predominantly female.) Disabled male sexuality, on the other hand, resonates with themes of emasculation. Indeed, as scholars have noted, “[d]isability is . . . characteristically linked with effeminacy.” (Recall the discussion in my fourth chapter of compensatory hypermasculinity in “It’s Hard to Walk

Tall When You’re Small.”) Moreover, as Paul Longmore observes, “[m]ore than one

4 In this regard Morrissey’s music finds a precedent in twentieth-century opera fandom. Poet and cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum has observed that from the 1930s through the 1960s, the American classical musical magazine Opera News constructed “[t]he implied or ideal listener[s] of the Metropolitan Opera Saturday afternoon broadcasts” as “the crippled, the infirm, the shut-in, and the pathetically lonely” (76). He adds that “[s]ince gays were considered sick until quite recently it’s not too big a leap to imagine that when Opera News presented a sick person as the Met broadcast’s ideal audience, that sick community included gays and lesbians” (78). Indeed, Koestenbaum notes that “[i]mages of outcasts – tomboys, sissies, nerds – fill the pages of Opera News” (79). The nexus of music, disability, and non-normative sexuality in mid-century operatic discourse would be echoed decades later in Morrissey’s disability discourse. 190 male character with a disability refers to himself as ‘only half a man’” (73). This latter remark is, of course, very pertinent to an artist whose “quasi-autobiographical” 1987 composition “Half a Person” finds its young male protagonist traveling to London and checking into not the YMCA, but rather the YWCA (Rogan Albums 81).

Tropes of disability derive a large part of their appeal for Morrissey no doubt on account of their utility for expressing gender and sexual concerns; this can be seen explicitly in “November Spawned a Monster,” particularly in lyrics describing its disabled protagonist as “a symbol of where mad, mad lovers must pause and draw the line” and its dubious querying, “if the lights were out could you even bear / To kiss her full on the mouth, or anywhere?” But it is interesting to note the ways in which elsewhere Morrissey’s rhetoric of gender and sexual identity resonates with his rhetoric of disability. By way of illustration, let me begin with a quote culled from Morrissey’s

June 1986 interview with Ian Pye for the NME:

“I wanted to say this to you,” he says slowly in a tone of

confidentiality. “I always thought my genitals were the result of

some crude practical joke. I remember an NME interview in the

very early 1970s – it was Gary Glitter. It concluded with the

remark 'the constant reminder that there's something between his

legs.' And I thought it might be quite fitting to end this with . . .

the constant reminder that there's absolutely nothing between his

legs!”

Morrissey’s remark that his “genitals were the result of some crude practical joke” has been much quoted in subsequent years. (Morrissey added an indirect gloss to this assertion when in a 191

1991 with Len Brown he asserted that “I’ve always felt closer to transsexuality than anything

else” [“Astonish”].) However, this was only a slightly more provocatively terse expression of a

sentiment that had been thematized in The Smiths’ 1984 track “Pretty Girls Make Graves.” Here

Morrissey describes a seaside stroll with a carnally ravenous female whose sexual aggression

vis-à-vis Morrissey’s own demure corporeal insecurities (“she’s too rough and I’m too delicate”)

inverts conventional gender roles. Certain lyrical passages circumspectly intimate (through the innuendo of “rise” in particular) that Morrissey as narrator is marked by sexual impairment, dysfunction, or insufficiency:

I'm not the man you think I am

And Sorrow's native son

He will not rise for anyone

And pretty girls make graves

I could have been wild and I could have been free

but Nature played this trick on me5

The words that conclude the above-cited passage, citing Mother Nature as trickster, prefigure

Morrissey’s 1986 interview remark regarding his sexual organs being cosmic subterfuge;6 both in turn prefigure the ascription of blame made by the disabled protagonist of “November

Spawned a Monster” for the “frame of useless limbs” with which she has been endowed: “Jesus made me, so Jesus save me.” And all these utterances in turn foretoken Morrissey’s thematization of frustrated sexual desire on his 2004 single “I Have Forgiven Jesus.” That song’s lyrics echo those of “November” in bringing together themes of blameless youth, non-

5 Johnny Rogan speculates that this line constitutes “a possible paraphrase of the words uttered by a heart-stricken homosexual barber in the groundbreaking 1961 film Victim” (Albums 25). If Rogan’s archaeology is accurate, the intertextuality adds double resonance to the theme of sexual non-normativity here. 6 The remark also resonates with the lyrical passage “I look at yours, you laugh at mine” from the 1984 Smiths track “Miserable Lie.” 192 functional body parts, social and amorous abjection, and divine culpability, as the passages transcribed below illustrate:

I was a good kid

I wouldn’t do you no harm

......

But Jesus hurt me

When he deserted me, but

I have forgiven Jesus

For all the desire

He placed in me when there’s nothing I can do

With this desire

......

Why did you give me so much desire

When there is nowhere I can go

To offload this desire?

......

Why did you stick me in

Self-deprecating bones and skin

Jesus, do you hate me?

Morrissey’s 1992 single “Tomorrow,” like “I Have Forgiven Jesus,” addresses the topic of frustrated desire (while simultaneously evoking, in the manner of “How Soon Is Now?” and

“Bigmouth Strikes Again,” cited above, the question of one’s identity as human):

Tomorrow, will it really come? 193

And if it does come, will I still be human?

All I ask of you is one thing that you never do

Will you put your arms around me?

In a later lyrical passage of the song, Morrissey’s thwarted desires are expressed as a form of

physical suffering which calls to mind the conventional rhetoric of disability as pain:

Ah, the pain in my arms

Oh, the pain in my legs

Through my shiftless body

Pointedly, during various performances of this song during his 1992 Your Arsenal tour and his

2007-2008 Greatest Hits tour, Morrissey amended this passage’s phrase “shiftless body” to

“useless body” (“Tomorrow – lyrics”), once again aligning a song about frustrated physical

desire to one about disability (by echoing, that is, the “useless limbs” of “November Spawned a

Monster.”)7

Morrissey’s Disability Discourse: Metaphorical Opportunism?

To be sure, one might well ponder these associative chains that link Morrissey’s rhetoric

of gender and sexual identity to his rhetoric of disability and conclude that Morrissey exploits

disability by invoking it as a proxy through which to articulate his own gender and sexual concerns, obscuring disability’s real self by arrogating it as a “master trope of human

disqualification” (Mitchell and Snyder Narrative 3). Such an assessment would not be new to disability studies. As philosopher Anita Silvers has written, “[a] signature thesis of disability

7 The anxiety toward intimate physical contact which is expressed in such songs as “Pretty Girls Make Graves,” “I Have Forgiven Jesus,” and “Tomorrow” is also alluded to in the 1987 Smiths track “I Keep Mine Hidden,” where it is punningly linked not to physical but to mental disability: Morrissey sings here of “a past where to be ‘touched’ meant to be ‘mental.’” 194

studies is that art inherently appropriates and exploits the figure of disability. Visual, literary and

dramatic art that portrays disabled people is charged by disability studies scholars with using

disability symbolically to signify something other than itself, and thus with diverting attention

from disability in order to hide it. . . . [I]mpairment is veiled by being treated as broadly

symbolic of disempowerment . . . of all those, whether or not impaired, whom the dominant

society excludes and oppresses” (232-233). (Silvers fails to cite music as a creative realm in

which this problematic stratagem can be deployed, but Morrissey’s work provides a site where

precisely this phenomenon can be observed.) Among the most outspoken proponents of the view

Silvers cites are David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder. In their introduction to the edited

volume The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability, these scholars argue that

“[o]ther than in autobiography, disability seldom has been explored as a condition or experience

in its own right; instead disability’s psychological and bodily variations have been used to

metaphorize nearly every social conflict outside of its own ignoble predicament in culture” (12).

This “history of metaphorical opportunism” (“Introduction” 17), Mitchell and Snyder argue,

eventuates in what they call “the representational double bind of disability. While disabled

populations are firmly entrenched on the outer margins of social power and cultural value, the disabled body also serves as the raw material out of which other socially disempowered communities make themselves visible. . . . In fact, once the bodily surface is exposed as the

phantasmatic façade that disguises the workings of patriarchal, racist, heterosexist, and upper

class norms, the monstrous body itself is quickly forgotten” (“Introduction” 6).

Such criticisms seem at first consideration to be wholly appropriate to a discussion of

disability representation in Morrissey’s oeuvre. That his disability-themed songs traffic in

clichés and stereotypes can be understood, as I suggest in my third and fourth chapters, as a kind 195 of cultural ventriloquism whereby Morrissey brings to attention a variety of attitudes regarding disability, proffering them for contemplation; in this view, Morrissey is exculpated from any endorsement of ableist prejudice against disabled persons, emerging instead as a provocateur who has the best interests of disabled persons at heart even as he alternately ridicules and expresses sympathy for them in song. This is the most generous view that can be taken of

Morrissey’s discourse of disability, and one not necessarily borne out by Morrissey’s other pronouncements, such as his brazen claim (with which I introduced this chapter) to be able to speak, by virtue of his powers of imagination, on behalf of disabled persons in “November

Spawned a Monster” and “At Amber.” This chapter has sought to assemble evidence (including

Morrissey’s youthful proposition that the ideal Mancunian would be a “bedridden deaf mute”) to suggest that Morrissey’s recourse to tropes of disability is less about disabled persons themselves and more about their utility as proxy symbols of other forms of social marginalization of greater interest to Morrissey – to wit, questions of national, religious, class, sexual and gender identity.

This reading of Morrissey’s discourse of disability sees it as deeply implicated in the

“metaphorical opportunism” decried by Mitchell and Snyder and other disability studies scholars.

Such concerns might well be mitigated, however, by recalling the observation that the figure of the normate discussed in my first chapter is defined through the exclusion of devalued traits that fall along multiple axes of identity – not just able-bodiedness, but class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality as well; disability cannot be disentangled from these latter categorical distinctions. As Garland-Thomson asserts, “disability [is] a reading of the body that is inflected by race, ethnicity, and gender” (Extraordinary 9). Indeed, by way of illustrating this point, she discusses how 19th-century American “[f]reak shows framed and choreographed bodily 196 differences that we now call ‘race,’ ‘ethnicity,’ and ‘disability’ in a ritual that enacted the social process of making cultural otherness from the raw materials of human physical variation”

(Extraordinary 64). Nor must the intersectionality of disability with other forms of marginalized identity remain confined to the realm of the theoretical. For instance, attorneys Jennifer L. Levi and Bennett H. Klein encourage transgender people (and their definition of “transgender” includes “a broad range of experiences, including transsexual people who undergo medical care and treatment to transition from their assigned sex at birth to the sex that is consistent with their gender identities, people who undergo no medical treatment but also take steps to conform their gender expressions to meet their gender identities, as well as people who take no such steps but are gender nonconforming in some way” [80] – a definition which would seem to clearly include

Morrissey) to resist recoiling at the stigma associated with the term disability in order to pursue legal protections under American disability laws. They reason that because the Federal

Rehabilitation Act (FRA) approved by Congress defines as disabled both those persons whose physical or mental impairments limit major life activities, as well as persons who are simply regarded as having such an impairment, it establishes a broad enough understanding of disability so as to be applicable to all transgendered persons, whether they regard their health condition as having a physical basis or a mental basis – or indeed, whether they even regard themselves as having a condition at all, since the law recognizes that disability accrues from simply being perceived as having a condition (79, 81-83). Levi and Klein thus assert that “[r]ather than discard an important source of legal protections, the transgender community must work with others both inside and outside the disability community to eliminate the stigma associated with disability” (75); Morrissey’s oeuvre provides an imperfect yet still potentially valuable site at which such political work might be accomplished. 197

In short, the recognition that disability has always been inflected by issues of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and so on renders Morrissey’s symbolic use of disability, and his deployment of mutually inflecting rhetorics of gender/sexuality and disability, less egregious exploitation than an empathetic maneuver. Indeed, Morrissey’s use of disability imagery implicitly subsumes all such marginalized identities into a single category, a strategy recognized by Morrissey biographer David Bret in his discussion of “November Spawned a Monster”: “The song (though otherwise unconnected with its title) does fit into the category known by the French as ‘Les enfants de novembre’ – collectively, the oppressed peoples of the world, whether this be by way of creed, colour, sexuality, war, or in this instance disability” (Scandal 135).

Still, even if regarded as fair use rather than semiotic colonialism, Morrissey’s recourse to tropes of disability is subject to the same objections alluded to earlier: the concern that opening too broad an umbrella in order to assert a commonality among different kinds of corporeal difference risks violating Susan Wendell’s admonition that “[i]t is . . . important not to assume that people with disabilities identify with all others who have disabilities or share a single perspective on disability (or anything else)” (70). The obfuscation of differences among the proliferating varieties of disability diverts attention away from the specific experiences of, discontents of, and remedies available to any individual disabled person. But then, political value undoubtedly accrues from an expansive conception of disability that departs from traditional narrow colloquial definitions, as this can advance disability studies’ assertion that disability names “a bodily condition and a social category [that] either now or later will touch us all. . . . [T]hat many of us will become disabled if we live long enough is perhaps the fundamental aspect of human embodiment” (Snyder, Brueggemann, and Garland-Thomson 2) – and can thus generate the potential to undermine conventional notions of disability as 198

stigmatized otherness. Wendell writes in a similar spirit that “[e]mphasizing similarities between

people with and people without disabilities seems to hold the promise of reducing the

‘Otherness’ of those who are disabled by enabling the non-disabled to identify with them, recognize their humanity and their rights, paving the way to increasing their assimilation into all aspects of social life” (74).

However, Wendell also posits a political value in forming communities to express distance from mainstream culture:

Emphasizing differences from the dominant group, on the other

hand, often creates a strong sense of solidarity among those who

share them and makes it easier to resist the devaluation of those

differences by the dominant group. In addition, some people with

disabilities do not particularly want to be assimilated into non-

disabled social life or non-disabled political groups, either because

they fear that unless social values are changed quite radically, they

will always be at a disadvantage in integrated settings, or because

they value qualities of their separate lives and organizations.

. . . . In separate groups of people with disabilities, powerful

‘givens’ of the larger culture that put them at a disadvantage, such

as the non-disabled paradigm of humanity, the idealization of the

body, and the demand for control of the body, can be challenged

openly and even made irrelevant. (74-75) 199

Although Wendell writes in this latter passage of disabled persons, her remarks are equally applicable to other socially marginalized collectivities – the “enfants de novembre” identified by

David Bret as embraced by Morrissey’s work.

Morrissey’s Discourse of Community and Anxiety Toward the Rejected Body

Indeed, it is worth noting in the context of the present discussion that despite the emphasis in so much of Morrissey’s work on individual isolation, there exists a countervailing discourse of community and solidarity that emerges on occasion. And what is more pertinent, the phraseology through which such community is limned is tinged with the language of corporeal impairment, of disability. For instance, in his upbeat, rockabilly-influenced 1992 single “Certain People I Know,” Morrissey extols the virtues of the titular coterie of his friends – singing that “I take the cue from certain people I know” and “I trust the views of certain people I know” – but adds that “they break their necks and can’t afford to get them fixed,” a line which evokes the possibility of paralysis, paraplegia, and the wheelchair. Similarly, on the track

“Nobody Loves Us,” the B-Side of his 1995 single “Dagenham Dave,” Morrissey posits himself as a member of a community of unloved “born-again atheists” and “practicing troublemakers.”

His description of them as “useless and shiftless” deploys the same adjectives used to describe the impaired corporeality of the disabled protagonist of “November Spawned a Monster” as well as the frustrated sexual desire of “Tomorrow.” He also describes this unloved fraternity as “bog- eyed and cross-eyed” (stigmatized physical differences both) and asserts that “we are just stood here [sic] / Waiting for the next great wound” – again raising the theme of impairment. Then too, the concluding track of Morrissey’s 1991 album Kill Uncle, “There’s a Place in Hell for Me and My Friends” similarly thematizes the marginalization of Morrissey and his confrères, whose 200

extreme social abjection is registered by the song’s title. To the mainstream culture which has so

stigmatized them, Morrissey addresses the following lines:

All that we hope is when we go

Our skin and our blood and our bones

Don’t get in your way, making you ill

The way they did when we lived8

These lines lay emphasis on the revulsion caused by the corporeality of Morrissey and his

stigmatized companions, evoking the threatening figure of the corps morcelé discussed in my

second chapter. Moreover, Morrissey’s lyric, with its image of unpleasantly obtruding carnage, aligns well with Mary Douglas’s analysis (discussed in my third chapter) of the cultural figuration of socially marginalized identities (including disability) as dirt, as matter out of place,

and as pollution and contagion.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that the communities being imagined in these songs are

expressly fraternities of the disabled. Such a focus would be far too narrow for an artist whose

2006 single “The Youngest Was the Most Loved” – a song about a shy, overprotected child who grows into a murderous adult – tendered the blanket proclamation, “There is no such thing in life

as normal.” I argue instead that Morrissey is using the trope of disability in order to stake out a

sodality whose indeterminate boundaries are flexible enough to accommodate all socially

marginalized identities, whether predicated on gender, sexual, racial, ethnic, national, class, or

physical and mental differences. However, this attitude of inclusiveness which would seem to

8 As these lines indicate, the version of the song released on Kill Uncle is replete with overtones of ironic contrition which lend the song a certain self-pitying quality – one enhanced by the somber musical arrangement, which features sober piano accompaniment An alternate, faster, rockabilly-influenced version of the song recorded live at the Los Angeles radio station KROQ is less apologetic. Consistent with the increased aggressiveness of the music, the KROQ version of the song alters a lyrical passage from the original recording – “And looking back, we will forgive / We had no choice, we always did” – to the more defiant assertion, “And looking back, I won’t forgive / And I never will, I never will, I never will.” 201

incorporate non-normative corporeality is complicated, it must be noted, by Morrissey’s

expressions elsewhere of preoccupation with and anxiety toward physical vulnerability and

corporeal difference. On the April 1987 Smiths B-Side “Is It Really So Strange?” physical injury

is repeatedly referenced, but here is posed as no deterrent to love: “you can kick me / And you

can punch me / And you can break my face,” Morrissey sings, and “you can punch me / And you

can butt me / And you can break my spine / But you won’t change the way I feel.” A modified

reprise of this theme appeared in November of that same year with the release of The Smiths’

“Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before” single, in which two occasions of

physical injury are offered (perhaps disingenuously) as explanations for the failure of Morrissey

as narrator to rendezvous with a lover:

I was delayed, I was waylaid

An emergency stop, I smelt the last ten seconds of life

I crashed down on the crossbar

And the pain was enough to make a shy, bald Buddhist

Reflect and plan a mass murder

......

I was detained, I was restrained

He broke my spleen, he broke my knee

And then he really laid in to me

Friday night in Out-patients

Who said I lied to her?

Here physical injury is limned with greater anxiety. And more than twenty years later,

Morrissey continues to deploy this motif in song: on his 2008 single “That’s How People Grow 202

Up” (subsequently issued on his 2009 album Years of Refusal) Morrissey advances the proposition that maturity ensues from the recognition that the emotional pain resulting from romantic failure (“disappointment came to me / And booted me / And bruised and hurt me”) is no match for the physical pain that results from corporeal impairment (“I was driving my car / I crashed and broke my spine / So, yes, there are things worse in life / Than never being someone’s sweetie”).

Such anxiety regarding physical injury and impairment is not hostile to ableist prejudice.

Morrissey betrays parallel but even more explicit ableist sentiment in his recurrent expressions of support for conventional beauty norms. As early as a 1983 interview, for instance, journalist

Dave McCullough’s acknowledgement of the handsomeness of The Smiths’ members elicited the (perhaps tongue-in-cheek) remark from Morrissey that “we genuinely want a handsome audience above everything else. . . . I’m sure they can arrange it somehow. They can, ah, learn to look handsome. With great training of course!” (19). Twenty-five years later, Morrissey articulated a similar bent when in an interview with Ireland’s Hot Press magazine he said of

Ireland’s Taoiseach Brian Cowen, “Could Ireland really not find someone better looking? Is it impossible? Even now in 2008”9 (Nolan 38). No doubt, such statements must be

counterbalanced against Morrissey’s perennial professions of his own sense of unattractiveness.

Robert Chalmers included the following telling passage in a 1992 article on Morrissey:

Morrissey's fascination with adolescent concerns such as truth,

justice and sulking in your room seems remarkably undiminished

by age. At 33, he still talks about feeling isolated, sexually

9 International politics and beauty norms had previously intermingled in “America Is Not the World,” the opening track of Morrissey’s 2004 album You Are the Quarry. Here America, incarnated with “steely blue eyes with no love in them,” as well as “a humorless smile with no warmth within,” is charged, “your head’s too big” and “your belly’s too big,” and is derided as a “big fat pig.” 203

undesirable and socially inept. 'The thing is,' Morrissey says,

'people never believe me when I say I have become quite used to

the fact that nobody finds me attractive.' (Three hours later, I

would be watching this man straddling a monitor speaker while a

team of security guards battled to restrain a pack of hysterical

college girls attempting to touch his diaphanous blouse. The girl

behind me would have been leading the charge, but was hors de

combat after screaming 'I love you' incessantly for 10 minutes and

losing consciousness.)

Of course, Morrissey’s purported self-loathing vis-à-vis his appearance is not really at odds with his derogation of others’ attractiveness. Both are predicated upon the beauty norms that they also serve to reinforce, propping up notions of corporeal normativity. (It is worth noting here that the legislation which in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries prohibited visibly disabled people from appearing in public places was known colloquially as “ugly laws” [Garland-

Thomson Extraordinary 35].)

Conclusion

Yet there is a recurrent motif in Morrissey’s public appearances (live and mimed performances, album and single artwork, interviews, and so on) that can be read as attempting to redirect and reshape the gaze of dominant culture, including its ableist propensities: I refer to the artist’s penchant for scrawling words and phrases on his body for purposes of subsequent public display. A few examples should suffice to make the point. Thus, for instance, lip-synching The

Smiths’ 1984 single “William, It Was Really Nothing” on the British television program Top Of 204

The Pops, Morrissey at one juncture punctuates the performance by ripping open his shirt to reveal the words “MARRY ME” (taken from the song’s lyric) scrawled across his chest

(Simpson “Return”). Then, too, lip-synching some months later The Smiths’ 1985 single “The

Boy with the Thorn in His Side” on the same program, Morrissey can be seen to have scrawled the word “BAD” on the left side of his neck (thereby arguably participating in the strategy of transgressive resignification discussed in the third chapter of this thesis). Moreover, in the video for Morrissey’s 1991 single “Pregnant for the Last Time,” the ploy is reprised twice: at 0:27, a smiling Morrissey holds open his unbuttoned shirt to reveal the word “SINGER” scrawled above his left breast, and at 2:02, the shirt that falls off both shoulders to Morrissey’s waist reveals the word “VOICE” emblazoned across his chest. One final example: in the spring of 2008,

Morrissey issued a video confirming a July appearance at the Heatwave festival in Tel Aviv, and in this video, the Hebrew word for "Israel" is written in Gothic lettering on his right forearm

(Miller). This recurring motif can be interpreted variously. On the one hand, these ploys can be seen as a stratagems designed to draw, with a degree of circumspection, attention to Morrissey’s body; that is, a word scrawled on the chest provides a convenient excuse to disrobe publicly, enabling the artist to offer himself as a sex symbol on display while making that project appear almost incidental to his purpose. But the motif can also be read as a series of attempts to pose an intervention between the audience’s gaze and the artist’s body, one that seeks actively to modify the meanings ascribed to or derived from the body on display by preemptively arresting the gaze and fixing it in Morrissey’s mots du jour. Biographer Mark Simpson offers the following commentary on the tattoos of varying stripe that recur throughout Morrissey’s oeuvre – both the magic-marker tattoos that ornament Morrissey’s own body as well as the permanent tattoos decorating the bodies of his song characters, associates, and fans: 205

. . . post-Marr, Morrissey was to collect his own band of . . .

rockabilly pinups who, with their slicked quiffs and tattoos . . .

coolly handled the onstage, death-defying machinery of pleasure

and pain at his concerts. . . . Given their reckless defiance of the

way of the world, it’s no great surprise that tattoos often appear . . .

in Morrissey’s work, for example . . . the rear of the sleeves for

“The More You Ignore Me” and Vauxhall and I. And not just

because tattoos are associated with roughness . . . Tattoos, after

all, are a passionate . . . assertion of mastery of your own destiny,

or at least a defiant embrace of one that you can’t control; a self-

branding of your “meat,” reclaiming the body your parents and

nature thrust upon you, which was beaten into shape by the

family/school/the children’s home/Borstal/prison/the army as your

own. Aptly enough, tattoos have also become a sign of personal

dedication on the part of the fans: During the U.S. leg of the 1997

Maladjusted tour, young men frequently asked the Moz to

autograph their necks, returning the next day to show his signature

immortalized/mortalized in india ink injected beneath the skin.

(Saint 152-153)

Perhaps those fans who tattoo themselves with the signature of their beloved Morrissey, the artist who in his own imperfect but occasionally powerful way lodges objections against dominant culture’s normative gaze, are stating after their own fashion much the same thing that Morrissey asserts in the track “You Were Good in Your Time” from his 2009 album Years of Refusal. This 206 song is a grateful paean addressed to some unnamed idol about to expire on his or her deathbed.

It includes the following lyric, one which gives expression to the way in which art can serve to deflect and defang the devaluating and stigmatizing effects of dominant culture’s oppressive gaze upon socially marginalized identities:

You made me feel less alone

You made me feel not so

Deformed, uninformed, and hunchbacked

207

CONCLUSION

In the cursory survey of the field that I undertook in the first chapter of this thesis, I posited that one of the central projects of disability studies as it works to diminish the ableist prejudice that gazes up on corporeal and mental difference and sees only otherness is to reimagine disability as, in the words of Snyder, Brueggemann, and Garland-Thomson, “a bodily condition and a social category [that] either now or later will touch us all. The fact that many of us will become disabled if we live long enough is perhaps the fundamental aspect of human embodiment” (2). But if, as these scholars propose, disability constitutes one of the universal features of human experience, there is irony in the fact that the field of disability studies is an endeavor of relatively late provenance in the humanities. The irony doubles when one considers that popular music, which sociologist Motti Regev suggests can be considered a “contemporary global-universal form of expression” (qtd. in Frith Taking 157), has been relatively ignored in extant cultural disability studies literature, where attention has been devoted almost exclusively to literature, painting, film, and television. This thesis joins the small but growing ranks of scholarly works that have sought to rectify the omission in the literature by exploring representations of disability in popular music – specifically, it analyzes the music of the British singer and lyricist Morrissey, whose fan base is of significant size and whose influence on popular music over the past quarter century, both through his work with the eighties group The

Smiths and as a solo artist, has been formidable, even if the magnitude of his celebrity, particularly in the mainstream American media, has been comparatively small.

Given the oculocentrism that has characterized much of disability studies scholarship (to the detriment of its interest in music), the temptation exists, when approaching the popular 208

musicscape through the lens of disability studies, to conduct one’s inquiry through a reliance on

the methodology of lyric analysis. The temptation is particularly strong when the artist upon

whose work one’s inquiry is focused is one whose renown and critical acclaim derive largely from the lyrics he pens. I have sought in this thesis to stave off such analytical peril. While my analysis does bestow considerable attention on Morrissey’s lyrics, it has endeavored not to sleight the soundscape of Morrissey’s oeuvre. For example, where pertinent in the course of my lyric analyses, I have suggested ways in which the accompanying rhythms, pitches, timbres, textures, harmonies, and other musical elements enhance the meanings of the words Morrissey sings by inflecting them in sometimes reinforcing, sometimes ironic and discordant ways. In addition to words and music, I have given due consideration to the importance of visuals in

Morrissey’s discourse of disability: not only the imagery of his pertinent music videos, but also the iconography he has cultivated as part of his persona, such as the hearing aid prop that he adopted as an accessory quite early in his career.

I have suggested that, despite Morrissey’s official explanation for the presence of that

hearing aid on his person – that it was his expression of empathetic solidarity with a deaf girl

who had written him a fan letter – Morrissey’s discourse of disability, far from being consistently

and straightforwardly empathetic to the interests of disabled persons, actually expresses a great

deal of ambivalence toward disability and disabled persons. Taking my cue from musicologist

Joseph N. Straus’s argument that “language about music and music itself may be understood

both to represent and to construct disability” (114), I first considered the contributions made by

Morrissey’s music, apart from lyrical content, to his discourse of disability. My analysis

concluded that both the music and the critical discourse surrounding it (as articulated by critic,

fan, and artist alike) have expressed equivocal attitudes toward disability. For instance, ableist 209

overtones emerged from the “organicist” view, advanced by Morrissey and a number of his

commentators, that the music of The Smiths represented a hale and vital remedy to an injured and ailing popular musicscape. (Such discourse can be seen as partaking of the “medical model”

of disability discussed in my first chapter; this conception of disability, widely critiqued in

disability studies literature, regards disability as a problem inherent in the individual body, a

defect that where possible ought to be “cured” or “normalized” through the intervention of

medical authorities.) Then too, borrowing from disability studies’ interest in “cultural narratives

of the prosthesis” (Iverson 65), I suggested that The Smiths’ denunciations of synthesizers and

other forms of technological processing of music bespoke an anxiety toward the disabled body,

inasmuch as technological interventions would have suggested a kind of physical lack or

insufficiency in the bodies of the bands’ members. (I also suggested that The Smiths’ anti-

technological stance hinged on a naïve or disingenuous denial of their own reliance on forms of

technological prosthesis – a denial that is, to be sure, prevalent in rock music discourse

generally.) On the other hand, influenced by Joseph N. Straus’s discussion of the ways in which

music can be understood as an expression of the experience of embodiment, I argued that the unconventional song structures that characterize so much of Morrissey’s work represent

deformations of musical form that can also be understood as signifying deformities of the body –

deformations which, in their inventive deviations from the norm, have been valorized in a way

that can be read as implicitly subverting the ableist prescription of corporeal normativity.

Moreover, the modular, cobbled-together character of Morrissey’s song constructions (i.e., his

lyrics consisting of composites culled from varied sources which are assembled separately from

the music to which they are subsequently, and often incongruously, matched) evoke the corps

morcelé of Lacanian psychoanalysis, “the repressed fragmented body,” which, like the disabled 210 body, serves as an “unwanted reminder that the ‘real body, the ‘normal body,’ the observer’s body, is in fact always already a ‘fragmented body’. . . . The disabled body, far from being the body of some small group of ‘victims,’ is an entity from the earliest of childhood instincts, a body that is common to all humans” (Davis Enforcing 139-140). In sum, my analysis of the music of Morrissey and the critical discourse that has surrounded it reveals an ambivalence toward disability, an alternating embrace and disavowal of the rejected body.

In my third and fourth chapters, I turned my attention toward representations of the rejected body in Morrissey’s lyrics. While disabled figures had populated Morrissey’s lyrics from his earliest work with The Smiths, and continue to populate his work to the present, the most intensive period in which he explored corporeal non-normativity in song came in the two year period inaugurated by the release of his controversial April 1990 single “November

Spawned a Monster.” My analysis here was informed by the negative-image school of disability studies, wherein scholars scrutinize disability representations in order to identify and interrogate stereotypes that devalue people with disabilities by portraying them in reductive and demeaning ways that fail to do justice to their human complexity. The negative-image school is in turn informed by the “social model” of disability, discussed in my first chapter, which regards disability as residing not in the individual body but in a social environment whose physical structures, institutions, and attitudes are inhospitable to non-normative bodies. My analysis found that many of the disability stereotypes inventoried by scholars working in the negative- school tradition can be found in Morrissey’s lyrical representations of disability. While

Morrissey has professed his intention to portray disabled figures sympathetically, I argue that by invoking stereotypes of disability, even if for purposes of critique, Morrissey opens up a space for their reinscription if the listener does not consume his musical texts in an anti-ableist spirit. 211

Nevertheless, I argue that Morrissey’s high-profile song “November Spawned a Monster,” and

the music video that was filmed to promote the single, asks the listener/viewer to interrogate the

stereotypes and prejudices that these texts explore; that the musical elements – such as the song’s

abrupt and truncated conclusion – generates a lingering sense of irresolution which engages the

listener to participate in the exploration of disability that the song inaugurates. I argue that

subsequent Morrissey songs that treat the non-normative body similarly provoke the listener to

an interrogation of ableist prejudice and simultaneously point to an expansive and

comprehensive range of bodily differences that are subjected to stigmatization in an ableist (and

lookist and weightist) culture.

Taking my cue from Morrissey’s declaration to an “invalid friend” in his October 1990

track “At Amber” that “in our different we are the same,” I turned in my fifth and final chapter to

a consideration of Morrissey’s identification with the rejected body and the motivations for his

frequent returns to it in his work. I considered two primary possibilities in turn: that

representations of corporeal difference afford Morrissey the opportunity to articulate in more

visceral, visual ways his own experience of the invisible disability of depression, and that they

afford him the opportunity to articulate the experience of social isolation that results from a

number of derogated identity categories, including those constructed along axes of nationality,

religion, class, and sexuality (the last being of particular interest, given Morrissey’s own ambiguous sexual and gender identity and the stereotype of the Disabled Person as Sexually

Abnormal). I also discuss the problems that result from such motivations. As some disability studies scholars have argued, ableism inheres in invoking disability as a proxy through which to articulate concerns over other socially marginalized identities, obscuring disability’s real self by

arrogating it as a “master trope of human disqualification” (Mitchell and Snyder Narrative 3). 212

Nevertheless, I suggest that there is politically progressive potential in imagining a community of

various marginalized identities whose common ground is the challenge they pose to the

mainstream hegemony that abjects them.

Inasmuch as it similarly defines itself stylistically and thematically against hegemonic

mainstream popular music, alternative rock or indie rock – the genre of popular music over

which Morrissey is credited with having exerted much influence – may constitute a particularly

fecund arena of future investigation for a disability studies scholarship that has thus far paid

scant attention to this subsection of popular culture. Morrissey’s music may not draw an

audience on the scale of Michael Jackson, Madonna, or Britney Spears, but his cult stardom has

attracted a retinue of adoring fans who parse his words, music, and iconography for clues into his

enigmatic worldview. This study has sought to explore the discourse of disability that such fans might discern in Morrissey’s body of work – not because Morrissey’s personal attitudes toward disability are of particular importance, but because his work can be seen to acknowledge and reflect the ableist prejudice of his surrounding society. Moreover, as cultural studies scholars have argued, popular culture is a site of contestation, and Morrissey’s oeuvre affords one locus in the arena of popular music – equivocal, to be sure, but still bearing potential – in which anti- ableist critique can be mounted and disseminated. And while some of the more obscure B-sides

that I cite in this thesis are not likely to be known to any but the most devoted of Morrissey fans,

other tracks, particularly “November Spawned a Monster,” have reached a more massive

audience. Journalist Len Brown, recalling the release of “November,” writes that “the subject

matter of . . . Morrissey’s lyrics continued to provoke hostile reactions. Some DJs deemed the

focus on a disabled girl in ‘November Spawned a Monster’ unsuitable material for a pop song”

(Meetings 166). When representations of disability become mired in issues of censorship, in 213

questions of which media texts will receive mass exposure and which will not, we would do well

to know exactly what issues are at stake in those representations and what their political

implications may be. As my analyses in the foregoing pages have suggested, Morrissey’s

representations of disability are replete with ambivalence, capable of both perpetuating ableist

prejudice and inciting anti-ableist subterfuge. Therefore, no easy appraisal of the probity of

Morrissey’s disability politics is possible. However, because Morrissey’s artistry stands as a rare

site in the popular musicscape at which an artist of some renown has repeatedly introduced tropes of disability into his work, I have chosen to emphasize the progressive potential that inheres in Morrissey’s representations of disability. It is my earnest wish that others will join me

in discerning and seizing upon that same potential. 214

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