Frankly Mr Shankley, there’s panic on the streets of London. He’s been writing frightening verse to a buck tooth girl from Luxembourg for some years now. And, when he said that he was sick to death of Tories and Labour, we were okay with that. He had a point. Politicians are the mortal enemy of all of society and they’ve been lying to us from the ice age to the dole age. But now, bigmouth has struck again and Morrissey has gone too far.
Donald and Boris are cartoon characters from the 1950s. They crack wise with their racist remarks as though they are harmless, and they make sexism a fine art. But for some reason so many of the international proletariat enjoy their mad-cap antics as though they are straight from the screens of a sitcom, and they forget that these people have the power to make decisions that affect the lives of tens of millions of people.
Morrissey, on the other hand, has little influence outside of indie pop culture. Anyone who knows the words to Vicar In A Tutu can see him for what he is and is happy to call him out on it. He can’t preach hate to his liberal fanbase, the snowflakes demand the right to be aggrieved.
Last month, Billy Bragg used up the last of the words in the universe to write up a rant at Morrissey and Brandon Flowers. And while he might have a point about these matters, surely Johnson trumps Mozza?
Somewhere, Johnny Marr is repeatedly uttering the words “I told you so,” while former Smiths fans burn their CDs. All the while, Boris Johnson guffaws his way into Number Ten laughing about how he’s going to take us out of the EU on Halloween, even if it means stabbing us all in the eyeballs in the most undemocratic way. And yet we just don’t care. Apparently, as long as Netflix has some good stuff coming out that day, we’re rather okay with BoJo doing what he wants. There was a time when he used to lie and stick on the sides of buses. Maybe he’s learnt that he doesn’t need to lie. He can call a Muslim a letterbox, tell us that Brexit is good for the economy, and buy all the illegal water-cannons that money can buy. And yet, here he is, our unelected toff.
Maybe it’s that we’re just disappointed in Morrissey. We had such high hopes for him. He seemed like such a nice boy when he used to dance around waving pansies. But it turns out he just sang nice songs. How duped he had us all. All the time he was just a bequiffed rivers-of-blood quoting prize dickbag.
Peter Wyn Mosey is a writer based in Wales.
Medha Singh is music editor at Queen Mob's Teahouse, and a researcher for The Raza Foundation. She functions as India Editor for The Charles River Journal, Boston. She is also part of the editorial collective at Freigeist Verlag, Berlin. Her first book of poems, Ecdysis was published by Poetrywala, Mumbai in 2017. She took her M.A. in English literature from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and studied at SciencesPo, Paris through an exchange program, as part of her interdisciplinary master’s degree. She has written variously on poetry, feminism and rock music. Her poems and interviews have appeared widely, in national and international journals. Her second book is forthcoming. She tweets at @medhawrites from within the eternal eye of the New Delhi summer. Image: Morrissey's shirt in the Hard Rock Café, Barcelona. Via Wikimedia Commons (cc).
