Thanks for being so calm and reasoned in your response.
When I first saw the Morrissey cover story in 1992, I had driven about thirty miles to a tiny record shop and paid double the cover price to obtain my copy. It wasn't easy to find them in California. This was a ritual I went through two or three times a month because I was such an avid reader of the NME. I'm very appreciative of the paper and your contributions to it, as well as to Q. I just think you all got the Madstock story very, very wrong.
Because it demonstrates a level of magnanimity that runs counter to the grudge borne by some of his fans, even 17 years later.
I don't bear a "grudge" against the NME. Nor would I bear a "grudge" on Morrissey's behalf over any issue.
What you may not understand is that the 1992 NME story made it that much harder to be a Morrissey fan out in the world, forced to explain the skinheads on your T-shirt to people who were listening to Nirvana and Public Enemy. I'm not claiming I was "victimized" by the story-- far from it-- but Morrissey and The Smiths were moving against the tide of pop culture as far back as 1986, when Frank Owen attacked Morrissey for his comments about the BBC's "conspiracy" to promote black artists. Times had changed. Tastes had changed. Politics had changed. For this reason I was angry at
Morrissey, first and foremost, for his blockheaded dalliance with nationalist imagery and his needlessly ambiguous lyrics.
My anger at the NME-- again, entirely my own-- was that the paper clumsily presented a very complex issue that was only bound to send one message, and only one message, about Morrissey. Not that he was a racist, though I'm sure a few believed that. No, it was that Morrissey was way out of step with the times, politically and artistically. The editorial banished Morrissey to history's dustbin. He was a relic from another era. None of the music critics presented him as a racist, but from that point on none presented him as an artist worthy of serious consideration, either. His records were to be consumed with mild amusement and a dose of heady nostalgia for the glory days of The Smiths.
We had moved on, but so, it seems, had he.
Did he? Because publicly he seems to loathe journalists as much as ever. You may be right that he's moved on from the 1992 incident. I don't know. His opinion of the media remains caustic, however, at least publicly. Is it not possible that in his mind he distinguished the older generation of writers from the younger, who he perceived as hostile to him, and chose to remain friendly with those he saw as peers, e.g. those of you who moved to Q?
I still wish he'd addressed the issues we covered in that August '92 cover story. As I have said elsewhere, it would have changed the nature of the story. Without his input, it came across - necessarily - as an editorial. With his input, it would have been a story, with two sides.
The story
was two sided! The "Is Morrissey racist?" story has
always been two-sided. Morrissey's side of the story is in his art, precisely where it belongs. It's just that his side needs interpreting sometimes because he is (on virtually all counts, not just this) an enigma. The job of the music critic is to discuss this and, where possible, offer interpretations or explanations. In other words, exactly what you did for Herring.
Like Herring, Morrissey's performance (for it is always a performance, of course) works on multiple levels, often throwing a hairy contradiction into our laps that doesn't yield up an easy explanation. For example, as you say of Herring, his stage character acts like a racist though personally he is the exact opposite. In a paper like the NME, the critic has the duty and the pleasure of explaining what those different levels of meaning are, and how they fit together in an artist's work or performances.
Morrissey wasn't just anyone up there waving the Union Jack. He was Morrissey. The act demanded a totally different kind of interpretative process. Granted, the question of racism ought to have come up. (I also concede that, being American, I probably didn't understand the full meaning of some of the imagery and what it meant in England at the time.) But just as passionately should you or Dele have argued, in print, that an artist as complicated as Morrissey must never be "read" naively. This was an artist who put a photo of a naked man on his band's first single and spent the next quarter-century denying he was gay-- for a time, even denying that he had sex. Again and again, his most subtle statements proved either false or much simpler than we thought, and his most outrageous statements proved much more nuanced than first supposed. Waving the Union Jack was pure theater, just like so many of his other gestures.
The irony is, the NME called out Morrissey on the grounds that he was too important and too intelligent a figure to be flirting with dangerous imagery. Yet it was precisely because he
was important and intelligent that he deserved a much more sophisticated response. You chose to assume the worst when you might have assumed the best.
Did it not occur to you-- as it did with Herring-- that his use of the flag was an act of reclamation, that Morrissey was trying to wrestle the idea of Englishness
away from the skinheads? And that his performance at Madstock wasn't meant as courtship but as a direct confrontation with them? I doubt it was. But as with many things about Morrissey, I am not sure, and that's really the point: there are some questions we'll never answer about Morrissey, and the NME owed him enough respect to present the matter that way.
