“Morrissey is miserable at the best of times.”
Mom
(Given the off-year deceleration of political time, I wanted to pivot this blog back towards my first love — cultural criticism. Enjoy!)
I took awhile to properly get into The Smiths, though their virtues were enthusiastically evangelized to me by the art hoes and Anglophiles in my life. Taking after Lester Bangs, I thought there was something sad about my friends’ devotion, though as an unreconstructed metalhead I wasn’t one to throw stones.
“I’m reminded of the younger brother of an old girlfriend—he recently graduated from high school… when she told me he was playing in a rock band and I asked her who his favorite artists were, she said: “His three favorite groups are the Yardbirds, Cream, and the Doors.” Think about that for a minute. That kid is now entering college. The Doors broke up ten years ago…
“Can you imagine being a teenager in the 1980s and having absolutely no culture you could call your own? Because that's what it finally comes down to, that and the further point which might as well be admitted, that you can deny it all you want but almost none of the groups that have been offered to the public in the past few years begin to compare with the best from the Sixties. And this is not just Sixties nostalgia—it's a simple matter of listening to them side by side and noting the relative lack of passion, expansiveness, and commitment in even the best of today's groups. There is a half-heartedness, a tentativeness, and perhaps worst of all a tendency to hide behind irony that is after all perfectly reflective of the time, but doesn’t do much to endear these pretenders to the throne. Sure, given the economic climate alone as well as all the other factors it was a hell of a lot easier to go all-out berserk, yet hold on to whatever principles you had in the Sixties—today's bands are so eager to get bought up and groomed and sold by the pound it often seems as if even the most popular and colorful barely even exist, let alone stand for anything.”1
Don’t get me wrong, I still dig The Doors like any good English major — and haven’t we all had that Charlie Manson moment where you lie in your room on a hot day listening to The End and dreaming of the race war? But I digress.
When I eventually took the plunge, the melodrama was hard going for my half-caste ass. I still dislike Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now. My mind went back to Patrice O’Neal discovering Fight Club or Radiohead, confronted with “the holy grail of something white — some shit that I wasn’t supposed to see.”
“It’s self-hate, guilt, the burden of white guys who can’t be men, the burden of dishonesty — having to go to work and say blahblahblah.”
He eventually assigned Palahniuk’s opus as homework for his black fans, and I pen this missive in that spirit.
Ezra Pound said that “artists are the antennae of the race,” and you often learn more about a volksgeist from an acerbic lyric than you can from fifty academic monographs. Some works come out of the womb pretentious, but others are taken seriously only in retrospect, their greatness thrust upon them by posthumous critics. Those high-cultural products that molest a civilization’s k-lines like Kirk Hammett on a whammy bar really do reveal the trajectory of a people.
This piece has another purpose. Now that I’m off my Prussian diet, I want to find out what makes the English tick. Despite my upbringing in the British Empire’s finest oriental outpost2, I was radicalized into the right-wing by isolationist anglophobes like Pat Buchanan, Paul Gottfried, and other nameless Discord schizophrenics.
On the cultural front too, Manchester has so much to answer for.
At base, I’m searching for the sensibility that built the world’s largest empire, and then had to cope with its controlled demolition in the European Civil War. For a good bit of cultural anthropology on the subject, consult the following videos on the music of that empire in decline.
Another factor complicates my quest. Since the Second World War and Tony Blair’s Cool Britannia3, the English-Speaking people increasingly talk with an American argot, or worse, dance to the dulcet beats of disco and speak like the Windrush generation.
It is harder and harder for a foreigner like me to make out the unvarnished voice of Britain. So, join me in that search for the English sensibility, at once tragic and vital, at once optimistic and subtle and deeply anti-American in the way that all Europeans should be.4
“I am personally against Americanism. I am of the opinion that the philosophy of pure utilitarian thought, of optimism à tout prix, of “keep smiling,” of constantly having a grin upon one’s teeth, is not appropriate for the western man and his history. I hope that the European, at least in the pure types of his artists, will always spurn what’s just useful, the mass article, the collective plan, and live only from his inner self.”5
In a way I’ve always had the musical taste of a Norwegian skinhead, and like hair metal, this is its dialectical opposite: excessive but still essentially European. If you want to see Gottfried Benn’s attitudes immortalized in British song, accept no substitutes for The Smiths, and Morrissey’s solo stuff.
What Difference Does it Make?
“The Smiths brought realism to their romance, and tempered their angst with the lightest of touches. The times were personified in their frontman: rejecting all taints of rock n' roll machismo, he played up the social awkwardness of the misfit and the outsider, his gently haunting vocals whooping suddenly upward into a falsetto, clothed in outsize women's shirts, sporting National Health specs or a huge Johnny Ray-style hearing aid. This charming young man was, in the vernacular of the time, the very antithesis of a "rockist"—always knowingly closer to the gentle ironicist Alan Bennett, or self-lacerating diarist Kenneth Williams, than a licentious Mick Jagger or drugged-out Jim Morrison.”
Paul A. Woods
Let’s get this out of the way. The Smiths are an outfit that are almost ruined by their fanbase. You know the type. American altoids who ship the bandmates and rave about the “songs that saved their lives.” Just complete faggots who are at once pretentious and uncultured.
My mother grew up in the United Kingdom, and she still sometimes rants about her university roommate’s greasy-haired deadbeat boyfriend, who would sit around the house chainsmoking and blasting Meat is Murder from his Walkman, while a limp and shriveled rose hung out of his back pocket. That is pure wankery (and she always was more of a Deacon Blue gal).
That awful biopic England is Mine was made for these people, and makes Morrissey out to be an autistic loser, who listens to fucking show tunes at a Sex Pistols gig6. Like moths to a flame, these lunatics gravitate to pure, Dostoyevskian misanthropy, only without the pathos.
Also, in the context of their original four album run, I did always prefer Johnny Marr’s guitar heroics to Morrissey’s pound-shop-Keats act. But frankly, the frontman redeemed himself with his latter-day nationalism. I stills derive a sadistic glee from how it sends his fair-weather fans into conniption fits four decades later. His brilliant solo stuff filters out many an alt-rock cargo-cultist incapable of understanding the dialectical tensions that create culture in the first place.
“Rather like the murderer, the psychopathic killer, who sees all of society as his victims, this Left Communist/Nihilist analysis is designed to leave a lonely T. S. Eliot in his wasteland—in fact, to find a wasteland without an author, T. S. Eliot or anyone else, to transcribe it effectively.”7
“Yet, after this momentary act of vandalism, what do we find?… a mere grubbing around in the sand, dust, and ashes of what is left, an attempt to approach what Home would call the free creativity of the universalized proletariat—namely, no art whatsoever. This is a vision that truly resembles psycho-art—the often drug-induced despair and cultural illiteracy of the squat, of the anarcho-punk hatred of existence—i.e., the hatred of themselves. It is the state of mind one sees in the following piece of squat graffiti: the acronym ‘F.O.A.D.’—Fuck Off and Die!”
“The far Left always consists of conflicting strands, even within the same individual. These consist, on the one hand, of a desire to apply a form of universal humanism—do-goodery, in other words. While the other element, the other admixture, is blindly destructive, willfully nihilistic, anarchic, vengeful, and without pity. It is essentially a position that exists to mouth its own despair! Particularly when society itself can serve as a vehicle for an individual’s misanthropy. When an individual can vent his or her spleen on the society, on the social whole—especially when the do not have to pay any price for it!”
“The absence of working-class culture is used as an excuse to ‘destroy bourgeois culture’—the only form of existing culture—just because of personal dissatisfaction, a feeling of inadequacy, and unfulfillment. In short, nihilistic cultural communism is the rebellion of the fart and the belch—of a distended and inadequate angst on all finer things, particularly when those higher notions go under the general heading of ‘God’.”
Jonathan Bowden, a right-wing bohemian who devoted his life to the idea of Englishness, spoke of “the notion of art as a form of hierarchical ordination,” understanding “the fact that art is hieratic, religious, and occasionally spiritual.”
Notwithstanding the “Utopian tradition of anarchy, ecstasy, and plebeian fury” behind “Coppe, Blake, Sade, Lautremont, {and} the Surrealists… it is a recognition of the purity of the process, the fact that art has a genuinely apolitical element attached to it, and that human inequality is the basis for all genuine artistic activity.”
“When we mention the term ‘apolitical’, we do not declare an absence of social consideration—far from it—merely an understanding of the fact that art impinges on things that are slightly beyond the category of machine-guns and butter, even though without machine-guns and butter, of course, there could be no art.”
With his back against the wall, the artist must stand for a world of diverse hierarchies and hierarchical diversities. Anything else “ultimately serves the ends of cultural distortion—the assimilation and absorption of difference, the denial of quality and hierarchy in relation to culture.”8
In another essay on Francis Bacon, Bowden observed that:
“If the Right guarantees inequality, as it does, then the distinctiveness of the artistic personality is preserved. The fragility of the artistic ego is safeguarded by the social inequality that the Right safeguards. In short, the Right guarantees the importance of an artist, his inherent superiority, by virtue of the fact that it upholds order. As a consequence, the artist always prefers hierarchical inequality to humanitarian anarchy—as Louis-Ferdinand Céline once put it.”9
Along with a whole host of other Bowdenisms, like the tacit belief that Race is a primary identity out of which culture flows, you basically arrive at Morrissey’s arthouse nationalism. His comments on the threat posed to the arts by multiculturalism were quickly hoovered up by the right-wing culture vultures like InfoWars’s own Paul Joseph Watson, but that doesn’t make them any less profound.
And like all great English rock stars, like Lemmy, Bowie and Clapton, Morrissey hauled ass to Los Angeles when he knew it was over for Airstrip One.
“The England that I have loved, and I have sung about, and whose death I have sung about, I felt had finally slipped away. And so I was no longer saying, “England is dying.” I was beginning to say, “Well, yes, it has died and here's the carcass”—so why hang around?”
But didn't you see the Jealousy in the eyes — of the ones who had to stay behind?
The Light That Never Goes Out
“So, I would ask the people in this room to understand they are part of a tradition of non-surrender, a tradition of ultimate resource, a tradition that says “never say die,” a tradition that is the epitome of military life but in another area theoretically and politically and actuarily. One can never take one’s identity from one. One exists for a purpose. Liberals believe life has no purpose, but life has a purpose, and life’s purpose is to go forward and confront that which is before you. What is before us is cultural dispossession unless we are prepared to do something about it. What we can do about it will depend on the circumstances, but what we can do is to remain loyal to our own sense of identity, to our own sense of becoming, to our own sense of what we may be in the future…
“I ask you to put your hands together for Britain, for Europe, for Indo-European civilization, for our nation of ourselves, and for an undying and unquenchable fire that can never be put out because it never knows what it is to be extinguished.”
Jonathan Bowden, Speech on Vanguardism
The fundamental challenge for the Faustian Right in modernity is its desire to immortalize perennial values in a world where nothing is constant but change. The good conservative is a Parmenidean, in a world running on a Heraclitean metaphysic. It follows that the most conservative impulse in a man is his fear of death.
The project of the Right-Wing modernist, then, is to achieve a sovereignty over it. Some achieved sovereignty over death by turning their lives into a work of art — living forever as a “line of poetry written with a splash of blood.” The alternative is to raise a family and to pass on your culture and name as a way of enduring through time.
“The claims of the state, masquerading today as society, can become very demanding. Yet the individual retains the possibility of eluding its demands, if necessary even by suicide. “The possibility of suicide is part of our capital” -a maxim of mine with which I am occasionally reproached. I heard from one of our café celebrities, who are worshipped today as demigods for remarkably long periods, that “The time is approaching for the esteemed author to make use of his capital.”10
Men like Yukio Mishima are to this day condemned as mental cases for their unique relationship with their own mortality.
“Goldhagen… suggested that the Führer was inclined towards suicide for the entirety of his adult life, that Hitler ultimately committed suicide owing to this psychotic defect (disregarding the fact that not a single Prussian feldmarschall - exempting Paulus - had ever allowed himself be captured by enemy forces in lieu of taking his own life; to say nothing of the fact that the horrors of the fate awaiting Hitler had he embraced cowardice and delivered himself into Communist captivity likely defy comprehension) and that this latent tendency towards madness was intrinsic not merely to the Führer, but to the German race in toto.
“To Goldhagen and to the Jewish cultural mind generally (though the exponents of this sort of simpleminded propaganda are by no means exclusively Jewish themselves)… every aspect of the Third Reich that is edifying, tragic, or that evinces a conscious awareness of historical engagement is vilified as necrophilic, as an iteration of a primitively pagan “death worship”, or of a chauvinistic maladaptiveness that prefers oblivion to what the Jewish (and debased Anglophone) species arbitrarily declares to represent ‘Progress’.
“To the Judeo-American mind, every hero is a tyrant, every great monument a tombstone, any acknowledgment of the immutability of death is the blaspheming of a necrophile. In reality, as any thoughtful man who has reached middle age comes to understand, making a friend of death is sublimely life-affirming - to genuflect before its monumental power is to live historically, to embrace it with the quiet reverence yet unwavering zeal of a pious initiate is the way of the Aryan - of a disciple of Christ, and of a National Socialist.”11
Mishima and Jünger aestheticized their lives (to the chagrin of killjoys like Walter Benjamin) and in so doing they regained that sense of self-control denied to most modern men. That is the original definition of Freedom, as opposed to our modern conception of hedonistic license. And they lived truer and freer lives than our contemporaries, who shudder to contemplate their inevitable deaths.
“There's nothing tragic about being fifty - not unless you try to be twenty-five.”12
The animating myth of the baby boomer generation, full of has-been Norma Desmonds in miniature, is the cult of the virtue of youth. In contradistinction to that, we believe in the philosophy that came naturally to the twentieth-century’s frontline soldiers. Heidegger’s “koppelschlossphilosophie.”13
“The affirmation of individual development that Jünger emphasizes can be integrated with the nation to the extent that this nation consists of linguistically and ethnically similar individuals, all pursuing similar individual developments within a private experience of sovereignty over death. In this merging of individual and nation, the individual’s most violent whims can be affirmed and merged with those of a group of like-minded individuals linked together not on the basis of shared values, but of shared affinities… Within this context, the death of the individual within a nationalist project does not represent a subordination of the individual but its apotheosis.”14
Heidegger believed that temporality was the ground of one’s existence. He believed that one can only live authentically once one comes to terms with loss and death. You can’t understand historicism until certain things are taken from you, forever. When you’re mentally dealing with death in this way, certain tropes recur in your imagination.
“Like Keats, Fitzgerald was painfully responsive to the mutability of beauty and the evanescence of youth. Both yearned for immortality through art, and Keats’s early death imbued Fitzgerald with a sense of urgency. Above all, Fitzgerald identified with the Keatsian archetype—the handsome youth acclaimed for his genius.”
“The girl is the writer’s inspiration, but only when she is unattained. The satisfied artist is unproductive. Yet Fitzgerald was determined to pursue both love and literature because his idealized girl was an integral part of his ambitions.”
“Fitzgerald created a procession of female destroyers of men, but his judgment was not misogynistic. His women—even at their most destructive—are warmly attractive. If his men become their victims, it is the fault of the men for being weak. Given the romantic temperament of his male characters, it is clear they seek destruction—or at least welcome its potentiality. The romantic pattern of behavior expresses itself in defeat as well as triumph; and the noble failure who throws himself away for a gesture is a familiar romantic figure.”15
Given Morrissey’s preference for men, he stands alongside Mishima in a tradition of aestheticism stretching back through Fitzgerald and Wilde to Keats and beyond.
One sees two literary homos who underwent profound glow-ups, becoming nationalist gangsters. Here were men who believed that “beauty is something that burns the hand when you touch it.”
“The literary traditions for Fitzgerald’s male lovers may be traced to the code of courtly love and to Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” His heroes, like Shakespeare’s Troilus, are betrayed or destroyed by women who lack the capacity for total romantic commitment. Thus Gatsby idealizes Daisy, who is unworthy of his devotion. Indeed, a strain of masochism can be detected in some of Fitzgerald’s men—almost as though they deliberately choose destructive women. Yet his condemnation of feminine selfishness is often mixed with respect for female strength of character.”16
There is an echo of Fitzgerald’s female destroyers in Morrissey’s Charming Men and Handsome Devils. His homoeroticism is tragic, and his treatment of sodomy is gothically beautiful in its gruesome violence.
Mishima treats the same subject in a similar way in his Confessions of a Mask and Forbidden Colors. There is none of the sickeningly bourgeois boosterism that we associate with the modern queer “culture,” as it begs for PrEP subsidies and recognition from the leviathan state. Like Allan Bloom they were the erotic and esoteric creatures of the closet, imbibing in a dead English sensibility, killed as the aesthetic of the Vauxhall gay club spilled out into the mainstream, becoming our modern mass culture.
Oh, there's more to life than books, you know — But not much more, not much more, Oh, you handsome devil!
As The Flames Rose To Her Roman Nose
But Manchester’s answer to Mishima one-ups his Eastern doppelganger with his obstinate republicanism. Mishima-san gave his life for the Emperor, a powerful display of the unrequited devotion and filial piety characteristic of many Orientals. When debating Communist students, he declared that he “held the Joker,” thanks to his ability to appeal to the chrysanthemum throne as an animating national symbol.
But controversially, Morrissey was never one to play that card. Instead, he’d like to drop his trousers to the queen.
I often confuse people, because I say that I’m a monarchist in the Australian context and a republican in the British one. I take that stance because symbolically, the monarchy referendum functions as a referendum on Australia’s imperial history and its overall Europeanness. But in the British context, the apolitical, child-boinking royals did nothing to prevent the dispossession of their nation’s founding stock. Furthermore, a transition to Republicanism managed by a conservative government, like the transition to democracy in Taiwan, opens up ample opportunities for the productive renovation of England’s constitutional order.17
Morrissey’s nationalism is grounded in a defense of the British people as a unique culture-bearing caste. This conception should come easily to the piratical Americans in my audience. That nation is not represented by a token monarchy but by the folkways of its people. Although Morrissey despises him as an Irishman, this was Oliver Cromwell’s vital genius.
Many British nationalists, as opposed to the merely conservative contingent in that society, celebrate Cromwell as a “practical mystic, the most formidable and terrible of all combinations, uniting an aspiration derived from the celestial and supernatural with the energy of a mighty man of action; a great captain, but off the field seeming, like a thunderbolt, the agent of greater forces than himself; no hypocrite, but a defender of the faith; the raiser and maintainer of the Empire of England.”18
They believe that, when it comes to the survival of an ethnos, “being comes before well-being,” or that “a few honest men are better than numbers.” It is a dissenter Protestant disposition that says to “keep your faith in God,” while also “keeping your powder dry.”
The whole subtext of Morrissey’s nationalist republicanism speaks to the British Right’s ambivalent relationship to a monarchy which retreats from politics while the nation is undergoing a silent dispossession.
I do believe that, like a Mark Latham or an Oswald Mosley, Morrissey is entirely more consistent than people give him credit for being. For what it’s worth, I do also view the National Front Disco as a sincere critique of that expression of British Nationalism. I doubt he agreed with the Enoch Powell/John Tyndall view of the Ulster question. He would not have been hanging out at the Cromwell club, and I do suspect that Mosley's idiosyncratic form of laborite, theatre-kid fascism was the only strain on the right that ever held sway over Morrisey's Irish blood and English heart. This whole episode speaks to the western artist’s ambivalent relationship to institutional and organized conservatism, even if he is a man of the right.
You see echoes of it even today. Shit, I know several NF sympathizers or Irish partisans who’d like to see Margaret on the guillotine too!
“(Farewell to) this land's cheerless marshes
Hemmed in like a boar between archers
Her very Lowness with her head in a sling
I'm truly sorry, but it sounds like a wonderful thing
“I say, Charles, don't you ever crave
To appear on the front of the Daily Mail
Dressed in your Mother's bridal veil?”
From Skinhead to Suedehead
To return to my polemic against basic bitch Smiths fans at the start of this piece, to stop before the solo catalogue is to make a grave mistake when it comes to understanding the Morrissey weltanschauung.
Oh, it was a good lay, good lay.
The sublime tragedy of a forbidden longing is the overwhelming theme in his oeuvre, and this feeling is never foreign to us nationalists and conservatives.
“There's a country, you don't live there
But one day you would like to
And if you show them what you're made of
Oh, then you might do.”“Because you want the day to come sooner
You want the day to come sooner
You want the day to come sooner
When you've settled the score”
Kevin Coogan quoted T.E. Lawrence, when identifying the far right after World War 2 as a motley crew of many Dreamers of the Day. For those romantic dreamers, slandered by the mainstream as cranks, and dismissed by the cowards of institutional conservatism as utopians, one question remains salient:
How Soon is Now?
This Night Has Opened My Eyes
“I heard a Manchester Club leader who I vaguely knew earlier in my life who died recently. And he was in charge of Factory Records. Very left-wing. That’s why he produced bands called New Order and Joy Division, to make money out of it.
He said, “I didn’t like ’80s New Romantic music,” and the Radio 5 jockey said to him, “Why is that?” And he said “Because it’s too white.” Too white! Because its bass wasn’t black enough, he said.
Now, if you have these sorts of ideas you will mentally perish over time, and you will physically perish as well over time.
Jonathan Bowden, Credo
In David Bowie’s best era, he was defined by “white lines and black magic.” All of the radical energy that was locked out of parliamentary politics by the usual ethos of British gentility was displaced into the rock star’s arena.
“Another trick to all real performance is domination of the audience. You have to be up there, and they’re looking at you. All rock stars and all these other people use some of these techniques because they’ve gone into those areas. They’re not allowed militarily too much. They’re not allowed at all politically because then they may be authoritarian. So they’ve gone into other areas. You can never destroy anything. You can just displace it. Usually to some internet site they haven’t taken down yet.
But there is a degree to which these sort of techniques are very, very useful. Particularly in a democratic age, because you can speak to 40 and speak to three million using the internet as the weapon to do so. The irony is, you see, in politics you don’t speak to people’s minds. You speak to them physiologically. You speak to what’s underneath the mind.”20
The Moral-Majority was wrong to shun rock and roll — the European canon is here!
Of course, Morrissey was hip to that fact back in the day too.
“Morrissey gave an interview to Melody Maker in which he claimed that a “black pop conspiracy” was keeping his band down, describing reggae as “the most racist music in the entire world” and declaring that he “detests … black modern music”.”
So, young Anglo-Saxons, in the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, do not let your cultures go gentle into that “black pop conspiracy” that’s destroyed the best minds of my generation!
Truly, indie music is the white man's last redoubt. My train heaves onto Euston, Goodnight!
Lester Bangs, “Jim Morrison: Bozo Dionysus a Decade Later,” collected in Mainlines, Blood Feasts and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader
And for what it’s worth, my Shanghai boarding school wasn’t run by belligerent ghouls either. Caught Iron Maiden with the headmaster, in fact. From the suburbs to the French Concession, the city did what it did best, and cribbed Old-Europe’s colonial swagger.
Beautifully savaged in the pages of Peter Hitchens’s The Abolition of Britain
People have always lumped me in with the yanks because I speak with an American accent, and support ugly Americans like Donald Trump. But taking into account my throne-and-altar disposition, an observant teacher correctly observed that I’m more a spiritual European. His conclusion was that I belonged in Melbourne, the San Francisco to Sydney’s Los Angeles. The jury’s still out.
Waddya know, modern commies hate them too.
It is significant, and will be elaborated on, that the ostensibly hippieish Bob Dylan was self-consciously riffing on Eliot, what with his coughing heat pipes, etc.
https://jonathanbowden.org/book_excerpt/cultural-communism-the-inegalitarian-basis-of-all-genuine-art/
https://counter-currents.com/2013/04/thoughts-on-francis-bacon/
Ernst Jünger, Approaches: Drugs and Altered States
https://asylummagazine.ca/EUGENICS-NOW
Joe Gillis, Sunset Boulevard
In the words of Koselleck
https://escholarship.org/content/qt67p2b8p7/qt67p2b8p7_noSplash_443012edd9764c3d4e2b31afa730f12d.pdf
Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, by Matthew Bruccoli
Ibid
Lord Rosebery as quoted in The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (1937) by Wilbur Cortez Abbott
Incidentally, I think V&I is a great album to drop acid to, if you want to mentally experience Koselleck’s theory of multiple temporalities.
Jonathan Bowden’s speech about Punch and Judy, really a speech on oratory.
Good work, as usual.
It's interesting comparing and contrasting your analysis here with what I know about the rise of RAC (Rock Against Communism), which of course was never allowed to go mainstream, yet became an international phenomenon lasting 40+ years despite that...
Important stuff exposing the true origin of culture. Keep digging Sam.