Morrissey & Media: What Difference Does It Make?
It’s been a tumultuous week for Morrissey, even by Morrissey’s standards. First, he issued a press release stating that his sold-out show at the Staples Center in Los Angeles on February 28th will be the arena’s first entirely meat-free concert. Pretty impressive, yes, only the Staples Center doesn’t seem to agree. He followed that up by canceling an appearance on the Jimmy Kimmel show after being informed that the program would also feature the cast of Duck Dynasty, a reality show about a family who sells duck calls and decoys to hunters. Morrissey referred to the cast as “animal serial killers”, Kimmel blasted him for canceling last-minute, and a feud ensued. And if that weren’t enough, he also gave an email interview with Rookie, a teenage girl’s magazine, in which he advised readers, among other things, that “Life is a very serious business for the simple reason that nobody dies laughing.”
Funny, nobody seems to remember Morrissey’s last single.
The Moz has been overtly controversial for most of his career, and pro-animal since the age of 11. He named The Smiths’ sophomore album Meat Is Murder and even forbade his own bandmates from being photographed eating meat. “The most political gesture you can make is to refuse to eat animals,” he quipped in that same Rookie interview. “It was so when I was a teenager, and is still the case now.” True to his word, he’s blasted Paul McCartney for allowing himself to be knighted by the Queen (due in part to her immense fur collection), refused to play in Canada because of their gruesome seal-slaughtering pastime, and often refers to Madonna as McDonna. For obvious reasons, of course.
He’s also a man of sharp contradiction. He toured extensively in the United States while the nation was engaged in two corrupt international wars, has made several racist comments over the course of his career (he once called the Chinese a “subspecies”), and said, in the Rookie interview, that “If more men were homosexual, there would be no wars, because homosexual men would never kill other men, whereas heterosexual men love killing other men.” Right.
So . . . Morrissey loves animals, despises humans? Got it.
Confused? Don’t worry. The Pope of Mope allegedly has a memoir in the works, so there’s a slight chance that all of this might start making a little more sense in the near future.
