morrissey = the new david byrne

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

ok usually when i do this kind of thing i frame the question fast and badly (or i wd never frame it at all) and koganbot becomes testy towards my fuzziness

but here is MY "explanation" of morrissey = he brought something to the boywing of britrock = called CAMP -- as in polari, as in an angry bitchy code against the UNSTYLISH USELESSNESS of the STRAIGHTS -- except that, since he wz militantly coy abt his sexuality (korrektly, as "coming out" would have stripped a powerful ambiguity out of what he wz doin), his camp was developed as a kind of MALE HET camp...

ANYWAY -- i have always bin ambivalent abt camp as an attitude (it's quickwitted and funny but it's also a compensatory attitude adopted by those who take themselves to be victims and are sniping secretly back...)

and given the shifts since the mid-80s in fashions in sexuality and within sexuality blah blah, i think morrissey's STYLE (sex! yes! but not for me...) reveals itself as a lot more reactionary a-and larkinesque than it did at the time

(again i feel i have not got at the nubbin of what i'm on about but have at it anyway)

Comments

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

when i said "sniping secretly back" the key is in the SECRETLY -- there was a kind of code built into his chain of kitchen-sink/carry-on/beehive imagery that's at once very tightly coherent and very hard to unravel clearly -- and it's that that i think i in the end balk at

secrecy is fine for a season as a politics -- sometimes you have to hide up and lick yr wounds -- but it's VERY dubious INDEED as a root of yr politics; i think where the spark fails to jump the gap is where the "attractive local smallness of our concerns", which in this case was highly original and oblique to the rest, over time became a kind of dog-in-the-manger crappiness