A kung fu fighter in a disco

I was going to post here yesterday but work and then the server crashing intervened.

I am really really really REALLY REALLY REALLY not down with het men being camp. It never transcends the pantomime level of affecation, and in my experience most het blokes who've dabbled in androgyny and camp seem to have used it as an excuse to be even more massive misogynists than other men. There's also this element of "I am too ugly and weird to get girls so...I know! I will pretend that I don't want girls!" to it, except they don't want boys either, and it's just so self-deluding and self-denying and wrong-headed. There is also, you know, get yr fucking grubby indie hands off OUR dressing-up clothes, from the gay perspective.

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ok i can understand being territorial about camp but to me that does kind of affirm its flaws -- it suggest that what what "indie" is actually doing that is so horrible is holding up a mirror, bcz camp ISN'T a needed weapon to confident out well-sexed gay men, it's a kind of well-wielded victimhood-as-weapon; ie it actually exposes the inner passive-aggressive indieness of some of gay culture (esp.gay culture as of the mid-80s, when social exclusion was much more monolithic) (at which time the passive aggression was possibly more justified)

(also: in the bi male haha "community", esp.of a certain age -- mine -- there are a LOT of very unconfident how you say "social retards" who were actually not bi at all but full-on gay, except really alienated from the enforced manners of the clone-style of the day and unhappy that they didn't accord with the brazen fronting stereotype)

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also also: GURLS LIKED THE SMITHS?! (and liked guys who liked them too)

this is a list of contradictions btw, not a series of points towards an argument

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Yes, camp in gay men doesn't appeal either, for exactly those reasons, but at least there are reasons, a sense of history, a communal humour and so on.

"Girls like the Smiths" = "girls have terrible terrible taste in men"! It is the same thing as girls nowadays going crazy for Bright Eyes or someone.

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yay that's kind of what i expected (and hoped) you'd say re: camp -- viz "hurrah for tradition but sell-by-date is also always an issue plz thx"

have you ever read dan rebello's "1956 and all that"? it's about the kitchen sink moment in theatre esp., and how it swept in after noel coward and "changed everything" --- i think it's REALLY REALLY fascinating on the pro and con of these various issues

it even sort of jigsaws in w.the brady-hindley stuff -- maybe i should write something abt it one day

:(

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PSB aren't passive aggressive -- they explore melancholy and loneliness and aleination within a "club context" but MUCH more successfully bridge the homo vs het divide in this regard (indeed deal with it as if it didn't exist)

obv xhuxk's eternal tuff question "YES BUT HOW DOES THIS MAKE THEM ROCK HARDER" still obtains, but i think it goes some way to explaining the fondness many of us have for them

(worth noting maybe: as of 1986 neither psb or morrissey were OUT, and PSB were getting a LOT of flak for it from the activists) (haha not so much morrissey as there was a "you can keep him" sentiment possibly!)

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Haha but hadn't PSB already released 'It's A Sin'??? What did the activists THINK that was about?!

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well they thought it was "coded" which was not approved of at the time -- this is the era of "outing" as a mliitant weapon

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"everything i long to do/no matter when or where or who" ===> how is this remotely coded! ah 80s militants and your need for STRAIGHT TALKING.

i have not read that book but it looks interesting!

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to be (un)fair to the militants - i don't think they were actually PARSING LYRICS much, more like piggybacking on a certain level of fame to make a FASHIONABLE POINT point based on MINIMAL actual attention to content (erm same old same old there, then, marvellous)

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I do not know when I realised N Tennant was gay but it was well after hearing and liking It's A Sin. (admittedly also well before him actually coming out)

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The people who found them offensive and irritating weren't ESPECIALLY socially clued-in or beautiful by the way.

But in general the point is the if you buy into certain ideas of social acceptability, non-retardation, attractiveness, cool, glamour etc. you may well react negatively to people who don't fit those ideas REPEATEDLY and LOUDLY mocking or - worse! - claiming them. It's like how one deep root of slim people's dislike of fat people is the fact that the slim people have often had to work quite hard to be that way and so people flaunting their obvious lack of this body-work-ethic is in some way mocking.

"Your value system is kind of silly" is and always has/will be a devastating critique IF you can do it convincingly and from a position of strength.

i.e. only insecure people hated the Smiths!

(except much as I would have loved this analysis as a Smiths fan and wanted to believe it it wasn't entirely true. There was something genuinely quite annoying about Morrissey in particular - crystallised by the "pinched" comment above I think. The value system he proposed wasnt a glorious polysexual widening of everything but something far creepier and more limited.)

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And yet still MAGNETICALLY APPEALING (partly cos so many Smiths fans wanted to fuck* Morrissey!)

*erm, ok, hug**

**google image search "Morrissey Wolverhampton 1989" if you dare; I do not.

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to me the whole social retard thing is that most people have experienced it, and then grew out of it/stopped worrying about whatever faux pas they still made/JUST STOPPED WORRYING FULL STOP quite naturally because of that process known as GROWING UP - there is something v juvenile about the Smiths. The angsty music I tended to like - Amos, Harvey, Love et al - tended to be very self-dramatising, strong, cathartic, and they didn't wallow in it so much as try to exorcise it; whereas the Smiths' angst was a low-grade, general chronic one, they weren't possessed by demons or particularly tortured, they were just a bit narked at not getting laid.

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Yeah, there's a huge Peter Pan element to Morrissey which is very offputting.

That said there's also a big self-mocking element (or there was back then more so) and some of the stuff the Smiths sang to - shyness for instance - is not an exclusively adolescent condition.

The brand of angsty music you mention I tend to find insufferably hectoring so maybe there's a big gulf of taste too!

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My favourite Smiths songs as a teen were never the really bleak ones, except when I was working through a spectacularly pointless crush, instead they were the later ones - "Ask", "The Queen Is Dead", "A Rush And A Push", "Rubber Ring", and early solo Moz like "Everyday Is Like Sunday" and "Disappointed", where the perspective of the singer includes a sense of his own lameness as well as a promise of strength. These are also the 'funny' ones I guess.

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koganbot

Potential theoretical defense of Smith's stance contained in the unintended take-down of Cheyenne Kimball that begins here.

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