Intro from JC.
I’m very proud that a wonderful TVV community has built up over the years, and as I’ve said on numerous occasions, there is every possibility that I’d have given up the ghost by now if it wasn’t for the feedback/contributions from so many people.
I’ve never once turned down an offer of a guest posting, and I’m not going to start now.
Incidentally, it was my choice of music today.
Cancel-Culture Club
A GUEST POST by FRASER PETTIGREW
The composer Richard Wagner was an unashamed anti-semite, committing the most repugnant prejudice to print in both published and private writings. Decades after his death in 1883, his music was championed by the Nazis and used to glorify the horrors of German fascism. For many people, both Wagner’s own bigotry and his posthumous association with Nazism render his works unlistenable. Despite all this, he is almost universally recognised as one of the most important and influential figures in the history of music, without whose innovations the sound of our world might have developed very differently. His operas are a central part of the canon of western classical music, and he is revered today almost as much as he was over a century ago.
Risking a clang of bathos here, it could be said that Morrissey stands in a similar relation to modern pop music. His influence and innovations are not of comparable stature, but his now undeniable racism places fans of his music in an invidious and depressing position. How can people listen to songs that once defined and enriched their lives without conferring respectability on a man whose every utterance now disgusts them?
Neither Morrissey nor Wagner produced music that is explicitly racist, even though there is much post-hoc reappraisal of songs such as Bengali in Platforms, Asian Rut and National Front Disco. It was possible at the time for Asian fans to read those songs as sympathetic laments, and as I will argue below it is still possible for us all to do so, despite Morrissey’s more recent and unequivocal pronouncements.
All the same, it feels much easier to listen to Parsifal or the Siegfried Idyll than ‘How Soon Is Now’ or ‘Hold On To Your Friends’. The distance of time is undoubtedly significant. Wagner is long dead and not earning royalties from any of my purchases.
But musical genre has a lot to do with it too. It is much easier to divorce Wagner the anti-semite from his operas than it is to separate Morrissey the racist from any of his music because persona and performance are so much more important in rock and pop than in classical. It’s Morrissey himself who is singing to us when we listen to The Smiths and a huge part of the appeal of pop music is our admiration of and identification with the performers. When you become a fan of a group or a singer you buy in to the look, the personality, the sense of who these people might be and how you can make yourself more like them. Every star is a personalised dream of who we might like to be ourselves. Cool, talented, creative, adored by thousands… Nobody feels like that about Harrison Birtwistle or Michael Tippett because they were foosty old nerds. Consider the tragic uncool of Nigel Kennedy. I rest my case.
I am a firm believer in appreciating art without need of biographical details about the artist, or even knowledge of what they intended by their work. If the work enables you to arrive at an interpretation that illuminates, entertains or moves you, then that’s all that matters. But it’s hard to keep that up in the realm of pop music for the reasons above. It’s hard to be completely ignorant and not at all curious about who made this music and it’s natural to want to admire the person who made something you like.
Having said that, I reiterate that instinctively I want to be able to listen to the great creations of these people without guilt, and with a full focus on what the songs themselves make me feel. What we need to realise is that our responses to these songs are personal to us, not actually dependent on the people who made them or what they are really like, despite that impulse to identify. In the same way that young children will request specific stories for bedtime reading because they articulate feelings, anxieties, or aspirations that they harbour subliminally, we reach for particular songs and music because they capture something in our own lives or thoughts and give them expression more perfectly than we could manage ourselves, even though it may not be what the artist meant by it.
Once a work of art is out there in the world it takes on a life of its own. The artist can no longer fully control what the work means, even if they had a very specific meaning in their own minds when they made it.
An example of this for me is the Velvet Underground‘s ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’. This song was on rotation for me as a 15 year old, not because I aspired to be a New York junkie, which is what the song is about, but because I interpreted ‘waiting for the man’ in the sense of waiting to become a man, an independent adult with the freedom of personal responsibility. The song’s agitated, insistent rhythm was my impatience to be grown up and flown from the nest, not Lou Reed‘s strung-out desperation for another fix. It doesn’t matter to me what Lou Reed meant, the song will always be my coming-of-age anthem.
Listening to Morrissey won’t make anyone a racist. Nobody who grew up in love with The Smiths became racist because of anything Morrissey sang, nor will revisiting that music make you racist just because the mask has now fallen from Morrissey’s face. If you focus on the music and the memory of what those songs meant to you then you will continue to experience the humane, humourous, sensitive exposure of adolescent self-pity, the poignant loneliness, the yearning, the farce, the comic arrogance, the ironic love of life’s great disappointments. You will also continue to understand that Morrissey is a racist fuckwit. In fact, you owe it to yourself and to the rest of the world to prevent Morrissey taking those songs away from you.
That position may well be possible for you to achieve, but will you be able to resist the wrath of others who take a different view? One of the strong distinctions between our time and Wagner’s is the power of ‘cancel-culture’. Wagner wasn’t cancelled because when he was alive, anti-semitism was as socially acceptable as holding a door open for the ladies. Nowadays, if you transgress, you will be tried by a judge and jury of Twitterati and no argument will be brooked. I dislike using the epithet ‘woke’ in a negative sense, but sadly its proponents have made it all too easy for reactionary bigots to turn it against them through their rabid absolutism. To the woke, all is black and white, to coin a phrase, and nuance, subtlety and ambivalence are seen as tools of the fascists to undermine their comforting moral certainty.
So if the forces of the woke decree that Morrissey is to be erased, then good luck with arguing for the need to reclaim his creations of beauty and humanity. You may well end up cast out along with him. Your insistence on the value of anything Morrissey brought into the world will be like Winston Smith‘s happy memory of playing snakes and ladders with his mother, recalled at the end of Orwell‘s 1984. It will be punished out of you, it will be a false memory, a lie.
We should all question ourselves about where our own personal red lines are. What are the things that we find intolerable and inexcusable, and how should we react to them? We need to be able to explain and justify, to ourselves and to others, what our views are, because we have to understand our morality, not simply adopt it wholesale from another’s insistence. Not to do our own thinking is to submit to another sort of tyranny and it leaves us incapable of making sound judgements when confronted by new instances of social or moral transgression.
How else can you deal with the fact that Wagner had many Jewish friends, supporters and colleagues, including a long term friendship and professional association with the conductor Hermann Levi. It was Levi who conducted the first performance of Wagner’s final opera Parsifal in 1882, although in a demonstration of how obnoxious Wagner could be, he tried to insist that Levi be baptised before the performance. More recently, the Jewish pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim attempted several times to perform Wagner’s music in Israel, and did so to a private audience in 1991 and again to a public concert audience in 2001. I doubt that Wagner will be high up the playlists of many woke warriors, because those kind of moral complexities are too hard for them to compute.
Similarly, poor old Morrissey – no, I take that back, Morrissey doesn’t deserve any of our pity – stupid Morrissey. For someone who once seemed able to encapsulate Englishness in a couple of lines he seems incapable of understanding the country’s moral burden born out of its history of colonial exploitation, slavery and cultural oppression. As V.S. Naipul used to say every time someone suggested that immigrants should ‘go back where they came from’, “we are here because you were there.” Who now has more right to declare that “England is mine and it owes me a living” than the children of Indian or Caribbean immigrants whose ancestors were screwed out of their birthrights by English imperialists?
In conclusion, I am against banishing Morrissey’s works to the same dark and soundproof cupboard that holds everything ever recorded by Gary Glitter and R. Kelly because the works themselves still have the same positive humane values for me that they always did. I am against giving any more indulgence to Morrissey himself, and against doing anything that will enable him to profit greatly from his work any more. So, making some of them audible here on this blog seems a perfect way of achieving both of those things.
mp3: Morrissey – Hold On To Your Friends
mp3 : Richard Wagner – Ride Of The Valkyries
FRASER PETTIGREW
THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN 