Morrissey
The Pageant of His Bleeding Heart
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- $45.99
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- $45.99
Publisher Description
Morrissey is arguably the greatest disturbance popular music has ever known. Even more than the choreographed carelessness of punk and the hyperbolic gestures of glam rock and the New Romantics, Morrissey's early bookish ineptitude, his celebration of the ordinary, and his subversive endorsement of celibacy, abstinence and rock 'n' roll revolutionized the world of British pop. As a solo artist, too, he consistently adopts the outsider's perspective and dares us to confront uncomfortable subjects. In his brilliant book, Gavin Hopps examines the work of this compelling performer, whose intelligence, humour, suffering and awkwardness have fascinated audiences around the world for the last 25 years.
Hopps traces the trajectory of Morrissey's career and outlines the contours and contradictions of the singer's elusive persona. The book illuminates Morrissey's coyness (how can he remain a mystery when he tells us too much?), his dramatized melancholy (surely more of a radical existential protest than the gimmick some believe it to be), and his complex attitudes towards loneliness and alienation, as well as his intriguing sense of the religious.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"No one has ever been as sublimely uncomfortable about being a pop star," says Hopps, describing Morrissey, the lead singer of the 1980s band, the Smiths, who went on to a successful solo career in the following decade. But Hopps wants to argue that his hero is more than just a pop star: he's "a radical subversion of the traditional values of pop music" who restored the genre's ability to give voice to dysfunction and alienation. The argument veers from the defensive to the impenetrably academic; the lyrics of one song, for example, are described as "an unshackling of the referential function of language," while another is "an urban parody of the Liebestod of Tristan and Isolde." It's not that Morrissey can't be compared, as he is here, to the likes of Oscar Wilde, Ronald Firbank and Christina Rossetti or, perhaps most extensively, Samuel Beckett. As a singer and a songwriter, he is by just about any standard a significant artist. But Hopps's enthusiastic appraisal is at times so overwrought that it almost feels as if he's trying to convince himself as much as his academic colleagues of the validity of pursuing a thesis that is not nearly as provocative as it hopes to be.
