Let's start this discussion with a simple statement; I hate Morrissey. I still listen to his music, of course, but there are three ways in which I hate him. I hate Morrissey the person, because he is a self-righteous curmudgeon who isn't smart enough to keep his problematic opinions to himself. I hate Morrissey the musician, because over the last twenty years he has been such a poor lyricist that it hurts my artistic sensibilities to know he is still praised by as many people as he is. I hate Morrissey the idea, because I know his music is tied up in knots of self-loathing, and it holds too much appeal for me to ignore. Yes, I hate Morrissey, mostly because my inability to throw him in the 'dead to me' pile is an example of the ways I often hate myself.
Morrissey's music came into my life at a moment of personal weakness, introduced to me by someone I cannot guarantee was not a hallucination of my subconscious. Sometimes, I wish Morrissey had been the more questionable part of reality, as much of the last twenty years have been spent in an argument with myself on what I ever saw in him. The records that followed "You Are The Quarry" grew lazier and more trite, to the point where even I didn't hate myself enough to keep listening to his latest drivel.
Instead, I dug backwards. I pulled out a string of his singles from early in his solo career, and I sifted through The Smiths' catalog for the gems it contained. Listening to that music was my way of atoning for what Morrissey had become, but it kept his name in the back of my mind enough that as the rumors of a new album finally seeing the light of day grew louder, my curiosity forgot how much I had grown to hate the man.
The single "Notre Dame" encompasses all of this. In three minutes, Morrissey delivers a succinct argument against his own continuation as an artist. The song glides along on a pedestrian electronic 'groove' that is alien to anything the last forty years have primed us to expect, while Morrissey's voice strains and cracks to sing another of his tuneless 'melodies'. His writing is the biggest insult, as he pares the song to the bare minimum of words, repeats them without emphasis, and focuses the 'story' of the song on a racist conspiracy theory that makes it impossible to forget his turn into the more disgusting side of political commentary. He tried to massage the lyric from the live version he had been singing for years, but changing one word does not erase the history and genesis of the song, which is Morrissey at his ugliest.
The key lesson "Notre Dame" reaffirmed is Morrissey's laziness. He has had a few of his classic quips and bon mots over the last twenty years, but now he rarely tries to write anything that feels like a fully fleshed out song. He introduced this chapter with the title track, a song so lyrically bereft I struggle to see if he is trying to use it as a metaphor, or if it is literally a song about not wanting women to wear as much makeup as he does. Either way, his verses are so threadbare the title might as well be the entirety of the song. He has always done this, going back to when "How Soon Is Now" and "Shoplifters Of The World" repeated entire verses, but he had more panache back then, so we were forgiving of his occasional laziness. Now that it dominates his personality, forgiveness is a grace he does not ask us for, nor deserve.
Morrissey treats us to a cover of "Amazona", because after shelving multiple albums during his time fighting the record company system, he must have felt he didn't have a full record's worth of good enough songs, to which I would agree. When "Headache" reaches into the bag of cliches for several recitations of "la la", and then "Boulevard" finds Morrissey repeating the same word again and again while searching for a way to fool us into thinking it's a melody, what we are left with is akin to a piece of pop art. Like the works of Warhol, Morrissey is essentially giving us multiple tints of the same piece, none of which is an original idea, but merely a recycling of someone else's work. In this case, that work is Morrissey's own history, but plagiarizing yourself is only clever when you do it well.
The album is a fitting example of Morrissey's shallowness. He used to write songs making reference to Keats and Yeats, but he never wrestled with the meaning of the works he was name-dropping. The act of telling people he read those writers was enough to make him feel smart, whether true or not, so it didn't matter if he understood the message. And thus we reach the point; Morrissey has rarely had a message of his own that's worth the amount of ink that has been spilled dissecting his words.
Even now, the main theme of this album is Morrissey venting his anger at the music industry for not catering to his every whim, as if he played no part in sullying his own name. "Kerching Kerching" finds Morrissey making the sound effects of a cash register, but any criticism rings hollow, because the reason this album didn't come out years ago was Morrissey's refusal to accept a record deal that put the onus of making money on him making a good enough impression to convince people to buy a copy. No, Morrissey would rather take critics to task for listening to the very words he has spoken.
Morrissey is a shadow of the man he used to be, but this record does tell one truth in its title. Make-up may indeed be a lie, and Morrissey is applying none of it to himself. We hear the age in his voice, we hear the narcissism in his lyrics, we feel the dour tempo grow more and more oppressive as the album slogs its way through a dozen tracks that wouldn't have been good enough for b-sides in his heyday. It's only on "The Monsters Of Pig Alley" that any trace of the old Morrissey can be found, and that's only because it most resembles The Smiths. He ends his album-long musing by informing us "once you've tasted fame, nothing else will do". That is quite the telling statement.
It must drive Morrissey nuts that in nearly forty years of being on his own, he's never given us anything that doesn't make us want the one thing he hates even more than himself; who he used to be.
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