Alert! New album coming soon. Seymour Stein signed The Smiths on first listen in 1982ish and then Morrissey solo at the first opportunity. Here’s the discussion on them with the legendary A&R man who also signed Madonna, The Ramones, Depeche Mode, Ice-T, Talking Heads, The Pretenders, The Cure, Echo & The Bunnymen, Richard Hell, Soft Cell, Modern English, k.d. lang, Ministry. There is no punk, new wave, synth, electronic or goth without him.
My favorite naive comment from people about Morrissey who know only two things is the second one (the first involves ‘mope’) — Morrissey’s politics are offensive to someone somewhere, mainly about the “England for the English” line and remixes thereof in song and comment (“Bengali In Platforms”…”life is hard enough when you belong here.”) Well, interpret the artist and the songs and the public performances…
Here are some other views you may know he holds:
- “The Queen is Dead” – the 80s album and song, pitched against the monarchy (AKA the Imperialist Colonialist Regime that terrorized the world for 300 years till they collapsed). He moved out of England entirely for LA about 20 years ago, renouncing the place
- “Meat is Murder” – animals as members of our moral community, also anti-bullfighting (“The Bullfighter Dies”); he makes venues change their concession menus or he won’t play
- Against the Iraq war and Middle East meddling by the West (“World Peace is None of Your Business”)
- Defending the latino immigrant populations in the US
- Critique of capitalism and consumerism (“Glamorous Glue”), and the record industry (“Paint a Vulgar Picture”)
- Organized religion (“Vicar in a Tutu”, “I Have Forgiven Jesus”)
- General thuggery – he’ll walk offstage if the venue security roughs up his flower-wielding fans
Oddly his 2014 album still isn’t on streaming, since he lame-o label of the time bungled it. It’s very good and here is what “World Peace is None of Your Business” is about. He has called it his BEST album.
A single argumentative essay disguised as a glam-rock record: a cranky Enlightenment pamphlet, a tabloid, and a Wildean epigram book all stitched together with brass riffs and bile. Morrissey isn’t really writing “protest songs” so much as moral cartoons — exaggerated figures used to poke at hypocrisy, cruelty, sentimental politics, and the theater of power.
1. World Peace Is None of Your Business
Core idea: Moral exhaustion with global virtue signaling.
This isn’t isolationism so much as ethical triage. Morrissey is skewering the modern posture of public empathy as performance: everyone has opinions on distant suffering, but nobody cleans up their own moral mess. It echoes Swiftian satire — the voice isn’t necessarily endorsing indifference, it’s exposing how compassion becomes a brand.
Politically, it brushes against post-Iraq/Afghanistan Western fatigue, the era of online outrage cycles, and NGO moral theater. Philosophically it smells faintly of Schopenhauer: suffering is endless; moral grandstanding doesn’t fix metaphysics.
Artistically, the brass arrangement gives it a carnival-barker tone — serious accusation delivered with mischievous pomp, like a political cartoon that grins while biting.
2. Neal Cassady Drops Dead
Core idea: The myth of American freedom crashing into mortality.
Neal Cassady was the kinetic muse of Kerouac and the Beat generation — speed, sex, movement, rebellion. Morrissey treats him less as hero than as a cautionary fossil: romanticized freedom ending in banal decay.
Literary reference is explicit: the Beats as American secular saints whose transcendence curdled into addiction and burnout. It quietly critiques the modern startup-ish cult of “move fast, break everything” before that phrase existed.
Ethically, it questions whether romanticizing self-destruction is just aestheticized nihilism wearing leather jackets and poetry.
3. Istanbul
Core idea: Erotic geopolitics and cultural projection.
“Istanbul” operates as orientalist fantasy turned inside-out. Rather than celebrating exoticism, Morrissey dramatizes how Western desire projects fantasies onto other cultures — danger, sensuality, romance, escape.
Politically it hints at border anxiety, migration, and Europe’s long obsession with the “edge of civilization.” Istanbul becomes a symbolic hinge between identities rather than a real city.
Artistically, it’s camp travel writing: part tourist postcard, part fever dream, part self-mockery. The exaggeration is the point.
4. I’m Not a Man
Core idea: Masculinity as costume rather than essence.
This is a gender song without being a culture-war tract. Morrissey interrogates masculinity as performance pressure — dominance scripts, emotional repression, tribal signaling — rather than biology.
Ethically it aligns more with existentialism than identity politics: the self isn’t a fixed category, but a negotiation with social expectations. There’s a faint Wildean refusal of compulsory normality.
Politically it brushes the edges of contemporary gender debates but refuses to be programmatic — more psychological than ideological.
5. Earth Is the Loneliest Planet
Core idea: Cosmic loneliness and anthropocentrism.
This track leans philosophical rather than political: humans believing themselves special while simultaneously isolated and self-destructive. It echoes late-romantic melancholy filtered through modern cosmic awareness — we’re a tiny species having oversized moral drama.
There’s a subtle ecological undertone: humanity as a lonely tenant mismanaging its only apartment.
Artistically it recalls Bowie’s space-age alienation phase more than classic Moz miserabilism.
6. Staircase at the University
Core idea: Intellectual cruelty and institutional vanity.
Universities here function as symbolic theaters of ego, hierarchy, and quiet humiliation. It’s not anti-intellectual so much as anti-pretension: knowledge systems producing status games instead of wisdom.
Literary lineage: the campus novel tradition (Kingsley Amis, David Lodge) plus Morrissey’s usual sympathy for outsiders humiliated by polite society.
Ethically it critiques how institutions sanitize cruelty under civility.
7. The Bullfighter Dies
Core idea: Ritualized cruelty disguised as tradition.
Bullfighting stands in for any cultural practice defended as “heritage” while causing suffering. Morrissey uses theatrical irony rather than literal activism — cruelty framed as spectacle until death punctures the fantasy.
Politically this dovetails with animal rights ethics, but the deeper question is: when does tradition become moral inertia?
Artistically it’s melodrama as moral fable — almost operatic in its moral clarity.
8. Kiss Me a Lot
Core idea: Erotic dependency and emotional bargaining.
This one feels personal rather than political: intimacy as power exchange, affection as currency, desire tangled with insecurity. It’s classic Morrissey terrain — romantic masochism filtered through adult fatigue rather than youthful melodrama.
Literary echoes of doomed romance archetypes rather than social critique.
9. Smiler With Knife
Core idea: Politeness masking violence.
A social psychology song. The smiling face conceals predation — corporate, romantic, political, social. It aligns neatly with modern distrust of “nice” branding, PR language, soft authoritarianism.
Ethically it argues that cruelty increasingly travels disguised as charm rather than brute force.
This is one of the album’s sharper metaphors — almost Orwellian in its distrust of pleasant surfaces.
10. Kick the Bride Down the Aisle
Core idea: Marriage as power ritual, not romance.
This is savage satire of heteronormative ceremony, social coercion, and romantic mythology. Wedding culture becomes spectacle masking domination, conformity, and transactional union.
Literary lineage: anti-marriage satire going back to Wilde and Shaw — the wedding as social theater rather than love story.
Politically it flirts with anti-institutional critique without preaching.
11. Mountjoy
Core idea: Incarceration, control, and invisible suffering.
Mountjoy Prison in Dublin anchors the song in real carceral geography. The track gestures toward institutional punishment, invisibility of prisoners, and moral distance between society and its locked-away populations.
Ethically it questions punitive justice rather than reform. It’s understated social critique rather than sloganeering.
12. Oboe Concerto
Core idea: Art as refuge against vulgarity.
Instrumental title evokes classical refinement, emotional interiority, and the idea that beauty still matters in a coarse world. Even when lyrics enter, the framing is about sensitivity versus brutality.
Artistically it’s Morrissey defending aesthetic seriousness — beauty as moral resistance rather than escapism.