Is it actually possible to talk about music on the Internet…

…Without sounding like music’s gentle family doctor, telling it that it has syphilis?

I don’t think so. This was never intended just to become a blog that says douchey things about Morrissey, and yet, somehow, here we are. Today, I was trying to write a post about Patrick Wolf, who I have a tendency to perceive as somewhat brilliantly soulless. Who was that insight helping? Me? No. You? No. Patrick Wolf? Definitely not.

Maybe the fault’s in me. Maybe if I were just somehow better, I could write about music in a human way: about the voice, the references, the shape of the songs, without descending into the banal. Or alternatively, about the personalities – without doing someone some imaginative libel.

But I think it’s down to the form. Music is itself. It is unique among forms in that you can’t simulate its effect with anything but more music. This kind of thing works across some media; you could conceivably paint a scene from a novel and thus comment on it in an original fashion; you could conceivably write a good song about a play. But not, empathetically, never can you translate from popular music to nonfiction writing. Popular music is uniquely personal. The singer becomes the artwork; a critique of the artwork becomes a critique of the singer. And how barbarous to write a critique of a person! To discuss them, of course, is reasonable enough, but to write about them formally? Academically?

How can I explain Kristeen Young’s delivery of 1997:

What, in your lonely world, were you thinking? Were you thinking?

What, in your naive world, were you thinking? Were you thinking?

Or Neko Case’s of 2006:

And that’s as funny as real love

And that’s as real as true love

-any better than they explain themselves? How well can anybody?

The real shame is that these things reflect back, as they always do. I feel many musicians write more now with an understanding of music critics – not so much what they want, as what will resonate with them, make sense to a somewhat more removed worldview in which personae are built very deliberately. It inevitably becomes a more mannered, more formal, more professional form. This is an inevitable part of the descent of an artform, but it’s sad to see happening, if it is happening.

Oh, yes, let’s all take a shit on Maladjusted. Again.

Yes, yes, yes, I know, I know: you don’t like Maladjusted. You think it’s the worst Morrissey album, worse than Kill Uncle even; you think it’s dour, that it has no wit, that the sound is swampy and that it killed Christ.

I like Maladjusted. Top three, maybe top on good days. “He Cried” I think is excellent: “People where I come from/they survive without feelings, or blood” – the pun “stoned to death” condenses, elegantly, the entirety of Morrissey’s (very strong) latter anti-antidepressant track “Something Is Squeezing My Skull.” “Roy’s Keen?” Disappointed that he’s pulled it from the reissue. “Roy’s Keen” is incredibly funny. The conceit of the song is that Morrissey and Roy Keane are rival window cleaners and Roy Keane is great at it; he charms the hell out of everybody; he can clean windows and “hold a smile for as long as you require/even longer!” while he does it – Morrissey, conversely, is a completely shit window cleaner, alas. It’s light-touching and ridiculous, which is the only effective way to write about one’s envy of the effortless, or any heavy, nasty topic like that. Maladjusted in general is characterized by a self-aware warmth, which casts an even shadow over grimness and good cheer alike.

“Maladjusted” itself is brilliant, a glib trudge through a surreal swamp of words, images and sounds; “On this glorious occasion of the splendid defeat!” Anthony Newley proclaims, and then Morrissey says, “I wanna start from before the beginning!” and tears into a fragmented autobiographical ramble that seems to lurch drunkenly from side to side like a ship in a storm. If I mix-metaphor this description to death, it’s only because Maladjusted is also visual in a way that Morrissey albums aren’t usually; for one thing it has actual imagery, and for another the arrangements are heavily evocative of the same things I mention: storms, swamps, prisons, things like that.

If we are going to talk about Morrissey albums we do not like, then I will talk to you about You Are The Quarry, Kill Uncle and most of what’s collected on Bona Drag; these are records whose arrangements I find cheap and uninspired, and whose lyrics I feel are not Morrissey at his most interesting. It’s almost meaningless to really criticize one of his albums, though, as he’s trying to do something so specific that he’s not even really participating in the ordinary critical conversation. And thank God for that. A reasonable scale has never been discovered for measuring whatever he does. Nonetheless, these are not my favorites.

But Maladjusted has a suppleness and a damp uniqueness of vocal tone which should place it among his most highly-regarded records and yet, instead, it seems consistently either derided or ignored. Its recent (upcoming?) re-release will doubtless bring on a new little wave of criticism, the first touches of which I have just read, and this will be annoying.

I would never call it a perfect record. “Satan Rejected My Soul” strikes a false note, maybe, and “Sorrow Will Come In The End” may or may not be art (if it is, it’s good art, but I suspect it’s not). But there is enough good in “Ammunition” alone, with its hyperextended metaphor and series of pleasant, conflicting, clear statements about killing yourself and/or outgrowing the idea of killing yourself, to save it from the pit it’s been flung into, and “Ammunition” is not by far the best thing it has.

Trouble loves me,

Seeks and finds me

To charlatanize me, which is only…

…As it should be…

Oh, please fulfill me; otherwise kill me; show me a barrel and watch me scrape it!