"November Spawned a Monster" what's up with this song?

What is this line supposed to mean: "A symbol of where mad, mad lovers
Must PAUSE and draw the line" ??!?! That makes this sound about incest to me, now.

You know, I think I actually HAVE a video tape somewhere with all of Morrissey's videos from this era.... Perhaps I should go home and dig it up? Are you SURE it will all make sense, then? ;)

no it doesn't.

I love this song, it's one of my favourite Morrissey singles. The lyrics may or may not be offensive, but the tune and production rock.

Moz-nip! oh no!

But since it wasn't at all helpful (no offense!), I asked anyway.

There seem to be many knowledgeable people here... figured someone might know. Or at least have their own interesting interpretation.

BTW, where did MOZ come from?? I don't remember EVER hearing or seeing that nickname before 20 minutes ago. Is it new? or am I just out of the loop? (the morrissey loop- HEEEE!)

And what the hell happened to Mary Margaret O'Hara, anyway?

http://images-eu.amazon.com/images/P/B0000251KX.02.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

Hey, thanks everyone!

So the general consensus is that there is no underlying political message here? :)

Morrissey seems uhh, opinionated... so I thought maybe he was laying some deeper shit on us here or something.

Perhaps he is just mildly obsessed with cripples (ala early john lennon)?

ok, not really much like that at all...

Oh, one fine day
Let it be soon
She won't be rich or beautiful
But she'll be walking your streets
In the clothes that she went out
And chose for herself.

A victory for the outsider character! She is ugly and deformed, but asserts her individuality by choosing and buying and wearing and walking in her own clothes.

Morrissey is appalled by the notion that people consider it 'tactful' to pass over oddballs and mis-shapes and misfits in silence. He derides the 'mad mad lovers', those 'hedonists' who seem game for anything and anyone, but, like the worst 19th century eugenecists, will 'pause and draw the line' when confronted by anything but the most perfectly regular features. What could be less right wing than this song?

Morrissey later revisited the theme in 'You're The One For Me, Fatty' -- which again some people took, foolishly, as weightist. He seems to me an exemplary feminist.

A symbol of where mad, mad lovers
Must PAUSE and draw the line.
So sleep and dream of love
Because it's the closest
You will get to love
That November
Is a time
Which I must
Put OUT of my mind

Morrissey would have no interest in making us sympathise with a winner. That would be reactionary. So he spends most of the song setting the character up as a loser, then lets her win in a small way at the end.

And that's as close to 'uplifting' as M gets. I think it's very uplifting, like a Stan Douglas film with a tiny glimpse of redemption at the end.

One fine day
Let it be soon
She will be rich and beautiful

That would have given hope to all the hideously disfigured people, wouldn't it? They could all get plastic surgery, write a book about it, make a million, and run for president.

No.

It's called 'being British', Dan! God knows, I've written these kinds of songs myself.

I'm just counting down to someone demanding testily that I defend the indefensibility of 'Bengali In Platforms' now.

10, 9, 8, 7...

(And I could too, but that's another thread.)

5, 4, 3, 2...

And there's the question of deformity as inverted narcissism. Morrissey's whole schtick is about his own adolescence in the 70s, when he was very isolated, no doubt gripped by simultaneous feelings of huge inferiority and huge superiority. He often claims to this day in interviews that he's either irresistible or hideous. Nothing in between.

'She passed by the loving couples,
She turned her head away;
She passed by the loving couples,
And they didn't ask her to stay.'

suggests to me that Morrissey could even have had this poem in mind when he wrote 'November'. Note that Auden's ending is much darker.

* The massively successful dwelling on and celebrating massive success and winning

with the politics of

* The massively successful dwelling on and celebrating failure and losing

Isn't it clear that to cite Morrissey's creation of loser characters as some sign of right wing proclivities is just wrong? And a terrible slur on a humanist.

dude, yer the only one going on and on about right-wing moz conspiracy theories. we all love the big freakin' weirdo.

Hm. Funny, since Morrissey's a lot better looking than Auden if you ask me.

Hm.

In this reading, the lines

she'll be walking your streets
In the clothes that she went out
And chose for herself

are a strong symbol of 'coming out of the closet'. Walking down the street, defiantly proclaiming who you are, despite your exclusion from the hetero mating games.

... AND narcissistic, so well, yes maybe you ARE kind of a monster, Mr. Pretty, but not for the reasons people think you are, eh? {gargle snicker gargle gargle}

Morrissey was condemned for wrapping himself in a union jack at a live concert. But Primal Scream were not condemned for putting the confederate flag, a much more 'rightist' symbol, on their 'Give Out, But Don't Give Up' album sleeve. Later, the same journalists invented 'Britpop', which used the union jack at every opportunity.

Morrissey's comments on the encroachment of globalism -- 'We are the last truly English people you will ever know' -- were considered suspiciously rightist, but when Billy Bragg later picked up the same theme it was seen as leftist, a logical extension of the identity politics of racial minorities to the white English themselves.

Morrissey was condemned for his aesthetic conservatism -- for not, for instance, jumping onto the dance bandwagon in the early 90s, sticking instead stubbornly to guitars. Certainly he didn't make things easy for himself by declaring reggae 'vile', but we have to ask if any reggae artists were chided for failing to incorporate indie rock music into their style, and whether their dislike of other music genres would have been held against them as a sign of their reactionary politics?

It was all too often assumed that because Morrissey depicted the difficulties of Asian immigrants in the UK he was anti-immigration. This is like saying that anyone who writes a sad song about problems and disappointments in love is anti-love. And all the artists who fail to depict a Britain in which ethnic minorities, especially Asian ones, even exist at all, they're morally better, right?

Asian Rut depicts an Asian boy who has come to avenge the racially-motivated killing of his friend. But he in turn is beaten up. A disgusted Morrissey editorialises:

'I'm just passing through here
On my way to somewhere civilised
And maybe I'll even arrive
Maybe I'll even arrive'

The statement could be the Asian boy's, or it could be his own. There's no reason why either of them should feel at home in England.

'According to the garbled and inaccurate article [in The Sun newspaper] the track in question was entitled 'Handsome Devil' - and it contained "clear references to picking up kids for sexual kicks". When questioned by The Sun about his "controversial lyrics" Morrissey is reported as saying "I don't feel immoral singing about molesting children."

'What man would sign his own death warrant thus?.. Following the spot-the-pervert accusations in The Sun, Sounds ran a damning indictment of the band in their gossip colum Jaws - penned by none other than Garry Bushell, a fervent enemy of the Mancunian quartet.'

Morrissey is quite right: it is not inherently immoral to sing about child molestation, any more than it is racist to sing about racial problems.

Anyone who knows British journalism knows that the name Garry Bushell is synonymous with the populist right, Morrissey's true enemies.

I, along with the majority of people on the planet, no longer have any interest whatsoever in Morrissey (I never did have) but I have enjoyed Momus' defence of the old tart, all of which strikes me as being totally OTM until this last part about "reggae artists" - when did U Roy ever say "all indie music is vile"?

Morrissey became used to this kind of taunting, but at a certain point he decided to stop being drawn. So there's a marked difference between Morrissey in the 1983 article I link above, making a strong condemnation of child abuse, spelling out for the 'hard of thinking' what the song was about, and the later Morrissey, who refused to spell out the meanings of his Asian songs, preferring to leave their ambiguities intact.

In fact, it's his refusal to give interviews that was in fact the final straw for the NME, pushing them (in a well-documented editorial meeting) to do a hatchet job on him.

WTF?

Jim: That's very interesting! So we can see Morrissey as the ideological architect of Britpop, a kind of prophet who had to be killed in order to let the religion thrive? Why not? I mean, what would Christianity be like if Christ were still around to tell the Pope 'That's not what I meant at all!'

This Morrissey slain for Britpop argument is spot on: Smiths have been used totemistically by Blur (Graham Coxon caught the 'Hang The DJ' noose at their last gig and said in their South Bank show that it was kind of like being passed the baton), Suede, Oasis (they were signed to their management because J. Marr's brother Ian was friends with Liam G and yeah do share the 2G Irishness thing, v. significant) and in content terms Pulp are Smiths plus sex. Which is why Morrissey hates Jarvis so. Morrissey also 'did' Riot Grrrl-style feminism with Linder *well* before groups in both America and Britain (and in fact even before C Love was dosing Liverpool bands with LSD) and early interviews - the last time music writers seemed capable of discussing such things with intelligence and rational lack of hyperbole - made a great deal of him reading Molly Haskell and Andrea Dworkin. It suggests as well some kind of aversion to all forms of violence as cruel, invasive, or lacking in dignity (but in the case of bits of rough of whatever race or sexuality, who display other violence, you get the OMG HOTT!!! response immediately followed by a distancing through lapsed-Catholic guilt).

Morrissey is in a long line of 2G Irish writers (back to the equally sexless Shaw, Wilde) who engage with the Englishness of their day (or that of the recent past) as a form of social critique, especially in terms of social mores and the hypocritical handling of same by the establishment and more humble individuals alike.

Also in terms of criticism of Morrissey for having such a narrow aesthetic, you've got to remember that he is an autodidact. You can see how an interest in James Dean, radfem, glamour/squalor juxtaposition (classic schizoid stuff; you're simultaneously too good and not good enough), sexual ambiguity and pop as romance might actually produce a person engaged with his exact interests.

Hands up anyone who isn't an autodidact?

No matter what "it" is about, taking "truly English" to mean "100% English ancestors" is not good.

I know about Morrissey's background. I live in an area of London where a large minority (possibly even a majority) of the residents are first or second generation immigrants. I'm not wandering round saying those people are not "truly English". You seem to be.

Look Dadaismus the sort of message board I want to be on is the sort where if posters make what look like clumsy or unfortunate statements on sensitive issues it's possible to talk about that. I have a problem with people taking 'truly English' to mean '100% English ancestry' (as if there's any such thing) as you did upthread. I would have preferred it if you had wanted to talk about that and I'm sorry for my part in any fighting. Interweb fighting's rubbish.

Of course H managed to leave out the qualifiers 'often' and 'in a sense' when he quoted my statement, therefore making a caveat-laden cravat into a blanket big enough to fall asleep beneath.

...which is where we came in I think. OK fighting is stupid, jumping to conclusions about people is equally as stupid but if you can't detect any irony in Morrissey's "Englishness" then you don't really know much about Morrissey or growing up "Irish" in England or Britain.

""My Irishness was never something I hid," says Morrissey. "I was called Paddy from an early age. It was always odd later on with The Smiths when I was described as being extremely English, because other people would tell me that I looked Irish, sounded Irish."

And he did, he did.

PS. That line is 'The last truly British people you will ever know', not 'English'.

"Ironic given that Morrissey is far from 100% English (ditto Johnny Marr, the Gallaghers) - not exactly "the last truly English people you will ever know"

I don't think your intentions were malign but you rightly reacted very strongly - much more strongly than I did today - to Geir's comments about So Solid, when he appeared to question their 'Englishness'. I agreed with you then.

I also think that ambiguity in a lyric functions very differently from ambiguity in discussion, especially written discussion like this.

Ditto. Should we seek professional help?

On with the battle!

The line about 'the last truly British people you will ever know' is from 'We'll Let You Know', a song about football fans:

We're all smiles
Then, honest, I swear, it's the turnstiles
That make us hostile
Oh ...
We will descend
On anyone unable to defend
Themselves
Oh ...

Your Arsenal !

We may seem cold, or
We may even be
The most depressing people you've ever known
At heart, what's left, we sadly know
That we are the last truly British people you'll ever know
We are the last truly British people you will ever know
You'll never never want to know'

The obvious meaning of the song didn't stop John Harris in the NME from declaring:

'There are moments on this record when the hints of hideous political sympathies that have provided his detractors with new ammunition become full-frontal reminders of why Morrissey needed taking to task in the first place.
Here, "England for the English", the line from 'National Front Disco' that began life as a non-committal slogan stolen from someone else's mouth, sounds worryingly like a sincere clarion call - and after a two-minute feedback coda Morrissey announces that he was thinking of releasing the song as a single. Very clever move.
It's not the only chilling moment, either. You listen to 'We'll Let You Know', the song that talks about bovver-booted beer lads as "the last truly British people you'll ever know", visualise Morrissey wrapping himself in the flag in front of a backdrop featuring two skinheads, and feel slightly sick.'

Is this stupidity on Harris' part, or wilful misrepresentation?

It ain't got Dizzee Rascal on it, that's what's wrong with the cunt.

we're taking
Just keeping
The population down
You're giving, giving, giving
Well, it's your own fault
For reproducing
We're just keeping
The population down

sounds like an editorial to me, a claim to gay virtue straight out of some radical crusading gay magazine.

of course you could say that its a claim to virtue in celibacy

You forgot Mortiis.

I like Suzy's point because I made a similar one in an a.m.a. review of Maladjusted when it came out, ie that somehow the Smiths had both won (the obvious influences and connections via all the bands that Suzy lists) and lost (Moz's beloved pop obsessions of the past had become even MORE of the past, and even more now -- not merely in the passage of time sense, but the new combinations of mainstream pop and presentation since).

I love how googling "Stevie Smith" and "Morrissey" together takes me to an OTM Momus post from years ago. Stevie Smith's poetry is very reminiscent of Morrissey's lyrics and themes.

I'm still back on "it's an uplifting song because, even though she's so hideous no one will ever love or want her, she can dress herself"