Songs of Love 19
Can we separate art from the artist? Roland Barthes aside, any number of extremely dull and predictable thinkpieces have wrung their hands over this age-old question, particularly in the last decade or so, where a seemingly endless parade of predominantly male artists have fallen over themselves in revealing their predatory, abusive or just plain unpleasant behaviour and beliefs. The thing is, though, it’s a question with real bite outside of simplistic ideas of “cancellation” or “problematic” creators. In general, a worthwhile piece of art speaks to being human, and many forge an implicit connection between creator and audience, one which can be called into question if we find out something unpleasant about such an artist, or which can even suggest something unpleasant about ourselves in that identification. This goes doubly for a song performed by its writer, music being so inherently personal in how we respond to it. So this time, I’m dealing with two artists who made genuinely brilliant work, while behaving in reprehensible ways. In the case of the A-Side, that behaviour largely (though not entirely) post-dates much of his best work, including the song under examination today. But in the case of the B-Side, they’re inextricably linked. And for the love song specifically, this serves as an important reminder. Often, the love song wants to indulge in the idea of love as otherworldly, transcendent. But the song, like love itself, can’t be disconnected from the material realities of the world. And some of those realities are deeply unpleasant.
A-Side
There is a Light That Never Goes Out
Performed by the Smiths
Written by Morrissey and Johnny Marr
Released 1986
I imagine I don’t need to explain this song itself in too much detail. For one thing, it’s fairly self-explanatory, its simplicity part of its winning appeal. For another, many of us go through a Smiths phase at some point, especially in adolescence, more especially if you’re the kind of person who reads quasi-academic popular music analysis. And why not? Clever yet emotionally taut lyrics married to often bouncy and catchy melodies is a brilliant combination – no wonder so many of these songs have become instant coming-of-age classics, speaking to successive generations across four decades.
But there’s a problem. Because these days, that “why not” has a very simple answer: Morrissey. Never afraid of a little controversy, these days his strident statements on behalf of vegetarianism and celibacy have evolved into blatant xenophobia and outspoken support for far-right groups. There’s evidence that this kind of tendency has been in his work for a long time [1], but it’s certainly become more apparent in his public appearances over the last decade or so – in swinging to the extreme right since the early 2010s, you certainly can’t accuse Morrissey of being out of step with the Zeitgeist.
Now, the fact that this is a latter-day tendency might seem like a mitigating factor. His Smiths work is largely free of any kind of overt statement on race or immigration, so surely it can be enjoyed relatively guilt-free? After all, it’s not like he’s going to make any money from streaming. And in general, I would tend to think that’s broadly the case – at any rate, I’m not a fan of promoting guilt for engaging with the work of artists who have said or done abhorrent things, you can make up your own mind on that (although supporting them financially is another matter). But I also don’t think Morrissey’s Smiths work can be entirely detached from his contemporary far-right weirdness.
Because there’s one thing much of Morrissey’s work shares with every tinpot would-be Goebbels pouring out their blackened heart on tenuously renamed social media platforms. For all the sharply observed detail at times, a song like this one in particular is inherently romantic, in a sense of being dreamlike. It engages in fantasy, even if that fantasy is of oblivion: “And if a double-decker bus/Crashes into us.” So do many love songs, of course, but so much of Morrissey’s work exists on this kind of unreal plane. It finds the real world wanting, and chooses to disconnect from it. This tendency emerges in many cases out of bitterness and resentment: “England is mine, it owes me a living,” as he sings (with at least a tinge of self-aware irony, admittedly) on ‘Still Ill.’ Even on this song, one of his more optimistic (yes, really), there’s more than a hint of sulking in the conflict between the singer and their co-habitants, whether those be parents or housemates: “It’s not my home, it’s their home/And I’m welcome no more.” Yes, perhaps they’ve been banished by parents who just don’t understand them – or perhaps they’re just really annoying. This is, by design, not a song about engaging with reality, but wishing to escape from it. The love it describes is so idealised that it can only be consummated through death, and that kind of death drive is not itself a million miles from certain brands of fascistic rhetoric.
It’s not necessarily that all of this ruins this song, which I still think is a near-masterpiece. This is by no means a song of hateful ideology in and of itself. But it is co-written and -performed by someone who subscribes to such ideology, and has used his work and public appearances to promote it, and so it’s inevitably tainted, bearing hints of it even in its celebration of a love that defies all else. Because whatever Morrissey or any lover might like to believe, even the greatest love can’t quite escape the material realities of the world.
[1] I found the episode of the Bad Gays podcast dedicated to him to be particularly illuminating on this front.
B-Side
Performed by The Jimi Hendrix Experience
Written by Jimi Hendrix
Released 1967
Everyone knows who Jimi Hendrix was, right? An extraordinarily inventive guitarist who created, almost single-handedly, a sound that would define rock music for a couple of generations. A member of the “27 club” who died tragically young, his talent not fully fulfilled and leaving a lingering question of what else he might have done. A true child of the late 60s, a hippyish pacifist, who despite his famous protests against the Vietnam War seemed oddly unmoored from the realities of the world. And he was undoubtedly all of these things, all of which are important, as well as many others, not least a popular and respected black musician working in a barely post-Civil Rights USA and a Britain in which Enoch Powell had a good deal of popular support. But he was also something else, which is rather less part of the myth – so much so that I didn’t know about it myself until quite recently. Like a number of his contemporaries, notably Brian Jones and James Brown, he was a notorious and serial domestic abuser. Most of the women with whom he was involved in his relatively short life have some story of physical violence, often prompted by jealousy (and alcohol). At times, this violence was directed towards men as well, but women seem to have borne the brunt of his drunken fury.
So, in fact, I was wrong earlier. Hendrix wasn’t a peaceful, affable hippy devoted to nonviolence – or at least, he can only have been that if you consider that violence against women doesn’t really count, which admittedly does seem to be the position of many who write about this period in popular music history [1]. And it’s important to reckon with that in how we talk about him. He was both a musical genius and a serial abuser. One does not erase the other.
And that’s particularly important to keep in mind when considering this song, about the tumultuous end to a relationship. Oddly enough, the woman who inspired this song, Kathy Etchingham, maintains that Hendrix was never violent with her, and that this song arose out of a mutual dispute involving her throwing crockery at him – hence the broom “drearily sweeping/Up the broken pieces of yesterday’s life.” But this is still a song about a break-up in which violence lurks somewhere in the ether. While I’m often sceptical of reading popular music too heavily through biography, especially with an assumption that life events are translated directly into art, I don’t think there’s any ethical way to get away from the general principle at least of what Hendrix did to women when considering a song set in the aftermath of a domestic dispute.
Some of this is down to individual judgement, of course. For some people, the details of what Hendrix did will stop them from listening to his work at all, which is a perfectly fair position, albeit one that will end up excluding them from an awful lot of art, especially by Hendrix’s contemporaries. Others will think this is a lot of fuss over nothing, and will point to the usual excuses – it was a different time, everyone was at it – all of which have at least a degree of truth to them, although the degree to which that truth mitigates the reality of repeated acts of violence is, again, a matter of judgement. Still others, among whom I would probably count myself, are happy enough to continue listening to and even enjoying Hendrix’s work and acknowledging his important role in the development of popular music, while keeping in mind the realities of who he was.
And usually, that’s fine, and that unpleasant reality swims along neatly in the background. You can acknowledge it openly in discussions of Hendrix and his work without needing to be that guy from the Onion article. It exists parallel to the brilliance of ‘Purple Haze’ or ‘Voodoo Child (Slight Return)’ or ‘Burning of the Midnight Lamp.’ But with a song like ‘The Wind Cries Mary’ (unfortunately one of my favourite Hendrix songs), there’s no way to keep those things parallel. They collide directly, and you’re forced to reckon with both. And that’s just part of being an appreciator of art in an age where atrocious behaviour from artists of all kinds is being belatedly exposed and recognised. It requires constant judgement calls, constant balancing of priorities, even, to an extent, constant compromise. It all gets a bit exhausting at times, really.
[1] A rare exception is Andrew Hickey, whose podcast episodes about Hendrix (as with Brian Jones, in fact) were one of the main sources of my learning about his abusive behaviour.
