Morrissey: The Pageant of His Bleeding Heart

by Gavin Hopps

Overview

Morrissey is arguably the greatest disturbance popular music has ever known. Even more than the choreographed carelessness of punk and the hyperbolic gestures of glam rock and the New Romantics, Morrissey's early bookish ineptitude, his celebration of the ordinary, and his subversive endorsement of celibacy, abstinence and rock 'n' roll revolutionized the world of British pop. As a solo artist, too, he consistently adopts the outsider's perspective and dares us to confront uncomfortable subjects. In his brilliant book, Gavin Hopps examines the work of this compelling performer, whose intelligence, humour, suffering and awkwardness have fascinated audiences around the world for the last 25 years.

Hopps traces the trajectory of Morrissey's career and outlines the contours and contradictions of the singer's elusive persona. The book illuminates Morrissey's coyness (how can he remain a mystery when he tells us too much?), his dramatized melancholy (surely more of a radical existential protest than the gimmick some believe it to be), and his complex attitudes towards loneliness and alienation, as well as his intriguing sense of the religious.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781441124043
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	03/01/2012
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Gavin Hopps is the Research Council's UK Academic Fellow in the School of Divinity at St. Mary's College, the University of St. Andrews, Scotland.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Chapter 1: The Oxymoronic Self
Chapter 2: The Art of Coyness
Chapter 3: Maudlin Street
Chapter 4: The Light That Never Goes Out
Conclusion

Editorial Reviews

"[This is] the first book to focus on Morissey's lyrical output."-Publishing News

Mention in The Bookseller

mention in Times higher Education Supplement, 4 June 2009

From the Publisher

"No one has ever been as sublimely uncomfortable about being a pop star," says Hopps, describing Morrissey, the lead singer of the 1980s band, the Smiths, who went on to a successful solo career in the following decade. But Hopps wants to argue that his hero is more than just a pop star: he's "a radical subversion of the traditional values of pop music" who restored the genre's ability to give voice to dysfunction and alienation. The argument veers from the defensive to the impenetrably academic; the lyrics of one song, for example, are described as "an unshackling of the referential function of language," while another is "an urban parody of the Liebestod of Tristan and Isolde." It's not that Morrissey can't be compared, as he is here, to the likes of Oscar Wilde, Ronald Firbank and Christina Rossetti-or, perhaps most extensively, Samuel Beckett. As a singer and a songwriter, he is by just about any standard a significant artist. But Hopps's enthusiastic appraisal is at times so overwrought that it almost feels as if he's trying to convince himself as much as his academic colleagues of the validity of pursuing a thesis that is not nearly as provocative as it hopes to be. (June)

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