Morrissey
Southpaw Grammar

It is difficult not to write in the first person when talking about Morrissey. This author has an ability to engage, a capability to establish such a powerful and even shocking bond with the listener that writing about Morrissey inevitably means writing a bit about oneself, as it is impossible to pinpoint where the strictly musical part ends and the personal part begins, the one tied to the emotional impact his songs have had on the listener's private life. Morrissey is this kind of artist.

I don't think I have a favorite song by the Smiths, or rather, I have many, and they change in rotation based on the period I'm going through. I think this is very common among fans of this band. Among the many, I remember having had "Sheila Take a Bow" as a favorite song, which is a liberating anthem, then also "Rubber Ring," how can one not viscerally love this song that talks about loving songs?, and naturally "Half a Person," which Steven Morrissey and Johnny Marr recounted as being the track composed at the peak of their harmony as a songwriting duo. The same goes for Morrissey's solo songs: "We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful" is absolutely irresistible, then there's the shocking prayer "I Have Forgiven Jesus," and also "Life Is a Pigsty," which I want to be the penultimate thing I hear before I die.

My current favorite Morrissey song is "The Teachers Are Afraid of the Pupils." It's not one of his iconic hits, and the album it's taken from, 1995's "Southpaw Grammar," is generally not considered one of his best works. After the split of the Smiths, Morrissey released the album "Viva Hate" in 1988, evidently carefully crafted to include generational anthems that wouldn't make people miss his previous career as a vocalist. This was followed in 1991 by the fateful second album "Kill Uncle," which is perhaps the most forgettable in the singer's career, and then the following year came the third, "Your Arsenal," which is perhaps his most memorable work and contains ten tracks all of exceptional value, including "I Know It's Gonna Happen Someday," produced by Mick Ronson and inspired by David Bowie's "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide," in which Ronson played guitar; Bowie appreciated the song so much that he covered it the same year for his album "Black Tie White Noise" and invited Morrissey to open his concerts during the 1995 tour, which took place after Morrissey had in the meantime released the successful fourth album "Vauxhall and I" and the less successful fifth "Southpaw Grammar": to promote the latter, Morrissey performed its tracks during his opening acts, receiving the same lukewarm reception that greeted the album.

Yet "Southpaw Grammar" is an album of great value. The advertising ribbon accompanying the Japanese edition reads "Freed from the ghost of the Smiths and the chains of rock'n'roll, the true Morrissey begins now," and it's hard to disagree, also in light of his subsequent works. "Southpaw Grammar" consists of only eight tracks, but it still approaches a 50-minute runtime thanks to the opening track "The Teachers Are Afraid of the Pupils," which exceeds 11 minutes, the central track "The Operation," which almost reaches seven minutes, and the closing track "Southpaw," which hits ten: three lengthy tracks that programmatically frame all the others of conventional length, a model perhaps devised by amplifying the one proposed by the Stone Roses' "Second Coming" released the previous year, which too was opened and closed by unusually long tracks. It is hard to find weak moments in these 50 minutes: all the tracks seem to be the result of a moment of particular inspiration from both Morrissey the lyricist and, above all, from the two composers and guitarists, Boz Boorer and Alain Whyte. In pure Morrisseyan spirit, tracks like "Reader Meet Author" or "Do Your Best and Don't Worry" express an exuberant musical joy, often glam rock, often rockabilly, and always highly danceable, in a skewed and unsettling relationship with the lyrics that range from sarcastic to dramatic, from real-life stories to the foreshadowing of imminent tragedy.

It is in this last category that the opening track "The Teachers Are Afraid of the Pupils" is placed. First of all: without any hesitation and without any exaggeration, it is one of the highest peaks in the history of British, and perhaps world, popular music. The thematic, textual, and musical richness, and the exceptional relationship binding these three aspects among themselves, constitute an exceptional unicum that explodes in a quantity and depth of implications that have very few, or more likely, no comparisons.

The premise for the birth of the track is the legal abolition of corporal punishment in schools of the United Kingdom in 1986. According to reports, the new school situation generated a sort of incredible upsurge of violence from the students, hitherto submissive to teachers, which peaked in the mid-90s and continues to this day: statistics still count thousands of instances of teacher assaults every year, with almost half the entire teaching staff in the UK having suffered physical violence at least once and about a quarter experiencing it at least once a week (!!!); for comparison, in Italy (where corporal punishment has been illegal since 1928), only a few dozen cases are recorded each year. This situation, absolutely unparalleled with the rest of the world, must have struck Morrissey and inspired him for the writing of "The Teachers Are Afraid of the Pupils," or rather, it must have provided the cue to tackle a major theme in human history: injustice.

"The Teachers Are Afraid of the Pupils" is a song about injustice, more specifically about the innocent being victims of harassment, written by Morrissey and composed by his historic guitarist Boz Boorer, including numerous elements that address the theme from various viewpoints.

The song is perfectly mirrored against The Headmaster Ritual from 1985, which dealt with the exact same theme but from the students' point of view: back then, it was they who were the victims of teachers described as "belligerent bullies running Manchester schools, spineless swine with fossilized mindsets," but exactly ten years later, the situation has completely turned around. The lyrics of "The Teachers Are Afraid of the Pupils" narrate the terror of being a teacher:

There are too many people who plot to bring you down, and when your spirit is at stake, the nights can be terrible: sleep conveys the sadness to some other brain, and someone here won't be here next year. So here you are in front of the blackboard full of fear and good intentions, but if you think they're listening, well, you must be kidding, right? Oh yes, you understand change and think it's essential, but when your job is to be humiliated*... "Say a wrong word to our children and we'll get you, lay a hand on our children and it'll never be too late to get you." Snot on the collar, a nail stuck in the chair, a blade in the soap, and you cry into the pillow: "To be finished would be a relief, to be finished would be a relief, to be finished would be a relief, to be finished would be a relief..."

* = "humiliated" is the only word in italics in the album's booklet.

This is a translation proposal, not the only possible translation, and indeed Morrissey's lyrics are almost never translatable or interpretable in a unique way: this is precisely where their greatest richness lies. Some of the Italian terms used, for example, derive from the context given by the title, which, like in surrealist paintings, offers the (a) key to reading the work. In this case, the title specifies the school subject, but the text lends itself to other interpretations: for instance, in English Morrissey uses "board," not "blackboard," so it is not certain that the subject is near a blackboard and could be any "board": a "bulletin board" (where something important is posted), a "trial board" (disciplinary board) or a "job board" (job posting board, given that many teachers decide to change jobs after the violence), or even something extra-scholastic like the "keyboard" of a piano.

And here is the next interpretative level: after the injustice towards teachers comes the injustice towards artists. It is a recurring theme in Morrissey, for example in "The Boy with the Thorn in His Side," but in "The Teachers Are Afraid of the Pupils" it reaches a sublime level using a sampling taken from the first movement of Dmitri Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony (probably in a version conducted by Leonard Bernstein with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra). The choice could not be less casual because Shostakovich wrote this work under an absolute climate of terror. On January 26, 1936, Stalin, who exercised personal control over artworks produced during his regime, went to the theater to see the opera "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District," a major success for Shostakovich, but he left unsatisfied after the first act. Two days later, an anonymous article titled "Chaos instead of music" was published in the Pravda, condemning Shostakovich's work as bourgeois and contrary to the regime, effectively threatening the composer with death by exile in Siberia, as had already happened to other artists unfavored by Stalin. In this tense situation, Shostakovich decided not to explicitly declare either loyalty or opposition to the regime but to continue producing works in a miraculous balance between artistic exigencies and political necessities. This is the climate in which the Fifth Symphony was born in 1937: musicologist Francesco Antonioni describes it as "a masterpiece of depth for what it censors more than for what it affirms, for the ambiguity by which Shostakovich puts on a mask that is no less true than the face." The text of "The Teachers Are Afraid of the Pupils" could therefore very well narrate the biennium 1936-37 for Shostakovich: "someone here won't be here next year" could be the composer himself executed, "if you think they're listening to you, well, you must be kidding, right?" could refer to the Stalinist hierarchs, and the "children" could be the children of Mother Russia brainwashed by the music considered intellectual. In this sense, the repeated verse "To be finished would be a relief" could more faithfully be translated as "Being finished would be a relief": being finished by an execution.

The theme of the death penalty leads to a third possible interpretation of the piece: the condemnation of judicial errors. Just at the end, in fact, Morrissey includes in an apparently enigmatic manner a spoken text:

I'm happy that spring has come, the Sun is shining, and the birds on the trees sing with joy.

This is an excerpt from the 1954 British film Eight O'Clock Walk, which tells of a man unjustly condemned for the murder of a child, facing the titular "eight o'clock walk" towards the room where execution takes place, traditionally held at that hour in the UK. Therefore, the lyrics can be read in another way, and the nights that "can be terrible" are those preceding a hearing before a courtroom board. A case of child's murder, adults accused of wrongfully taking it out on minors, or more precisely, adults wrongly accused of it: this pairing with Eight O'Clock Walk might subtly suggest that Morrissey could be in disagreement with the abolition of corporal punishment in schools? Certainly not, as in The Headmaster Ritual he condemned these punitive practices without appeal. More likely, Morrissey's discourse, always multifaceted and never one-dimensional, seeks to open a debate on the subject and the need to find a middle ground between unacceptable corporal punishment and equally unacceptable teacher violence.

Then, naturally, there is Morrissey's personal reading level. A significant portion of the musician's output consists of anti-love songs, and these are often metaphors for his relationship with society, the music industry, and mass media, always seen as necessary evils. This was the case for instance with the beautiful All You Need Is Me, where the hateful-love relationship of the partner towards Morrissey could be a metaphor to indicate that with the British press, which despises the singer but never misses a chance to dedicate indignant front pages to him.

Lastly, there is a fifth and no less important level of interpretation: that of the listener. If this song is (currently) my favorite by Morrissey it is because I see myself in the lyrics, even if luckily not to the dramatic described levels, and that repeated and repeated phrase "To be finished would be a relief" actually becomes a temptation and particularly evocative and touching mantra. Anyone can go through a bad period where they feel unjustly misunderstood or attacked or hurt: if you are in the right conditions, this song hits the mind and heart of the listener with absolutely unprecedented and impossible-to-ignore power. The great power of Morrissey's words is to achieve an absolutely exceptional compromise between saying a lot without saying too much, between providing enough details to recognize oneself in a story, but not so many as to overly characterize it. Morrissey's lyrics are, to borrow the words of Antonioni, masterpieces of depth for that which is censored more than for that which is affirmed. Naturally, interpretations are diverse and personal for every listener: some see in the lyrics a great metaphor for the artist's career, some remember their terrible school days, and others perceive philosophical-political-religious interpretations. Such a clear yet ambiguous text could only come from Morrissey's pen, the same author of dozens of songs where the protagonist's gender is unclear, or his guilt is not understood, or what is happening isn't clear and it's the listener who must fill these gaps with their personal experience.

The content level of "The Teachers Are Afraid of the Pupils" is, therefore, so rich and complex as to risk turning into an enormous and pretentious superstructure too heavy to be supported by a pop song, but Morrissey, Boorer, and their producer Steve Lillywhite achieve the miracle of combining such a layered text with equally layered music.

The track is composed of various distinct and independent components masterfully combined. At least five are recognizable: the singer's voice, the classic rock power trio of guitar, bass, and drums, the Shostakovich symphony sampling on a loop, a string quartet, and a mass of unidentified background noises similar to cries of pain. Five components, five interpretations, fifth album, fifth symphony, five ascending notes and five descending of the theme played by the electric guitar and strings, 1995.

The five components, or sound layers to use a typical terminology of 20th-century classical music, are juxtaposed in an extraordinarily emotional manner, creating an atypical crescendo not so much from increasing sound volume but from its obsessive repetition, loading the listener with unbearable anguish. Initially, the track is composed only of the sample and the mass with distant echoes of guitar and strings; after a minute and a half, the voice finally enters, singing its melodic line without support from the base; at the four-and-a-half-minute mark, following a sequence of terrible "To be finished would be a relief," the tension finally explodes with the violent entry of the power trio, which for another three-and-a-half minutes alternates or overlaps with the string quartet, which in turn plays a melody in counterpoint to the Shostakovich sample; another minute of singing, and then the remaining two-and-a-half minutes are filled by a coda, leading the track to an emotional finale entrusted solely to the string quartet until the final fade-out. Eleven and a half minutes outside the world.

The composition and arrangement work behind "The Teachers Are Afraid of the Pupils" is memorable and, again, finds no equivalent in pop music. It was called a "commercial suicide" at the time, and the entire album wasn't very well-received: it doesn't matter; it wasn't the first nor will it be the last work judged poorly. The power trio and string quartet return in other tracks of "Southpaw Grammar," and particularly notable is "The Operation" for its beautiful initial drum solo by Spencer Cobrin, but naturally, it is the opening track that steals the spotlight, outclassing everything.

After spending at least two decades as a venomous rock icon and an incredibly romantic and melancholic figure on the inside, after becoming the reincarnation of Oscar Wilde both literarily and as a lifestyle (but with gladioli instead of lilies), after demonstrating unmatched sensitivity, intelligence, and witz even in the smallest things like the list of favorite songs "Singles to be Cremated With", after ridiculing every single aspect of the constituted power and insulting every possible small-bourgeois symbol of the United Kingdom, Morrissey seems to have changed in recent years in a way that humiliates and kills his previous persona, up to the latest outcomes of his transformation leading him to post "Morrissey Central" pensioner conspiracy-laden memes on Facebook. Even the recent death of his mother last August was the pretext for graceless attacks and improbable declarations like requests for prayers "from Chile, Mexico, Italy, Peru, Paraguay, Brazil, USA, Ecuador, Israel, and Ireland" (are prayers from elsewhere not welcome?). Yet, Morrissey's music resists his personal decay: in his songs' lyrics, the miraculous balance between what to say and what not to say is still there, his creative vein still seems vital, World Peace Is None of Your Business and Spent the Day in Bed could be contemporary anthems... then you go read his interviews, and all the unspoken is splattered out, and unfortunately, it wasn't what you thought.

There remain two last ways to enjoy Morrissey's music: listen to and reassess his old records, including the exceedingly complex and demanding works like "Southpaw Grammar" towards the listener, or listen only to the songs ignoring any extra-musical declarations. The important thing is to keep listening to this artist who has left an indelible mark on pop music and, more importantly, on the heart of every listener.