Morrissey: Fandom, Representation, and Identities (review)

At their best, scholarly anthologies present their readers with wide-ranging conversations about clearly defined subjects. Individual articles should speak to each other, offering counterarguments or support, developing perspectives, and lines of argument more subtle and complex than possible in any single chapter. Eoin Devereux, Aileen Dillane, and Martin J. Power have assembled a volume that nicely replicates what must have been an energetic and stimulating series of discussions at the 2009 University of Limerick symposium that inspired it.

Near the end of the collection, Johanna Sjöstedt places Morrissey's musical rhetoric in the context of the "philosophy of ordinary language," which Sjöstedt describes as "grounded in the analysis of the use of words in their everyday context, rejecting metaphysical language" (p. 293). Sjöstedt reads Morrissey's 1991 album Kill Uncle as a response to melodrama, understood in this context as an anxiety over either failing to express oneself or revealing more than is desired. Reading the sophisticated argument in this late chapter, I pondered the extent to which this anxiety is present in popular music, but remains relatively uninvestigated in most scholarship about popular music.

Ordinary language is hardly common in academic writing generally, and, whether due to defensiveness regarding its subject matter or simply academic convention, popular culture scholarship is a frequent source of jargon and overly complex argumentation. I admit to suffering a momentary convulsion upon seeing the name Adorno in the table of contents. However, throughout the collection, including in Rachel M. Brett's Adornian evaluation of Morrissey's negotiation of the pop industry, theoretical concepts are effectively placed in tangible contexts and attached directly to real-world musical and cultural objects. This is essential, as ultimately the goal of a volume like this must not be simply to reach other scholars, but far more importantly, to offer inspiration for fans themselves to expand their critical responses to music.

As the editors acknowledge, many of the authors themselves display their personal affection for Morrissey quite explicitly. Morrissey is among the most notoriously loose-lipped of celebrities. For decades, he has been dogged by coverage of his sometimes bizarrely nationalist and racially insensitive public statements. One might expect that, as fans, some of the scholars in this collection would risk engaging in knee-jerk defenses of Morrissey's impolitic and often offensive behavior, but for the most part, they do not. In fact, two authors address it directly and in thought-provoking ways. Colin Snowsell considers how fans respond to controversial actions of their favored artists, arguing, perhaps surprisingly, that Morrissey must take responsibility for the fanaticism he engenders, as well as its potential consequences. Snowsell's theorization of fandom is engaging and constitutes a valuable contribution to reception studies. John H. Baker tackles what is probably the best-known example of Morrissey's entanglement with white supremacist ideologies: his early 1990s performance at Madstock, a reunion festival for Madness, a band closely associated with British skinhead culture. Baker does an admirable job of revisiting the history of skinheads, describing the skinhead style and culture as rooted in working-class conditions and experiences, and differentiating between the racist and explicitly antiracist strains of the phenomenon.

For the most part, rather than obscuring ideas in anecdotes, the various authors' fandom provides unique opportunities for reflective writing, an approach of great value when writing about popular culture. In the opening chapter, Erin Hazard relates a personal, teenage pilgrimage to Fairmount, Indiana, the town in which James Dean came of age and the setting of the promo video for Morrissey's "Suedehead." Hazard's story serves as a frame on which to construct a beautiful reflection on the allegorical significance of the relationship between fans and heroes and how the fusing of the two—or rather, understanding their relationship as fluid—empowers fandom with a creative potential not often attributed to it. The layers of allegorical identification discussed by Hazard provide possibilities for understanding the fan...