Why Morrissey Still Matters
Andi Zeisler's recent Salon piece on Morrissey misses the point. Strung together from selective grievances and approved outrage, it reads like criticism written to cancel culture's demands. Morrissey’s difficult. He's also a genius. These facts aren’t in conflict, and the refusal to hold both simultaneously is exactly what's wrong with how people talk about artists now.
Notably, Zeisler's piece barely bothers with the music, which is like reviewing a restaurant and skipping the food. Make-Up Is a Lie, Morrissey’s 14th solo album, is witty, haunting and defiantly alive. "Boulevard" is a piano-backed lament at its most precise, co-written with longtime collaborator Alain Whyte. The Brit raids Roxy Music's “Amazona'” and makes it his own. Even the oddly charming "Zoom Zoom the Little Boy,” in which Morrissey channels animal-loving delight, reminds you that the Pope of Mope contains multitudes.
Zeisler's critical kill shot is a Paste review of the new album, which, in 2026, carries the same cultural weight as a MySpace bulletin. This is the laziest kind of criticism.
Meanwhile, 20,000 fans at the O2 Arena in the UK roar back every lyric like scripture. They know something the critics don't: Morrissey has always been the point. Not despite the provocations, but partly because of them. He arrived as a literate conscience—combative, unapologetic, allergic to the palatable—and he's never left. At 66, flowers still in his pants, shirt still half-surrendered, he performs with the conviction of someone who doesn't care what you think.
Zeisler's smoking gun is a set of pre-Smiths letters in which a teenage Morrissey slagged Aerosmith and called the Buzzcocks-ignorant “stupid sluts.” If we were judged by what we wrote at 17, no one would emerge looking remotely employable.
Nevertheless, she presents this as evidence of proto-trollery. It's evidence of someone who loved music with the territorial ferocity of a perfectly normal British bloke. This is a nation that spent decades demanding you declare yourself Stones or Beatles, Jam or Clash, Oasis or Blur, with the solemnity of a constitutional oath. British music culture has always run on absolutes, fierce tribal loyalties, the ecstatic certainty that your band is the only band that matters and everyone else is a fool. Morrissey didn't invent that. He simply did it better than most. Filing adolescent fanboying under pathology says more about the filer than the filed.
Morrissey has said things that’re indefensible—suggesting the Notre-Dame fire was arson with a knowing wink toward Muslims, endorsing For Britain, the far-right party that even most of the right found embarrassing, and delivering lines like “everyone ultimately prefers their own race” with the breezy confidence of a man who considers this merely stating the obvious. These aren't footnotes; his admirers don't pretend otherwise. And the ones who do are doing him no favors. What they refuse to do is perform the required ritual burning, the theatrical renunciation, the public surrender of every record they own. The Queen Is Dead, celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, remains one of the greatest rock albums. Your Arsenal is undiminished. “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” is a perfect song about longing.
What Zeisler and her fellow cancel-culture clergy can't forgive isn't the offenses. It's that he keeps slipping the net. Labels drop him; he self-releases. Critics try to delete him from Smiths lore; fans scream the catalogue back into existence every night. He is, as Brendan O'Neill noted in The Spectator, sustained by bloody-mindedness—which turns out to be a more durable resource than critical goodwill, industry approval, or Salon's blessing.
The real scandal isn't Morrissey. Today’s culture is so allergic to contradiction that a man can be simultaneously a towering artist and a tiresome controversialist, and that's treated as a paradox requiring resolution rather than a portrait of a complicated human being. Art isn’t a reward for virtue. It never was.