Comments on: other jacksons in your house https://freakytrigger.co.uk/hidden-landscapes/2018/05/other-jacksons-in-your-house Lollards in the high church of low culture Sat, 20 Mar 2021 18:35:45 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 By: Mal https://freakytrigger.co.uk/hidden-landscapes/2018/05/other-jacksons-in-your-house/comment-page-1#comment-2494721 Sat, 20 Mar 2021 18:35:45 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31089#comment-2494721 The title of “A Rush and a Push and the Land is Ours” comes from a pamphlet written by Oscar Wilde’s mother I think, under her pseudonym Speranza, about Irish independence. Of course, as the article above states, the inspiration for a song is not the be-all and end-all of its meaning. It’s notable that pretty much every reference (online at least) to the original pamphlet that one comes across is in the context of explaining the Smiths song. So I assume that when the song was released, its title didn’t work as an explanation of the song’s meaning, it was just another phrase.

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By: mark sinker https://freakytrigger.co.uk/hidden-landscapes/2018/05/other-jacksons-in-your-house/comment-page-1#comment-2241838 Thu, 17 May 2018 20:41:43 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31089#comment-2241838 800+ views in 4 days is very gratifying! if you subscribe now you can read my next patreon post right now (it’s about the late tom wolfe, another problematic fellow to be sure)

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By: Tommy Mack https://freakytrigger.co.uk/hidden-landscapes/2018/05/other-jacksons-in-your-house/comment-page-1#comment-2241809 Thu, 17 May 2018 16:02:22 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31089#comment-2241809 I wonder if he partly got a free pass because he was entertaining about it, spinning mad conspiracy theories and the like which played to his image as an eccentric whereas someone like Phil Collins got castigated for whinging about taxes because it makes him look petty and small. (Also the papers in question liked Morrissey’s music and hated Collins’ which must have played a part)

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By: Kit https://freakytrigger.co.uk/hidden-landscapes/2018/05/other-jacksons-in-your-house/comment-page-1#comment-2241689 Wed, 16 May 2018 20:24:38 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31089#comment-2241689 “I don’t know about alt-right, but I get the feeling, looking back, that Moz was already properly racist back then”

Yes, this – it’s not so much that he started throwing tantrums in response to challenges in 2005, as that in 1993 people stood down in the face of his entitled pouting. The fact that he apparently (still!) doesn’t BELIEVE he’s racist perhaps gave an authority to his tendentiousness that people accepted at the time.

However, note that after being called on “testing the limits of (as we used to call it) semiotic free play” to an audience of skinheads, he spent years doubling down on skinhead imagery as backdrops and record sleeves. And then, during his relationship with skinhead Jake, would smirk as the ex-boxer shoved and threatened music writers. He had always been, of course, wondrously skilled at using the press as a main outlet of his performance project The Personality Of Morrissey, but transitioning from arch provocative statements to arms-length almost-violence, through a living symbol of what he’d been challenged on, felt extremely telling and a significant turning point.

(Of course, in the moment it was probably largely that it gave him warm fuzzies, and half a stiffy, to be so vociferously defended by his boyfriend.)

Thanks for the piece, Mark, and I’m really looking forward to the book!

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By: Andrew Farrell https://freakytrigger.co.uk/hidden-landscapes/2018/05/other-jacksons-in-your-house/comment-page-1#comment-2241619 Wed, 16 May 2018 12:10:21 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31089#comment-2241619 What is it that you feel you don’t know about Bengali in Platforms, Peter?

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By: mark sinker https://freakytrigger.co.uk/hidden-landscapes/2018/05/other-jacksons-in-your-house/comment-page-1#comment-2241466 Tue, 15 May 2018 16:40:37 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31089#comment-2241466 it’s quite hard to put together a history of the uk music press without saying it:

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By: Phil https://freakytrigger.co.uk/hidden-landscapes/2018/05/other-jacksons-in-your-house/comment-page-1#comment-2241454 Tue, 15 May 2018 15:55:48 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31089#comment-2241454 Neither do I – it’s a racist category – but it’s an accurate label for the types of music that people like Morrissey hate, or believe they hate. (Can you say you hate a genre of music if you hate it in general and a priori, irrespective of what any example actually sounds like?)

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By: Peter Miller https://freakytrigger.co.uk/hidden-landscapes/2018/05/other-jacksons-in-your-house/comment-page-1#comment-2241440 Tue, 15 May 2018 13:47:22 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31089#comment-2241440 I do not like the concept of “black music”.

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By: Peter Miller https://freakytrigger.co.uk/hidden-landscapes/2018/05/other-jacksons-in-your-house/comment-page-1#comment-2241439 Tue, 15 May 2018 13:46:40 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31089#comment-2241439 I don’t think Panic is racist, and I don’t really think Morrissey is/was racist. I think it is more anti-Radio 1, which was available in all the places listed.

I suppose this is not a staggering new take on the song.

I don’t know about Bengali in Platforms.

I don’t really mind the flag, although I wouldn’t do it myself.

I don’t know why anyone would support Anne-Marie Wotsit.

I really like the picture of the aliens thinking about this.

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By: Matthew Marcus https://freakytrigger.co.uk/hidden-landscapes/2018/05/other-jacksons-in-your-house/comment-page-1#comment-2241406 Tue, 15 May 2018 10:02:18 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31089#comment-2241406 Oh man, I hadn’t thought about A Rush And A Push through the lens of the new Morrissey showing his true colours, but it’s a bit horrid isn’t it? It’s gonna be hard to listen to old favourites ever again now. Still I enjoyed a Polanski film despite myself not long ago, so maybe I can compartmentalise this too…

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By: Mark M https://freakytrigger.co.uk/hidden-landscapes/2018/05/other-jacksons-in-your-house/comment-page-1#comment-2241307 Mon, 14 May 2018 20:45:57 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31089#comment-2241307 Re7: Yeah, in retrospect (but mostly in retrospect*, I suspect) the signs are there.

(*But things were very clear after Bengali In Platforms – I had Viva Hate on cassette and used to fast-forward past it every time. Never did buy another Morrissey offering).

[Completely apart from the Morrissey issue, there seems something a bit uncomfortable about the ‘soul act’ and ‘reggae act’ categories – they feel like very old-fashioned pigeonholes into which to fit the staggeringly exciting black music being made in the US, Jamaica and the UK at the time. I know that soul was used very flexibly, but even so.]

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By: mark sinker https://freakytrigger.co.uk/hidden-landscapes/2018/05/other-jacksons-in-your-house/comment-page-1#comment-2241303 Mon, 14 May 2018 20:31:25 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31089#comment-2241303 Thanks Billy! Excellent — I see the word “all” in the so-called totemic quote transferred across from video.

Nico is an, um, interesting choice as “soul act”. It’s maybe just a reference to the fact that at that time she lived and performed in Manchester, a tired shabby smacked-out echo of her old ice-maiden self — but there’s another possibility that I’m afraid jumps out at me. At some point in the mid-70s — I don’t know exactly when, or who she was talking to — she had announced her dislike of “negroes” to a Melody Maker writer, comparing them to animals and cannibals (she chose to make an exception for Bob Marley). As a result, she was quietly dropped by Island Records, and ever afterwards persona non grata, certainly at the NME (a senior editor once told me she would never appear in the paper as long as he had anything to do with it). I guess I hope Morrissey wasn’t making a sly and shady joke about this — though of course he was an obsessive reader of the rock press at just this time.

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By: Billy Smart https://freakytrigger.co.uk/hidden-landscapes/2018/05/other-jacksons-in-your-house/comment-page-1#comment-2241294 Mon, 14 May 2018 19:22:19 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31089#comment-2241294 Morrissey’s choices in full:

BEST GROUP: James
MALE SINGER: Pete Burns
FEMALE SINGER: Tracey Thorn
BEST NEW ACT: Shock Headed Peters
BEST SINGLE: ‘Nu Au Soleil’ – Ludus
BEST LP: ‘Fried’ – Julian Cope
BEST SONGWRITER: Don’t be silly
BEST DRESSED SLEEVE: ‘Jean’s Not Happening’ – Pale Fountains
CREEP OF THE YEAR: Sade
MOST WONDERFUL HUMAN BEING: John Walters
TV SHOW: ‘Victoria Wood As Seen On TV’
RADIO SHOW: Richard Skinner
FILM: ‘The Dresser’
SOUL ACT: Nico
REGGAE ACT: Reggae is vile
INSTRUMENTALIST: Johnny Marr
BEST DRESSED: Linder
PROMO VIDEO: All videos are vile

Poor Sade. The readers’ Creep Of The Year was – as you might expect – Margaret Thatcher.

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By: Billy Smart https://freakytrigger.co.uk/hidden-landscapes/2018/05/other-jacksons-in-your-house/comment-page-1#comment-2241293 Mon, 14 May 2018 19:15:25 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31089#comment-2241293 I have a copy of the NME for 23 February 1985 in my hands, and can confirm that on page 22 Morrissey does indeed opine that “reggae is vile”.

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By: mark sinker https://freakytrigger.co.uk/hidden-landscapes/2018/05/other-jacksons-in-your-house/comment-page-1#comment-2241280 Mon, 14 May 2018 17:43:51 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31089#comment-2241280 This is the Johnny Rogan googlebooks citation (you have to scroll down a bit). He says an NME poll in Feb 85 (and he is king of the cut-and-paste biography so quite likely right). But elsewhere I have seen it dated 1984.

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By: Phil https://freakytrigger.co.uk/hidden-landscapes/2018/05/other-jacksons-in-your-house/comment-page-1#comment-2241274 Mon, 14 May 2018 16:58:49 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31089#comment-2241274 OK, now I’m confused. I definitely remember a questionnaire-type thing with the more usual ratio of questions to answers (many Qs, 1 A each), which I guess would go with having individual prompts for musical genres. (Maybe it actually was Sounds?) Alternatively, maybe all the other people I mentioned answered the same questionnaire more conventionally – it would be just like Moz (Good Moz, that is – the Moz We Thought We Knew) to ignore the Qs & send in his own lists.

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By: mark sinker https://freakytrigger.co.uk/hidden-landscapes/2018/05/other-jacksons-in-your-house/comment-page-1#comment-2241269 Mon, 14 May 2018 15:37:18 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31089#comment-2241269 or maybe that is all there is: someone’s transcribed it here (it’s dated 1983)

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By: mark sinker https://freakytrigger.co.uk/hidden-landscapes/2018/05/other-jacksons-in-your-house/comment-page-1#comment-2241268 Mon, 14 May 2018 15:33:28 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31089#comment-2241268 do you mean the “portrait of the artist as a consumer” page?

here is morrissey’s — but it does seem to be chopped off short:

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By: Phil https://freakytrigger.co.uk/hidden-landscapes/2018/05/other-jacksons-in-your-house/comment-page-1#comment-2241265 Mon, 14 May 2018 15:06:55 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31089#comment-2241265 Fascinating stuff. A couple more footnotes. I remember reading “All reggae is vile” – it was in NME’s page 3(?) box-out insta-poll, the same one where Darryl Hall and John Oates (those were different times) both nominated The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, the guy from Eels answered every question with “Get Ur Freak On” and MES said his favourite work of fiction was “Julian Cope’s Bumper Book of Lies About Mark E Smith” (miaow).

Unless it was (all of the above, but) in Sounds.

I don’t know about alt-right, but I get the feeling, looking back, that Moz was already properly racist back then – I mean, “Bengali in Platforms” really is ‘vile’. Perhaps what blind-sided (most of) us was that, as well as being automatically enrolled into the Nice Guys’ corner qua indie pin-up, he didn’t seem to be talking like a racist. On the one hand, he wasn’t using the defensive language of the receding tide of acceptable racism, making a point of using phrases like “our coloured brethren” and making jokes about blackboards – he believed what he believed, and he was on the attack. On the other hand, though, he wasn’t talking about muggers and dogfood and ten to a room, the recognisable language of everyone from the NF to Bernard Manning to Michael Wharton. We simply hadn’t had anyone expressing overt anti-Black racism through hatred of Black music – and (pretty much) only that way – so in a way it’s not surprising that what he was actually saying went relatively unnoticed for so long.

Hiding in Plain Sight: British Pop Culture From Telstar to Beetlebum. ISAGN.

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