Popular Culture Review
more closely involved in Morrissey’s career, such as Geoff Travis, boss of the
Rough Trade label to which the Smiths signed (152ff). Most of these portraits
are hatchet jobs, some of them merely dismissive, others very funny. In
fact, throughout Autobiography, Morrissey indulges in verbal knife-plunging,
stabbing everyone from his old school-teachers to Margaret Thatcher (14344, 226-27) who, according to one study of Morrissey and his music, was a
“negative inspiration” (Hopps 28) for him. In most cases, Morrissey’s targets
seem to deserve the attack, although of course their autobiographies would
no doubt give a different version of events.
As for the music industry, its “gluttonous snakes-and-ladders legalities”
(170) reach their acme, or nadir, in the notorious 1996 Smiths’ trial, in which
Michael Joyce, former drummer with the Smiths, brought a civil action against
Morrissey for a share of royalties and other income the band supposedly had.
appeal, all of which Morrissey lost. Many long paragraphs in this section
testify to the torrent of emotion and commitment to righting the record, a
performance not to be interrupted by pause or change of subtopic until the
current one is exhausted, though the stark brevity of the author’s equation,
“fame=money=lawsuits” (321), is convincing. Post-breakup legal actions
among former band members are almost a required element of the pop-rock
career and part of a long tradition—Pete Best and the Beatles provide an early
example—but the Smiths’ case is a particularly bitter and, it seems, unjust one,
forming a caution against that other staple of a pop-rock career: attending to
music but not to business.
When a pre-fame Morrissey submits a script to the TV soap Coronation
Street, “the twice-weekly crawl through northern morals,” he describes his
effort as “a word-slinger’s delight” (122). The phrase, with its implication of
both pleasure and haste in language, applies well to the style and structure
of Autobiography. The problems and advantages of the style come from
the same source. The language tumbles out in a rush of energy, the words
propelled by the writer’s need to tell his version of the truth. The style is an oral
one with the speaker addressing his audience very directly, confessing his
anger, frustrations, desires and pleasures. Autobiography is a performance
makes immediate contact with its audience and reads quickly, an advantage
for such a long book. Sometimes, though, the prose trips over itself to fall into
at least minor incoherence and grammatical error. Then the style resembles
rush writing with a touch of Tourette’s. It’s not clear what editing process the text
has gone through. Perhaps a desire, author’s or publisher’s, for the authentic
problems while retaining the style’s energy and momentum.
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