This song dramatizes and laments the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing attack, in which the Libyan refugee brothers Salman and Hashem Abedi murdered 22 and physically injured 239, most of them teenagers or even pre-teens, as they exited a pop concert. And it denounces the promotion by British opinion-makers of an outrage-squelching form of mourning in response to the massacre.
Morrissey has a number of songs that combine dramatized expression of pathos with moments of biting commentary, but I’d say this one is at or near the top of those—it’s quite an achievement.
Implicit in the song is a condemnation of the failure of British authorities to keep the public safe from terrorism. Here is a story which recalls the lax intelligence and police work—which at least in one instance was aggravated by a security guard’s fear of being accused of anti-Islamic hatred,—and which was all the more inexcusable given the Paris Bataclan Theatre massacre by Islamic terrorists (90 murdered) in 2015.
The song’s more prominent issue, however, concerns public mourning and remembrance, and is trickier to understand for those not from Manchester. The key lyrics here are:
And the silly people sing:
“Don’t look back in anger!”
And the morons sing and sway:
“Don’t look back in anger!”
I can assure you, I will
look back in anger, ‘till
the day I die.
What happened was an apparently spontaneous thing: a woman sang parts of a 90s rock song, “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” at a Manchester gathering to honor the dead, and then, many in the crowd joined her. As the Manchester Evening News reported:
On May 25, 2017 a minute's silence was held in St Ann's square in memory of the innocent victims. But out of the silence a single voice was heard.
Lydia Bernsmeier-Rullow began to sing the Oasis song, “Don't Look Back in Anger.”
Here are the lyrics of the chorus:
And so, Sally can wait--
she knows it's too late,
as we're walking on by,
her soul slides away.
But don't look back in anger,
I heard you say.
…When the Arena reopened Noel Gallagher [Oasis leader, and this song’s writer] performed to 14,000 people whose voices joined as one singing the same song.
He said: "Every time we sing, we win, so sing like you've never sung before."
As for the lyrical content of the song outside that one line, well, it doesn’t help things. While it may be Oasis’s most irresistible number, its lyrics have no firm message about forgiveness—they are rather, a hard-to-interpret hodge-podge. The title refers an old John Osborne play, but I agree with those who say the main message concerns the necessary attitude to take after a tough break-up. Not that this is clear, conveyed as it is alongside various slices-of-life, one of which is about “Sally,” who some interpreters say refers to a character in a Stone Roses song, another is about the protagonist (or someone) wanting to “start a revolution from my bed,” and third is a warning to someone against putting (her?) “life in the hands, of a rock ‘n’ roll band.”
Well. If the song is about a woman realizing her need to move on from a relationship, perhaps with a rock band member, but without angry regrets, that’s a resolution that hardly seems morally equivalent to a community realizing its (purported) duty to not to dwell in anger upon a terrorist attack.
And notice that Noel Gallagher offered up no objections. He easily could have said—“I’m flattered, and glad it could comfort the gathered mourners at that moment, but the song doesn’t quite fit, and in fact, I think the public has legitimate reasons to be angry.” But he instead rode with the hype, and willingly sold the whole idea there that to express anger at terrorist acts is to fall into what the terrorists want you to do.
Quite a few Manchester residents remember this aspect of the story as something more pushed upon them by the usual media suspects than something proceeding from the public’s dominant feeling. Here’s one comment among several similar ones I noticed posted to the videos of “Bonfire”:
I'm from Manchester and worked a few streets away from St Anne's Square - the place where they held a vigil a couple of days after the bombing. I went with everyone from work, and stood there, absolutely furious, as everyone sang that bloody song, along with chants of Stronger Together - whatever that means. On the night of the bombing, Manchester was failed by so many people who should have been there to protect us from a dangerous ideology....
Video evidence shows, BTW, that far less than everyone in the crowd sang it.
Here’s what Morrissey himself, who grew up there—he currently lives in LA--said the day after:
Celebrating my birthday in Manchester as news of the bomb broke. The anger is monumental. For what reason will this ever stop? …Theresa May says such attacks “will not break us,” but her own life is lived in a bullet-proof bubble, and she evidently does not need to identify any young people today in Manchester morgues. Also, “will not break us” means that the tragedy will not break her, or her policies on immigration. ….In modern Britain everyone seems petrified to officially say what we all say in private. Politicians tell us they are unafraid, but they are never the victims. How easy to be unafraid when one is protected from the line of fire. The people have no such protections.
Eloquent! And he refused to side-step around the relevance of the immigration issue.
In any case, I gather that there was a divided feeling in Manchester at the time, but that it was subjected to a media operation that presented the response-preference of one side as the correct one.
So finally, that other side of the public’s opinion is getting its day in Morrissey’s new song. And yes, it is the right side. It is, in fact, “silly” to bring a rock song which has an uncertain-at-best message into a remembrance ceremony.1
More centrally, public expressions of forgiveness can only follow some kind of public repentance on the part of those responsible. A philosophy scholar who has looked at the issue has said that while real forgiveness is always between private persons, there can be a public form, a “sibling” of real forgiveness called public apology, wherein apology “is offered by the appropriate state official for wrongs done by the state” or is offered by leaders of “previously conflicting groups in the community.” Such was not clearly offered here, either by May’s government, or by England’s Islamic leaders.
And as a push-back against the idea that anger is always to be avoided, we might recall the discussion in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, where he voices in passing, while talking about a possible (but rare) “deficiency” in anger, the assumption that “Holding back when one is being foully insulted, or overlooking it when it happens to those close to one, is slavish.”(1126a8)2
Unfortunately, however, this song’s meaning cannot be limited simply to what it talks about. We also are obliged to face-up to the fact that this is a suppressed song. As explained a year ago in this half-unsympathetic article by pop-music writer James Hall, by around May of last year Morrissey had a full album of songs ready to go, studio-recorded, but he had been dropped by his label BMG the previous November. Morrissey said the album could be released by the “highest (or lowest) bidder,” but apparently for more than a year now, there have been no takers. Maybe we will learn that Morrissey is asking a unreasonable price, but that would be directly contrary to what he’s implied, and so I think Hall’s headline, “No record label will touch Morrissey – and that’s the music industry’s loss,” is accurate.
Let that sink in.
Major artist. Longtime fan-base. Reliably fills halls, and sells recordings. For the last six years, doing what many critics, such as Hall, and Fiona Dodwell, feel is very fine work, and way up there by middle-aged career standards in popular music.
And you cannot purchase the song I’m talking about here.
Why not?
I pointed to a few of the excuses for injustice to Morrissey in a piece I wrote last year about Van Morrison’s “Where Have All the Rebels Gone?,” but here are the “charges” in detail.
One, it is said he has harshly criticized others over the years (yes, this is the man who in one of his early songs accused anyone who eats meat of being a murderer) and this reflects a basic arrogance. Two, it is said that he is remarkably difficult person to deal with, especially for music industry people, and this reflects the same. Three, it is said he is racist, or “culturally racist,” or culturally insensitive, because he a) once slagged reggae music, b) voiced support for a group called the English Defense League, the EDL, back in 2013, and a few of its members were later proved guilty of physical attacks on non-whites, and c) he now voices some support for the populist-conservative party For Britain, which is most known for daring to say that the problem with the amount of Muslim immigration to Britain is not just one of “Islamism,” but is fundamentally one of Islam’s own poor fit with democracy.
To charges one and two, my basic response is “Are you serious?” Shall we recall all the positive cliches about divas and geniuses that everyone in the music scenes constantly repeats? Or consider, dear reader, whatever figures you place in what I’ll call your “Book of Heroes”—I’ll mention Socrates, Hamilton, and Ralph Ellison as examples from mine--Would you not admit that the charge of arrogance! been brought against nearly all such figures? Moreover, we should recall that Morrissey’s concern for the suffering of others (including animals), pervades his songwriting, even if yes, he is one of the all-time masters of delivering a dressing-down in song.
As for charge three, my basic response is Hell No He Is Not, while admitting that important disagreements exist between UK citizens about immigration policy, such that not everyone who vigorously expresses a difference of opinion with Morrissey on this need be thought guilty of the vile sin of falsely accusing a political opponent of racism. (Just because most every privileged writer, speaker, or artist able to opine on a big platform, and who is in favor of current UK immigration policy, is guilty of precisely this sin, it doesn’t mean that the policy position requires its supporters to behave in this low-down way!) I will also admit that there are details of the British debates about racism, immigration policy, and third-parties that are difficult for outsiders like myself to judge,3 and more generally, that all populist-conservatives like myself—and also, all old-school liberals like Morrissey--have tricky issues to negotiate when deciding how far to distance oneself or one’s political coalition from figures or groups who at one time held, or at present hold, views that seem to flirt with xenophobia, racism, white-nationalism, etc.4 However, while I deal with both of those tough issues in the footnotes just given, I do need to say in the main text that the For Britain party has a disciplined leadership and platform that thoroughly repudiates racism. I fully agree with Morrissey’s defense of himself here in the NME against R-word slanders, and fully share his outrage that this newer party, led by Anne-Marie Waters (a lesbian, and ex-Labor) is subjected to a categorical information blackout by British media and gets accused by them of being hate-mongering as a matter of definition! “Today the leader of the hatred-stoking group For Britain held a campaign rally”—that sort of thing. A truly totalitarian media ploy, and we should not be surprised if this approach eventually results in members or leaders of that party being murdered, as Waters is warning. Were I British, I would consider voting for For Britain, depending on my MP and the state of local political play. For most Tories are useless anymore.
The real sin of Morrissey, the one which now has him black-listed by the entire music industry, is that he “wandered off the reservation,” and became someone those who assumed they were his ideological officers could no longer control. Even more ugly than the ingratitude shown by all those millennials and Z-sters who now attack J.K. Rowling for her sanity about the present extremes of transgender ideology, is the ingratitude shown by progressivists generally to Morrissey, who has an unassailable claim to not only to have been the most important songwriter who fought for gay dignity, but also the same for animal-rights veganism. More than Van Morrison does, Morrissey has a right to sing these Morrison lines:
Now I'm certainly no hero,
'Cause all the goodwill I gave them
now just means zero.
All his contributions to the progressivist cultural/political cause, and they couldn’t even cut him a pass, let at least him express a heterodox opinion on immigration as he approached middle-age!
The way Morrissey has himself put it is edgier and wittier than what Van Morrison arrived at:
Seemingly, the villains in charge of the music industry and pop-culture journalism just all emailed one another: no studio releases for Morrissey—see how much he loves this new record of his, saying “it’s his best work ever”—well, let’s deprive him of that!
It’s out of lickspittle insecure spite, sure, but far more so, it’s to warn up-and-coming artists: you’d better not try what Morrissey did! Right now, you can bet that there is some younger popular-music artist who is reasoning the following way with herself: “Can I get away with releasing a song a third as defiant as Tommy Coyle’s ‘Stasi State’ or Morrissey’s ‘Bonfire of Teenagers?’ Morrissey’s had his career, and thus can’t be totally cancelled, but if they’re willing to do this to even him, they’ll really hammer me I’d better make my songs that touch on my dissent as ambiguous as possible.”
What they are doing is thus the exact opposite of liberalism, of the old spirit of bohemia, of “hippie,” of “punk,” etc.
Is it even evidence that our societies are now totalitarian? Well, no, contrary to what Black Pigeon Speaks says somewhere in this wild-ride (and delightfully Henry-Rollins-dissing) video on Morrissey’s stand. The fact that I am writing these words, that you are reading them, that Black Pigeon Speaks is viewable on yt, and that Morrissey recently performed this song in Las Vegas on several nights5 and will soon take it to England, is clear evidence that we do not live in totalitarian despotisms.
I speak here with the authority of a scholar who co-edited a book on applying the concept of totalitarianism to East Germany, and in the film The Lives of Others.
And yet, what this incident is forcing me to realize, is that we need a way of recognizing a new kind of totalitarianism that has been tried with increasing success over the last decade, but especially since Covid—call it: Partial Totalitarianism.
A contradiction in terms, right? But think about it. Is it not fact that in the music industry, there are now bans against dissent about lockdowns, vaccines, lenient immigration rules, trans-activism, and the PC line on Islam? Established artists like Morrissey and Van Morrison can elude some of these bans if they are willing to endure slander campaigns, but newer artists have reason to believe these bans exist and that violations of them, whether in lyrics, in gig-organization, or even in “private” conversations, would likely be career-killers.
A society of Partial Totalitarianism leaves certain democratic and liberal structures in place, but undermines their honest operation. It leaves some areas of cultural activity and public opinion alone, but fiercely de-platforms and career-kills when it is defied in certain spheres. And regarding the so-far left-alone spheres of activity and of potentially free discourse, it provides no assurances that it will not eventually break into these.
In the society of Partial Totalitarianism, many alert persons, like Margaret Anna Alice and Mattias Desmet, notice that classic totalitarian methods are being used to manipulate or control the populace. But they will not be able to show there is a correct Party Line on every issue. Plausible Deniability is one of the operative principles of the regime, after all. No-one comes out and says what they believe, that people are best served when manipulated, that the day of democracy is done, etc.
I’m sure I’ll talk more about my concept of Partial Totalitarianism here another time.
If it is correct, however, notice what follows with respect to the “Rock scene,” or popular music more generally: it is definitely one of the zones of totalitarianism. (Others are medicine, academia, and broadcast news.) I was quite right, then, to compare someone like Kevin Morby to Georg Dreyman. Neither he, nor any of his peers, are actually free to say what they want—and most of them have paved the way for this.
But as for Morrissey, he’s a free man.
They’ve taught some of us how Savonarola whipped up frenzy in 1490s Florence with sermons against Vanities, resulting in a Bonfire of cosmetics, fine furniture, paintings, etc.
Do you see it now, the 2020s Bonfire that lights up our own sky, upon whose flames our crowds will even, according to Morrissey’s poetic message here, toss the children, because they so believe that everyone Must Protect the Dogmas? Two key Dogmas are that about Islamic immigration being double-plus good, and this newer one about the vaxxes being so safe and necessary.
Look upon it with sorrow, horror, or perhaps dance around it with Morrissey’s sort of mockery of “morons” who want to put us all “on a chain,” but also, yes—
--look upon it with anger.
It is not irrelevant to note that three years later the small-time actress Bernsmeier-Rullow who initiated the singing of the chorus, sought to establish a Manchester chapter of Black Lives Matter. That is, her track record of sloppy and somewhat self-righteous thinking, and of having no serious and consistent stance on the place of anger in politics—why was BLM’s exploitation of anger justified if anger was itself so toxic?--, would continue. Still, we must also note that her response to the moment was embraced by many.
I am willing to discuss what additional claims are put upon the Christian citizen with respect to these issues, but only with my fellow Christians. I would sharply disagree with any Christians confused enough to suggest that the commands given us to forgive others in radical ways line-up with the progressivist pacifistic teaching drawn from the Oasis song (or rather, from that one line!), and particularly given the political context in this case, which had to consider the opinions of many non-Christian survivors and citizens. Morrissey himself claims to be a Catholic Christian, but I would regard him as at best, very heterodox—consider his near-total attack on Christian sexual teachings, which goes well beyond criticizing them for prohibiting homosexual acts, and which would cast aside the Aristotelian teachings on sexual ethics also, in his 2017 song “Israel.”
I would not, for example, join my fellow populist-conservatives when some of them say about the UK’s history with immigration, “Enoch Powell was right!” About some things, I’m sure he was. About all? Sorry, I’ve read too much about British national fronters back in the 70s and 80s, and have too-much believed the basic account of those days provided by the black British director Steve McQueen in his impressive Small Axe series, to think that. Besides, just because one might be right about some stricter immigration policy that the UK could have adopted back in the day, and seems vindicated by today’s facts, the white British citizen is today morally and civically obligated to deal with his now-fellow citizens of Jamaican or Pakistani background as entirely equal citizens. Those choices, whether or not the best ones, were made, and cannot be revoked once citizenship is granted. Islam, of course, brings in issues much more fundamental and difficult than, say, Jamaican race and culture, and the refusal of so many progressivists to admit that has cost European nations three decades of mad immigration policies. The best approach to the problems raised by this is that sketched by Pierre Manent in his Beyond Radical Secularism book, written for his fellow Frenchman, but in many ways applicable to the British situation. Its English subtitle is How France and the Christian West Should Respond to the Islamic Challenge. A must-read.
Here’s a shorthand sketch of what I think I know about the British third-party groups and figures who dare to criticize Islam, which I’d recommend to my fellow American conservatives (on the basis of very limited study and acquaintance with the key issues, and so it is undoubtedly off here and there): a) don’t believe a thing the BBC or other mainstream British outlets say on these issues—the record of lies and casual slander about person after person is now nearly endless, and it is what they are using to unfairly characterize Morrisey, with one outlet quoting another’s judgments of him with zero evidence, or pulling some “connected-to-X, who is connected-to-Y!” trick,—b) For Britain is all right, which is putting it too mildly—you may disagree with them on some issues, as I do with their Halal stand, but they are seriously self-disciplined and seem nearly always able to keep semi-cloaked racists or all-out Islam-denouncers out of their organization, c) Tommy Robinson, who has now joined For Britain, does have a few sketchy things in his past as far as I am able to weigh things, but they cannot disqualify his very careful statements over the last eight or so years—if something bad is unearthed, it could become necessary for all conservatives to distance themselves from him in the future, as the American National Review rightly had to do a decade ago with John Derbyshire, but it increasingly seems unlikely, and d) don’t trust Katie Hopkins—something is messed up about her—she’s as charming and intelligent as all get-out, but my gut tells me she could get American conservative fans of hers into trouble on race- or Islam- related issues, given their distance from the British context. She’s already had the imprudence to accept an award from a white-nationalist European organization that turned out to be a fake, a trap set by woke activists, but that is not the only warning sign with her.
I was too fund-deprived to attend, which is why y’all need to subscribe!
Apologies in advance if I get heated or long-winded, but Stephen Patrick Morrissey did sing the songs that saved my life through teenhood (and ever since), so it's hard for me to stay even-keeled about him. That being said, I just want to break this down into 2 points:
1. I live in LA and had a young WeHo gay at my house awhile back, who of course knows nothing of the world that doesn't take place inside the hall of mirrors called Social Media, and he made the mistake of vocal-frying "Morrissey is a trash person" within earshot (I think this was bc of one of Morrissey' other blasphemies, maybe some trans heresy). And I had to remind him that in the early/mid 80s, while every queen from Freddie Mercury to Elton to even Boy George (!) was deeply closeted, the Smiths' second single was "This Charming Man" ("and in this charming car, this charming man"), an obvious love song from man to man. But of course in our time of Celebrate the Proud gay heroes of yesterday today and tomorrow (OR ELSE!), this truly brave and groundbreaking act has to be memory-holed, because the prime directive is Must Always Display Complete Fealty to the Doctrine and if not you shall suffer Damnatio memoriae.
2. Speaking of Doctrine uber alles in re the Manchester attack, really it's hard for me to say this with feeling like a crank, but I don't see how any clear assessment of the evidence points in any other direction. For the Corporate Globalists and their media propagandists, all of them completely brainwashed by the Social Justice morality and worldview, it seems that this is their belief system, to be pronounced and enforced by any means necessary:
If a White kills a Brown/Black: the entire Anglosphere (if not planet) must mourn and reflect, march and donate, weep and promise to do better, use the right slogans and logos, and if the last benchwarmer on the most obscure New Zealand cricket team refuses to wear the ribbon or take the knee, he and his whole family and anyone who sticks up for him must be denounced and driven out of society; while at the same time
If a Brown/Black kills a White: we must never get angry or respond in kind or Hate Wins!, and besides there are always larger historical and social contexts to think about and we wouldn't want their community to feel some sort of stigma (the greatest crime at all), and who are we to judge anyway? Instead let's sing some songs and say some prayers and maybe buy a new T-shirt.
So unless I'm crazy, the Corporate Globalists want the citizens of the Anglosphere (and other rich countries) to be a dazed and docile populace who never fight back or stick up for themselves, who have no right to have and protect their own traditional homelands or cultures, because (say it with me) "That's racist!" and their partners in the Social Justice cult act as their ideological enforcers and Red Guard because despite all their treatises about Equality and Liberation what they've really wanted all along is to just punch Whitey in the nose.
Please, someone tell me, am I wrong? Do I sound crazy?? What would Morrissey say??
Helluva post, Carl! "I am not a dog on a chain" is fabulous. What a find (and a gem). I look forward to seeing where you go with Partial Totalitarianism.