It’s always funny to see admirers of an artist turn around as soon as they discover an unpleasant aspect of his personality. From an idol, he becomes overnight the object of all opprobrium. Love, when disappointed, often transforms into the fiercest hatred and the more pure and intense this love has been, the more powerful and strong the rejection will be.
So with Morrissey. A true icon when he sang with the Smiths (1982-1987), he experienced disgrace once his solo career was launched, after having spread remarks that smacked of low-level nationalism, with all that this can imply in terms of racist or populist overtones. Since then, he has become the bane of a whole section of the left, who see in him the very image of the devil incarnate. However, the 66-year-old British singer has not changed. And if his records have varied in quality and intensity, he remains an outstanding lyricist and one of the most enlightened singers of his generation, the last of the sacred monsters.
So what, I ask myself falsely, should we boycott Morrissey because he is this or that, because he colludes with a right that reeks of extremes, because he makes outrageous or polemical remarks? With the greatest vehemence, I refuse. Or put another way, I don’t care about Morrissey’s political views. They are what they are, I do not share them in any way. But however strongly I disagree with these opinions, they will not prevent me from listening to his music or attending one of his concerts.
Life is far too short to bother with such controversies. Morrissey is neither Joseph Goebbels nor David Duke. He has strong opinions on immigration? Much good to him! He laments multiculturalism and its perceived harmful impact on British society? And then?! If I started to boycott all singers, writers, painters, musicians and artists of all kinds whose opinions repel me or are contrary to my values, my life would be hell in which I would spend my days listening to the entirety of Nana Mouskouri’s discography.
My tolerance obviously has limits. It is not for nothing that I have always forbidden myself from reading the writings of Louis-Ferdinand Céline. There is a threshold beyond which I feel that I can no longer consciously listen to or read this or that work. When it conveys in all its voluble monstrosity an ideology of proven abjection. When artistic achievement ceases to be a reflection of sensitivity and becomes a support for hate speech.
Apart from a few tendentious songs, none of this from Morrissey. And when he tries, he stays within reason. In his fourteenth solo album, Make-Up Is a Lie (released March 6, 2026), one of the tracks titled “Notre-Dame” suggests that the fire in the Parisian cathedral was not the result of chance, but of deliberate intention. It’s not flamboyant, without being the scandal of the century either. I don’t have the soul of a political commissioner. I am not going to weigh each word to see if it meets the declaration of human rights.
It is a disease of the left to absolutely want everyone to look like them or think like them. It’s understood: Morrissey is probably not left-wing. May I know how this prohibits me from tasting these songs, some of the most successful of which appear on this latest album, such as the moving “Lester Bangs”, the heady “Boulevard”, the sardonic “Kerching Kerching” or the sumptuous and already classic “The Monsters of Pig Alley”?
We find there at the same time the acidity of Morrissey’s humor, his sarcasm, his own way of settling scores, his hostility to modernity and its dehumanizing fashions, his desperate quest for authenticity, for love… Yes, for love, so true is it that the Mancunian singer sometimes resembles a misanthrope quick to love humanity without particularly appreciating his neighbor.
We must continue to love Morrissey, despite his provocations and his excesses. We must love him in the candor of a passion that does not want to die. We must love him for everything he gave and brought to us. We must love him as we love our first love all our lives, lucid about what he could have become, but determined to keep him intact in our memory. You have to love him for what he was and for what he still is today, a singer with a timeless voice, capable of the worst as well as the best.
You have to love his latest album for these few songs which, for a moment, reconnect with the grace and delicacy of yesteryear, these lyrical flights of light melancholy where Morrissey reappears at the best of his form, like an uncompromising crooner who does not intend to give in to the canons of his time. Morrissey doesn’t cheat. His latest record is thus in his image: whole, corrosive, elegiac and of chaotic beauty.
