There’s actually been a lot of study about this. The tl;dr are some shared cultural experiences around lack of acceptance as immigrants, and shared musical sensibilities. Morrissey has largely embraced this following despite doing so in pretty much the worst way possible once famously saying, “I really like Mexican people. I find them so terribly nice. And they have fantastic hair, and fantastic skin, and usually really good teeth.”
Christ is Morrissey ever an insufferable douchenozzle of a person, and I say this as someone that was absolutely obsessed with The Smiths growing up.
Three things. First, he’s a good musician. You don’t have to love his stuff (solo or with the Smiths), but if you know nothing else than what’s coming out of the speakers and you’re not scrutinizing every lyric for an encoded political message, it’s probably going to sound at least pretty good, and maybe you’ll love it.
Second, when “outsider” stars get entrenched with certain demographics like that, they REALLY get their roots in. The 14-year-old Latina girls listening to him today (or whoever) got him as a hand-me-down from their mothers’ generation. You see this sort of oddball cross-whatever appeal a lot, not just with Morrissey. Sometimes it’s just a random seed that took root in just the right way, or sometimes there are hidden connections you’d have to be in the specific group to appreciate.
Third, his UKIP-style racism and nationalism aren’t, at face value, going to read as anywhere near as offensive to (for example) Mexican-Americans as they would to South Asian Brits. Yeah, it’s all the same root cause when you’re picking it apart in a grad seminar, but even if his average Chicano fans heard a clip of him talking about preserving English identity yadda yadda yadda, it’s not going to come across as a slap against them because the context is so different.
He didn’t write the post. His FB admin (his manager?) did. I’m sure Morrissey probably agrees with it, but it’s clear a lot of journalists and ahem bloggers haven’t actually read the post to the end.
I would love to see Bart Simpson saying to Morrissey, “You mad, bro?” Somebody make a t-shirt of it; I’ll buy it! You could even sell it on the BoingBoing Store.
Yeah. Morrissey is an indefensible piece of shit. Though Simpsons going for the low-hanging fruit of fat-phobix caricature and vague, obvious, criticism, also speaks to the show’s (non)relevance as a source of satire for going on two decades now.
i will go on the record as liking him – solo, with the smiths, whatever. sorry, he was pivotal to a younger gay me. this is not to say that i like or approve of him as a person. he’s awful, and i will happily mock him and criticize his racist, backward-thinking views. but the music still stands, he wasn’t solely responsible for it anyway, and this is one of those cases where i separate the artist and the art. like picasso.
As someone whose husband has taken us to both a Morrissey concert and the Dickens Museum in London, I regret that I have but one heart to give for this. You have made my day.
