You really ought to read the damn book, but please feel free not to shut up in the mean time. As usual the discussion they generate is productive in the most welcome way.
Without rambling uninformed discussions this site wouldn't exist.
Or I wouldn't.
Sure, but why is that a problem? You could say the same for practically any aspect of the work of any writer, artist, film-maker or architect.
You answered the question yourself: it's a problem because you can say the same about almost any pop singer. I'm exaggerating when I say this, of course-- I know Morrissey is better than the rest-- but it becomes more difficult to read a critical study that tries to take him seriously as an artist when
some of the things said about him could also be said about pop singers we don't and shouldn't take seriously. It's like the recurring joke in "Twenty-Four Hour Party People" where Tony Wilson insists that Shaun Ryder is the most significant poet since Yeats. To me the humor in that joke, aside from Wilson's characteristic deadpan absurdity, lies in the impossibility of refuting him.
You put the matter very well by saying that Hopps focuses on "what occurs in the meeting between one's own consciousness and Morrissey's music". Couldn't we just as easily read 300-page academic books on the subject of the meeting between one's own consciousness and Lady GaGa's music, or Sting's, or Status Quo's? We could, but they wouldn't convince. My point is not that Morrissey shouldn't be treated seriously, only that this particular treatment-- which I
really oughtta read some day soon-- begins to sound arbitrary to the point of meaningless. I thought what you wrote about the way Hopps explains the way he sings over Johnny's guitar in a contrapuntal fashion to be very interesting, but the thought immediately occurs to me that I could note the same (or similar) phenomenon if I were to listen closely to R.E.M., Jackson Brown, The Velvet Underground, Iron Maiden, Gang of Four, and so on.
Let me repeat: I'm hardly suggesting Morrissey is no better than these other groups. I'm exaggerating to illustrate my argument, which is simply that Hopps runs the risk of doing the reverse of what he intends, which is
failing to differentiate Morrissey from his peers.
I'm going to answer that by a rethorical question, namely "why?".
In my opinion, by approaching Morrissey as a "critic", in the Wildean sense, the study would have the virtue of contextualizing Morrissey within pop music as a whole-- that's all I meant by that.
Well, to trump the trump, how do you know? Did you ask him? If so, are you sure you can trust the answer to be a straight and exhaustive one?
Well, I don't know, Qvist. If I'm willing to debate a book I haven't read, what makes you think I know anything real about Morrissey?
This is a mode of anlaysis that is not about the artist, but about the art. It's not about his project largely conceived ...
which is not his place in pop music but what occurs in the meeting between one's own consciousness and Morrissey's music.
I basically agree with your approach to interpreting Morrissey's work. I don't really care about the ways in which Morrissey is
like other singers, I want to think about why he's different and superior-- why I think he's a great artist. And when I do that, sure, I zero in on the bits that affect me deeply and directly, not just the ones that differentiate him from other pop stars. I don't love "Cemetry Gates" because it's about plagiarism in art or that the music makes me think of folk music a little or that it's among the "Top 50 Songs of 1986!" I love it because it speaks to me in a very personal way. I gather this is how you try and think about Morrissey's songs, too. We're fans, not critics (and even paid critics should always be fans first and professional explainers second).
Now, Hopps is just such a paid critic. He has to walk the minefield. He has to go beyond his personal contact with the music and try and explain just what it is about Morrissey's art that's so affecting for so many people. As you say, he has to focus on these words, these gestures, these song structures, etc.
I notice in reading your eloquent paragraph on this subject that you speak of "Morrissey's art" in the same way that one speaks of "Picasso's art", for instance. I don't believe you can do that in the case of any pop singer, least of all Morrissey. This was the reason I mentioned the BBC sessions of The Smiths' early singles. (You could use any of his live versions, like "Rank" or "Beethoven Was Deaf", too.) Now, setting aside the obvious fact that Morrissey's vocals fluctuate from performance to performance-- his throat is hoarse one day, he's in a chipper mood, he's drunk, he's inside a studio, whatever-- his lyrics and delivery are more or less constant.
What's different are the non-Morrissey elements: the playing of his backing band; the venue, the way the songs are produced, the audience (in the case of a live show), the mode of transmission, the date of release, other music that may be in the charts; and any of a host of other little factors that might figure in. It becomes extremely difficult to extract "Morrissey's art" from that mix of ingredients, don't you think? Much more difficult to do than, say, extracting "Yeats' art" from the varying editions of his poems, or the venues in which they are encountered, and other factors. So much in each song is contingent on things outside Morrissey, which is why I stubbornly cling to the notion that any study that underplays these contingencies is bound to be lacking.
Whether or not Hopps' study does this, I admit I don't know.
Regarding Morrissey's intentions: this gets to the statement I made about its simultaneously deep/shallow qualities. Morrissey's intentions
are often opaque, which is why his impeccable taste-- his capacity to make just the right choice of lyric, vocal phrasing, tour backdrop, turn of phrase on a postcard-- is both profoundly impressive and almost impossible to explain in a scholarly way. Can anyone explain why he tilted the photo of Elvis Presley on the cover of "Shoplifters Of The World Unite", or Billy Fury on "Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me"? Not one in a million graphic designers would have given the cover such a weird little touch. The tilting might mean something. It might not. It might have been the result of a funny mood he was in. Maybe he was making a sly comment about how photos can be misleading, since the facial expression seems to change markedly; how icons can shift in front of our very eyes (go ahead, flip the cover of "Shoplifters" a few times-- it's barely the same picture of Elvis).
Hence, any interpretation of Morrissey that doesn't have the dexterity to say he's channeling Beckett and merely quoting a favorite line from a "Carry On" film
in the same line doesn't even remotely get to the essence of Morrissey's art. Again, if Hopps' study does that, then my reservations about the book will melt, melt, melt away.
not everything has to be done by everyone.
Couldn't agree more. I like having numerous different kinds of books about Morrissey and The Smiths, actually. There isn't a single book I like more than the others, just as I don't think there's one definitive Smiths/Morrissey website but three or four that provide complementary resources.
But as you can tell, I obviously have some strong feelings about the sort of book Hopps has attempted. Why? Well, in brief, I think "serious" studies like this usually amount to an attempt to justify a pop artist as a "real artist" by making lots of dubious claims about said pop artist's affinities with Real Official Art. I think it's done with a bad conscience and I don't like it. Let me be clear: I don't mind if a critic says "Morrissey is cut from the same cloth as Shakespeare" so long as he quickly adds, "Of course, he's also cut from the same cloth as Rick Astley".