Sing out in anger

The singer Morrissey is about to release his 16th solo album, Without Music the World Dies. Meanwhile, his 15th solo album, Bonfire of Teenagers, has gone unreleased for three years. Morrissey (forename Steven, former band The Smiths, foremost lyricist in English pop) said Capitol Records refused to release Bonfire of Teenagers because of its eponymous title song. “Bonfire of Teenagers” is about the Islamist bombing of an Ariana Grande concert at the Manchester Arena in 2017 and about how we prefer, and are even encouraged, to deny the moral challenge of evil.

The Manchester bomber, Salman Abedi, was an Islamic State enthusiast and the son of Libyan Islamists who, incredibly, had won asylum in Britain. Detonating a 66-lb. nail bomb hidden in a backpack, Abedi killed himself and 22 others and injured 1,017 more. Ten of the dead were under 20 years old. The youngest was an 8-year-old girl. One man’s body was so disfigured that he could only be identified by a leg tattoo.

The now-traditional sequence of reactions followed. Shock and disgust, inquiries and public commemoration, the piling-up of soft toys in memoriam and the fine-tuning of surveillance in prophylaxis, and a nationwide minute’s silence and a no less systematic silence about Islamism and immigration. The only novelty was that the Manchester commemoration ended with the crowd breaking into soccer-style singing.

Oasis, like Morrissey, is from Manchester. "Don’t Look Back in Anger" is a typical Oasis tune. The intro is lifted from “Imagine" and the chorus melody from "All the Young Dudes." The lyrics are passionate but almost meaningless. Noel Gallagher, the song’s author, admits to lifting the “Imagine” intro and reflects that, had he known how significant the song would become, he would have worked harder on the lyrics. This, like his songs, has the virtue of honest craftsmanship. It isn’t Gallagher’s fault that we have lost our moral way so badly that we fall back, or forward, into random pop songs and gross sentimentality.

Gallagher believes that “Don’t Look Back in Anger” became an “anthem of defiance.” To me, and to Morrissey, it sounds like a prelude to surrender. Its title is a pun on John Osborne’s 1956 play Look Back in Anger, itself a study in empty gestures and moral surrender. Osborne was one of theater’s “angry young men.” The Manchester crowd should have been angry but sounded passive. Mass murder is not a collateral cost of immigration or as beyond human control as the Manchester rain.

“And the morons sing and sway: ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger,’” Morrissey sings on “Bonfire of Teenagers.” “I can assure you that I will look back in anger till the day I die.” The intro of Morrissey’s tune is from another 1970s hit, Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day.” The children at the Ariana Grande concert were hoping to enjoy a perfect night. The familiar chords become ironic and inverted, like many a Morrissey lyric. Gallagher would be the first to admit that, unlike Oasis’s lumpy mash-up of sonic and lyrical fragments, the words and music of “Bonfire of Teenagers” combine perfectly.

There are plenty of canonical songs about murder, and many of them are first-person confessions: “Mack the Knife,” “Hey Joe,” and “Used To Love Her.” The murder ballad is a country music convention. There are always topical and political songs, too. But there have been few songs about terrorism since the 9/11 attacks. Most of the 9/11 tunes tended to the hokey reflexes of patriotism (Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue”) and sentimentality (Bruce Springsteen’s Rising album). Taylor Swift has never released her response, “Didn’t They.” Morrissey has recorded his response to a subsequent variation on the Islamist theme of atrocity. Why can’t we hear it?

I digress into critical niceties because artistry is a defense against the charge of obscenity or exploitation. The artistic defense cannot, however, always rebut a charge of tastelessness. Look online for the lyrics to “Bonfire of Teenagers” and for unofficial live footage . You’re adults. Judge for yourselves if the real offense is murdering little girls at a concert or writing a song.

“Oh, you should have seen her leave for the arena/ Only to be vaporized,” Morrissey sings. The internal rhyme (“should have … arena”) is as lightly ironic as Morrissey’s famous “A dreaded sunny day/ So I meet you at the cemetery gates.” The next line is as heavy and blunt as possible. The refrain, “Go easy on the killer,” is damning. I had forgotten that light tunes could carry such moral weight.

We are told that art has a right to make us uncomfortable. The reality is people prefer escapism and illusions. Governments and corporations prefer passivity and political correctness, even if it means dishonoring the victims by going easy on the killer as well as ourselves. Which minority were Capitol Records and its owner, Universal Music, more afraid of offending: Islamist terrorists or their fellow travelers, the censors of the Left? If Morrissey wants to release his song, all of us have a right to hear it, the terrorist and the censor be damned. If the world cannot hear it, music dies.