We all know Morrissey has always been quite a divisive figure. However, it’s easy to overlook how important he was – and still is to some extent – in the development of alternative music. Despite being sometimes seen as an embarrassment here in the UK he is world famous and well respected abroad. British music might look a lot different today without Morrissey and The Smiths. For example, even now most artists on the ‘indie’ scene acknowledge the debt they owe to them. Morrissey’s ego has been a huge part of the problem – that and the obsession he has with being controversial, but this was part of what propelled The Smiths to success. Controversy and transgression has always been an intrinsic part of popular music; the music industry relies on it to sell records and the media sees it as good copy. Morrissey has always been a reliable source of ‘good copy’ but the problem is that now it overshadows everything else he does and his music stopped being as interesting a long time ago. This wasn’t always the case though. The Smiths, at the time, seemed to be very different from everything else that was going on but they shared a number of qualities with their contemporaries, for example; firstly, like other 1980s artists they played around with accepted notions of gender and sexuality; secondly, their songs challenged songwriting conventions in the same fashion as most other post punk bands; thirdly, Morrissey made sure everybody knew how intelligent he was. Arguably the last point is the most important.

Despite being from a Mancunian working-class, secondary modern background Morrissey went out of his way to prove to middle-class, southern journalists how much cleverer than them he was. This was not necessarily anything new; it had been going on since The Beatles’ Scouse sarcasm in the 1960s but Morrissey took it to outrageous lengths, even going as far as calling for Margaret Thatcher’s assassination and then stubbornly refusing to apologise for it.More recently he has called the royal family ‘benefit scroungers’. Morrrissey like many of his contemporaries of the time spent a lot of his time on the dole reading in public libraries. This is something he had in common with many other eventually famous musicians, such as Mark E. Smith, Billy Bragg, Jarvis Cocker, Pete Wylie, Paul Heaton, etc. This self-education fed into the music that they made and resulted in far more interesting and witty lyrics than most of their competitors. Lyrics don’t have to be overtly political to be subversive; Morrissey challenged people’s ideas about working-class manhood in a unique and discomfiting way for many people. It is noticeable that it is no longer fashionable for working class musicians to show their intelligence anymore – although that isn’t the case in urban music for a number of reasons. Perhaps the first signs of this began when Noel Gallagher boasted about never having read a book. Most of the best British popular music has been made by people from working-class backgrounds and so it stands to reason that we are clever people. Despite his faults, I’d rather be represented by troublemakers like Morrissey than be pilloried on Benefits Street and Jeremy Kyle.