Morrissey – Autobiografía: Música (Citas)
Morrissey, finalmente y después de años de espera y especulación, decidió publicar sus vivencias en un libro que, desde su lanzamiento y como es costumbre con el prodigio de Manchester, causó polémica al ser publicado por la editorial Penguin en su sección de clásicos donde se encuentran únicamente monstruos como Joyce y Dickens. Así es como este es el primer libro contemporáneo que Penguin Classics publica como un clásico instantáneo.
Más allá de sus obsesión con Shelagh Delaney, James Dean y una infinidad de celebridades, su odio hacia la monarquía inglesa, su repudio al Thatcherismo, la muerte de varios miembros de su familia y su amistad con James Maker y Linder Sterling, aquí un resumen en palabras de Morrissey sobre lo que disparó su genio y que más tarde, cristalizaría en arte con The Smiths.
LA MÚSICA
EL POP: Su gran pasión que descubrió a través de artistas como Shirley Bassey, Righteous Brothers, Marianne Faithful, Sandie Shaw, Rita Pavone, Timi Yuro, Small Faces, Paul Jones, Lulu, The Foundations, Jimmy Jones y New Vaudeville Band entre muchos otros.
“These small black discs are the first things that are truly mine; my choice, paid for with my own scraps of cash, reflecting my own stubbornness. In a dream , I watch them spin and spin, calling out, pointing the way. These are the days when very few people collect records, so therefore whatever they might buy defines their secret heart.”
“the magical properties of recorded noise had trapped me from 1965 onwards. Song made a difference to everything, and permitted expressions that otherwise had no way through”.
“The Paul Marsh record shop on Alexandra Road had been my Eton, a temple of Holy Scriptures and evangelical hope. Nothing else could be worth knowing”
“My very first disc had been Come and stay with me by Marianne Faithfull”
“My face had by now taken on the demeanor of continual deep regret, which only music could soothe”
“It seemed to me that it was only within British pop music that almost anything could happen. Every other mode of expression seemed fixed and predictable and slow”
LOS SOLISTAS Y EL PODER DE LA MELODÍA POP
“all human activity is fruitless when pitted against the girls and boys singing on pop television, for they have found the answer as the rest of us search for the question” [Top Of The Tops]
“Here and there my eyes and ears are caught only by the solo singers; town-crying to all people at all times, television troubadours minus jingle-jangle nodding musicians”
“The song bears witness, the body weaves and there are no camera cuts to blandly smiling session-players when all we want to see is the sculptured singer alone, carrying all”
“There is no way out for the solo singer; introduction, statement, conclusion, quick death – all conveyed in the pop sonnet, with no winking glance over the guitarist in order to ease the setting”
“like the science of sings, I am called to, because the song is the art of using language as persuasion, and with that allowance and this hope, I want to cry”
Loudly and wildly the music played, always pointing to the light, to the way out, or the way in, to individualism, and to the remarkable if unsettling notion that life could possibly be lived as you might wish it to be lived”
LOS INADAPTADOS: T. Rex, Mott the Hoople, David Bowie, Roxy Music, The Velvet Undergound, Lou Reed, Nico, Patti Smith, Iggy & The Stooges, Sparks, Jobriath, The Ramones y The Sex Pistols.
“The topsy- turvydom of 1972 had brought an explosion of music and art and newness into my life and I was now in full self-development mode and desperate to be free of censure”
“As David Bowie appears, the child dies. The vision is profound – a sanity heralding the coming of consciousness from someone who – at last! – transcends our gloomy coal-fire existence”
“David Bowie is detached from everything, yet open to everything; stripped of the notion that both art and life are impossible. He is quite real, impossibly glamorous, fearless, and quite British. How could this possibly be?”
“Wearing makeup and an extreme mantle of pride, Bolan didn´t seem to have any life other than song”
“Marc Bolan´s lyrics are steeped in the quietly insane world of the gothic English novel, and are too deeply eccentric to survive any explanation”
“T. Rex are my first concert”
“In this year I also see Mott The Hoople and Lou Reed live, and my senses never return”
“Lou Reed is unimpressed by applause, and lives a life detached from custom. His stare is cold and his romanticism is brutal…he might drop dead any second, and is therefore the real thing”
“Bowie´s extraordinary effect of menace upon British culture is largely forgotten now, but I watched it break like a thundercloud in 1972, and its presence was as volcanic as that which later would be termed punk”
“I allowed Horses by Patti Smith to enter my body like a spear, and as I listened to the bare lyrics of public lecture, I examined the genderless singer on the heavyweight album sleeve”
“Patti Smith was the cynical voice radiating love; pain sourced as inspiration, an individual mission drunk on words”
“Unfulfilled as a woman, impotent as a man” [Patti Smith]
“The Ramones are models of ill-health, playing backwards”
“Singer Joey [Ramone] looked as if he had been murdered in a hospital bed. I´ve found my twin”
“Lipsticked Iggy was tougher than them all, and each night on stage he sang and he moved as if he might possibly die at any moment”
“Iggy Pop, Lou Reed and Patti Smith have secrets that have never been lost because the inquisitive mind can´t get in. This trinity is decorative art with an incredible understanding of effect”
“The Sex Pistols are the first British band whose social importance appears to be instantly recognized”
“Their singer is a striking Dickensian original; a pop eyed Wilfred Bramble, but aged 19, and I am fascinated to discover that the Sex Pistols loathe and despise everyone on earth expect the New York Dolls”
“Nico was an unclassifiable artists and largely disregarded as a gifted amateur who took far too much refuge in horror”
“I reassure her four studio albums, none of which contain the faintest hint of hope” [Nico]
THE NEW YORK DOLLS: Una obsesión aparte
“An even darker force controlled the personalities of The New York Dolls, who are younger than Bowie and who are more-or less transgender in appearance”
“Melody Maker announces them as ‘the world´s first homosexual rock band’, which of course, is what they are not”
“The Dolls are menacing rent boys who are forcing the world to deal with them.”
“The New York Dolls were chaotic because they were themselves; their own creation”
“The Dolls are legless realism – wired and rigged honest trash scraped up tff New York´s back alleys, banished from the communities of the living”
“The opposite of polite and antiseptic”
“The confusion with the Dolls is that their scumsucker rough-trade drag contrasted with the truth of their wise-guy personalities. The Dolls were actually the toughest band on earth, and their appearance proved it”
“The Dolls were the slum of all failures, had nothing to lose, and could scarcely differentiate between night and day”
“appearance is a new debate in rock music, and the counterculture of the New York Dolls is an infinite landscape”
“The New York Dolls were the first band who equaled each other in demeanor and effect; in essence, the most perfect looking pop group – minus that hesitant component who wasn´t quite sure of his connection with others”
Citas obtenidas de: Morrissey. Autobiography. London: Penguin Classics, 2013
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