Morrissey: The Pageant of His Bleeding Heart

I am a Morrissey fan, but actually purchased the book to use a source for a research paper. It's not only a great in depth analysis of Morrissey's lyrics but also of the environment that inspired them. I wouldn't consider this a casual read but as a research source it's prove invaluable. Hopps digs deep into the man and the society that molded him and has some very interesting ideas and concepts behind the meaning of Morrissey's lyrics and how by "his celebration of the ordinary" Morrissey created something extraordinary!

Morrissey fans and anyone interested in cultural/social studies will enjoy this title.

This is a book that not only touches on Morrissey's life but also on his inspiration when it came to song writing, it gives details on recording sessions, and it quotes interviews with Morrissey. Great for any Smiths and Morrissey fan.

If you want a further rehash of Morrissey's collaboration with Johnny Marr and the Smiths or another speculative inquiry into his love life, then this book is NOT for you. If, however, you have been longing for a thoughtful, respectful reading of Morrissey's lyrics in terms of theme, word choice and strategy, as well as an analysis of his work in the specific context of Britain and Ireland's literary greats (Wilde, Larkin, Rossetti, Joyce, Betjeman, Beckett, Joyce), then you should buy this book immediately and prepare for an enjoyable read. "Morrissey: The Pageant of his Bleeding Heart" adroitly brings together many observations of Morrissey's work (its simultaneous emphasis on despair and levity; its tendency to dwell on the eccentric, the infirm, the monstrous; the attempts at finding a way to live and love in a world beset by categorization, failure and embarrassment, etc.) and weaves them into a coherent whole. What is most striking is how Hopps is somehow able to articulate what many Morrissey devotees have felt (ok--what I have felt!), sensed or loved about his work but have as yet been unable to express in so eloquent a fashion. Hopps' work, with its judicious use of literary criticism and passionate emphasis on always going back to the source--Morrissey's words--, makes one long for a print edition of Morrissey's complete lyrics. "The Pageant of His Bleeding Heart" is an intelligent examination of the artist--one that Morrissey very much deserves and one that we have been needing for a very long time.

Any true Morrissey fan knows he's brilliant, and that the majority of what he does or says is definitely well-calculated or has hidden/double meanings. However, this book has some definite over analyzation leaving it quite dry as a whole. It is written like an extremely long dissertation, which makes it a bit boring, and at times strays onto different topics. Some points made in the book seem a real reach, and I was often thinking "What would the Man say to this? Perhaps that moment was completely off the cuff, yet the author is TRYING to extricate all this hidden meaning behind it?" If you are looking for a book about Moz, definitely stick with Len Brown, as Hopps has no direct interviews he's conducted that make me relaxed and confident that his meanings and interpretations about the songs are spot on. Besides, Mozza wants us to think and feel the music on an individual basis, not via others analysis.

Again it was a present for my husband for Christmas so do not know if he found it good, but saying that he is a great Morrissey fan so he will enjoy it. Go out and buy it.

Loving this,

Readable, I liked it. For Mozz fans.

Academe Does Pop: Gavin Hopps, Morrissey: The Pageant of His Bleeding HeartAccording to the dust wrapper of his book, Gavin Hopps is an academic at the University of St Andrews and a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge. Steven Patrick Morrissey, or simply "Morrissey" as he prefers to be called, is a singer-songwriter and former frontman of the Smiths (1982-87). Hopps is obviously a fan and has written an entirely serious 300-page study of Morrissey—his persona, his music, especially song lyrics, and his place in popular music and culture.Hopps finds Morrissey to be an important artist, in opposition and contrast to the values of 1980s New Romanticism exemplified by the plastic gloss of bands like Wham! and Duran Duran. Hopps locates Morrissey’s cultural significance partly in his resistance to the “vacuity” (215) of such music and his critique of “the 1980s hedonistic, upwardly mobile ideal” (222) informed by Thatcherism. But Hopps claims more than this, that Morrissey “is a radically disturbing artist” (211) whose work centres on “a daring and deep-seated defence of difference” (222). Hopps states that “Morrissey’s great achievement—and what makes him a serious artist rather than merely a pop star—is that in Beckett’s sense he has dared to fail” (225). Hopps emphasizes and approves of Morrissey’s “’fidelity to failure’ . . . to the faultiness, the weakness, the brokenness of things” (225) and claims that “the repetition, the hyperbole, the self-parody and the indulgence . . . are in fact part of this ‘fidelity to failure’” (225). Such music would not interest everyone but a wider part of Morrissey’s appeal is identified by Nina Persson, lead singer and songwriter of the Cardigans, who describes him as “the best lyricist in the pop world” (qtd in Hopps 253).To demonstrate the artistic significance he claims for Morrissey, Hopps uses ideas from a range of thinkers such as Bakhtin, Blanchot, Freud, Nietzsche and Zizek. Jacques Derrida is the informing intellectual spirit of Hopps’s method and, as well as sections focussing, for example, on Morrissey’s use of flowers and clothing, and his alleged racism, there are extended discussions of the importance of various types of “interruption,” gaps or aporias in Morrissey’s songs and their performance. Ultimately, in no apparent conflict with a Derridean approach, Hopps’s study is informed by and concluded with a religious sensibility, both his own and the one that he claims, convincingly, lies at the root and centre of Morrissey’s art.All of that is interesting and thoroughly, even creatively, thought out. Anyone who reads Hopps’s study will certainly know and understand much more about Morrissey’s music and its various contexts, such as pop in the 1980s, than before. And Hopps’s work is definitely better than some of the more casual commentary on Morrissey, which Hopps repeatedly criticizes. There are, however, some limitations.Quite simply, it is difficult to write about music, for the medium resists translation into verbal language. As Hopps points out in his discussion of “Now My Heart Is Full,” something “is obviously lost on paper” (159). This difficulty is tempered by the facts that most of Hopps’s discussion is about Morrissey’s lyrics and Hopps clearly has technical competence in music, as shown in his comments on the significance of chord changes in some of Morrissey’s songs.Yet the problem of writing about music is exacerbated by Hopps’s prose style which, though often readable, has its more than occasional difficulties. Hopps is an academic writer and his syntax and vocabulary can limit readability, at least for a wider audience. For example, in a brief, preliminary discussion of Morrissey’s “reflexive irony” (9), Hopps writes, “in the same way that his [Morrissey’s] multiplicity has an ironizing function—since being any one thing is haunted by the sense of being its opposite as well—his corollary mobility effects a linear subversion of meaning, since it dissociates the singer from what appears to be his own utterance” (7). Or, as the rest of us would say, people are contradictory. One more example, and there are many, should confirm the problem. In a discussion of Morrissey’s pronunciation of words when singing, Hopps states that “the melismatic extension of words . . . appears to be a sort of ‘spillage’ or overflow . . . . In this sense, the proliferation of florid involutions may be seen as the stigmata of ineffability” (27). It is fair to point out that, on the preceding page, Hopps has clearly defined melisma as “the singing of multiple notes to a single syllable of text” (26), but the florid involutions of his own style do not help clarity. That is a problem for many academic writers in the humanities and may testify to their desire to be creative writers and enjoy the play of language. It may also be a marker of membership in Club Academe and should usually give way to Orwell’s famous dictum in “Politics and the English Language” that good prose should be “like a clear window pane.” For an expository essay, at least, there is surely no better model.A contributory minor but noticeable problem is the substantial and consistent scatter of proofreading errors, many of them obvious and irritating. On page 13, for example, a bold-face, all-caps heading reads “THE ART OF WEEKNESS.” Surely no competent proofreader should miss that. In a 300-page book, some errors in proofing are almost inevitable, but in Hopps’s case these are a persistent presence throughout and, whether the fault is the author’s or editor’s, suggest a lack of care for the more mundane tasks of the publication process.Though poorly proofread, the book is well-researched and appears to have only one factual error. Hopps refers to “Woody Allen’s joke about not wanting to belong to a club that would have him as a member” (278). That well-known joke is usually attributed to Groucho Marx and ultimately to Freud, though probably the joke was old when Freud was young.In conclusion, Hopps’s work is a serious, sincere and generally successful study of an interesting singer-songwriter. If the readings of Morrissey’s songs sometimes claim more subtlety and depth than they may actually have, that is surely excusable in a committed and intelligent fan. Morrissey: The Pageant of His Bleeding Heart shows what a study of popular culture can achieve when the writer is well-informed about his subject and fully committed to the task. It is, however, a pity that Hopps has not written his book in a more accessible style. Many people who are fans of Morrissey and would enjoy Hopps’s ideas would be defeated by the academic prose.

Endlich mal ein ernsthaftes Buch über die Kunst Morrisseys, ohne Klatsch und Tratsch, einfach nur wissenschaftlich ernsthaft am Text und an dessen Präsentation dran. Man muss allerdings ziemlich gut Englisch können.