Morrissey autobiography book depository
Where Is Mozlandia?
“Morrissey perhaps was seduced by LA like most people who are not from here, lured by the nostalgia of old Hollywood or perhaps simple sunshine.” So says author Melissa Mora Hidalgo in her new book Mozlandia, a tribute to Morrissey fans and Smiths fans worldwide as well as a highlighting of their creative expressions of fandom. It is particularly about those fans in the US Mexican borderlands. Here Melissa talks Mozlandia.
HEADPRESS: Hi Melissa. Tell us the background of Mozlandia?
Melissa Mora Hidalgo: The book came about for a few reasons. I wanted to offer something new about Morrissey fans, particularly Morrissey fans in the US-Mexican borderlands region, from the perspective of a fan and someone who is part of the community. I also grew tired of the slew of articles, documentaries, essays, news pieces, and other write-ups that asked the same question—’why do Mexicans/why do Latinos love Morrissey?’ —and produced the same responses. We know this fan base exists, and it has for some time, so rather than ask “why?” and reproduce the same predictable responses (‘because they’re passionate, because they’re Catholic, because they’re outsiders’, etc., all important things to consider), I wanted to ask a different set of questions: “How do these fans express their fandom and love of this singer? What can their creative expressions of Morrissey/Smiths fandom tell us about larger histories of borderland populations? What does it mean for Morrissey fans in the borderlands to appropriate his image, music, and style for their own creative expressions of cultural identity?” As for the term, Mozlandia, it is a nod to the ‘Spanglish’ slang term for ‘land’ (‘landia’) and ‘Moz’ comes from Morrissey’s nickname. So, Mozlandia means “Morrisseyland” or “Land of Moz,” in Spanglish. Frida Kah
...hang the dj
...hang the dj is a music blog. Old school, shoegaze, psych, and darkwave are featured genres.
Legal disclaimer: This blog is my personal, independent website. It is not affiliated with Bell Media, nor does it represents the thoughts, opinions, or desires of Bell Media
...hang the dj
...hang the dj is a music blog. Old school, shoegaze, psych, and darkwave are featured genres.
Legal disclaimer: This blog is my personal, independent website. It is not affiliated with Bell Media, nor does it represents the thoughts, opinions, desires, etc of Bell Media
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Thursday 27 July 2023
Hebdomadal Causeries
Tuesday 9 May 2023. To the Ipswich Job Centre to register as ‘gainfully’ self-employed. I now have a year in which to ‘build my business’ and see if I can make enough from freelance work to live on. This means writing, reviewing, indexing, giving talks, whatever I can turn my funny little hand to. After a year of looking for conventional employment, armed with a newly minted PhD in English and Humanities, the only positions the government could offer me were prison warder or tube train cleaner. I exaggerate, but not by much. These jobs obviously need to be done, but probably not by a middle-aged disciple of Quentin Crisp.
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12 May 2023. My review of the new Sparks album is published in The Wire magazine. I’m pleased to see that the magazine is sold in the WH Smiths at Ipswich station. I’m also pleased that magazines still exist at all, and indeed that Sparks still exist at all, the Mael brothers now in their seventies.
I sit in a café by the newish Ipswich waterfront area. Close by are shiny new university buildings, a dance school, and a new archive, ‘The Fold’, which is a pleasing pun for a repository of manuscripts in a rural town.
The main part of Ipswich, alas, is more unhappy and run down. Local newspapers speak of the area as ‘no-go’. Many shops in the centre are empty and unused, even the Ancient House, which was such a pleasant bookshop when I was a teenager. The others have been turned into a surfeit of charity shops, that ominous symptom of decline. Still, there’s talk of turning these zombie spaces into new housing, which makes sense. As long as it’s housing that people can afford.
Meanwhile, bored teenage boys in black hooded tracksuits loaf on street corners, their signature smell of marijuana announcing them from a distance. Once associated with hippies and liberalism, this scent is now the stink of poverty, pack surviva My relationship with Morrissey is ‘streets upon streets upon streets upon streets’: streets to entice you and streets to repulse you, with no sign of an end in sight. Whenever the entrancing lyricist cum outspoken exasperation releases new material, it offers a chance for me to reckon my admiration for much of his music with the turn my stomach takes after every statement he makes. I refer to myself very deliberately, because it’s hard not to find Morrissey’s transformation into a sentient repository of controversial opinions personally engaging. I’m admittedly a Smiths fan who gingerly puts his hand into the fire of Moz’s solo career, quickly retracting it. Then again, I can’t help but like much of Morrissey’s work. ‘Spent the Day in Bed’ and his 2017 cover of ‘Back on the Chain Gang’ have long been fixtures in my playlists: ‘Suedehead’ and ‘Alma Matters’ are even good enough to match up to The Smiths catalogue. At times you can feel like you’re listening to a Yazoo-ripoff band It becomes hard not to find the aged lyricist captivating at the start of I Am Not a Dog on a Chain. As his morose voice echoes across the start of ‘Jim Jim Falls’, I’m already taken in – it’s like the start of ‘Strangeways, Here We Come’ all over again. However, the beginning is the album’s apex: perhaps for the best, Morrissey’s spell is waning. I Am Not a Dog on a Chain isn’t as good as his earlier offerings, and even his swift witticisms can’t paper over the tiring self-victimisation in the title track and ‘Knockabout World’. The concept of not being a dog on a chain would be ham-fisted, even if he hadn’t based his past three albums around the same idea. After all these years we should expect more from Morrissey, whose witticisms seem all the more predictable as time goes on Yet, the album makes no false steps, apart from ‘The Secret of Music’, an Morrissey’s mysterious spell is waning on ‘I Am Not A Dog on a Chain’