The Minstrel of Misery or the Poet Laureate of Bedsitland: Morrissey has been musical marmite since he first entered the public consciousness with The Smiths’ debut single, “Hand in Glove”, over thirty years ago. World Peace Is None Of Your Business may be a return to form, but it is unlikely to change his public image. No doubt he will be fine with that.
The lyrics, predictably enough, are from the Morrissey that we have all come to recognise and the music is still mostly dominated by the white boy, indie sound that he has long made his own – albeit with occasional trumpet and acoustic guitar flourishes. While proclaiming his outsider-status like a drunk in the street on “I’m Not A Man” (“I’m not a man. I’m something much bigger and better than… a man”), he still manages to exude a superiority complex that would put king atheist Richard Dawkins to shame. On the title track, he gives the political status quo a bit of a finger-wagging over a tune that is initially reminiscent of Marc Almond’s torch songs but then mutates into quasi-stadium rock. While on “Neal Cassidy Drops Dead”, Morrissey ruminates on the death of the King of the Beats, his friend and occasional lover, Allen Ginsberg, and general ill-health – perhaps alluding to his own recent-ish run of illness and last year’s publishing of his autobiography. He has always been the master of hyperbole, especially when it comes to claims about himself, and kinship with the mainstays of the Beat Generation is certainly a grand claim.
Morrissey does manage to drop the ball a couple of times with the sixth form poetry of the mercifully brief “The Bullfighter Dies” and the plodding “Istanbul” but World Peace Is None Of Your Business is a solid piece of work that is both entertaining and mildly comical, in an almost vaudevillian way: much like the man himself. It is also his best album in years.
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