Sing with anger – Washington Examiner

Manchester bomber Salman Abedi was an Islamic State enthusiast and the son of Libyan Islamists who, incredibly, had been granted asylum in Britain. Detonating a 66-pound nail bomb hidden in a backpack, Abedi killed himself and 22 others and injured 1,017 more. Ten of those killed were under the age of 20. The youngest was an eight-year-old girl. One man’s body was so disfigured that he could only be identified by a tattoo on his leg.

The traditional sequence of reactions followed. Shock and disgust, inquiries and public commemoration, the piling up of soft toys in memoriam and the fine-tuning of prophylaxis surveillance, and a minute’s national silence and a no less systematic silence on Islam and immigration. The only novelty was that the Manchester celebration ended with the crowd chanting in football style.

Oasis, like Morrissey, hails from Manchester. “Don’t Look Back in Anger” is a typical Oasis song. The intro is taken from “Imagine” and the chorus melody from “All the Young Dudes.” The lyrics are passionate but almost meaningless. Noel Gallagher, the song’s writer, admits to having taken the intro from “Imagine” and reflects that if he had known how significant the song would become, he would have worked harder on the lyrics. This, like his songs, has the virtue of honest craftsmanship. It is not Gallagher’s fault that we have so lost our moral way that we retreat, or advance, into random pop songs and crass sentimentality.

Gallagher believes that “Don’t Look Back in Anger” has become an “anthem of defiance”. To me, and to Morrissey, it sounds like a prelude to surrender. Its title is a pun on John Osborne’s 1956 play Looking back in angeritself a study in empty gestures and moral surrender. Osborne was one of the “angry young men” of the theater. The Manchester crowd should have been angry, but they sounded passive. Mass murder is not a collateral cost of immigration or something as beyond human control as the Manchester rain.

“And the idiots sing and sway: ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger,’” Morrissey sings in “Bonfire of Teenagers.” “I can guarantee I’ll look back in anger until the day I die.” The intro to Morrissey’s song is from another 1970s hit, Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day.” The kids at Ariana Grande’s concert were hoping to enjoy a perfect night. The familiar chords become ironic and inverted, like many Morrissey lyrics. Gallagher would be the first to admit that, unlike Oasis’s jagged jumble of sonic and lyrical fragments, the words and music of “Bonfire of Teenagers” fit together perfectly.

There are many canonical songs about murder, and many of them are first-person confessions: “Mack the Knife,” “Hey Joe,” and “Used to Love Her.” The murder ballad is a staple of country music. There are always topical and political songs, too. But there have been few songs about terrorism since the September 11 attacks. Most of the songs about September 11 tended toward maudlin reflections of patriotism (Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue”) and sentimentality (Bruce Springsteen’s “The Crime of Terror”). Ascendant album). Taylor Swift never released her response, “Didn’t They.” Morrissey recorded his response to a subsequent variation on the Islamic atrocity theme. Why can’t we hear it?

I digress into critical subtleties because art is a defense against charges of obscenity or exploitation. Artistic defense cannot, however, always refute a charge of tastelessness. Look online for the lyrics to “Bonfire of Teenagers” and for unofficial live footage. You are adults. Judge for yourselves whether the real offense is murdering little girls at a concert or writing a song.

“Oh, you should have seen her go out to the arena/ Just to be vaporized,” Morrissey sings. The internal rhyme (“should have … arena”) is as lightly ironic as Morrissey’s famous “A dreaded sunny day/ So I meet you at the cemetery gates.” The next verse is as heavy and direct as it gets. The chorus, “Go easy on the killer,” is damning. I had forgotten that light melodies can carry so much moral weight.

We are told that art has the right to make us uncomfortable. The reality is that people prefer escapism and illusions. Governments and corporations prefer passivity and political correctness, even if it means dishonoring the victims by going easy on the killer and on us. Which minority were Capitol Records and its owner, Universal Music, more afraid of offending: Islamic terrorists or their fellow travelers, the left-wing censors? If Morrissey wants to release his music, we all have the right to hear it, the terrorist and the censor be damned. If the world can’t hear it, the music dies.