The pop singer Morrissey made news on his just-wrapped American tour, but it wasn’t for the music so much as for speaking out about his outcast status. 

“As you know, nobody will release my music anymore. As you know because I’m a chief exponent of free speech. In England at least, it’s now criminalized. You cannot speak freely in England. If you don’t believe me, go there. Express an opinion, you’ll be sent to prison. It’s very, very difficult,” Billboard reports. 

Those who have followed Morrissey into this late stretch of his career know of his difficulties in getting a label—an unimaginable state of affairs four decades ago when his band The Smiths’ first album came out, featuring classics like “Hand in Glove” and “This Charming Man.”  

His last album, which came out four years ago after years of trouble getting it released, demonstrates how his ideological evolution has made him unmarketable in a world where pop stars do nothing more controversial than endorse Kamala Harris. But is the heart of Morrissey’s problem his political provocations, or does it lie elsewhere: in the music itself, or the dark realities of the pop music industry? The answer is all of the above. 

Morrissey has always been a controversialist. The title track on the evocatively named I Am Not a Dog on a Chain explained his aversion to the media, hearkening back to 1991’s “Journalists Who Lie” in its dismissal of the “build them up, knock them down” approach of the press: 

I do not read newspapers 
They are troublemakers 
Listen out for what’s not shown to you 
And there you’ll find the truth 
For in a civilized and careful way 
They’ll sculpture all your views. 

Morrissey’s critiques of the media have come at the cost of a career that may have been several orders of magnitude bigger if he hadn’t insisted on giving reporters hot quotes on everything from the Royal Family to speculation on Chinese people’s eating habits. 

His criticism isn’t limited by political party: his denunciations of Margaret Thatcher began before The Smiths were underway and continued through her death in 2013. Even amid her posthumous lionization, he said that the Tory prime minister “ignited the British public into street-riots, violent demonstrations and a social disorder previously unseen in British history.” 

Time hasn’t mellowed his insistence on delivering his truth—inconvenient though it might be in the zeitgeist and commercially damaging as it has been to his career. In 2018, he sparked what remains probably his biggest controversy when he supported the right-wing For Britain party, arguing that England is for the English. While nationalistic themes have often popped up in his music, such as “Irish Blood, English Heart,” his defense of the political movement as not being “racist and fascist” was a bridge too far for many observers of a globalist political bent. 

He also denounced the media’s “fashionable outrage; inflammatory and unjust comments against any new party that threatens the same old bloody pointless two-party system” and argued that “Labour and Conservatives have already sold [the British] down the river into righteous oblivion.” He said nearly seven years ago that the “Loony Left” is only concerned with victim culture just as it was reaching its zenith in opposition to Trump’s second term.  

The ideologically narrow world of pop music doesn’t know what to do with that kind of outspokenness. And a political media that so often clings to the familiar “left versus right” dichotomy couldn’t abide an outsider voice demanding a different paradigm. That’s the issue Morrissey has always faced.  

So where do all these provocations come from? A review of his Autobiography—released as a Penguin Classic, rare for a music memoir—reveals that a young Morrissey was desperate for music to save him from the degraded and gloomy Manchester of his youth. Pop records from David Bowie and his beloved New York Dolls convinced him that the way forward from his grim upbringing was through transgression—of traditional mores and of a culture that would consign him to mundanity if he couldn’t escape it.  

This understanding bore fruit during what is still the most important part of his career: the roughly five years that The Smiths were together, with Morrissey and the guitarist Johnny Marr delivering roughly seventy songs in a patchwork quilt of twelve-inch singles, albums, two British compilations and one American compendium. The lyrics ran the gamut—everything from transgressive religious figures (“Vicar in a Tutu”) to animal slaughter (“Meat is Murder.”) 

But the ever-present theme at the heart of The Smiths’ oeuvre was the unfulfillable nature of love itself. From the “straight” relational dynamics described in the kitchen-sink drama of “Jeane” to encoded gay narratives, Morrissey’s approach to love songs during his most commercially fecund period was that of a kid with his nose pressed against the shop window, sealed off from his true desires, and dissatisfied because of it. 

Morrissey spent much of that period speculating that Smiths records weren’t given the chance to top the charts, blaming the production companies Rough Trade in England and Sire in the U.S. for not getting him the exposure the records merited. Back then, he didn’t blame cancel culture; he blamed bad marketing. And he still seemed to have some hope that he could overcome his cultural obstacles, just has his musical heroes did in his youth.  

But then, after their fourth studio album, Strangeways Here We Come, The Smiths collapsed. Morrissey never found another collaborator like Marr. Though Vini Reilly’s work on Viva Hate was perfectly complementary to that album’s themes and sounds, and the producer Stephen Street helped to give early singles some of that familiarly bright Smiths sound, Morrissey has increasingly floundered in his solo career. Though some songs, such as the scathing industry critique “Why Don’t You Find Out for Yourself,” are every bit as good as The Smiths’ best work, even Morrissey’s most ardent fans follow him largely because of music released during the Reagan presidency. 

That glide path to nostalgia act could have happened whether or not Morrissey took controversial stances. Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys has remarked on the so-called “imperial phase” of pop acts, which is a period of time, perhaps five or ten years, when an act’s sound is peerless and it is at its artistic and commercial peak. Implicit in that theory is that it’s all downhill after that. 

Morrissey has not been immune to the passing of the imperial phase. Long after his uncanny connection to the zeitgeist made The Smiths a sensation, he still has plenty to say. But in a youth-obsessed pop music landscape where even the thirty-something Taylor Swift plays the ingenue role, there’s little room for an uncompromising voice from the past and its inconvenient, long view of history.