People Are The Same Everywhere

This song is a response to accusations of racism that were made against Morrissey in September 2010. Typically, Morrissey completely submits to the idea of his opponents - declaring anti-racists totally correct in their refusal to acknowledge racial difference, accepting that everyone's the same. But he then spins this ironically to emphasise how mundane that prospect might be if true, likening the undifferentiated homogeneity of global uniformity to a herd of cattle where America, the ultimate expression of individuality, the home of the free and land of the brave, can no longer exist. Of course, Morrissey doesn't see himself as part of this mass. As in so many other songs, he portrays himself as a freakish outcast, "the biggest mistake of all". The song is a clever way of pouring ironic scorn on those who sift Morrissey's interviews for evidence with which to label him a racist because it takes their view of the world literally. But rather than fighting back at their grotesque accusations, Morrissey outdoes them by representing himself as an even more sorry prospect than they suggest. "If you try to break my spirit, it won't work. Because there's nothing left to break."

An ironic song about conformity, popular illusions and, of course, Morrissey's own well-tended outsider identity.

You could compare this to his other, earlier runs at the same themes. To pick just one: twenty years ago, Moz sneered on Viva Hate at "Ordinary boys, happy knowing nothing." In that song, he lionizes someone like himself who is "so different / You stood all alone / And you knew / That it had to be so." That's Moz vs. Mortals. Guess who wins?

At the same time as insisting on his otherness, Morrissey hasn't exactly been overly proud of himself. "Me without clothes..." he sang on the same album, "a nation turns its back and gags." Some of his wittiest lyrics feature his self-deprecation.

This is the man, remember, whose Smiths songs "Unloveable," "Nowhere Fast" and "Half A Person" chronicle various states of isolation, morbidity and low-aspirational listlessness (where getting a job as a backscrubber is a career highlight). The value of not fitting in with the herd is independence, and a certain freedom -- at the very least, the freedom to poke fun at the herd and what the herd values. The price, at least in Morrisseyean terms, is often self-loathing and marginalized existence.

And that brings us to the irony in "People Are The Same Everywhere." It isn't exactly sung from the perspective of a hero. This isn't someone who puffs himself up the way the person in "Ordinary Boys" seemed to do, proudly apart. Here is an antihero, grasping at the rude straws of his existence.

As in other well-known Morrissey songs, fate has been unkind at the moment of creation. But it isn't nature any more that's playing tricks, as in "Pretty Girls Make Graves." No, this is the theological Mozzer who first surfaced in "November Spawned A Monster" to blame birth defects on Jesus.

These days, we get the generic term "our creator." And this creator has really goofed in making the song's outsider. In fact, it's this God or Goddess's "biggest mistake of all." In other words, what's worse for a creator than botching all of humanity? In short, says the song, it's worse to cough up one Morrissey.

Now, you could say that's self-mockery and equally you could say it's very sly backhanded self-praise. What's better, after all? To be one of the ordinary boys, cut from the dull cloth of sameness, or to be a flub of the creator and as a result have a chance at thinking for yourself? A chance of defining yourself? So here we have a most unusual creation myth -- one I don't think you'll be hearing at church any time soon.

By calling out God, I'd say Moz is continuing in the same vein as in other recently snide religious references, notably "I Have Forgiven Jesus." He likes to thumb his nose at conventional piety (and I really enjoy him doing it). It is the conventional public, after all, that produces "our loveless nation" of partners who are each as disposable as the next. He's inviting us, finally, to look beneath the surface of "the land of the free and the home of the brave." What we'll find there, he says, is pretty different to what is advertised.

So this is one more Morrissey song about standing outside, looking in. He's been more artful before, but the frankness and cutting tone here are as savage and revealing as he's ever been.