The Artist’s Confessor: Morrissey, Melancholy, and the Romantic Imagination

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Abstract
I would like to explore the deep and often ineffable connection between the music of Morrissey—both in his solo career and as the lyricist of The Smiths—and those who identify as artists. By examining lyrical themes, tonal aesthetics, and cultural positioning, I would argue that Morrissey’s work appeals uniquely to creative individuals due to its intense interiority, emotional chiaroscuro, and its dramatization of alienation as an almost sacred state. More than just a songwriter, Morrissey functions as a mirror for the Romantic spirit in exile—a confessor for the beautifully bruised soul of the artist.

Introduction: The Saint of Sensitivity

In the lexicon of pop music, few figures possess the polarizing magnetism of Morrissey. To the general public, he may appear enigmatic, sometimes provocative, often aloof. But to artists—painters, poets, writers, actors, filmmakers—Morrissey is a familiar ghost, a nocturne rendered human. His lyrics read not so much as songs but as whispered diaries from a bedroom where imagination has become both altar and prison.

While academic studies on Morrissey have explored his cultural politics, sexual ambiguity, and postmodern ironies, less has been written on his peculiar and persistent appeal to artists. This article proposes that the affinity stems from Morrissey’s ability to convert inner turbulence into lyrical beauty, a trait that has long been the province of the artist.

The Aesthetic of the Wound

Morrissey’s music dwells in that exquisite space between despair and ecstasy. The Smiths’ catalog—songs like "I Know It’s Over," "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out," and "Cemetry Gates"—reveals a sensibility acutely aware of death, desire, and dislocation. For artists, this lyrical world mirrors their own internal weather.

Art has historically been a response to fracture, and Morrissey does not attempt to "heal" so much as to honor the fracture. His lyrics romanticize pain, but not in the adolescent sense; rather, he renders melancholy not as an affliction but as a credential. "I wear black on the outside," he sings, "because black is how I feel on the inside." For the artist, this is not costume—it is creed.

The Literary Soul in Pop Clothing

There is a literary density to Morrissey’s lyrics that sets him apart from the pop landscape of his time. Echoes of Wilde, Auden, and Larkin haunt his verses, not as references but as kin. His songs function as lyrical essays—short meditations on class, loneliness, beauty, and shame.

In "Now My Heart is Full," he chants the names of obscure literary rebels—Dallow, Spicer, Pinkie, Cubitt—characters from Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock. For the uninitiated, the line may pass unnoticed. For the artist steeped in literature, it lands like a secret handshake. Morrissey speaks in the dialect of cultural outsiders, making the listener feel less alone in their strange tastes and aesthetic obsessions.

Romanticism Reborn: The Sacredness of Isolation

Artists are often drawn to the margins—to silence, solitude, and sublimated longing. Morrissey, too, worships at the altar of the outsider. He sings not of triumphant love but of its absence; not of belonging but of the tender ache of exclusion. The world, in his work, is not hostile—but indifferent, and therefore all the more tragic.

But this isolation is never merely depressive—it is sacralized. To be lonely in a Morrissey song is to be initiated into a higher order of feeling. His characters are not victims; they are pilgrims. For the artist, who often struggles to articulate their inner dissonance in a noisy world, Morrissey becomes a kind of priest: unjudging, poetic, and precise.

Conclusion: The Unspoken Muse

In the end, Morrissey’s genius lies in his ability to articulate what others cannot—or dare not. He does not instruct, uplift, or entertain in the conventional sense. Instead, he gives voice to the pained dignity of those who feel too much, think too deeply, and belong nowhere.

To artists, he is not merely a musician. He is a companion. A confessor. A reminder that sadness, when shaped into language, becomes a kind of grace. For those who create not to escape the world but to make sense of its strangeness, Morrissey’s music offers not just comfort but communion.

~John Kobeck

The Drumbeat of Death

The drumbeat of death
pounds without mercy.

She stands betwixt East and West—
a tempest born of the North.

Where have you gone?
Opioid to the heart-wrung.

A gown lies wrought upon the bed,
high heels scattered on the floor.
The girl sits silent at the edge—
and naught remains.

Some perish behind hospital walls.
Most wither
behind the walls of their own souls.

She said, “You’re not my kind—
don’t take it personally.”

The executioner’s smile
is ever just beyond reach.
Then the jester weeps.

Life is a thread
of fleeting encounters,
each fading
into the ever-hungering void.

Haiku #642

The talking box screams with declaration

Woven into the sublime it’s well planned

Even the fool reads the walls in public toilets

Bigger Isn't Always Better: The Failures of "Big Art"

February 27, 2025

Walk into almost any contemporary photography gallery today, and one thing becomes immediately clear: the photographs are enormous. The prints span entire walls, towering over viewers, dwarfing frames, and sometimes—drowning content. There's a growing belief in the art world that bigger means better. Bigger shows confidence. Bigger commands attention. Bigger sells. But I would argue that this trend is not only misguided—it is actively damaging the integrity of photographic art.

Photography fails constantly. And when it fails, large scale only magnifies the failure. A weak photograph, printed at six feet wide, doesn’t gain strength through sheer size—it simply exposes its own emptiness more dramatically. It’s like shouting a mediocre sentence through a megaphone. The volume increases, but not the value.

This obsession with scale reflects a crisis of confidence, not a surplus of talent. For some, large format has become a refuge for small ideas—concepts too thin to withstand close, quiet scrutiny, yet dressed up in grandeur to compensate for a lack of visual or emotional substance. It’s a sleight of hand: overwhelm the senses, and hope no one notices there's nothing underneath.

It wasn't always this way. Many of the most iconic photographs in history are small. Think of the intimate silver gelatin prints of Diane Arbus or the quiet 8x10 contact prints of Walker Evans. Their power comes not from size, but from clarity of vision and emotional honesty. These photographers trusted the image to speak without needing to shout.

Size in art can be meaningful—sometimes even necessary. But it has to be earned. It should emerge from the concept, not precede it. When Andreas Gursky prints at mural scale, it’s not to inflate a weak image, but to reflect the overwhelming systems and structures he’s critiquing. There’s a reason for the magnitude. But when scale becomes default—when “big” is the creative solution rather than the result of one—it points to a shallow understanding of the medium’s possibilities.

If the only solution to a lack of originality is to go bigger, we’re in deep trouble. We lose the quiet image. We lose the contemplative moment. We lose the trust in photography’s ability to whisper rather than scream.

As an artist with an MFA in photography, I believe we need to re-center the conversation around vision, not volume. Photography isn’t cinema. It doesn’t need to dominate a wall to move a viewer. In fact, sometimes the smallest photographs pull us in the closest—and that proximity, that intimacy, is where true power resides.