A comeback album to alert us all
In the six years since Morrissey’s last album release (I Am Not a Dog on a Chain, nodding to Bob Dylan’s “Only a Pawn in Their Game”), the West has been subjected to an epidemic of suppressed truths, government lockdowns, and blatant mendacity that parallel Morrissey’s exile from the music industry and cancellation by mainstream media. His new album Make-Up Is a Lie is being released on Sire Records (part of the Warner Music Group), and its title track boasts his liberation — plus his singular wit and courage.
But Make-Up Is a Lie is only marginally a social manifesto like the Smiths’ 1985 classic vegetarian screed Meat Is Murder. Morrissey campily drags the cosmetics industry to highlight the tradition in which public duplicity is widely accepted. So he pioneers the meme-song. This direct attack on disingenuousness gets at the heart of the prevarication that infects all current social behavior — the millennium’s Big Lie. (Remember how “Take it seriously” became Biden’s press secretary code for powdering over indifference and inertia?)
If decorating oneself is a habit of worldly sophistication (and not just among women), it implies a covering up of what is real and true — and Morrissey unmasks the anger, despair, and artistic will prompted by his media and corporate persecution. The song’s story laments a female celebrity’s grief, regret, and death — a familiar act of androgynous empathy (coinciding with Brigitte Bardot’s recent passing) that unleashes the singer’s ardency and rancor in full-throated repetition. His honesty and clarity respond to our era’s ruined discourse.
Make-Up Is a Lie is in the great pop tradition of calling out untruths, whether the Eagles’ “Lyin’ Eyes” or the Rolling Stones’ “Lies” or Morrissey’s own “Journalists Who Lie,” a song about the patterns of media treachery that predicted the moment that New York Times editor in chief Dean Baquet crossed the decency line, wrecking journalistic prudence, to accuse a U.S. president of lying. The media bias that inspired the ingenious term “Fake News” also gave birth to widespread skepticism about the media. The information gap that separates political factions causes a widespread naïveté that, following Morrissey’s alarm, needs to be shocked into awareness. It’s as nervy and important as when Dylan poked at media hacks in Don’t Look Back.
By raising that plaint to address this era’s many social deceptions, Morrissey brought back my personal awakening — a memory of an MTV press conference that announced the network’s 1987 launch of its MTV News segment, an event so deviously misleading (replete with soda and pizza to bribe the entertainment press) that its foulness only dissipated later when I happened to hear the Sex Pistols’ rampaging “Liar” on a magazine store’s PA system. It cleared my brain fog. Although the tune “Make-Up Is a Lie” has a rhythm as soft and throbbing as a heartbeat, Morrissey’s passion revives the Sex Pistols’ scolding punk thrill. He reiterates the title’s moral assertion (his resolute phrasing of “All make-up . . .!”) until the point hits home teasingly, marvelously.
The album is not just a comeback; it reasserts Morrissey’s principled approach to pop music as vividly as Van Morrison did in his two Lockdown albums, and as John Lydon did in Public Image Limited’s End of World. Most pop musicians went through the Covidapocalypse as if everything was okey doke — part of their escapist routine. But instead of playing pop idol and catering to marketplace artifice, Morrissey offers a cover photo that shows an aged, gray-haired pop veteran caught in wordless exhortation, his hands raised as if in shock or poised to grasp our attention. It isn’t glamour or a joke but a new way of remaking/remodeling pop music (as in Morrissey’s meaningful rendition of Roxy Music’s dreamy, revolutionary “Amazona”). In the photo’s background, there’s a crucifix as a pinpoint of light. Either redemption is a memory, or hope is distant.
This new way of presenting one’s image trusts the public’s acceptance while also challenging it. The album’s opening track, “You’re Right, It’s Time,” recognizes the comeback as an occasion to confront reality: “I want to move away from those who stare at screens all day,” describes the lost consciousness that should be a pop star’s safekeeping, that isn’t merely subject to the self-righteousness or social justice pretenses of folk and protest music. When “Make-Up” describes “In her mind of blank reclusion / Until the same explosion,” Morrissey poeticizes the discomfort of those who feel deceived by false beliefs, who can no longer hold back disgust and regret — the flip side of the hivemind.
Producer Joe Chiccarelli’s arrangements are less whimsical than on the great I Am Not a Dog on a Chain, but underneath the gentle, offbeat accents on Make-Up Is a Lie, one hears imaginative encouragement to know one’s own self, to rethink the lies that pop music sells too often. That’s because the industry and the media came down hard on Morrissey, harder than they pushed the jab, personal isolation, and conformity — as if to show that hatred means more to tyrants than money.
Confessional honesty gives Make-Up Is a Lie greater depth and meaning than politics. The spiritual subtext of tracks such as “Notre-Dame” and “Boulevard” (“I just need one more reason to give up on God”) reflect the search of the Catholic manqué artist for renewed faith. This extraordinary album is worthy of further discussion even as the lies of mainstream culture continue.