Morrissey meets D. W. Griffith and sings about home, the world, and history.
Why is “The Monsters of Pig Alley” the most poignant pop song of the era? It eschews the distraction practiced by the Millennium’s biggest music acts (Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Harry Styles) to remind listeners that their humanity has been warped by a corrupt culture. Morrissey sees how the entertainment industry functions as a tool of social control, and he expresses his regret in massively relatable personal terms that reconnect to what’s essential in pop culture history.
Over a century ago, D. W. Griffith created the first gangster movie, The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912), innovating a narrative message that would transcend genre limits. Now, in “The Monsters of Pig Alley,” Morrissey uses Griffith’s metaphor to convey the entrapments of the secular entertainment industry. (“Did you meet the star makers and the leg-breakers?”) We recognize the emotional sacrifice he knows as an individual who left family behind — vocalized in his chorus “We’re not sophisticated / We’re overweight and dated / But we love you.”
Morrissey valorizes family — the basic social unit — at a time when it’s attacked by ideologies that favor political dominance over family loyalty. He realizes the difference between the two, from his celebrity experience and maturity. His song clarifies the complex lesson of rock music — perpetual adolescence seduced by corporatized rebellion — relating it to the outlawry that resists familial tradition. Griffith’s gangster metaphor was the first to recognize this condition as early as 1912; his intertitle notes “a link in the system” that contrasts a musician’s honorable hope with dangerous ambition, success with failure, aspiration with caution.
Griffith’s classic American urban-slum setting dramatized the basic drive of an artist (Walter Miller) and his wife (Lillian Gish). During their risky social advancement, they encounter the gangster as rebel (a Cagney-esque Elmer Booth), a prophecy of the pop star as tragic hero.
Although Morrissey’s album was recorded in France and includes many autobiographical allusions to Paris, reviewers who cite Pigalle, the city’s red-light district, misconstrue the song’s source. (Pigalle was named for sculptor Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, not a diminutive of “pig alley” as WWII Allied soldiers joked.) Morrissey evokes Griffith’s basic class reference and destitute background (Griffith filmed Musketeers in New York and New Jersey) to convey a working-class artist’s regrettable upward climb.
Morrissey’s song title twists “Musketeer” into “Monster,” switching fraternity to adversary, solidarity to antagonism — reappraising what propels one’s venture into society, creating distance from the security of the past. The perils of show business (ignored by Swift, Beyoncé, Styles) are felt by family relations who vicariously experience the star’s alienation versus his popular success, the home versus the world.
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The music video The Monsters of Pig Alley is not good enough. While Sire Records can be lauded for putting put its resources behind Morrissey’s comeback album Make-Up Is a Lie, with a promotional clip that dramatizes the finale track, director Lewis Cater misses the power that makes “Monsters” special. No other great pop artist has been though Morrisey’s politically motivated cancel-culture travails, yet that pain comes through in a troubadour’s threnody. But Cater’s premise — a young man (Thomas Malloy) flees his family to become an actor and succumbs to showbiz vices, leaving his corpse for his family to mourn — is too slick to capture Morrissey’s complicated recall of his own personal, professional agon. Cater uses Millennial showbiz types, and his imagery even suggests fashionable Ukrainian empathy.
Only a great film artist of Griffith’s genius could achieve immediate spiritual identification, although the song’s empathetic message has been communicated by some other movies — not just gangster films — from Satyajit Ray’s Aparajito to André Téchiné’s J’embrasse pas (I Don’t Kiss), where deep, familial regret becomes the essential moral lesson of the modern urban epic. As the closing track of the album Make-Up Is a Lie, “Monsters” perfectly combines the throes of careerism and personal survival.
Similar home-and-the-world ideas in the creative process of Griffith’s Musketeers are also exercised throughout Make-Up Is a Lie, especially evident in the way Morrissey swings from scary emotionalism (the debauchery of “Many Icebergs Ago” and “Headache”) to pop-obsessed romanticism (“Lester Bangs,” “The Night Pop Dropped,” and “Amazona”) while “Boulevard” could have emerged from the anguished mind of Brando’s Paul in Last Tango in Paris. The album gives a fully rounded portrait of modern success and the complicated ambivalence behind the often envied and misunderstood pop-star image.
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Morrissey/Smiths scholar Thomas Papp recently drew a comparison with another filmmaker: “Like [Pier Paolo] Pasolini in his day, Morrissey occupies the position of cultural dissident working from within the very machinery he distrusts.” But that distrust creates a paradox that gives Make-Up Is a Lie its most thrilling moments, such as the nerd tribute to Lester Bangs (“I lean and you are leaned upon”). Paeans to innocence “Zoom Zoom the Little Boy” and “The Night Pop Dropped” contrast with the devastating showbiz alarm “Kerching, Kerching,” where Irving Berlin meets Lou Reed. These songs and the fresh vigor of a new band, with producer Joe Chiccarelli’s always imaginative settings, refine the worldview first expressed in the themes of family, politics, and mortality in World Peace Is None of Your Business.
Papp explains, “Like Pasolini, Morrissey’s antagonism is not a type of reactionary nostalgia but a sort of studied moral resistance: a refusal to accept consumer satisfaction, institutional virtue, or liberal tolerance as substitutes for dignity, memory, and genuine difference.” Thus, the conflicted transition from “Musketeers” to “Monsters.” (Family is humbling like nothing else.)
There’s great growth from adolescent resentment of parental influence to adult appreciation in “Monsters.” The opening homilies (“Good health is wealth”) pierce your defenses. They rebuke the defiant bohemian with a powerful primordial pull. (“Come back home / We’re all your own / And we love you” answers the ache of Morrissey’s “Nobody Loves Us,” from 1996.) Advising “The higher you climb, the less you find” is smarter than boho cynicism and as heartbreaking as a family song by The Roches. As a fan who became a pop star, Morrissey often uses his wit to defend against tragedy and cruelty; here, wit rises to compassion. He sings with a melody that goes from gentle to heart-wrenching declaration.
“Monsters” updates the moral tension in Griffith’s Victorian narratives and Satyajit Ray’s critique of worldly estrangement, all cresting with a superb version of Pasolini’s cultural dissidence as the song’s melody goes from gentle puzzlement to firm-stepping, irresistible declaration of love. We can relate it to the lost principles of pop stars who have betrayed our trust and to every victim of lawfare and public persecution. The song’s beauty opposes contemporary ugliness; it should make every ideologue who slagged Morrissey ashamed of himself.
