Leave off Morrissey's testicles.

I'm serious, and no, I don't mean the mainstream rock community. Of course these guys are going to object to Morrissey's testicles; of course they're gonna find them (in what seems the consensus term) "alarming," because mainstream critics have Reset buttons that are pressed every two years, or 200 albums, whichever comes first, and it causes them to forget everything they know about a given singer save the first clause of his reputation—in Morrissey's case, "angsty, celibate Mancunian," obviously—and as such, to these men and women, Morrissey's smutty, horny lyrical history is constantly beginning again. It's a mystical cycle.

So I direct the following to those of us who look past the immediate implications of the "explosive kegs" in "Dear God Please Help Me"—i.e. those of us who glance at the critics with world-weary eyes over our copy of the Your Arsenal liner notes, which we are reading exceedingly quickly, as "Handsome Devil" plays in the background, and wonder how anybody in his right mind can conceivably imagine that Morrissey's lyrics have just recently been plucked (and you have to picture, from Rome, a tremendous, slightly irritable, startled yelp) of their virgin flower:

Why can't we give the kegs some artistic credit? They're a fucking uncomfortable metaphor, yes, but I don't see why that can't be deliberate. After all, comfortable is not a word I'd ascribe to Moz's previous canon—comforting, yes, but he gave us he gave us "National Front Disco," he gave us "You Knew I Couldn't Last"—why not presume he's up to one of the few tricks he consistently repeats?

To start from before the beginning:

"Dear God" occupies a vital point in the structure of Ringleader of the Tormentors. Morrissey is fond of the opening manifesto song which grandly sets the stage for the album itself—"The Teachers Are Afraid of the Pupils," "You're Gonna Need Someone On Your Side," "The Queen Is Dead." Ringleader, in keeping with its general tone of Visconti-calculated excess, has three of them. "I Will See You in Far-Off Places," "Dear God Please Help Me" and "You Have Killed Me" function as an introductory tryptich: the album comes loaded with flesh, religion and complex realignments of simple things; furthermore, all of this is going to take place on an unexpectedly broad field of play—of which broadness is a statement in itself.

Morrissey's albums tend constantly to have an eye on place—or better, the feel of a place, and its size. Part of the reason Maladjusted feels so discombobulated is that it lacks that sense of loction; the opening track places it in a fractured, dislocated filmic England, and then it wanders in abstraction before winding up, more or less accidentally, in hell. But generally we can treat location as one of his few absolute trademarks: Manchester, London, L.A....Rome, except Ringleader's opening track doesn't actually set it in Rome.

Instead, "I Will See You in Far Off Places" is pure massive horizion, and while it appears to reference the Middle East (and the United States' interactions thereof), it does not really ground itself in any specific spot. The specific lyric is likewise ungrounded; it asks a series of questions about the difficulty of human connection, about faith ("why, then, do I know...") and, implicitly, about the motivations of violence—however these questions are asked in such quick succession, and placed in such odd juxtaposition, that it almost seems that the purpose of their being here is to be asked not answered. Where You Are The Quarry opened by informing America that it was not the world, Ringleader opens by boldly informing us that, okay, maybe it doesn't quite know what the world is, either; "I Will See You..." is an uncertain but far from tentative attempt to pat out the edges of a new, broader universal—to grasp an objective, loving, artistic worldview within a wider and more complex timezone than Manchester in 1986, or even Los Angeles in 2004.

Eventually this cyclone of confusion whirls to a point—and brings us to the splendid discomfort of "Dear God Please Help Me."

Shall we get this out of the way:

I am walking through Rome with my heart on a string

There's an obvious jump here, from all the big questions that can't be said—to small, tiny. The music's slow, the arrangement's somber (or a glam concept of "somber") and the lyrics describe a situation so intimate that the entire song seems miniaturized, poised on the head of a pin.

And yet that very intimacy is no contradiction to the wildness of "I Will See You"—more an inversion than anything else.

"Dear God..." is heavily patterned with shifts of identity. The repeated title line could be addressed either to God, or to the companion referenced elsewhere in the song—with the "dear god" performing the same function as "as I live and breathe" in "You Have Killed Me;" it could be a phrase with meaning in its own right, or it could be nothing more than emphasis. The companion also shifts pronouns ("then he motions to me..."/"now I'm spreading your legs...") and "you" is used to refer both to the companion, as above, and to God/Christ: "Dear God...did this kind of thing happen to you?"

Furthermore, the song's one apparent line of dialogue:

Will you follow and know

...could be spoken by either principal character in the tableau. The words, followed by a hand on one's knee, make precisely as much sense one way as the other. The general effect is a conflation of narrator and companion and God—a conflation which results in a great crunch of identities in the final line—there is no room to move, but "the" heart feels free, and fade out over strings—which allows for a brief moment (very brief, if "You Have Killed Me" is a direct sequel) when it all makes sense in some nonverbal way...

Also, it's an orgasm. Let's be frank: sometimes in Ringleader there is an orgasm. You had better dodge.

Anyway—the kegs are part of that. To feel part of the human morass is all very pleasant in theory, but the narrator finds it both freeing and nerve-wracking—his statement that "there is no room to move," the lip-biting uncertainty of the vocal delivery in spots ("with his hand on my knee...") and the pleas for help and to God. Form is emotion, and it performs its visceral digs. The disturbingly concrete testicle thing (and leg-spreading thing) is a grinning yank of the audience into the song's emotional muss, and it works: we feel it, we can't leave. Once that phrase goes into your brain, it doesn't come out again.

Did he go too far with it? Up to you. But I won't agree that the discomfort of the line could conceivably be unintentional.

And then we come to "You Have Killed Me" and what appears to be this bout of lovemaking's complex, cinema-riddled and basically sore aftermath. In "You Have Killed Me," identity theoretically rights itself (even if the characters are, in a pleasantly weird assertion of pop culture over immediate emotion, described as directors, actors and films!), many double meanings are enacted, nobody is really sure what all of that even meant...but then...forgiveness.

So it turns out all right. Doesn't it?
(This is my favorite Morrissey album.)

Ringleader first declares its intention to shoot the moon—it will be a highly ambitious work, and perhaps it comprehends that such ambition can never be entirely fulfilled; to say it contains an excess of ambition is not to approve or condemn it, but simply to describe one of its pervading traits—a excess of ambition, a tendency towards extended falsetto and a lot of keyboards (Visconti). In some ways, it seems an attempt (through archetype, microcosm and a several songs which are simply about Morrissey's personal life) to embrace an abstract idea of "human life and human connection," just as Your Arsenal was an attempt to embrace the abstract idea of "England." It is heavily self-referring (if you wanted, you could also argue that the three great abstractions that tease through "I Will See You..." –touch, violence and faith- are elaborated upon specifically in the suceeding three tracks—you could do something with the two songs about the deaths of fathers, diametrically opposite in their approaches to the concept—you could make a convincing argument that the whole thing's actually about Oscar Wilde...) –to the point, it is so patterned and archetypical that the patterns and archetypes take on a life of their own, and encourage a degree of senseless interpretation in the susceptable which may not be wholly reasonable (but which is always good squeaky fun...!). There are so many picky little readings that the entirity becomes somewhat abstract, which is only as it should be.

Yes, they are man balls. And yes, yes, Ringleader is exasperating; yes, at times it appears to actively court your irritation. But it's not stupid. It has poise and intention. It is music composed with a manic gleam in the eye.

Give the kegs the credit they're due.