This essay is an attempt to elaborate on these lines, from Southpaw Grammar's Wikipedia entry:

"...There is no real consensus on which market this album was aimed at. The answer is probably no-one, given the fact that this album does not obviously appeal to any specific group; it is an album Morrissey wanted to make. Whether this reflects positively on the album is not obvious."

It takes the form of five ideas, and a striking exception.

Here we go, then:

ONE: The idea that most civilized actions are, in one way or another, disguises for violent intentions, rather than attempts to better oneself by resisting these intentions:

A theme to which Morrissey has often referred in interviews, and which seems to form a fairly fundamental part of his worldview.

There are two particularly interesting connections to the idea in Southpaw Grammar. One is the title, and the association with boxing. Boxing had a personal connection to Morrissey at the time - it was his assistant Jake Walters' former occupation - but it's also an exceptionally apt summary of the ideas above; it's violence codified.

There's also a Wilde connection to boxing: the twelve rules which form the basis of the modern sport were set down at the instigation of the Marquess of Queensbury - Lord Alfred Douglas' father, and the man who did more than anyone else to ensure Wilde's spell in prison. Boxing, seen through this lens, thus has a series of associations (homophobia, persecution of the artist, and a favorite Morrissey metaphor, the threat of law courts and prisons) which tie in closely with Southpaw's thread of institutionalized violence.

The other major connection is the treatment of the teacher in the first track - and the extraordinary line "Lay a hand on our children/and it's never too late to have you." The teacher's hand-laying, whether it refers to corporeal punishment or to pedophilia, is of violent intent; the parents respond by threatening retaliatory violence, creating an environment of cyclic, abusive fear.

The unfortunate students are not directly mentioned, but their presence, and the lesson that they learn (Morrissey: it's about "the school of hard knocks...") saturates the entire album.

TWO: Self-destruction and suicide:

First: the album itself can be read as a professional suicide. I realize it's easier to read it that way from 2006, knowing that Morrissey had been experiencing a period of moderate mainstream success, and that this album ended that - and it's true that Morrissey does not tend to acknowledge publicly that a work of his is not "commercial;" however, I do wonder if an artist this self-conscious can possibly not look at his current work, and remark to himself that what with the lengthy drum solos, and the progged-up guitars, and the marked deviation from Vauxhall & I's pattern of witty, catchy three-minute songs - that there might just be something about this album that the public wouldn't take to as well as they took to Vauxhall & I.

Second: "Do Your Best And Don't Worry" and "Southpaw," both third-person songs about self-destruction - which I strongly suspect have more meaning for Morrissey than they possibly can for us; the evocation of Elizabeth Smart's poetry, "you in a drab dress" (tm, LASID: Lyrics and Song Information Database) and the apparent autobiographical references in "Southpaw" are strikingly meaningless out of context - or at least, they are to me; more on this later.

Third: "Reader Meet Author," which concerns the press and their inability to comprehend an artist's (okay, fine, Morrissey's) complex internal battles - with, further, the implication that true communication between a reader and an author is impossible, as the reader expects "sense" but encounters only further mystery. I think this track is at the heart of the album -and at the same time, indicates what keeps it from any standard idea of success. I'll come back to this later as well.

THREE: The inability to accept one's unwanted sexual impulses, and the channeling of said impulses into violence

I'm talking about "The Boy Racer." The narrator explicitly intends to "kill" the boy racer, but is obsessed with the teenage-crush-evoking phrase "he's just too good-looking" (even sneering it hungrily, three or four times, at the end of the song...); he's (quite defensively) "jealous, that's all;" he specifically refers to watching this "pretty thing" "stood at the urinal" (which at once calls up associations with English pre-legalization gay culture, in which "cottaging", cruising in public men's rooms played a major part) before letting out the oddly-paused "I'm gonna....kill him!" As the song goes on, the word "kill" becomes an increasingly thinly veiled euphemism, even moreso when you remember that it's a favorite tactic in Morrissey's discussion of sex and love - "a murderous desire," "you have killed me."

FOUR: Violence channeled into competition

More explicitly, "The Boy Racer" deals with another favorite Morrissey theme, jealousy and resentment of success - even if it's success measured solely in terms of one's ride.

"Dagenham Dave" also describes a car-related competition between the narrator and subject -though it's primarily concerned with the odd, unwinnable war between the employed and unemployed. For a better description than I could give, I'll link you to the "Dagenham Dave" page on LASID, which I don't believe I could improve upon.

FIVE: Violence of the public upon the individual

One of the most remarkable gestures on the album is Morrissey's almost inaudible, whispered, half-distorted plea, "help me, help me..." on the very tail end of "Southpaw." It's a black hole of a moment - quiet, nearly invisible, but with immense power. The voice is pleading for help - and we can't give it, since we're not there; we're listeners, not friends.

The gesture, as such, both expresses a kind of forced cruelty in mass communication (our remove from the artist deprives us of any human response to his unhappiness) and a type of self-destruction, since the artist knows we can't do anything.

BUT...

Here's we get to the problem with interpreting Southpaw Grammar: so many of these songs seem connected, and expressive of a particular state of mind - but there are crucial moments that don't connect at all.

What are we meant to make of "The Operation" and "Best Friend on the Payroll?" The latter is presumably about Morrissey's relationship with Jake Walters, his personal assistant who lived in his house and took shirtless photos of him, and the former certainly appears to be a cruel breakup song - but neither track gives up any more secrets than that. "Southpaw" may be confusing, but "Best Friend," with its total lack of detail, and "The Operation," with its inexplicable central metaphor, are wholly opaque.

All of Morrissey's albums are quite personal - however, only Southpaw has this particular trait, of leading to a bridge we cannot cross, a point at which our understanding of the album's subtext must end because Morrissey eliminates all hint, not only of what he was going through at this time - which is typical, and to be expected, and probably for the best - but of how it made him feel - which is a shocking omission.

"It's not gonna work out" is a statement. So is "everyone I know is sick to death of you." There is no indication of the narrator's feelings about them, and as such it's impossible to develop a true idea of the thoughts and emotions that went into the album as a whole. We are left understanding that it's full of violence and complication and distance and cyclic tragedy - but we can never quite feel that the author is communicating with us, that we can learn to understand what all these strange battles really mean to him or his characters.

Was it Morrissey's intention to keep the door so thoroughly locked? Possibly; I keep going back to "Reader Meet Author" and that buried, untouchable "help me, help me" - though asking someone for help always acknowledges some possibility of communication and understanding.

It's also possible that the door isn't locked at all, that this emptiness, this lack of affect, this general refusal to portray emotion, does describe an emotional state - that of a depression so profound that all that one can see is cruelty and emptiness.

There also exists the chance that, as a young American woman in 2006, I'm not in a position to immediately comprehend the album at all - because it's so heavily grounded in the experience of working-class English masculinity in the mid-nineties - the "masculinity" part in particular. I've always thought of myself as a person who's more than usually gender-blind, but in reality, I wasn't born a man nor raised to express my emotions like one. It's possible that the feeling behind songs like "The Operation" comes through more clearly to native speakers.

As always with Morrissey: it's likely all of these are true, to some degree or other.

I rate Southpaw Grammar very highly; I think it was an important step in the long process of Morrissey's finding his solo voice, and it's teeming with interesting subtext. But at the heart of that subtext, there is a complex blankness that's impossible to interpret. Perhaps someday, as my second epigraph implies, I'll figure out whether this works to its benefit.