Morrissey is, as we all well know, famous for two things: first, for being in popular 1980s band The Smiths. And second, for being a full-grown human misery contraption who appears to hate everyone that isn’t an animal or British person.
His recent reported comments on Donald Trump, Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey, however, he vehemently denies. We wrote about them at length here, but to summarise: he reportedly made some, er, inflammatory comments about sexual assault and multiculturalism when speaking to German newspaper Der Spiegel. After the interview was published, Morrissey claimed the paper had misquoted him, and that he was now no longer doing print interviews (rejoice tbqh!).
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Anyway, he’s now released another statement on Facebook, this time under the title “THE SLANDER SYSTEM”, which makes it sound like some kind of strange political poem you might hear at a student union spoken word event. Technically speaking, slander only happens when someone says something out loud, whereas libel relates to what they publish in print so maybe he should have called this THE LIBEL LIES. I digress. In the post, Morrissey again denies the claims and asks Der Spiegel to drop the raw, unedited audio file of the interview. He also says the print media will usher “eggless” people through like a “little bag of dung”, so there’s that. You can read the whole thing below as there’s quite a lot to unpack here.
Whew – “Kevin Spacey’s private proclivities” is one helluva way to summarise “allegedly laying a 14-year-old boy onto a bed, aged 26, climbing on top of him and then saying you can’t remember if that ever happened” but there you have it. Spacey has since apologised. Now only one thing remains: for Der Spiegel to drop the audio and settle this once and for all (whether they did in fact misquote Morrissey, or whether he said things he now regrets). This whole thing reminds us of that time Lana Del Rey told The Guardian she wished she “was dead already” in 2014, before saying she’d been misquoted. At that point the journalist uploaded the audio file of her indeed saying those words to Soundcloud, which I personally think should be sampled on a track one day, maybe even by Lana herself.
The thing with this particular Morrissey interview, though, is that he didn’t just say one casual throwaway line. If the transcript of the interview is to be taken at face value, there would have in fact been paragraphs of him saying things like “it seems to me Spacey has been unnecessarily attacked” and “some people are very awkward when it comes to romance anyway” and “if you try to make everything multicultural, you will not have any culture in the end”. Fire up that Soundcloud, Der Spiegel. The world is ready.
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