god, i'm in bad shape right now

[NOTE: For full effect, please picture this as a very cheaply produced commercial for a restaurant called X’s Bar And Grill, featuring DMX holding a spatula and wearing a “Kiss the Cook” apron and Swedish Chef hat]

What is it about Morrissey that inspires this in people of both genders?

When Neutral Milk Hotel announced they were reuniting for a tour, I didn’t lose my mind with joy.

Morrissey was going to have a show in Wichita Falls, Texas on November 28, 2012.

I know this not because I have an interest in the social calendar of the Texoma area, but because of the giant Kay Yeager Coliseum sign by the highway that I could see from the hotel room where my parents and I stayed as we experienced the last days of my grandmother’s life and her funeral.

One of my oldest jokes—one I can always guarantee a laugh from music nerds—is that one of the ways I stereotypically live up to my Latin heritage is my unabashed love of the Smiths and Morrissey’s solo work. I say Latin because if you ask members of my family, you get conflicting answers about our lineage. We’re Spanish, no we’re Mexican. We’re Spanish on my grandmother’s side and Mexican on my grandfather’s. In any case, I’m biracial. Being biracial has had a big impact – my cultural identity has been something that has cycled as a point of worry over and over in my life. I never seemed to fit in with either side of my family. While in Texas with my mother’s family, it was a comfort to be surrounded by people who look exactly like you, but might have a completely separate worldview. Whereas on my dad’s side of the family, I stick out like I was bussed there.

My grandmother was a tiny, tough woman who had twelve children. She was our matriarch, the glue that held all of us together. We all lovingly called her “ma’am,” no matter if you were her child or grandchild or great-grandchild. Even though there were so many of us, she remembered and loved each and every one of us.

The day after my grandmother died, my mother, one of my aunts and I went to the funeral home. We were allowed to prepare her hair before the viewing. My aunt had my grandmother’s brush and a stack of bobby pins so we could put her hair in her signature bun. My grandmother always had jet black hair and wore it in a bun that reached Ronnie Spector heights since before I was born, but her hair was grey and coarser than I remembered. My aunt brushed her hair, spritzed it and pinned it up the best we could despite her prone position. When we finished, we all stood there looking at her. My aunt broke the silence by saying, “Looking good, ma’am!” I never can pass up the chance to make a tense moment funny. “You know what they say, ma’am,” I said, “The higher the hair, the closer to God.”

I have to say that I’m very nervous about this adventure I’m embarking on. There’s no other way to say it: people either love Morrissey to the ends of the Earth, or believe him to be a hack of Las Vegas magician proportion. Much like religion and politics, Morrissey probably shouldn’t be discussed at the dinner table because you JUST KNOW your Aunt Jane is going to go on a rant about how liking Morrissey makes people insufferable and Obama is in a nefarious pyramid scheme with Jay-Z and Beyonce when all you did was ask her to pass the salt.

No matter how you look at it, the man sometimes called “The Pope of Mope” inspires intense feeling. That’s what I hope to focus on this week – what drives each and every one of us to either love or revile an artist. Is it just the music or the man – and can you separate those?

Bill Murray on Gilda Radner:

“Gilda got married and went away. None of us saw her anymore. There was one good thing: Laraine had a party one night, a great party at her house. And I ended up being the disk jockey. She just had forty-fives, and not that many, so you really had to work the music end of it. There was a collection of like the funniest people in the world at this party. Somehow Sam Kinison sticks in my brain. The whole Monty Python group was there, most of us from the show, a lot of other funny people, and Gilda. Gilda showed up and she’d already had cancer and gone into remission and then had it again, I guess. Anyway she was slim. We hadn’t seen her in a long time. And she started doing, “I’ve got to go,” and she was just going to leave, and I was like, “Going to leave?” It felt like she was going to really leave forever. So we started carrying her around, in a way that we could only do with her. We carried her up and down the stairs, around the house, repeatedly, for a long time, until I was exhausted. Then Danny did it for a while. Then I did it again. We just kept carrying her; we did it in teams. We kept carrying her around, but like upside down, every which way—over your shoulder and under your arm, carrying her like luggage. And that went on for more than an hour—maybe an hour and a half—just carrying her around and saying, “She’s leaving! This could be it! Now come on, this could be the last time we see her. Gilda’s leaving, and remember that she was very sick—hello?” We worked all aspects of it, but it started with just, “She’s leaving, I don’t know if you’ve said good-bye to her.” And we said good-bye to the same people ten, twenty times, you know.  And because these people were really funny, every person we’d drag her up to would just do like five minutes on her, with Gilda upside down in this sort of tortured position, which she absolutely loved. She was laughing so hard we could have lost her right then and there. It was just one of the best parties I’ve ever been to in my life. I’ll always remember it. It was the last time I saw her.”