In Vegas, an angry ballad scrutinizes England’s 9/11.
Context means everything when you hear Morrissey’s new single “Bonfire of Teenagers,” recently premiered during his Las Vegas residency at Caesar’s Palace. Morrissey introduced the song’s subject as “England’s 9/11,” referring to the May 22, 2017, homicide bombing in his hometown’s Manchester Arena by Islamic terrorist Salman Abedi. It killed 23 people (including Abedi) and injured more than a thousand who were attending an Ariana Grande concert.
The live performance in Vegas gave Morrissey an opportunity to debut the title track of an album as yet unreleased because he was dropped from his BMI record deal and canceled by the music media, which deemed him politically incorrect. Morrissey’s rebellion in “Bonfire of Teenagers” requires explanation, especially since media outlets ignored the song’s passionate critique, calling it insensitive to Manchester’s grieving families.
It is the context of Morrissey’s American exile in Vegas that makes the song’s rebellion significant. After the 2017 bombing, numerous pop musicians convened at various charity concerts to placate the traumatized Mancunians. Morrissey exposes these acts of so-called solace as offensive gestures of pacification. His bitter ballad opposes the political submissiveness that has since led to Covid-era passivity (replacing panic over terrorist bombings).
The media’s misinterpretation starts with the sentimentality conjured by the title’s “teenagers” image. Morrissey turns the idea of adolescent rebellion inside out, noting how a youth-culture event became an occasion for annihilation. Rather than copycatting Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities (the satirical castigation of social decadence now accepted as commonplace), Morrissey points to the culture’s deliberate self-destruction.
The extermination of youth is analogous to massacring society’s future and potential — a fear connected to movements that enforce unproven vaccines or that encourage chemical and surgical castration. The “bonfire” image is horrific enough to counter the notion of innocuous pop-culture pleasure. The lyrics conjure what lies beneath: the acceptance of tribal sacrifice. The song’s setting describes a young girl innocently preparing to attend a concert, “only to be vapourized / Vapourized.”
Not since his powerfully ironic “The National Front Disco” (1992) has Morrissey posed such an unsettling confrontation with dangerous cultural appropriation. In the refrain, he explicitly takes on the modern fad of mind-hive conformity by quoting a 1995 Oasis song:
And the silly people sing “Don’t Look Back in Anger,”
And the morons sing and sway “Don’t Look Back in Anger.”
He dares refer to those do-gooder fundraisers where Coldplay, Metallica, and Ariana Grande herself performed the Oasis hit in the aftermath of the Arena bombing, as if the song was an anthem of solidarity and healing. Morrissey ripostes, “I can assure you I will look back in anger till the day I die.”
Against feckless public response to tragedy, Morrissey pinpoints the thoughtless way pop culture can be misused to anesthetize the populace. This is as challenging as “The National Front Disco” except that the new tune elegizes youth culture’s demise. Its solemnity brings back that woeful moment when Rolling Stone’s inexcusable August 1, 2013, cover glamorized Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a precursor to the British press’s absolving of Salman Abedi. Morrissey’s chorus of “Go easy on the killer” seethes with righteous anger.
Anger was never an aspect of Morrissey’s creativity (recall his brilliantly pithy “Rejection is one thing / But rejection from a fool is cruel”), but “Bonfire of Teenagers” proposes anger — reasserts it in Oasis’s face — as the artist’s means of achieving the proper moral affect. It’s a rare quality at a time when our culture has lost the capacity to recognize either sensationalism or propaganda. Morrissey’s song connects them as two forms of agitprop, finding both in the self-righteousness and self-pity of an already brainwashed sing-along.
Enduring the exile of cancellation (in Vegas, singing against a backdrop collage of the French vocalist Sacha Distel) pushes Morrissey to reject cultural habit, just as Van Morrison does in his wonderfully inciting anti-lockdown songs — that’s true pop rebellion. The Who’s old-time rebellion in “Won’t Be Fooled Again” fits the retrograde nostalgia of Top Gun: Maverick, but Morrissey realizes that today’s culture is self-immolating through lies and the West’s cultural appeasement. “Bonfire of Teenagers” defies the conformity that’s well under way. Such is the treachery of pop-industry sanctimony. When some brave, enterprising record label finally releases the Bonfire of Teenagers album, the TikTok generation should heed its warning.
