IS IT REALLY SO STRANGE?
video, color, 80 minutes, 2004
DESCRIPTION
Making the connection between The Smiths’ working-class, Manchester-raised, ethnic Irish experience and that of the sons and daughters of Latino immigrants in Southern California, Is It Really So Strange? is the first documentary that allows the fans themselves to speak at length about their lives, their loves and their brief encounters with their idol.
REVIEWS
The following articles are about the exhibition of photographs called Is It Really So Strange? Reviews of the movie are at williamejones.com.
Michael Ned Holte, “William Jones,” artforum.com, March 2, 2004.
In an ongoing series of richly printed black-and-white photographs, William Jones explores a self-organized “movement” of mostly Latino Southern California kids enthralled by Morrissey and the Smiths. More than a mere fashion appropriation, the parallels between '80s Manchester and postmillennial SoCal suggest a complex cultural transposition that is not entirely linear: The words “VIVA” and “HATE” tattooed across one kid’s knuckles refer to his own Latin roots as much as to the Smiths song “Viva Hate.” Seemingly casual, the photos reveal acute observation. In Handsome Devils, 2003, three young men with pompadours guard their fragile machismo; one keeps a sly, wary eye on the photographer. “Unhappy Birthday,” Hollywood, 2003, captures a crowd unified in unguarded excitement, but one individual catches Jones in the act, training his own camera on the photographer. As in the best documentary work, the unseen photographer becomes a curious presence: Shadowing Smiths tribute band the Sweet and Tender Hooligans, Jones acts as the invisible center of a loosely knit group of subjects, moving from objective distance as an observer to empathic proximity as a friend. In Chris S in Los Angeles, 2003, the most affecting of these images, Chris sits on his bed, wearing a Morrissey T-shirt and surrounded by posters of the singer and of James Dean (who inspired the Manchester kids twenty years ago). He clutches a pillow, staring openly into the camera, letting Jones inside the invisible center of his world.
Ron Athey, “Considerable People: William Jones, Charming Man,” L. A. Weekly, November 28-December 4, 2003, p. 13.
Call it “Moz Angeles.” SoCal has more Morrissey devotees per square foot than any place on Earth. And the vast majority are Latino. For the last two years, filmmaker William Jones has been documenting, through black-and-white photography, this subculture within a subculture. Jones, himself a fan of the Smiths when they were still together, became interested in the Latino aspect of Mozmania through his boyfriend: “When I asked him, ‘What did you do after you graduated from high school?’ His answer was, ‘I laid in bed for a year and listened to the Smiths.’” This display of devotion re-ignited Jones’ passion for the Smiths, and eventually led him to the annual Morrissey conventions in L.A. as well as the now-defunct club London Is Dead, which played all Morrissey all the time.
He started taking photos of clubgoers. “A Moz-impersonator drag king encouraged me to get a pompadour, and I did, and found out people were much more willing to be photographed.” Jones, who’s also conducting video interviews for an eventual film, finds that he gets a different answer from every person he asks: Why is Morrissey such an icon to Latinos? Theories range from relating to the Irish immigrant to the fetishization of working-class culture to the sexually ambiguous persona to traditional machismo. He feels that KROQ has more than a little to do with it, having been the only mass-market radio station to play the Smiths then and now.
Over the past year, Jones has concentrated more on taking portraits of people in their rooms with their Moz shrines as well as of the tribute tattoos that take the Morrissey phenomenon to a whole new level. (Jones has a solo show, “Is It Really So Strange?,” coming up in February at Golinko Kordansky Gallery; his progress on film and photo projects can be tracked on www.shiftlessbody.com.) “There’s a couple who have a child that was born on Morrissey’s birthday. They had Morrissey sign their wrists and went to a tattoo parlor and had them filled in. And there was the winner of the tattoo contest at the last Morrissey/Smiths convention. He won with a picture of Candy Darling, from one of the Smiths’ singles, sort of impressionistically rendered on his forearm. You see, it’s a little more complicated than people might give them credit for.”
STATEMENT
Stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before.
In November of 2001, I saw an ad for a club in Los Angeles called London Is Dead, which exclusively played Morrissey and Smiths music, and I thought to myself, I’ve got to see this. It was a surprise for a lot of reasons. At the event, I was surrounded by people in their twenties, dancing and singing along to music I had loved long ago. The atmosphere was quite joyous, and belied the popular perception of Morrissey as a poet of doom and gloom. Another surprise was that most of the crowd was Latino. It was also interesting that whole scene had developed around the work of an artist who hadn’t released a new record in several years. I was happy that my original opinion of this music was being confirmed, and more importantly, I felt that I had something in common with a group of young people to whom I would not normally be expected to have a connection. I decided that night to document the scene.
I began taking pictures at the Smiths and Morrissey Convention held at the Hollywood Palace, and then at other tribute events, and at the concerts of Sweet and Tender Hooligans, the Los Angeles Smiths and Morrissey tribute band. As I got to know people in the scene, I would ask them if I could take portraits. I thought it would be a good idea to conduct interviews with the people who were willing to talk to me. I also enlisted the help of friends and acquaintances outside the scene. Most of the people I interviewed approached the process with ambivalence, a combination of shyness and exhibitionism. This seems curiously appropriate for fans of an entertainer who transforms his solitude and social discomfort into spectacle.
One of my college friends introduced me to The Smiths at the end of March 1984. At the time, I wasn’t aware that this was the last record that would, as the saying goes, change my life. There is a limited window of time when this sort of thing can happen to a person. For me, it was roughly the period from 1974 to 1984, not a bad time to be coming of age, considering the deplorable state of pop music in subsequent years. I suppose this opinion is hard to defend, but there lies the problem of making any claims at all about pop music. Often, people who love it are searching for themselves, or more likely, an ideal version of themselves, in what they hear.
In my youth, I had a habit of buying records for their covers. Before the internet made a wide variety of music available even to kids in the provinces, there were few alternatives. The cover artwork was often a reasonable way to gauge the merits of a record that got no radio airplay, that is to say, a record that might actually be worth buying.
I had noticed the first single by The Smiths, “Hand in Glove,” in a record store near where I lived, but I was afraid to buy it. The cover featured a picture by Jim French of an anonymous model. The sentiments of the photographer seemed fairly unambiguous.
From the beginning of the project, I found befriending people in the scene a bit of a challenge. Many were reluctant to talk to me, since I was a member of an older generation. I wondered how the process could become easier, and how I could fit in at these events. I tried wearing a pompadour, and I was very pleasantly surprised. Not only was it much easier to take pictures of people who had the same style as I had, but potential subjects started asking me if they could take my picture, and as far as I was concerned, that was just fine. It was great fun, though some of my friends referred to it as my midlife crisis expressed in a hairstyle.
When Morrissey asked the crowd at one of his shows at the Wiltern Theater, “How are things in San Bernardino?” he was doing more than making idle chatter. He was acknowledging the geography of his grassroots audience. During the hiatus of Morrissey’s career, the region where his fame was the greatest stretched from East Los Angeles, Boyle Heights, and Highland Park in the west to San Bernardino and Riverside in the east. This corridor along the 10 and 60 Freeways is eastern edge of the Los Angeles metropolis: formerly irrigated agricultural land, then a center of heavy industry, now old and new suburbs.
Unlike the West Side or the Hollywood Hills, this region is rarely chosen to represent Southern California in movies or television programs, perhaps because it offers a better sense of what it is actually like to live in the region. There is a lot of pollution, terrible traffic, but real estate is more affordable the farther east one travels, and development has not quite obliterated all the buildings of historic interest. Most of the population is Latino, and several cities have Asian majorities. The outlying area of the region is called the Inland Empire, but its boundaries are vague and there is no emperor. Audiences all over the world see an image of Southern California in Beverly Hills 90210 or The O. C., but the true hotbed of youth culture is more likely to be Pomona 91766 or The I. E.
The Smiths’ first album suggests the world of a working class youth with a taste for revenge. He assumes poses that will be useful when fame and fortune beckon. He tries to avoid being beaten up or ground down. He wants to relive the old school days, this time with a sense of mastery. He relies on the favors of older men and ultimately resents the situation, or perhaps he only fantasizes about it. He falls into the abyss of unrequited passion. A sense of menace pervades the scene, but the action remains unconsummated.
Throughout his career, Morrissey has written succinct word portraits of types resurrected from the “kitchen sink” realist films produced in his childhood. In England, he mourned the disintegration of traditional working class culture, but when he moved to Los Angeles, he discovered aspects of this culture reinvented in a new landscape. The persona narrating his songs was originally that of a working class youth ambivalent about being admired by his betters, and it gradually became that of the older, successful man doing the admiring. This transition, partly artistic, partly geographic, and accomplished over nearly two decades, is extremely interesting in itself, but I would still maintain that Morrissey’s first, most urgent utterances were his greatest.
In my initial flush of adoration for The Smiths, I imagined an army of fans making their presence felt in a hostile world. Effeminate, bookish, incapable of sustaining gainful employment or of starting families of their own, they were disappointments to their fathers. But what made them failures in a conventional way of life made them splendidly successful in another realm of endeavor. They were modern dandies. They rarely banded together, but one can sometimes catch a glimpse of them in old concert footage.
A whole new generation of dandies has appeared to worship Morrissey, though the scene and its forms of expression have drastically changed. One thing remains constant: the people I met and befriended do what they do not because someone told them to buy a record or to go to a concert, but out of love and spontaneous enthusiasm. The events I attended were not planned or staged by publicists. They were organized by the fans themselves. They were expressions of popular culture in the truest and most admirable sense. It’s important to remember that the early Smiths records were released by an independent label with very little money for promotion. The band’s success was a surprising departure from business as usual, and a story unlikely to be repeated in a music industry dominated by a small handful of corporations.
While I was documenting the fan scene, Morrissey made a comeback – or should I say a return? – and an apparatus of publicity made it possible for him to reach a wide audience. He appeared on television and radio, and in countless magazines. He was described by the meaningless hyperbole and impoverished adjectives that are the stock in trade of mass culture. He was once again a celebrity. There was excitement about this development, but also the sense of an ending. The scene that was faithful to Morrissey during his period of relative obscurity continued to exist, but it just wasn’t the same. I loved the homemade quality of the events and the complete conviction of the people who attended them. An era has passed, but I can say I was there while it lasted, and I recorded some of what I saw.