Morrissey
I Am Not A Dog On A Chain
BMG
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[0 Stars out of 5]

“I see no point in being nice,” Morrissey sneers on the title track of I Am Not A Dog On A Chain.

Funny thing, Moz, neither do I.

He’s right about one thing, though. He is not a dog on a chain. It’s too much of a coincidence that he covered Bob Dylan’s “Only a Pawn in Their Game” on 2019’s California Son, where he elegantly warbled the line “And he's taught how to walk in a pack / Shoot in the back / With his fist in a clinch / To hang and to lynch / To hide 'neath the hood / To kill with no pain / Like a dog on a chain” and, one year later, he’s using the line as an album title.

He’s not a dog on a chain because he is instead the cop holding the chain, whipping the dog and forcing it to fight, another wealthy white man with a perception of power and a platform, ever-shrinking as it is, telling the eleven fans he still has that everyone else is the problem, that they are the persecuted ones, that he’s just telling the truth and that they, not him, need to throw themselves into the ring to be torn apart and slaughtered for their honor.

Now shunned by the very fans who once savored his every word, Morrissey is going out of his way to be as much of the Morrissey we hate as possible, like a drunk man in a bar insisting that you’ll see, one day you’ll all see. The album is the jukebox musical of an ugly teenage boy on Twitter typing TRIGGERED??? to no one, while other kids are in after-school clubs or playing sports or going on dates. “If you’re going to kill yourself, then for God’s sake, kill yourself,” he sings over an included-with-every-Casio pulse on “Jim Jim Falls.” He’s not “politically correct,” he’s not going to “let people tell him what to do.” He’s Morrissey. The man who once sang “And you go home and you cry and you want to die” is a tough guy.

More than that, though, Morrissey is the victim. A song like “Knockabout World” would have been gorgeous ten years ago, a lush and tender ballad about standing tall in the face of adversity. But the only adversity Morrissey is facing in this, the year of our Lord 2020, is that it’s not acceptable to be an Islamaphobic, misogynistic piece of shit. “They try to turn you into a public target” sings the man who made the conscientious decision to wear a For Britain badge on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, obliterating any hope he ever had of a comeback.

Leaning heavily into those generic electronic beats like every old man who tries to be cool, Morrissey sounds exhausted. It’s hard to be Morrissey, I imagine, the ever-heavy stress of knowing that your best days are further behind you than death’s approach is ahead, the constant mental overload of hatred rotting what’s left of a once-intellectual brain.

But no one asked him for another album; he could have retired on California Son and left with some good will; the album was more brilliant than it had any right to be. So why drag yourself through the half-hearted slog of “Love Is On Its Way Out,” grunting and sighing about how rich people murder elephants for sport, not even putting in enough effort to come up with a second verse? What is so vital to say in “Bobby, Don’t You Think They Know?” that we haven’t heard in “These Things Take Time” or “Hand in Glove?”

(Interestingly enough, “Bobby” features backing vocals from R&B singer Thelma Houston, quite a generous get for a man who, in 1986, said “…to get on Top Of The Pops these days, one has to be, by law, black,” and admitted he believed that there was a conspiracy by black artists to keep white performers off the charts.)

Ultimately, the album reminds us that Morrissey needs us more than we need him. “Darling, you will cry out for me in the years to come,” he assures us in “Darling, I Hug a Pillow.” Except…we won’t. We all have our copies of The Queen Is Dead and Bona Drag and even Years Of Refusal, for the few songs that it is worth. Songs like “Darling” and “Once I Saw a River Clean”—which contains a strobe-effect keyboard fill that is the musical equivalent of toxic waste—sound more like a parody of Morrissey than an actual song penned by Steven Patrick Morrissey, the very same man who wrote “First of the Gang To Die” and “Our Frank” and “Suedehead.”

The album’s only bright spot—if you can even call it that—is the sunny, David Byrne-esque melody that underscores “What Kind Of People Live In These Houses.” Of course, Morrissey sours it by simply being Morrissey, scorning them with “They look at television, thinking it’s their window to the world.”

But just as Morrissey wonders what kind of people live in these houses, I wonder what kind of people this album appeals to. Morrissey is and always has been a bit of a niche meal—you either think he’s a genius or a sad sack, so any chance of broad commercial appeal is already out by nature of the name on the cover. Most Morrissey fans, myself included, have heard it all already, and this album—unlike California Son—gives us nothing new to work with, furthering our self-imposed exile. The album lacks a hook or a valid single to impress newcomers, and at best, serves only as an audition to take over as host of any given incel’s YouTube channel.

But perhaps Morrissey’s biggest failure with I Am Not A Dog On A Chain is that it actually unites us where it is intended to divide. Without even a cheeky cover song to save its reputation—as “Back On The Chain Gang” was the sole saving grace of Low In High School, albeit only included on the subsequent deluxe edition—the album is so wholly unappealing, so musically migraine-inducing that finally, finally, we holdout Smiths fans and Smiths haters can clasp hands and declare, once and for all, that Morrissey sucks.

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