X's Comeback and Morrissey's Fall
When do we let musicians off the hook for thinking bad thoughts
Alphabetland arrived with a thunder crack last month, an unexpected transmission from a band long presumed dormant. The original lineup of X reunited a while ago but it was one of those hazy affairs, pegged to forgotten festival appearances that nevertheless did provide the catalyst for a permanent revival of the L.A. punk band. As the years passed, the prospect of a new album hung in the air but guitarist Billy Zoom shot down the possibility in a 2017 feature for Rolling Stone claiming "the chemistry wouldn't be right...it wouldn't sound like an X record."
It turns out Alphabetland sounds exactly like an X record—one of the early, speedy ones, clocking in at under a half-hour, just like Los Angeles. All of this is intentional, of course. X went so far as to resurrect two early songs, offering an officially finished version of "Delta 88 Nightmare" (previously aired as a demo on a 2001 reissue of Los Angeles) and plucking "Cyrano De Berger's Back" from the Flesh Eaters' 1981 LP A Minute To Pray, A Second To Die (it was the only song John Doe wrote for Minute; X later recorded it on 1987's See How We Are). The explicit nods to the past function as route markers for the rest of Alphabetland, showing how X has retained its spirit. "Cyrano De Berger's Back" itself functions as a capsulation of their evolution, swinging nimbly on its verse and graced by Zoom's saxophone, elements that make this version feel more like X than its heavy-footed 1987 variation. Velocity is at a premium on Alphabetland but the quickness isn't reckless, it's purposeful. It's performed with the control of a band who wears its forty years well: they're comfortable with their chemistry so they deepen their signatures—revved-up rockabilly and the ragged tag-team vocals from John Doe and Exene Cervenka—instead of exploring new territory. It's the kind of acceptance that comes with age but X doesn't sound settled, they seem invigorated, as if they're gleeful to have the chance to match Los Angeles and Wild Gift, knowing full well they won't clear that bar. The wild thing about Alphabetland is that they come within spitting distance because it never sounds as if X is chasing their past. They're the same band they've always been, only bearing scars and wisdom.
The first shock of Alphabetland was that a new album existed, the second was that it was good. Once the shock wore off, a lingering question surfaced: does the strength of the music either erase or excuse the conspiratorial personal politics of Exene Cervenka? During the first half of the 2010s, she littered social media with Sandy Hook and 9/11 trutherism along with other proto-QAnon rants. All this is just far enough in the past to not be fresh but to not be forgotten, either. Concerns about Cervenka's paranoia crept into my Facebook feed, with some of my online friends wondering whether the lyrical content of Alphabetland reflected Cervenka's fringe beliefs.
To the best of my perception, none of Cervenka's lyrics on Alphabetland indulge any kind of conspiracy, although they certainly reflect her worldview; the closing beat poem "All The Time In The World" with its notion that "history is just one lost language after another" flirts with the fringe without letting nuttier ideas flower. This makes the record quite different from Morrissey's recent I Am Not A Dog On A Chain, an album which teems with the right-wing grievances the former Smiths singer regularly airs in print and on stage. As is his wont, Morrissey continues to play coy with his politics, brandishing a badge emblazoned with the logo for the far-right organization For Britain but denying he's a racist. Compare that to X's Billy Zoom, who explicitly identifies as a conservative but pointedly refuses to discuss his beliefs in detail in interviews. Zoom's politics are a known quantity in X but as he's the band's lead guitarist they don't shape the lyrical content of their songs.
Morrissey may not be an ideal yardstick by which to compare X since they hail from opposite sides of the Atlantic and embrace musical aesthetics that distinctly embody the sound and value of their homeland. That said, I'm finding I Am Not A Dog On A Chain and Alphabetland stir similar thoughts and emotions within myself, making me ponder the distance that's been traveled culturally since the 1980s. Forty years ago, The Smiths and X belonged to the punk-inspired underground that seemed to exist in opposition to the heavily-lacquered mainstream. Each group picked up a string or two dangling from the past. X revived rockabilly and didn't run from the seedy Los Angeles underground documented by The Doors, going so far as to hire Ray Manzarek to produce their first four albums. The Smiths eschewed the synths that dominated British music in the early 1980s, rejecting the futuristic dance-rock of fellow Mancunians New Order in favor of resuscitating the big jangle of mid-1960s guitar-pop. Unlike, say, the Stray Cats, neither band were straight revivalists. Zoom's greaser licks were revved up with the vigor of West Coast hardcore, Morrissey's keening caterwaul couldn't have happened without punk. Looking back, though, it's hard not to notice the musically conservative strain of both bands, how they forged their own identity by foraging through the past.
It doesn't take much for a conservative streak to calcify. A bracing blast from the past can quickly seem stuffy (look again to Brian Setzer), but X and The Smiths avoided this pitfall because they embraced their own complexities and contradictions. To an extent, this is because they were bands driven by a pair of complementary personalities who thrived because of their creative sparring matches. X revolves around the axis of John Doe and Exene Cervenka's relationship, where Morrissey dueled with Johnny Marr but the singer also found worthy substitutes for the guitarist following their 1987 split. Enlisting the excellent guitarist Alain Whyte as his lieutenant, Morrissey continued to widen his net during the 1990s, cranking amplifiers on the furious Your Arsenal and turning wistful on Vauxhall & I. Whyte departed in 2009, replaced by Jesse Tobias, a former Red Hot Chili Pepper who didn't push Moz so much as match his mood. Morrissey has been in the doldrums for a while but the striking thing about I Am Not A Dog is how Morrissey seems reinvigorated creatively, reconnecting with the neo-prog subtext of Southpaw Grammar as he finds different avenues to familiar conclusions.
When I listen to I Am Not A Dog On A Chain, I can be momentarily sucked into its current, happy that Morrissey doesn't sound as listless as he did wandering through the 2010s, but its pleasures are undercut by how the music's meaning mirrors the cultural gripes the singer airs in public. Once a lyricist of extraordinary empathy, Morrissey has let his compassion curdle to the point that he's encouraging suicidal souls to just kill themselves at Jim Jim Falls. It's a nasty note to begin an album and it reverberates through the record, turning the superficially heartfelt "Love Is On Its Way Out" and "Bobby, Don't You Think You Know" in hectoring little numbers. The hardness of spirit proves to be a compelling counterpoint to the liveliness of the music, amounting to the debut of a new variation of Morrissey's persona. He's made his heel turn and now is making better music to spite the former fans who have flown the coop. That sourness is distinctive and effective, elevating I Am Not A Dog On A Chain above the pedestrian LPs Morrissey has made in the past decade but I find the album depressing in a way few recent records have been. I Am Not A Dog confirms all the worries about Morrisey as both an artist and as a public figure, proving that he's as blinkered and callous as his too clever flirtations with the right wing suggest.
That's not the case with Alphabetland at all. Maybe Cervenka hasn't shown public contrition for her outlandish political beliefs but they didn't color her contributions to the album. Much of this is certainly due to the fact that X is a band, not a solo act, so the dynamics are different. A few years back, John Doe told Rolling Stone in a slightly different context that "families are complicated" and those difficulties are very much part of the reason why Alphabetland feels alive, unencumbered by the past or personal politics. It's not even that John Doe's songs counterbalance Exene Cervenka's tunes, it's how that pair meshes with Billy Zoom and DJ Bonebrake, the group's inherent chemistry making even darker moments sound joyous. For me, it's the powerful presence of X's combined identity that makes me comfortable with recommending X's comeback even if I certainly can not condone Cervenka's predilection for conspiracies. After all, Alphabetland doesn't belong to her alone. It's the work of her entire, messy family.