Sometimes two contradictory things are true: The Smiths made excellent music and are generally excellent. Morrissey, their vocalist and principal songwriter, is a generally miserable, rather intolerant human whose every lyric was plagiarized from that notebook you kept in 8th grade but swore to never show to anyone. See?
A second example: The Simpsons is one of the greatest, most cutting edge television shows of all time. The Simpsons also hasn’t had its finger on the cultural pulse for about 20 years now.
These two sets of facts collided in spectacular fashion this past weekend as The Simpsons, after enlisting no less a talent than Benedict Cumberbatch, made the baffling decision to base an episode around a Morrissey parody in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty-one.
The episode, “Panic on the Streets of Springfield,” features Cumberbatch as Quilloughby, lead vocalist of sad-boi alt-rockers The Snuffs, the group behind the in-universe hit “Everyone is Horrid Except Me (And Possibly You).”
And while most reacted with detached bemusement, one person took significant umbrage with the Quilloughby character: Morrissey himself, who took to Facebook to blast The Simpsons for being irrelevant in perhaps the greatest “pot-kettle” dispute of the last century or more. Specifically, he objected to the show’s depiction of him as a bitter, aging, meat-eating racist. And it is sort of understandable why he would be so upset, as Morrissey, to my knowledge, does not eat meat.
It’s hard to look at this dispute as anything other than sad and confusing. The Simpsons, particularly in recent years, has developed a reputation for being a bit behind the times. Part of this owes to the sheer amount of time involved in putting together an episode of the show, which can take upwards of a whole year. Unless, however, this episode has been in production since 1991, it is by all possible metrics, an incomprehensible choice.*
Morrissey, for his part, claims that the show cannot point to a single instance to justify its assertion that he is a racist, as if he did not once write, record, and release a song called “Bengali in Platforms” with lyrics like “shelve your western plans and understand that life is hard enough when you belong here” and as if googling “Morrissey racist” does not return 681,000 results. He went on to recommend other shows that “still do a great job at finding ways to inspire great satire” rather than “trying to capitalize on cheap controversy and expounding on vicious rumors” like… Saturday Night Live.
*Author’s note: from my research, I can confirm that the episode was not in production in 1991.
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Thanks for yelling at us!