The Alternative Number Ones: Morrissey’s “The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for members only. Thank you to everyone who's helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

Well, look who's still around. The Billboard Modern Rock chart launched in 1988, not long after the Smiths broke up and Morrissey went solo. Solo Morrissey was one of the defining acts of the chart's early years, even though he didn't score a #1 hit until "Tomorrow" in 1992. In those early years, Morrissey might as well have been the personification of alt-rock radio -- the arch British singer who writes proudly insular laments about his alienation from the world. If you were a singer like that, you probably did pretty well on alt-rock radio once upon a time.

Right around the time that "Tomorrow" reached #1, the chart went through a sea change, replacing arch British singers with the American fuzz-guitar acts who had a different approach to their alienation from the world. But in spring 1994, the high grunge era, Morrissey still reigned supreme over the Modern Rock chart. Morrissey's "The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get" was the biggest song on American alt-rock radio on the day that Kurt Cobain's body was discovered. It was #1 when Pearl Jam sued Ticketmaster. It was #1 when Parklife and Smash and the Blue Album came out. In this most '90s of '90s moments, Morrissey was still doing the misanthropy pantomime routine, and American alt-rock radio programmers were still on board. I think that goes to show a couple of different things. One is that history changes more gradually than we remember. Alt-rock radio didn't fully shift overnight; it's just got a twisty continuum. It also goes to show that Morrissey came out with the right song at the right time. He needed a hit, and he got one.

The world changed after Morrissey released Your Arsenal, the 1992 album that included "Tomorrow." Morrissey recorded that one with the legendary David Bowie guitarist Mick Ronson on production, and Ronson died soon after his work on the LP was complete. Grunge obviously came in around the same time that Your Arsenal arrived, and something just as dramatic took shape in Morrissey's native UK. That's when the local media went into feeding-frenzy overdrive for a wave of saucy young bands -- the genesis of the Britpop Era, which is just as mythic over there as the Grunge Era is here. The big Britpop bands Suede and Blur and Oasis all revered the Smiths, but that alone wasn't going to keep Morrissey relevant.

Not that Morrissey was ever particularly concerned with staying relevant. With Your Arsenal, he got into singing about working-class tough-guy life, which probably served to put him at an even more incoherent place in UK class culture. (I can't pretend to know how all that works over there.) Morrissey's 1994 LP Vauxhall & I is apparently named after a London neighborhood with a lot of gay clubs and maybe also after the movie Withnail & I. Morrissey recorded the album with producer Steve Lillywhite, who did U2's early records and who's already been in this column for producing Talking Heads. Morrissey wrote the whole album with the two guitarists, Boz Boorer and Alain Whyte, who'd been his main collaborators on Your Arsenal. Boorer co-wrote half the songs on the album, and Whyte did the other half. "The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get" is one of the Boorer joints.

"The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get" probably isn't the best illustration of the Morrissey thing, but it's a pretty classic example. Musically, the track is rich and playful and propulsive. There's a big, quasi-romantic garage-rock guitar riff and some strummy-jangly acoustic action, and Morrissey sings everything in that wounded lounge-singer baritone that only he has. He sings for you to let him in -- the quintessential wilting wallflower who just needs your love and attention. But the lyrics aren't romantic at all. It's an intentionally creepy stalker-screed, a guy telling you that you have no choice but to pay attention to him so you might as well just get used to the idea. The irony is so bald and obvious that it probably doesn't even qualify as irony.

Morrissey sure makes a meal of that irony, though. On "The More You Ignore Me," Morrissey steers right into the inherent bitchiness of his tone. He lets nearly every word end in an exasperated sigh, and he reaches for jazz-hands drama with almost every note. The song has a more defined hook than many of Morrissey's solo songs. He repeats the title again and again, as an invocation, and he delights in the way he can turn devotion into a threat: "When you sleep, I will creep into your thoughts like a bad debt that you can't pay/ Awwww, take the easy way and give in!" This isn't exactly the most sophisticated writing, but when Morrissey throws himself into performing a fucked-up mentality, he doesn't need to be subtle.

I think a song like "The More You Ignore Me" is a big part of the reason that Morrissey can still tour some pretty big venues even after what feels like a decades-long campaign to alienate most of his most ardent fans. On songs like "The More You Ignore Me," you're not supposed to sympathize with Morrissey's narrator. For plenty of people, the man himself can get away with being a self-obsessed, deluded, preening narcissist in public because he's sung from the perspective of so many self-obsessed, deluded, preening narcissists. He hasn't spent his whole life pretending to be a great person, and the pettiness that motivates many of his strange statements is also what helps drive a song like "The More You Ignore Me." I think Morrissey is able to play the role of an ice-blooded stalker so well because the man's lyrics and his public profile seem pretty consistent with one another. He's always played sketchy characters, so he can morph into a sketchy character himself without losing as much of his audience as you might expect.

I'm not saying "The More You Ignore Me" is a good song because Morrissey seems like he might really stalk someone. That's not what we're doing here. But the imperious self-regard of the whole Morrissey character -- and god knows where the character ends and the real guy begins -- finds a great vehicle in "The More You Ignore Me." Morrissey is really, really good at faux-sincerely crooning about making himself a central part of your mind's landscape whether you care or do not. The cascading prettiness of the song's guitar-jangle and the glam-rock strut of its central riff both clash sharply with this small little guy telling you that you can't get away from him. Beware, he holds more grudges than lonely high court judges, and he thinks he has some power over you. That's a scary character, and it's one that Morrissey knows how to embody.

Morrissey doesn't go out of his way to sing "The More You Ignore Me" as a scary character. Instead, he just sings it as Morrissey, and that's scary enough. "The More You Ignore Me" has a chorus that's fun to sing while spinning around with your arms out. The verbose title falls into an easy rhythm, to the point where I can't see the title typed out without getting the chorus stuck in my head. Morrissey and his collaborators surround that central melody with simple, guitar-focused ear candy. As a result, "The More You Ignore Me" works as something resembling a pop song without even trying to disguise the darkness of its lyrics. That contrast doesn't always work, but it snaps into focus here.

Nothing else on Vauxhall & I is anywhere near as immediately resonant as "The More You Ignore Me," but nothing really needed to be. In the UK, "The More You Ignore Me" reached #8 on the pop charts, which makes it Morrissey's biggest hit of the '90s. It also means that there's video of Morrissey lip-syncing "The More You Ignore Me" on Top Of The Pops. In the US, "The More You Ignore Me" became the only Morrissey song ever to cross over to the Hot 100. (It peaked at #46.) None of the other songs from Vauxhall & I landed in the same way. Morrissey's follow-up single "Hold On To Your Friends" only reached #48 in the UK and didn't make the Modern Rock chart at all. Good song, though.

Actually, "The More You Ignore Me" came very close to being Morrissey's last hit on the Modern Rock chart. American radio just moved on. "The More You Ignore Me" isn't Morrissey's best song, but it was strong and catchy and fucked-up enough to connect to that changing audience. Still, things were shifting, and that shift took those stations far away from Morrissey. A couple of non-album tracks that Morrissey released as singles in 1994 and 1995, like the sweeping Siouxsie Sioux duet "Interlude" and the twinkling story-song "Boxers," were top-40 UK hits that just never got any traction over here.

Even in the UK, Morrissey's chart fortunes decreased in the latter half of the '90s. The former Smiths bassist Mike Joyce sued him for a bigger share of royalties and won, and Morrissey responded by acting so wronged that he got into a brief public feud with one of those lonely high-court judges. He moved to Los Angeles, switched record labels a few times, and scored a real comeback when he returned with 2004's You Are The Quarry, his first album in seven years. The UK went nuts for that record, sending four singles into the top 10. America didn't lose its shit in the same way, but lead single "Irish Blood, English Heart" did reach #36 on the Modern Rock chart. That's Morrissey's last hit in this particular radio format, and it came a decade after "The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get." That would mark an impressive career span if it didn't lead quite so directly us to present-day Morrissey.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=KKoS5X4SMrY

The grand Morrissey comeback lasted for a few years. He made more albums, and they continued to do pretty well, especially in the UK. He played bigger venues, and he wielded enough clout to say that, for instance, the McDonald's franchises at the Staples Center were not allowed to sell meat on the night that he headlined the venue. For his entire career, Morrissey has been plenty vocal on two big issues, his support of animal rights and his loathing of the British monarchy. Even when he took those beliefs to extremes, nobody got too upset, since that was just Morrissey being Morrissey. In the late '10s, however, Morrissey started saying more and more reactionary things about, say, multiculturalism, or Brexit. In 2019, Morrissey played on The Tonight Show and wore a pin supporting UKIP, a far-right British party that's now defunct. Morrissey has long denied that he's right-wing in any way, and he recently launched a legal case claiming that he's the victim on a coordinated campaign to make him look like a reactionary extremist. At a certain point, though, people just get sick of making excuses for you.

Thanks to burned record-label bridges, Morrissey apparently now has two unreleased albums, including one that he recorded with aging-rocker-comeback engineer Andrew Watt. Morrissey says that he can't release either of those albums because free speech is illegal now. I don't like the idea of any art sitting on a shelf somewhere because someone pissed of a label exec, so I hope those albums eventually do come out. But it's hard to feel too bad for Morrissey. He's not making hits anymore, but he still gets plenty of attention. Whenever this website posts about whatever weird bullshit Morrissey just said, the post usually does numbers. He's a part of our mind's landscape, whether we care or do not. Maybe he can't get any closer if we just refuse to ignore him.

GRADE: 8/10

BONUS BEATS: Here's the soft acoustic version of "The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get" that Sharon Van Etten did for a 2011 Morrissey tribute album:

THE NUMBER TWOS: Enigma's "Return To Innocence," a purely moody chillout-tent jam built from the "When The Levee Breaks" drum break and an uncleared recording of a Tibetan folk song, peaked at #2 behind "The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get." Uyyyyy yiiiii haiiiii it's an 8.