No one seems to know what to make of Morrissey.

A quarter of a century after proclaiming the death of the English monarchy in The Queen Is Dead, the seminal album of his old band The Smiths, recently Morrissey was dreaming of the time when the English were sick to death of Labor and the Tories and spit upon the name of Oliver Cromwell (In a song titled “Irish Blood, English Heart”).

In spite of his progressive political stance, Morrissey has dabbled so many times in political incorrectness. He has been accused of promoting racism in his songs “Bengali in Platform”, “Asian Rut” and “National Front Disco”. And performing with the Union Jack draped around his shoulders surely does not live up to the reputation of someone who once wanted to bring Margaret Thatcher to the guillotine.

Morrissey flirts with gangster imagery — the cover of his eighth solo album You Are the Quarry shows him toting an Al Capone-era Sten gun — at a time when it is no longer politically correct to do so.

For someone who despises America so much — he had one song pleading with America to stop preaching democracy until it had voted for a black, female or gay for president — Morrissey lived in Southern California for years before moving to Italy.

The biggest enigma among Morrissey’s fans is of course his sexuality. No one is very sure who is the particular “you” he addresses in songs like “Let Me Kiss You”, “I Like You” or “All You Need Is Me”. For years, Morrissey has been sexually ambiguous and his promotion of celibacy only brings more speculation about his homosexuality.

www.itsmorrisseyworld.com

Now, more than twenty years after his prime with The Smiths, Stephen Patrick Morrissey remains the same vitriol-driven rock singer who still channels the angst and rage of the 1980s generation. The jury is also still out on his sexual orientation, if the homosexuality allegation matters at all in the first place.

But if Morrissey’s music with The Smiths was better suited to accompany old fans’ slightly seedy, loitering, lost twenties, music from his solo career — especially since You Are the Quarry in 2005 — is the soundtrack to forties’ reductive quests for money, career or that gross attention called respect.

In “I Know It’s Over”, that brooding song from The Queen Is Dead, Morrissey compared the feeling of being unloved with being buried alive in a shallow grave. In “It’s Not Your Birthday Anymore”, one of the standout tracks from his latest album Years of Refusal, Morrissey, decides to take vengeance: It’s not your birthday anymore/there’s no need to be kind to you/and the will to see you smile and belong has now gone.

In “I’m OK By Myself” off Years of Refusal, the perpetual misanthropic Morrissey declares that he does not need any salvation by others: I don’t need you/or your morality to save me/or your benevolence to make sense.

At 50, Morrissey, the son of a hospital porter and a librarian, should at least rein in his self-loathing and, like other elderly rock stars, he should have indulged in the corniest of feelings like contentment or uplift (Imagine Bono).

On the contrary, Morrissey decided he must tune up the amp and declared that should he wither away, he was making sure that he would go in style, and with a bang. You Are the Quarry has a number of songs that recalls Morrissey’s stint with The Smiths, chiming guitars, forlorn melodies and brooding lyrics, but some of its better tracks were ones in which Moz rocked the hardest. “The First of The Gang To Die”, with a driving lead guitar and a punk-ish rhythm section is one of the best songs Morrissey wrote in the wake of The Smiths’ demise.

Morrissey even needed to hire Jerry Fin, producers of punk newbies; Blink 182, Rancid, Green Day and The Offspring, to update his sound. Fin’s last work prior to his death last year was Morrissey’s Years of Refusal.

And it was this updated sound that Morrissey brought to his Chicago fans when he performed

at the Aragon Ballroom early this month for his multiple-city Tour of Refusal.

Performing in the full-to-capacity Aragon Ballroom and in front of original fans from the 1980s and an equal number of hipster new fans who prefer to buy the vinyl copy of Years of Refusal, Morrissey proved himself to be one of rock’s most original performers. His plaintive croon remains inimitable, his signature stage antics remain the most recognizable and his in-between-song banter remains the wittiest.

“You know I have a new CD coming out called Years of Refusal, you can find it at the last outpost of the music industry such as Borders and uh…what else,” Morrissey told the concertgoers, referring to the struggling book and music retailers.

After four songs, he introduced members of his new bands, two of whom are native Chicagoans guitarist Boz Boorer and bass player Solomon Walker, Morrissey with a sardonic grin, said, “As for me, I have no identity.”

Some of fans came to the show expecting Morrissey to comment on the state of the world. I, for one, expected him to bad-mouth America. But, that night Morrissey steered clear of anything political. Maybe because he has nothing more to say after Barack Obama was elected president last fall.

And there’s the music, one of the most amped-up sounds I have heard in recent memory. The first song on his set list, “This Charming Man” off The Smiths’ eponymous debut album, was barely recognizable in the maelstrom of guitar distortion and a bass-heavy sound.

The only original sound left from “How Soon Is Now”, The Smiths’ biggest hit, was the tremolo-ridden riff that helped cement the reputation of Johnny Marr as one of rock’s greatest guitarists. This song alone is worth the $60 admission fee to the concert.

For a man old enough to be most of his new fans’ grandfather, Morrissey exuded the charm and magnetism that David Cook could only imagine having. The concertgoers went berserk when Moz took off his plain white shirt midway through “Irish Blood, English Heart” and bared his barely sculpted torso. The crowd’s adoration was palpable.

When the show was over, after an encore of “The First of The Gang To Die”, alcohol-fueled fans exited the ballroom humming the falsetto coda: And he stole from the rich and the poor and the not-very-rich and the very poor/And he stole all hearts away, he stole all hearts away.

In the end, after three shirt changes (after the obligatory throwing of one into the crowd after singing “But then you open your eyes and you see someone that you physically despise”), all in the Aragon Ballroom had their heart stolen by Morrissey.

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