(Photo: Gabriel Olsen/Getty Images)

Citing the negative effects of “comic-strip dumbshows,” the “artificially aroused,” and “ephemeral damagers” everywhere, Morrissey has announced that he’s canceling the last six shows of his current U.S. tour. The former Smiths frontman made the announcement via his official fan site, True To You, in an open letter that pinned the blame on the tour’s management company, 360 Management.


Morrissey notes that the tour’s money apparently “evaporated” after health issues with the band’s keyboardist, Gustavo Manzur, forced a few shows to be delayed, at which point “360 Management faded out as quickly as they had faded in.” And while we could pick and choose excerpts and quotes from Morrissey’s damning, florid prose all day, it seems appropriate to let deprived fans get their full dose of Moz by reprinting at least part of the letter in its entirety:

Incontestably, the Morrissey Band is the best in the world. We have been repeatedly done over in recent years by slippery industry incompetents, yet we have always recovered our stride and bounced back like the sea—saving ourselves from those who wish us off the map. We are a disciplined ship and we succeed without any help from the music industry. We continue to live with the optical device of an industry where only scale and enormity of cash is seen as evidence of talent; where the public is thought ready to swallow anything as long as it is done with the punch of five million dollars. The results appear to be continually elaborate comic-strip dumbshows that do not even matter to those directly involved. The true artists must look after themselves whilst the artificially aroused are aided and assisted to the highest ranks without a shred of effort, and the result is…a nest of horrors. And on it goes.


And on it did, with Morrissey also taking the time to praise his fans and apologize to those forced to see him play in “roped-off bits of waterlogged fields.” He ends the letter by noting that his year was “scarred at the end, but drenched in beauty,” before signing off with an enigmatic, “I will see you in extremely far-off places,” emphasis his.

[via Consequence Of Sound]