Happy new year everyone. Today I have begun studying the period between 1870 & 1940 as part of my degree in English Language & Literature. The module I am part way through is entitled ‘Literature in Transition: from 1800 to the present’. The introduction to book 2 (entitled Movements: 1870-1940) of the module examines the contexts around what we think of as Modernist literature and art. As a precursor to some planned content examining Modernist literature over the coming year, I have decided to share my notes as I believe they serve as a useful primer to thoughts about this subject.
Unlike similar terms such as romanticism, Modernism is difficult to define and critics are in disagreement over its origins, significant features, and historical parameters. Key reference points for Modernism are three thinkers:
Karl Marx (1818-1883), whose economic theory of capital predicted the revolutionary overthrow of class hierarchy.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), whose philosophy questioned truth and the moral framework of Christianity.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), who constructed a new model of the human subject through psychoanalysis.
Some of the stylistic aspects of Modernism can be traced back to nineteenth-century avant-garde writers like poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) and critic Walter Pater (1839-1894).
High point of modernism occurred between 1910 and 1930. This was also a period in which European, and especially British, colonialism entered an aggressive ‘imperialist’ phase, initiated by the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885. One effect of this was an awareness and interest in the art and cultures of colonised peoples.
Simultaneously, colonial rule began to be questioned and opposed during this period (ie. Ireland) and this generated politicised art such as Synge’s Playboy of the Western World (1907).
Artists and writers from the colonies also came to the ‘great European cities’, inflecting Modernism with their own unique perspectives.
We should keep in mind an awareness of contemporary art and literature which the term Modernism leaves out, such as Edwardian realism, New Women writers, the First World War poets, and the engaged political fictions of the 1930s.
Energies of Modernism are most evident, perhaps, within the various ‘movements’ which it nurtured:
Forms of Symbolism and Impressionism
Imagism
Vorticism
Cubism
Italian and Russian Futurism
Expressionism
Dadaism
Surrealism
An important ‘movement’ to consider is the Bloomsbury circle of writers associated with Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and E. M. Forster, which did not have a set artistic agenda, but did pioneer innovative stylistic and formal techniques in literature.
A common feature of Modernism is its proponents seeing art and literature as having revolutionary potential. This period is distinctive in fostering radical political movements:
Anarchism and Syndicalism in Europe
Bolshevism in Russia
Fascism in Germany and Italy
Writers like Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis readily adopted roles as political organisers, producing manifestos and seeing their art as a kind of challenge or attack on outmoded values and forms.
Right or Left wing, Modernist writers tended towards an equivocal or elitist stance in relation to the masses, even as they incorporated aspects of popular culture into their work. Alongside their formal experimentation, this elitism and ambivalent relation to the popular accounts for the self-conscious “difficulty” of many Modernist works.
A recurrent feature of Modernist writing is that it seeks to respond to a prevailing sense of crisis and fragmentation.
David Lodge notes that the Modernist novel rejects a linear ordering of narrative and does away with the overarching controlling feature of ‘a reliable, omniscient and intrusive narrator’. Instead we are often presented with a single limited viewpoint, or multiple different points of view, which are often incomplete, fallible or unreliable.
This may be seen as a symptom of Modernist literature’s concern with ‘the question of how to live within a new context of thought, or a new worldview’, but it is also a formal experimental challenge to established novelistic convention and other norms within art and literature.
Modernist writing rebels against conventions (notably forms of nineteenth-century realism) and instead presents life in more subjective, abstract or impressionistic terms.
Modernist novels and poems seem to lack proper beginnings or endings, plunging the reader instead into a running narrative.
In place of a ‘constraining’ narrative structure, alternative devices such as symbol and myth would be used to order otherwise seemingly disjointed poetic or prose forms.
The decentred and fragmented characteristics of Modernist literature reflected contemporary ideas about subjectivity, perspective, and consciousness. Sigmund Freud had shown how the human mind was not the centre of a unified self, but was split and divided into a collection of drives and socially-learnt compulsions, trapped in uneasy existence.
Modernist writers like James Joyce experimented with forms of internal monologue and stream-of-consciousness (Ulysses, 1922). D. H. Lawrence developed a new sense of the primacy of sexuality, undoubtedly facilitated by Freuds ideas (which he was personally critical of).
The broken perspectives of modern art and literature, their shattered forms and odd viewpoints, were grimly appropriate to a generation which had been physically and psychologically shattered by the First World War.
Psychological disorientation however, could also be liberating. Movements like Dadaism and Surrealism used chance objects and contingent juxtapositions to create art which subverted societal and artistic norms, enabling new, creative avenues to the representation of experience.
Scientific advances, such as The Special Theory of Relativity (1905) postulated by Albert Einstein (1879-1955), the influence of philosophers such as Henri Bergson (1859-1941) and the dizzily accelerating machines and vehicles of the modern era meant that time had lost its linear predictability and its conventional progressive form.
In Modernist writing, time could be arrested or reversed, and the psychologism of many Modernist texts meant that forms of subjective time and memory could be exploited for literary effect. Just as how narratives could be reframed via the narrow subjective frame of a single consciousness, the manipulation of time (as the medium within which character development usually takes place) could also change characterisation.
For some writers, the new conceptual flexibility of time had further, far-reaching implications for the apprehension of history and the persistence of the cultural trace of the past on the present.
Writers expressing the modern condition as a catastrophic and/or liberating dissolution also attempted to collate some form of system or mythology to make sense of and compensate for a lost unity. Writers like T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats used myth and archetype to create a revelatory or divinatory system through which the world could be pieced back together through poetry. As Eliot stated at the end of The Waste Land (1922), which reworked classical fertility myths and the Christian Grail legend, “These fragments I have shored against my ruins”.
Modernism sought to destroy and then remake the world. In this dangerous process its writers could never be sure of their cultural foundations. The intensity and excitement of Modernist literature derived from a tension between the desire to ‘make it new’ and an awareness that now the creative processes had no guiding forms and would have to rise phoenix-like from the ashes of a previous age.
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I thought I felt something brush past me
As I reached the escape velocity
Necessary
To escape the gravitational pull
Of gods.
In the dimly lit fuselage
Of the privately funded rocket
I stood shoulder to shoulder
With dead eyed depressives
Undiagnosed
Who should be social distancing
In this fading future.
When the big dumb boosters lit up
We found the systems
Syncing our cloud data
When we needed them the most.
Every week we drift further and further
From the promise of sepia:
The genius of photography,
The dust clouds of eternity.
Bloody red nebulae &
Radio chatter
The ‘Wow!’ Signal,
Orbiting Soviet spheres that bleep
& chemical dependencies
That help us to sleep.
In work-sore dead of night
I reach for prescription painkillers
On the dust covered nightstand.
Chemical dependency degenerates
Neural connections,
Enforces aphasia,
Panic and alarm, clenched fists,
Knuckles white in the confusion of morning,
Why is everyone in here?
Where am I?
Why am I here?
I’m wearing a cricket jumper
On Top Of The Pops
In 1990.
A solitary eyeball collapses
Crumples
Into a visionless organic mass.
Claws clenched like
Whitened knuckles,
Circling wings beating down
Dust storms rising into broken AC.
As we take off, the particles percolate
Into a swirling vortex of COSHH governed peril.
On orders from the old timers,
I throw some bleach around
Until they nod in approval.
White walls and cage doors,
Dragging Henry by the suction tube
Across familiarly patterned floors.
I’m wearing the carpet upon my chest.
Lights swing like ligatures
In the hospital heated mornings,
Flickering in the heat of neglect.
I eagerly anticipate
A fortnight of jet lag.
As I look on, heavy lidded eyes,
A fluorescent strip stutters and fades.
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Another literary taxidermy I have worked on for the past several weeks. This time the first and last lines come from a novel rather than a song, William Gibson’s cyberpunk defining Neuromancer.
Taxidermy #2: Cyberpunk Hauntology
The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel, Greyscale mashup of crusty pixels, Launching the careers of a million YouTube video essayists, Flickering lines in horizontal drift Across convex surfaces of CRT screens. With sunglasses affixed, like Mollys eyes, I slide a cassette tape into my portable cyber deck And flip Back and forth Through advertising pop-ups For dating apps & how to manage your crypto portfolio. Flip. The other side is games on tape, Pixelated faces in two colours Or two shades of the same colour. He told me Molly was his soulmate, In this semiotic swirl of neon billboards, Fake tanned robots & whitened teeth, She was the only thing that brought him joy, He said, The only thing he thought of as pure, good Correct. She tattooed a Molotov cocktail on her left cheek, Just below the eye, the legend read: “A toast to the rich.” It’s all over social media: Guillotines outside Bezos’ mansion, Pitchfork & torch mob chasing down Musk, Gates crucified, Rihanna spreadeagled. Molly licks her lips & cuddles up closer To Kurt Cobain & Eugene Kelly. Flip. He had proper insomnia for the first time in months, Propelled by podcasts & hope for denied futures, Spectres haunting Europe in the sickly light Of late-stage capitalism. He thought I was a robot, for some reason. Maybe it was my telescopic, go-go-gadget arms Or my electrified hull. Have you never seen a guy with tank tracks before? Flip. She said she’d take me anywhere, Pasted in gum Arabic, Monochromed by xerox & stapled in a bedsit. TS Eliot wanders in & asks me if it’s his. Mayakovsky commodified As social realism is used to self me junk food. Here, in the desert of the real The mirages take on the aspect Of heroic scenes of miners at the coalface, Writ in mosaic On the marbled plinth Of a six hundred foot Lenin statue, Loyally guarding the industrial dock lands From the predatory approaches Of Union busters & Pinkerton patrols. Flip. He found her next At a union meeting, waving a red flag, Armed & dangerous, bullets for bailiffs, 1312 carved into the stock of her rifle. She smiled at him warmly & offered him coffee. It was like a support group, Name badged workers sitting in a circle On plastic chairs. “My name’s Colin & I’m a communist.” “My name’s Andy & I’m an anarchist.” We escorted the Nazbols out, at gunpoint. All through the meeting She made regular eye contact with him. It reminded him of bus journeys From petroleum-choked city centres To endless fields of humming pylons, Brutalist substations & grazing cattle. Terraces & tower blocks giving way To reservoirs & army bases. Liminal transition: Burial into Boards Of Canada. The urban rain nestles up against Bucolic pastoral mellotrons. Flip. It was here, amongst the effigies, That they were finally separated. Burning haystacks hummed Like an overcharged oscillator, Birds singing like circuit bent toys, Folkloric mythology depicted in pixels. My avatar is a pagan deity, My alt anon account is a denizen of the underworld. I see him running, mind scrambled Like a CRT between two magnets, Flickering lines of snow whisper prophecies Foretold In ancient hard drives. I never saw which way Molly fled, Or if she survived, But he woke up screaming In a soft walled room. The medication soon soothed him. Empty bliss of depersonalisation. He never saw Molly again.
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I recently became aware of the concept of Literary Taxidermy. The general idea is that you take the opening & closing lines of a poem, story or book & write an entirely new poem, story etc. between them. Instead of following this formula precisely, I have written this poem using a lyrical couplet from one of my favourite songs, Zürich Is Stained by Pavement (see below). The opening couplet here is about self-doubt & the fear that you’re not as strong as you need to be. I took this theme & ran with it. I hope you like it.
“I can’t sing it strong enough.” Well I might be able to, No promises, But I’ll give it a go. Maybe I’ll be able to find new reserves Of deepest, strongest strength to tap Way down deep where I wouldn’t expect. Maybe I’ll absorb that strength from others, By osmosis while holding hands Or shaking hands Or hugs Or fist bumps. Maybe I’ll fall within the range Of an area-of-effect buff From one of my stronger, More confident companions. Maybe the strength I seek Will be found in spirituality, Although I must admit, That is incredibly unlikely; A long shot, to say the least. Maybe I’ll find the strength I need In the unshakeable belief In my fellow man, Solidarity in community & rejection of competition. Solidarity not selfishness, Sacrifice in the face of solipsism. Maybe the strength required Can be found In the wisdom of the dead, Dusty library words, Observances and inventions, Artistic enlightenment That gradually evolves Into feelings of encouragement & spasms of renaissance. The worst-case-scenario, of course, Is that there is no fresh, Untapped well of superhuman strength, External or internal, Waiting for me when I need it the most. No secret inner quality, No unrealised ambitions Or dormant skills. Maybe there is nothing but weakness, Doubt and disillusionment. Maybe, just maybe, “That kind of strength I just don’t have.”
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Apologies if you’ve already seen this, as it was published in January 2020, but I’ve only recently found this excellent interview with David Berman, conducted by email in the months leading up to his death in August of 2017.
The interview is full of interesting insights into Berman’s thought processes and links to excellent reading material and music which he enjoyed.
Thought of The Prodigy’s Firestarter today after hearing a parody by anti-Conservative music group The Iain Duncan Smiths called Childstarver by Boris Johnson (“crony subcontractor, Serco benefactor”).
Unfortunately, I have chosen Firestarter previously, in the Song of the Day (The Chain) series. As a worthy substitute I have chosen The Prodigy’s (in my opinion superior) follow-up single Breathe. I’ve also added the video of Childstarver as a bonus.
Breathe with me
Breathe the pressure Come play my game, I’ll test ya Psychosomatic, addict, insane Breathe the pressure Come play my game, I’ll test ya Psychosomatic, addict, insane Come play my game Inhale, inhale, you’re the victim Come play my game Exhale, exhale, exhale
Breathe the pressure Come play my game, I’ll test ya Psychosomatic, addict, insane Breathe the pressure Come play my game, I’ll test ya Psychosomatic, addict, insane Come play my game Inhale, inhale, you’re the victim Come play my game Exhale, exhale, exhale
Come breathe with me Breathe with meBreathe the pressure Come play my game, I’ll test ya Psychosomatic, addict, insane Breathe the pressure Come play my game, I’ll test ya Psychosomatic, addict, insane Come play my game Inhale, inhale, you’re the victim Come play my game Exhale, exhale, exhaleBreathe with meBreathe the pressure Come play my game, I’ll test ya Psychosomatic, addict, insane Breathe the pressure Come play my game, I’ll test ya Psychosomatic, addict, insane Come play my game Inhale, inhale, you’re the victim Come play my game Exhale, exhale, exhale
Looking for some great music?
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I was reading Simon Price’s review of Futurology (Manic Street Preachers 2014 album) on The Quietus, & he mentions that, according to Bassist & lyricist Nicky Wire, the third song on the album, Let’s Go To War, is the “final part in the ‘You Love Us’/’Masses Against The Classes’ trilogy.” This was news to me, that a trio of disparate songs from disparate times of their career went together as a sequence. It’s difficult to believe that the “trilogy” was planned from the start. I suspect that Wire is referring to a sense of kinship he personally feels between the three songs. I thought it might be a good idea to cast a critical eye over the trio of songs from the point of view of them being a trilogy.
You Love Us (1992)
Quote used at beginning of You Love Us video
Back at the start of their career, Manic Street preachers were difficult band to pin down, ideologically speaking. Their artwork & lyrics were chock full of esoteric quotes & references. This was evidenced across the artworks of their records, music videos (see above) & even on their clothes or written on their skin in marker pen. New Art Riot, an early EP, had a several quotes printed on its sleeve. Karl Marx (“I am nothing and should be everything”) & a lengthy Andy Warhol one:
You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it…
Andy Warhol
This observation of the ubiquitous nature of Coca-Cola was reworked slightly -via contemporary slant- in the lyrics ofSlash ‘n’ Burn, the opening track on their debut album Generation Terrorists, as “Madonna drinks Coke and so you can too/Tastes real good not like a sweet poison should.” It’s unclear to me whether their image of Coke as a “sweet poison” is echoed in the Andy Warhol quote, but it seems as though the Manic Street Preachers viewed it that way.
Another early single, Motown Junk channels William Burroughs on its sleeve:
Rock and roll adolescents storm into the streets of all nations. They rush into the Louvre and throw acid in the Mona Lisa’s face. They open zoo’s, insane asylums, prisons, burst water mains with air hammers, chop the floor out of passenger plane lavatories, shoot out lighthouses, turn sewers into water supply, administer injections with bicycle pumps, they shit on the floor of the United Nations and wipe their ass with treaties, pacts, alliances.
William S Burroughs, Naked Lunch
This brief sequence from Naked Lunch, Burroughs’ seminal & nightmarish cutup masterpiece, seems to be ascribing qualities to the new generation of teenagers that he wished upon his own generation. This paragraph echoes, in my mind at least, what the German expressionist group of artists known as Die Brücke were saying in 1906: “We call upon all youth to unite. And being youth, the bearers of the future, we want to wrest from the comfortably established older generation freedom to live and move.” The group aimed to build a “bridge to the future” & I’m certain that Burroughs, writing in the mid ’50’s, could see the potential of the nascent youth-movement coalescing around the equally nascent Rock ‘n’ Roll genre of music, to fulfil this promise. To build this “bridge to the future.” The Manic Street Preachers not only printed this on their record sleeve, but the concept of throwing acid into the Mona Lisa’s face likely influenced the line in You Love Us: “throw some acid into your face.”
A slight diversion here but Die Brücke weren’t the only 20th century European art movement which influenced the Manic Street Preachers in their early days. The Situationists love affair with the art of The Slogan also rubbed off on them somewhat. It’s easy to draw parallels between the slogans the band scrawled across their clothes in the early days with the slogans which the Situationist International scrawled upon walls throughout Paris of 1968. Something like “BOMB THE PAST”, written on one of Richey Edwards shirts in ’91, isn’t dissimilar to something like “AFTER ART, GOD IS DEAD” by the Situationists.
While Stay Beautiful quoted Burroughs’ friend & peer Allen Ginsberg, form his epic Beat Poem Howl!
Moloch whose Soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose Poverty is the specter of Genius Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless oxygen Moloch whose name is the Mind. Robot apartments
Allen Ginsberg, Howl! (1954-1955)
These sections from Howl! about Moloch are pure Manics. Moloch [from Wikipedia] “is the biblical name of a Canaanite god associated with child sacrifice, through fire or war.” Ginsberg was drawing connections between death, war, child sacrifice & relentless march of technology & modern society. While not directly pro-communist, it’s difficult to argue that Howl! isn’t anti-Capitalist. “A cloud of sexless oxygen” seems to me, to be one of the most beautifully poetic descriptions of boredom I’ve ever heard.
This quotational diarrhoea, while being hugely appealing to a 13/14/15 year old version of me, was a bit of a red flag for the band’s well meaning, left leaning but confused ideology. This same confusion/contradiction was as visible in the band’s music & artwork too. Musically, & You Love Us is a prime example of this, Manic Street Preachers didn’t know whether they wanted to be Punk or Hair-Metal. Songs were short, aggressive & spiky but James Dean Bradfield’s excellent singing voice & virtuoso guitar playing often lent them a ‘big Rock’ sound which seemed to shave against the grain of the Punk lyrics & rhythms. Most songs included the ‘big Rock’ moment: the impressive guitar solos which were inspired by the bands love & dedication to US hair-metallers Guns And Roses.
You Love Us seems to be a coalescence of these diverse influences & confused ideologies. There is a preoccupation with sin in You Love Us, “we are not your sinners/our voices are for real.” To sin is to be inauthentic in their minds. The latter line has an uncomfortable (& prescient) relationship with the infamous “4Real” incident. In a strangely 2020 couplet at the beginning of the second verse “’til I see love in statues/your lessons drill inherited sin.” This could almost have been written for the ‘controversy’ surrounding the destruction by protestors of statues to infamous slave traders & Confederate generals. “Inherited sin” in this case being the slave trade, the uncomfortable & shameful foundation stone supporting much of modern, western society.
There are lines which seem to express frustration with Neoliberalism (Thatcher was still in power & Reagan had only recently being replaced by Bush senior when these lyrics were written) “PR problems,” “Parliament” being a “fake life saver” & poisoning “mineral water” (a drink associated with the Yuppy movement in the early ’90’s) “with a strychnine taste.”
The other thing the Manics were unable to escape during their early years was The War. The Second World War, that is. The Holocaust in particular. The “Death Mask uniforms” of the first verse are a pretty clear reference to the skull-logo of the SS, including senior staff of concentration camps & use of the word “holocaust” itself in the second pre-chorus.
& then the final piece of the puzzle is the self-centred arrogance of the songs title itself. The Manic Street Preachers were famously arrogant in their early days. At least in the press. It was obviously all an act & designed to get good press, but it informed this song heavily. “We won’t die of devotion,” they sing in the first pre-chorus, “understand we can never belong.” Is this a hint of resignation, pessimism? Admission that they will fail at their stated plan: to sell 16 million copies of Generation Terrorists & then split up completely. This hyperbolic bravado certainly succeeded in garnering masses of attention from the music press, so job done in my opinion.
The Masses Against The Classes (2000)
“Went to Cuba to meet Castro…” Manic Street Preachers meeting Fidel Castro, 2001
Before discussing The Masses Against The Classes in any detail, it’s worth noting a cool piece of Rock n Roll trivia. The Masses Against The Classes was the first new UK number 1 single of the 21st century. It’s a hell of an achievement & one which the Manic Street Preachers will always hold over their detractors.
The Masses Against The Classes (named for a quote by 19th century British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone) was described in terms of a return to an earlier version of the Manic Street Preachers. Writing in NME, Victoria Segal described it as “an attempted return to the primordial punk slime of their birth.” Journalist Martin Power likened it to the “raucous, guitar-driven […] Pop-Punk” of Nirvana’s On A Plain. Nicky Wire claimed they wanted an “Iggy & The Stooges vibe.” It’s important to remember that The Masses Against The Classes was released in the wake of their commercial peak: the polemic powered proletarian Rock of Everything Must Go which bled into the chart-bothering late-’90’s Indie Pop of This Is My Truth, Tell Me Yours.
This Is My Truth, Tell Me Yours, named for a quote by the great Labour politician Nye Bevan, came dangerously close to falling into the beige subgenre of late-90’s Indie where you’d find things like The Verve, Travis, Coldplay etc. Despite the slowed down, polished up sheen of This Is My Truth, it still provided the band with some of the most compelling music of their career. Lead single, If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next, with its flanged guitar chords & dense keyboard soundscapes, became (probably) the first UK number one single to address fighting Fascists during the Spanish Civil War.
The Indie music press, though, had written the Manics off as just another commercially successful band in the sea of beige. Contemporaries of Chris Martin & co. So, The Masses Against The Classes was seen as a rebuttal of that safe, smooth image. It was supposed to be a roar of anger against the band’s detractors & a reassuring gesture for fans that they may have lost (or come close to losing) in the post-Richey years. It is a downtempo, heavy guitar driven slice of Alternative Rock. The Nirvana comparisons are probably about spot on. The “ahh ahh ahhh ahhhh” intro is a nice enough throwback to the early days of Rock n Roll (specifically the Beatles version of Twist And Shout), which was obviously on their mind a lot at the time because one of the b-sides was a cover of Chuck Berry’s Rock And Roll Music.
Lyrically, The Masses Against The Classes feels a little shallow at first glance, especially fresh from listening to You Love Us with its dense web of references. It is however bookended by a pair of quotes. The song opens with a quote from American dissident linguist Noam Chomsky: “The country was founded on the principle that the primary role of the government is to protect property from the majority, and so it remains.” Stick a heavy reverb on that & we’d almost be in Choking Victim/Leftover Crack territory. The song closes with James Dean Bradfield screaming out an Albert Camus quote: “The slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown.” The choice of quotes seems to muddy the waters of what the song is about rather than offer any clarity. This is compounded by the quotations printed on the record sleeve. Mao Tse-Tung on the 10″ vinyl (“We should support whatever the enemy opposes and oppose whatever the enemy supports.”) & Kierkegaard on the CD (“Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be read forwards.”). Profound these quotes may be, but it’s hard to tie them into The Masses Against The Classes lyrical content.
“Hello it’s us again,” the opening line states, “we’re still so in love with you.” I suspect that the “us” here is the same “us” that “you” loved back in ’92. This backs up the idea that The Masses Against The Classes is reaching out to lapsed (or betrayed) fans in some way. “You” can still love “us” because “we’re still so in love with you.” It’s quite simple & transparent. On the nose. I personally miss the opacity of earlier lyrics, like You Love Us. To confuse things slightly though, the end of the first verse seems to insult the same lapsed fans they were just trying to appeal to: “You thought you were our friends/ Success is an ugly word/Especially in your tiny world.” Even in transparency, the Manics embrace contradiction.
The chorus is also quite contradictory. “The masses against the classes/I’m tired of giving a reason/When the future is what we believe in.” In the final chorus, the song echoes You Love Us completely by declaring that “we’re the only thing left to believe in.” I take from these lyrics that the band are becoming increasingly uncomfortable in explaining their politics. It’s a classic dilemma of the left. Left-wing politics based on theory, history & dialectical analysis. By contrast, right-wing politics appeals to nothing other than greed, selfishness & hate. There is no future through Neoliberalism. The masses should, logically, be always against the classes because that’s the only way they have a future. The band are tired of “giving a reason” why they’re “against the classes.” They believe in the future, that’s why. The final lines of the chorus seem to me to be a bit of copy/paste Manics mythology trivia. I distinctly remember (although have failed utterly to find) an interview in which the band state that they prefer winter to summer. The reasoning, as I recall, was along similar lines to “we love the winter/It brings us closer together.”
I’m fairly certain that the first part of the second verse is addressing the absent Richey Edwards. “So can you hurt us anymore/Can you feel like it was before/Or are you lost forever more/Messed up and dead on alcohol.” This is addressing the pain which his disappearance caused the band. There’s a probing quality, like a tongue poking at an aching tooth. Will this return to our roots hurt? Will it bring back the pain of your loss all over again? The second couplet addresses Edwards’ reliance on alcohol & wonders aloud if he’s dead or alive. The second half of the verse feeds back into the You Love Us continuation. “Hello, fond farewell my dears/I hope you hear this nice and clear/Our love is unconditional/Our hate is yours to feed upon.” Is the “fond farewell” a signalling of the end of the original version of the Manic Street Preachers? The Punkier, angrier nihilists who wrote You Love Us & Motown Junk? It seems to read that way to me, though their following album, 2001’s Know Your Enemy, included several rawer, Punkier songs, like lead single Found That Soul.
Let’s Go To War (2014)
“…here in my safe European home…” Manic Street Preachers, 2014
Let’s Go To War is the only song in the secret trilogy to not have been released as a single. It is also the one I am least familiar with. As a fan, I was left slightly disappointed by the scrappy effort that was 2001’s Know Your Enemy, & I lost touch with the band for a long time. I remember someone playing me Lifeblood & I enjoyed it, but it didn’t excite me the way their older material did. Recently, I have decided to try & catch up with everything they’ve released since Know Your Enemy. Futurology is definitely the highlight of the bunch. Recorded at the legendary Hansa Studios in Berlin (of Bowie/Iggy fame) & channelling a love of European culture & music, Futurology is thought of by many to be ‘their Krautrock album’. That’s a little simplistic & inaccurate though. While it’s clearly inspired by Krautrock, Futurology is still very much the Manic Street Preachers we know & love.
The influences actually do a lot to bring the percussion to the front of the composition process, making Futurology, perhaps, Sean Moore’s album; his time to really shine. The motorik, propellant beat of Let’s Go To War is definitely aided by having as accomplished a stickman as Moore on the drums. The walking bass & steady drumming almost bring to mind Faith No More’s powerful We Care A Lot to mind. There’s even a little guitar lick before the chorus which is eerily similar to a certain slap bass lick from We Care A Lot. Not to mention the similar choruses, composed from the same number of words & syllables. I sort of wish I hadn’t noticed that similarity.
Lyrically, Let’s Go To War seems to be almost resigned to a coming conflict. One which was both anticipated in the lyrics to You Love Us & The Masses Against The Classes, & which the Manics hoped to avoid. It’s almost like spending all of your time & resources trying to win elections, to save lives through official/proper channels, only to realise that you’ll actually have to build those guillotines & spill a little blood after all, even though avoiding that was the entire reason for your legitimate campaign.
The song lists things, in the first verse, which could be references to the legitimate campaign & the hostile opposition it faced. “All the complications/All the deviations/All the holy edicts/All the broken subjects.” James Dean Bradfield sounds almost defeated in this verse, downhearted, downcast. There’s a sense of resignation. That things are not getting better. & then you have the Faith No More lick which leads into the chanted chorus of “Let’s go to war.” “To feel some pureness and some pain […] we need to go to war again,” it continues. This certainly seems to me to be the resignation I mentioned before.
The second verse, which speaks of “working class skeletons” which “lie scattered in museums” seems to be addressing the futility of war, as well as the reality of it; that those who do the killing & the dying are from the working classes. The First World War is often viewed as mechanised slaughter of the working classes by a cabal, on each side, of bloodthirsty toffs. The “false economies” which “speak falsely of your dreams” are both the justification & the rewards of war. And all of these ‘rewards’ generally go to the rich. The “working class skeletons” rarely, if ever, see any benefits from the wars they fight in.
In the bridge section of the song we get a continuation from The Masses Against The Classes. An affirmation that despite all of the “knives they will now sharpen,” the Manics still love you. “So don’t forget we love you still,” James sings. It repeats through echoes several times, as if to underline the point. The point being that You Love Us & we love you.
& that, I believe is what the secret trilogy of Manic Street Preachers songs is about. Love & War. They love us, hope/want us to love them & will both lead us & stand by us in the vaguely defined war. Another takeaway is that despite their blurred & confused ideology, the Manics definitely mean what they say & say what they mean. Even if they don’t understand it. Or know how to properly articulate it.
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It was reported by the BBC today that Bob Dylan has just broken the record for oldest artist to have a number one album of new, original material in the UK. This is great new for Dylan & his fans. It also comes hot on the heels of his first US Billboard chart number one, with the fantastic new single Murder Most Foul.
At 79 years old, Dylan has overtaken previous record holder, Paul Simon, who hit the top spot in 2006, at the age of 74, with Stranger To Stranger. Dame Vera Lynne holds the record for oldest artist to have a number one album with her 2009 greatest hit’s collection, We’ll Meet Again. She was 92. Maybe in 13 years time, Dylan can beat her too.
This is a significant achievement & I’m happy for DYlan. Check out this great animated lyric video for Dylan’s most recent single, False Prophet.
And while we’re on the topic of Bob Dylan, he’s just uploaded this video to his YouTube channel. An alternative take of If Not For You.
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Day 1 of using Song of the Day to celebrate African American music culture in solidarity to the Black Lives Matter movement & support for the protests against racist police violence currently gripping America & the solidarity protests taking place all over the globe.
Gil Scot-Heron’s revolutionary poetry, set to a live funk band backing track, was one of the fundamental building blocks of Hip-Hop. Scathingly political, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, chronicles an imaginary uprising and skewers countless sacred cows of American culture.
You will not be able to stay home, brother You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out You will not be able to lose yourself on skag And skip out for beer during commercials, because The revolution will not be televised
The revolution will not be televised The revolution will not be brought to you By Xerox in four parts without commercial interruptions The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon blowing a bugle And leading a charge by John Mitchell, General Abrams, and Spiro Agnew To eat hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary The revolution will not be televised
The revolution will not be brought to you by the Schaefer Award Theatre And will not star Natalie Woods and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal The revolution will not get rid of the nubs The revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner, because The revolution will not be televised, brother
There will be no pictures of you and Willie Mae Pushing that shopping cart down the block on the dead run Or trying to slide that color TV into a stolen ambulance NBC will not be able predict the winner At 8:32 on report from twenty-nine districts The revolution will not be televised
There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down brothers on the instant replay There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down brothers on the instant replay There will be no pictures of Whitney Young Being run out of Harlem on a rail with a brand new process There will be no slow motion or still lifes of Roy Wilkins Strolling through Watts in a red, black, and green liberation jumpsuit That he has been saving for just the proper occasion
“Green Acres”, “Beverly Hillbillies”, and “Hooterville Junction” Will no longer be so damn relevant And women will not care if Dick finally got down with Jane On “Search for Tomorrow” Because black people will be in the street looking for a brighter day The revolution will not be televised
There will be no highlights on the eleven o’clock news And no pictures of hairy armed women liberationists And Jackie Onassis blowing her nose The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb or Francis Scott Keys Nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom Jones, Johnny Cash Engelbert Humperdinck, or The Rare Earth The revolution will not be televised
The revolution will not be right back After a message about a white tornado White lightning, or white people You will not have to worry about a dove in your bedroom The tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl The revolution will not go better with Coke The revolution will not fight germs that may cause bad breath The revolution will put you in the driver’s seat
The revolution will not be televised Will not be televised Will not be televised Will not be televised The revolution will be no re-run, brothers The revolution will be live
Stuck for something to listen to. Here’s a playlist of the Song of the Day (BLM) series.
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Be Safe is a bit of a weird one. It’s a collaboration between Wakefield indie rockers The Cribs & Sonic Youth guitar maestro Lee Ranaldo. Only Ranaldo isn’t playing guitar. He’s giving a spoken word performance of one of his excellent poems.
There isn’t an official video for Be Safe, and rather than just link to the official audio I found this excellent fan made video. It’s perfect to me.
One of those fucking, awful black days When nothing is pleasing and everything that happens Is an excuse for anger An outlet for emotions stockpiled, an arsenal, an armor
These are the days when I hate the world Hate the rich, hate the happy Hate the complacent, the TV watchers Beer drinkers, the satisfied ones
Because I know I can be all of those little hateful things And then I hate myself for realizing that There’s no preventative, directive or safe approach for living We each know our own fate
We know from our youth, how to be treated How we’ll be received, how we shall end These things don’t change
You can change your clothes Change your hairstyle, your friends, cities, continents But sooner or later your own self will always catch up Always it waits in the wingsIdeas swirl but don’t stick They appear but then run off like the rain on the windshield
One of those rainy day car rides, my head implodes The atmosphere in this car, a mirror of my skull Wet, damp, windows dripping and misted with cold Walls of grey, nothing good on the radio, not a thought in my head
I know a place we can go and I’m falling Love so hard that you wish you were ten
Lets take life and slow it down incredibly slow Frame by frame With two minutes that take ten years to live out Yeah, let’s do that
Telephone poles like praying mantis against the sky Metal arms outstretched So much land traveled, so little sense made of it It doesn’t mean a thing, all this land laid out behind us
I’d like to take off into these woods and get good and lost for a while I’m disgusted with petty concerns Parking tickets, breakfast specials Does someone just have to carry this weight?
Abstract typography, methane covenant Linear gospel, Nashville sales lady, stocky emissary Torturous lice, mad Elizabeth
Chemotherapy bullshit
I know a place we can go and I’m falling
The light within you shines like a diamond mine Like an unarmed walrus, like a dead man face down on the highway Like a skunk, eating it’s own tail Steam turbine, frog farm
Two full closets burst open in disarray, soap bubbles in the sun Hospital death bed, red convertible, shopping list, blow job Deaths head, devils dancing, bleached white buildings, memories Movements, the movie, unfeeling, unreeling, about to begin
I know a place we can go and I’m falling Love so hard that you wish you were ten
I’ve seen your hallway, you’re a darn call away I’ve hear your stairs creak, I can fix my mind on your yes And your no, I’ll film your face today in the sparkling canals All red, yellow, blue, green brilliance and silver Dutch reflection
Racing thoughts, racing thoughts, all too real You’re moving so fast now, I can’t hold your image This image I have of your face by the window Me standing beside you, arm on your shoulder A catalog of images, flashing glimpses then gone again
Untethered to the posters soak in me, every clear afternoon now I’ll think of you, up in the air, twisting your heel Your knees up around me, my face in your hair You scream so well, your smile so loud, it still rings in my ears
I know a place we can go and I’m falling Love so hard that you wish you were ten
Imitation, distant, tired of longing, clean my teeth Stay the course, hold the wheel, steer on to freedom Open all the boxes, open all the boxes Open all the boxes, open all the boxes
Times Square Midday, newspaper buildings News headlines going around, you watch as they go And hope there’s some good ones, those tree shadows in the park They’re all whispering, shake some leaves
Around six p.m., shadows across the cobblestones Girl in front of bathroom mirror, she slow and careful Paints her face green and mask like Like my cheese, portrait with green stripe
Long shot through apartment window A monologue on top but no girl in shot The light within me shines like a diamond mine
Like an unarmed walrus Like a dead man face down on the highway Like a snake eating its own tail A steam turbine, frog pond
Two full closets burst open in disarray, soap bubbles in the sun Hospital death bed, red convertible, shopping list, blow job Deaths head, devils dancing, bleached white buildings, memories Movements, the movie, unreeling, about to begin
Oh, great by me Yeah? Mine were alright, wasn’t my best one but who cares? That’s the spirit
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Scruffy Theory 