THE MERRY MONTH OF MAY (Day 6) : THE RECORD THAT CHANGED MY LIFE

How do you go about writing about your favourite band? The one that had such a profound effect on you that you know you would have ended up a rather different person without it. A band you can’t imagine your life without. A band that helped re-wire your brain and awakened your social conscience and emotional consciousness. I suppose you could start by sitting on the same bed where you listened to that life-changing record for the first time several years ago. The band, the Manic Street Preachers; the album, Generation Terrorists.

I know it would be cooler or perhaps more impressive if the album discussed were their greatest to date, The Holy Bible. But it didn’t happen that way. After years of slipping around my periphery, the Manics first truly shifted into focus through Generation Terrorists. Let me backtrack a bit...

My first encounter with the Manics was in 1998 whilst watching MuchMusic, the Canadian equivalent to MTV. It had been a steady stream of Britney Spears and boy bands, but sandwiched in between them, rather conspicuously to me, was the music video for If You Tolerate This, Your Children Will Be Next. Not only was the length of the song title incongruous, but the visual style and sound was thrown in high relief against the general party-like-it’s-the-end-of-the-millennium atmosphere. Relief, indeed. Over ten years later, I can still remember me sat there, transfixed by the stark blue and white video of faceless humans, whose identity had literally been erased, and I mulled over the song title for years afterwards. However, I was still at a place in my life that didn’t seem to require any further research into this trio and their desperate, seemingly out-of-step sorrow. I, like probably most other North Americans, just assumed they had always been a trio from a vaguely Britpop background and had just had their first hit single.

A few years later, I found This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours in a used record shop, and recalling that video, which never left me, I bought it. I enjoyed it well enough, but didn’t listen to it as much as other albums by other bands. My tastes were still shifting in a restless, post-adolescent flux, and I still regarded the Manics as rather gentle, melancholy Britpopsters. Their lyrics were more complex than many others, but that album didn’t really ignite me as I continued pursuing The Clash and The Smiths.

Around the same time, I found myself in Northeast England working for four months. I don’t really remember what I was watching on TV, but suddenly, much like the first time I saw them, the Manics were on-screen. This time there were four of them and they were playing Roses in the Hospital live on something like Top of the Pops. This time around the energy of the music intrigued me as did the title and chorus, which rolled around in my mind long after. Along with that fourth, guitar-playing member. I now had two pretty different images of the band to contend with. And despite the fact that I went on to write a short story, entitled “Carnations in the Hospital Window,” the following spring for college, it took yet another couple of years to move beyond these inspiring flashes of the Manics.

As though the randomness of the universe converged into a brief moment of organized chaos, I saw Richey Edwards on the cover of the NME while at the bookstore where I worked, and I found a copy of Generation Terrorists in that same used record shop I had first purchased TIMTTMY all those years earlier. It was the tenth anniversary of Richey’s disappearance, and I was beginning to reconcile the angrier, hungrier four-piece from that Top of the Pops performance with the subdued, careworn band from that blue and white video. Then I sat down on this bed with headphones in place, Generation Terrorists in my Discman, and the liner notes in my hand. I can still feel those opening call-and-answer riffs of Slash ‘n Burn ricocheting in my brain as I finally understood what made the Manics so vital. I wasn’t, and still am not, that familiar with Guns ‘n Roses and bands of their ilk, but as much as I would concede the obvious influence of that style on early Manics material, I didn’t, and still don’t, hear Generation Terrorists bracketed in those terms. Rock music of the Guns ‘n Roses kind had never stirred me, had never inspired me. Generation Terrorists did both simultaneously. It had to do with the sheer force, honesty and intelligence behind it, pushing it forward like a socio-political glam juggernaut.

The artificial, glam pose of the Manics, which I learned more and more of as I explored, had more in common with the original purveyors of glam like Bowie and Roxy Music and their 70s punk admirers than the cocky, cock-centric, meaningless provocation of bands like Guns ‘n Roses. The Manics had a precocious agenda of feeding the world ideology, philosophy and politics through a stream of catchy rock music unashamed of its popular sound and populist roots. It was Situationist rhetoric via an intravenous of popular art. The Manics weren’t merely hijacking a low culture art form for rather high brow purposes like many artists before them; they truly believed in the salvation and escape offered by loud, intense rock music, the kind of music that lifts arenas of common people into the echelons of heroes for one night.

Pay for it, pay for it. You’re gonna pay for my intelligence. – So Dead

Yes, you can hear the angsty cry of adolescence spilling in every direction on Generation Terrorists, but it spoke to me in a language I understood. Its perhaps overreaching, self-indulgent verbosity made complete sense to me, a girl who had loved language and its possibilities all her life and often had too many fragmented, big ideas to let any one of them go, resulting in a torrent of stream-of-consciousness that could be taken for overly romantic, extravagant or inarticulate. Listening to Generation Terrorists and reading along with the lyrics, I finally felt like I had found a band that would be the perfect fit for me. Here was a band who spoke my twisted tongue and didn’t simplify for the sake of scansion.

From a critical angle, Generation Terrorists could be viewed as adolescent bluster that should have been pared back from its eighteen tracks, but I had no such thought listening to it in this very spot. It was one of the most honest albums I had ever heard, which keeps it from being pretentious and detached. For every cerebral, breathless lyric, there’s a blistering James Dean Bradfield guitar solo; for every Rimbaud, Larkin, Plath and Nietzsche quote, there’s a mighty melodic riff more ambitious than any debut album is expected to be. As evident in the flurry of press they played so well to, their honesty extended to very human contradictions, but their ability to use the media to their advantage shows in the work of their head rhetorician, Richey Edwards, and his aphorisms and tenet-like declarations, poised like a knowing prostitute for a sound bite. They screamed for my attention and gave me renewal, a second shot at youthful idealism and outrage.

Love your masks and adore your failure. – Stay Beautiful

As a person barely in her twenties, frustrated with no apparent direction for the future, angry for being ashamed of not having a plan, disgusted with the world and its infinite injustices, I found strength in Richey Edwards and Nicky Wire’s words and reassurances that I wasn’t as alone as I felt. With Generation Terrorists, I felt like I had a cause; I felt like I needn’t be guilty for wanting to learn and to behave like a learned person; I felt like being working class had dignity and that the struggle was more satisfying than having the world handed to you. This record bled self-belief and gave me a sense of fearlessness that no one else had before it.

My feeling of being used up and degraded by my environment and the impulse to destroy this world, set this society alight, found catharsis here. My need to kick down boundaries and myths that made less and less sense to me was fulfilled by this album. My lifelong battle with not feeling good enough or as good as other people, paired with a bizarre, intermittent sense of superiority, could be decoded in these liner notes. Rules and ideas that I hadn’t bothered to question earlier in my life and which were falling apart around me were finally pulverized through this record. The impotence and seemingly selfish inability to feel happy and satisfied in the same way as my parents were allowed to come to the surface, the Manics’ music drawing it out like a deep infection. While physical androgyny has always been attractive to me, the Manics took that kohl-lined, feather boa-ed androgyny inwards and made it seem natural to feel genderless.

Culture sucks down words, itemize loathing and feed yourself smiles. – Motorcycle Emptiness

Although I love most tracks on this album, the song that still gives me chills and catches in my throat is the fourth track, Motorcycle Emptiness. With that opening wistful guitar riff punctuated by that drum and piano, I could feel “neon loneliness” pulsing through me, and the strain and futility of escape was palpable. It’s such an expansive, poignant ballad that it just washed over me with the beauty of an ocean oil spill, or to borrow a phrase from their sophomore album, “cheap, tarnished glitter.” There’s musical and lyrical virtuosity scattered across this debut record, but it finds one of its highest peaks in this song. The heartbreaking vocals and the guitar, which seems to be crying out in an ecstatic torture, overwhelm me like the bittersweet ending to a film or a book. And even though its lyrics shut down all avenues of escape, its music elevates me beyond my mundane existence to somewhere beyond societal spectatorship. While the other half of this album dances about in an almost gleeful destruction of conformity and its self-perpetuating mythology, this song moves at a different, more reserved, pace and exudes the oppressive solitude of crowds, a theme which is so brilliantly done in its music video.

As much as Generation Terrorists gives me self-affirming, fist-pumping moments, the Manics never appeared like lofty, untouchable rock gods in the same way The Clash did to me. The Manics seemed like extensions of my own psyche. Even the mythologized Richey Edwards just feels like the intimate friend I never had. Except he will always have been more vulnerable and sensitive than I could ever be; I can never let myself go there completely because that is truly where madness lies. I’m keenly aware of this “fragile prison of sanity,” and I know it would be too precarious for someone like me to open myself up in that way. But he has allowed me to find the wealth and depth of my moods, and helped me to utilize them.

Though Generation Terrorists is double the length of most albums, when James Dean Bradfield whispers that last line, “There’s nothing I wanna see/There’s nowhere I wanna go,” in the epic, brain-shredding Condemned to Rock ‘n Roll, I was left wanting so much more. And I found it. I continue to find it. To many, the Manics material can be seen as too mopey, too dark, too nihilistic, too much, and that could very well be true. Perhaps only those who have known the ludicrous extremity of that black mental state can truly grasp the essence of their music or find comfort in it. The Manics are one of those rare bands that polarizes people; those who love, love furiously, those who hate, ridicule and criticize passionately. It is with reams of context and experience that I can now return to TIMTTMY with a more finely tuned ear and understanding; it will never be among my favourite albums from the Manics, but I respect it, like I do the rest of their two decades of output.

I don’t express my Manics fandom on forums or discussion boards. I don’t often even vocally express what they mean to me because no one around me in my immediate environment really cares who they are. But I listen...I listen and I think. And I am inspired to create. I’ve joked to friends before that being a Manic Street Preachers fan is a lifestyle choice, but there’s a grain of truth in it. They can be all-consuming, and they are life-changing. They’re like an old friend who’s there for me in ways I never asked them to be.

Lips I kiss just another plague. Love can’t fix the hole they made. Condemned to rock ‘n roll. – Condemned to Rock ‘n Roll

mp3 : Manic Street Preachers - Motorcycle Emptiness

TODAY'S GUEST POSTING IS COURTESY OF THE HIGHLY TALENTED ANGLOPUNK FROM WINNIPEG IN CANADA.

THERE'S LOTS MORE OF HER GREAT WRITING TO BE FOUND OVER AT HER OWN BLOG, WHICH IS NAMED AFTER ONE OF THE AFOREMENTIONED SONGS - CONDEMNED TO ROCK'N'ROLL.