Popular Music, Critique and Manic Street Preachers [1st ed.] 9783030430993, 9783030431006

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Popular Music, Critique and Manic Street Preachers Mathijs Peters

Popular Music, Critique and Manic Street Preachers

Mathijs Peters

Popular Music, Critique and Manic Street Preachers

Mathijs Peters Philosophy Department Utrecht University Utrecht, The Netherlands

ISBN 978-3-030-43099-3    ISBN 978-3-030-43100-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43100-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Everynight Images / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Guido and Thijs, with whom I discovered the power of popular music.

Preface

This book would not exist without Manic Street Preachers. Not just because this book is about Manic Street Preachers, but because the Welsh band played a pivotal role in sparking my interest in philosophy and, eventually, my decision to specialise in political philosophy, social philosophy and philosophy of culture in an academic context. This decision was primarily incited by the band’s lyrics, mainly written by their guitarist Richey Edwards and bassist Nicky Wire. It was also motivated by the many interviews in which the band members list books, playwrights, philosophers, films, politicians, actors, architects, poets, painters and other musicians as inspirations, as well as by the ways in which they refer to these inspirations with help of quotes printed in the sleeve booklets of their releases, phrases projected on stage during concerts and slogans spray-painted on their clothes. Combined with these references, Manic Street Preachers lyrics constitute a network of links between phenomena as diverse as consumption culture, the Holocaust, The Clash, Situationism, self-harm, Berlin, Russian avant-garde painters, late capitalism, David Bowie, cultural fascinations with serial killers, Welsh poetry, fascist and communist dictators and the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche. In this way, the band have carved out their own position in the realm of popular music, encouraging listeners to critically reflect on the political, social, religious and economic structures that shape our lives and give our existence meaning. vii

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This is not to say that their music, primarily written by singer and guitarist James Dean Bradfield and drummer Sean Moore, is unimportant. Manic Street Preachers releases are defined by diverse musical styles, ranging from aggressive punk rock to acoustic guitar ballads, and from bleak postpunk to anthemic, commercial stadium rock. What made and still makes the band stand apart for me, however, is the way in which this music is combined with lyrics that constitute a critical prism, fragmenting, for example, the complexities of modern life or the history of Europe with countless references to both ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. It is this aspect on which I will focus on this book. By doing this, I will address a more general issue: the ability of popular music to formulate social and political critique. I will do this by confronting Manic Street Preachers with an author to whom they themselves, surprisingly, have never referred in their lyrics or artwork: Theodor W.  Adorno. In the works of this German philosopher and cultural critic, we find an attempt to analyse, understand, explain and grasp the problematic history of Europe and to criticise phenomena like totalitarianism, consumption culture and late capitalism as well. Whereas Manic Street Preachers shape this attempt with help of the methods available to them within the realm of popular music—lyrics, musical compositions, interviews, album sleeves, video-clips, clothes, body art and more—Adorno uses the methods prevalent in the realm philosophy. He uses words that, with help of references to philosophers and sociologists like Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Simmel or Weber, aim to diagnose and criticise cultural, political, economic and aesthetic developments, as well as theoretical ideas and concepts. The fact that Adorno and Manic Street Preachers are embedded in different realms and use different methods sets them apart, especially since Adorno himself was sceptical about the ability to formulate critique within the realm of popular music and would disagree with (most of ) the claims I will be making. In this book, however, I will use this tension to show that Adorno’s ideas about critique, art and modernity form a unique framework that can still be used to foreground the critical aspects of certain popular music groups. Whereas Adorno devoted lengthy books to single composers like Wagner and Mahler, and to the differences between

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Schoenberg and Stravinsky, this means that this book will adopt a similar exclusive focus and mainly analyse one band: Manic Street Preachers. What Adorno and Manic Street Preachers have in common, I will show, is that both aim to problematise the social and cultural contexts in which they find themselves, confronting their readers or listeners with radically critical perspectives that explore the limits of moral thought, of historical frameworks and even of meaning itself. These perspectives often refuse to be resolved in a catharsis or to be reduced to one essential statement, are dark, devoid of humour, and offer a much less positive or hopeful account of the emancipatory potential of art, as well as of social change in the future, than some of the works of Adorno’s fellow Frankfurt School authors like Herbert Marcuse or Walter Benjamin do. Both Adorno and Manic Street Preachers, furthermore, present deeply European perspectives: they are concerned mainly with the problematic aspects of European history and often criticise many aspects of North-American culture and politics. Both, I will also argue, are characterised by a sensibility that is modernist in nature, often problematising the, in their views, corroding and fragmenting influence of modernisation processes, and resisting those aesthetic and theoretical positions that, I will argue in this book, are often grouped together under the notion of ‘postmodernism’. Another aspect that Adorno and Manic Street Preachers share is that both, in their attempts to develop these critical perspectives, frequently break through the boundaries of their respective disciplines. Manic Street Preachers release popular music that refers to aesthetic and intellectual phenomena from ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, mainly outside of the discipline of (popular) music. Their releases mention Sylvia Plath and Taxi Driver, Yukio Mishima and Judge Dredd, Solomon Northup and The Medusa Touch, often making it easier, for example, to draw parallels between their works and the literary stories of Hubert Selby Jr, than between their albums and those released by other popular musicians. Adorno, in turn, combines his highly theoretical writings on philosophers like Kant and Hegel with sociological explorations of fascism, as well as with essayistic, almost literary and musical analyses of the compositions of Arthur Schoenberg and the writings of Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett. Furthermore, both entwine their critical analyses with intimate explorations of the subjective realm. Manic Street

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Preachers do this in lyrics and musical compositions that are concerned with experiences of loss, depression, addiction, despair and self-harm; experiences that gained a disturbing gravitas by the psychological state of their guitarist and songwriter Richey Edwards, who disappeared in 1995 and was never seen or found again. Adorno does this in his collection of both highly personal and theoretical reflections on existence under National Socialism and late capitalism: 1951’s Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. With this book, I hope to show that combining the works of a band and a philosopher who seem to be vastly different but do have aspects in common can result in a fruitful exploration of, in this case, the critical dimensions of popular music. I aim to contribute to a growing discourse in which popular music is combined with philosophical ideas, such as Alison Stone’s The Value of Popular Music (2016), Jim Vernon’s Hip Hop, Hegel, and the Art of Emancipation (2018) and Stan Erraught’s On Music, Value and Utopia: Nostalgia for an Age Yet to Come? (2018). Furthermore, I will not only focus on Adorno, but also refer to philosophers and cultural critics as diverse as Guy Debord, Friedrich Nietzsche, Andreas Huyssen and Mark Fisher. I want to thank my family for their support, especially my parents, Adri and Hanneke. My greatest thanks go to my partner, Barez, who continuously encouraged me to write this book. Lastly, I want to thank my friends, especially Guido and Thijs, with whom I have been able to share my passion for popular music and popular culture since the age of thirteen, when we started exchanging cassette tapes, talking about bands and visiting concerts. This book is a result of the passion for music that we developed during those early years in Utrecht. Utrecht, The Netherlands

Mathijs Peters

Contents

1 Making Music Redundant  1 Introduction   1 Music and Lyrics   2 Affectivity and Performativity   5 Defining Popular Music   9 Lyrics and the Status of Popular Music   11 Baby and Bathwater   13 Critique  14 ‘A Design for Life’   17 Auteur Theory  20 ‘Faster’  22 Introducing the Band   23 Why Manic Street Preachers?   25 Approach  29 Structure and Content   31 2 An Exclusive Language 41 Introduction  41 Questioning an Entire Culture   42 Autonomy and Reflection   44 Nine Building Blocks   46 xi

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Multitextuality and Intertextuality   48 Intratextuality  52 Repetition and Unoriginality   54 Aims and Intentions   55 Question Everything  56 Gang of Four and Scritti Politti   60 Popular Modernism  62 Dream Pop and Madchester   68 After Uniqueness  70 Three Bands  72 Critical Lyrics  74 Conclusion  77 3 The Windowless Monad 83 Introduction  83 Modernity  86 Embodiment and Modernity   87 The Windowless Monad  89 Internal Freedom  94 Adorno’s Paradoxes  96 Embodiment and Art   99 Atoms with Windows  101 Arguments Against Popular Music  103 Critical Popular Music  106 Responses 109 Industry 111 Identity, Culture and Representation  113 Form 117 Embodiment and Popular Music  122 Adornian Feedback  125 Why Adorno?  130 Munchausen 133 The Critical Model  136 Conclusion 138

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4 Détournement, Subjectivity and Popular Modernism: Generation Terrorists, Gold Against the Soul and The Holy Bible147 Introduction 147 Postmodernity and Critique  148 Situationism 151 Artistic Manifestations of Détournement  153 Early Releases  155 Pastiches of Punk  158 ‘Motown Junk’  161 Glamrock as a Trojan Horse  165 The Lyrics of Generation Terrorists 170 The Failure of the First Critical Model  173 ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’  176 Gold Against the Soul: A Subjective Turn  179 The Splinter in Your Eye  181 The Holy Bible 185 Britpop 187 Post-Post-Punk 190 Personas, Covers and Sleeves  191 Verbal Space  195 Purity, Religion and the Abject  198 Abjection and Modernism  201 The Holy Bible’s Lyrics  205 Exploitation 206 Corporeality 207 Misanthropy 210 Hiroshima and the Holocaust  215 A Dark Mirror  218 Conclusion 220 5 Embodiment and Self-Overcoming: Everything Must Go, ‘Judge Yr’self ’ and Journal for Plague Lovers233 Introduction 233 Being One’s Truth  235

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Embodiment and Critique  237 Corporeality and the Fourth Critical Model  239 Embodiment, Personas and Popular Music  240 Three Sides of Truthfulness  244 The Vulnerability of a Longing for Truth  248 Truth as a Militant Ideal  252 Modernism and Abjection  255 Disciplining the Body  257 Truthfulness as Self-Destruction  259 A Return to The Holy Bible 261 The Lyrics of Journal for Plague Lovers 264 Semiotic and Symbolic  265 Mental Health Clinics  267 Christianity 267 Suffering 269 Self-Overcoming 270 ‘Bag Lady’  271 Conclusion 273 6 Marxist Specters and Alternative Futures: Everything Must Go, This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours, Know Your Enemy and Lifeblood281 Introduction 281 The End of History and Adorno’s Paradox  283 Critique and Spectrality  285 Mourning 288 Spectrality and Popular Music  290 Between Hauntological and Left Melancholy  292 Britpop and the End of History  294 History and Melancholy  297 Stuck in a Sepia Film  299 A Revival of Modernism  301 Labour and Liberation  302 ‘If I Can Shoot Rabbits, I Can Shoot Fascists’  304 Memory Becoming Pain  309 Masses Against Classes  311

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Postmodern Inertia  317 Repelling Ghosts  318 Conclusion 323 7 Locality and Internationality: Rewind the Film and Futurology333 Introduction 333 Sincerity 335 References 337 Digimodernism 339 Complex Seeing  346 Manic Street Preachers and Wales  350 Rewind the Film 356 Futurology 361 Internationality 363 Late Work  367 Conclusion 369 8 Conclusion375 Libraries and Power  375 Semiotic and Symbolic  377 Unwelcome Guerrillas and Crackpot Messiahs  381 Despair and Hope  383 Working Through the Past  386 Discography389 Filmography395 Bibliography399 Index421

1 Making Music Redundant

Introduction ‘Personally I just want to make music redundant… All we wanted when we were young was a band who spoke about political issues and we’ve never had one in our lifetime. It was all just entertainment, love songs, which never changed anything. I want to sing about a culture that says nothing, where you feel like a nobody…’ (qtd. in NME Originals: Manic Street Preachers 2002: 22). So observes Manic Street Preachers’ lyricist and guitarist Richey Edwards, who disappeared in 1995 after the release of the band’s third album, The Holy Bible, never to be seen or found again. Edwards made this statement in the beginning of the group’s existence, during a 1991 conversation with British music journalist Steve Lamacq. Everything that Manic Street Preachers are about, Edwards suggests in this interview, is the message they aim to get across with help of their lyrics; the ‘political issues’ about which they are manically preaching; a message that should result in change. The band’s music, he suggests furthermore, is a vehicle to slip this message into the mainstream; to make the band’s critical lyrics part of the public’s consciousness and to resist a music industry and a popular culture that, in his view, mainly © The Author(s) 2020 M. Peters, Popular Music, Critique and Manic Street Preachers, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43100-6_1

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revolve around uncritical entertainment and superficial sentimentality, propagating naive notions of happiness in a society permeated with dehumanising political and economic structures. Edwards’ statements conflict with many ideas about the importance of lyrics in popular music, especially as formulated in the discipline of popular music studies. Whereas non-academic analyses of this music often tend to focus more on lyrics than on music—the meaning of words, after all, is easier to write about than the meaning of sound, rhythm, melody, tonality or musical structure—many contemporary academic analyses frequently criticise this approach for ignoring that which makes popular music into music. In this introductory chapter, I want to focus on these ideas and discuss several aspects of popular music in general. I will conclude with an overview of the content of the following chapters. By doing this, I will sketch the contours of the main arguments that I will eventually develop in this book, in which I confront the releases of Manic Street Preachers with several observations developed by the German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno. This will enable me to use these releases as a lens to explore the ability of popular music to formulate social, political and cultural critique, mainly through lyrics.

Music and Lyrics Most of the ideas about the relationship between lyrics and music, as formulated within the discipline of popular music studies, revolve around the claim that one cannot and should not separate words from music, since song lyrics are entwined with—and most of the time secondary to—the musical aspects of the artwork that is the song as a whole. Simon Frith, for example, one of the founders of this discipline, emphasises the performative elements of song lyrics, criticising the ideas that lyrics would ‘communicate’ a specific message to listeners or that we can read them as poetry (Frith 2007). Their meaning, Frith observes, does not so much revolve around what these lyrics mean when written down, but with the ways in which they sound and work with the music when they are performed and sung: ‘A song is always a performance and song words are always spoken out  – vehicles for the voice. The voice can also use

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nonverbal devices to make its points – accents, sighs, emphases, hesitations, changes of tone. Song words, in short, work as speech, as structures of sound that are direct signs of emotion and marks of character; songs are more like plays than poems’ (qtd. in Christgau 2014: xiii–xiv; see also Shuker 1994: 100–107).1 In his analysis of political forms of protest music, John Street makes similar observations about the meaning of political songs, arguing that ‘it would be a mistake … to see the words, at least as they appear on the sleeve, as conveying the (political) meaning of the song. Not only are they heard in the context of the other aspects of the song (the beat, the production, etc.), they are also heard through the tone of voice and inflections of the singer. A song is more than its words’ (2014: 743; see also Street 1986: 2). Reflecting specifically on the genre of rock, Theodore Gracyk famously took these observations one step further and concluded that in this type of music ‘most lyrics don’t matter very much’ (1996: 63).2 In Alison Stone’s impressive The Value of Popular Music: An Approach from Post-Kantian Aesthetics, to which I will return frequently in this book, we find a recent and comprehensive defence of this approach to song lyrics. Stone takes over Julia Kristeva’s distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic elements of language. Within Kristeva’s post-­ Freudian analysis of the psychosexual development of the self, the ‘semiotic’ refers to the linguistic rhythms and sounds that constitute embodied forms of meaning for the young child (Kristeva 1994: 25–30; Stone 2016: xxi). It refers, for example, to the feelings of connectedness and love that accompany the soothing experience of listening to the sound of one’s mother’s voice as a baby. The symbolic elements of words, on the other hand, concern the ideas that these words communicate; they concern their content. According to Kristeva, these elements become important when the child learns the conceptual meaning of a language. She then begins to distinguish herself as a self from other selves, Kristeva argues: she starts giving a specific meaning to herself and the objects around her, shaped and structured in and through the language and the words she is learning. Kristeva concludes that the meaning of language is constituted both by the semiotic and symbolic elements of words: by their sound—how they are pronounced, work together rhythmically, and

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resonate with our bodies as affective entities—and by their content—that which they conceptually communicate (Kristeva 1994: 26–7). Using Kristeva’s distinction, Alison Stone argues that the meaning of popular music is primarily constituted by the semiotic elements of music and lyrics: popular music, she observes, generates meaning through its specific organisation of pitch, rhythm, melody, bass, sound, dynamics and more. These aspects of a song address what Stone calls ‘the intelligence of our bodies’ (2016: xx – I return to this idea in Chap. 3) and resonate with the experiences we had when we grew up as young children and responded with our bodies to sounds (2016: xxi). She follows Kristeva herself, who argues that music is a ‘nonverbal signifying system’ that is ‘constructed exclusively on the basis of the semiotic’ (Kristeva 1994: 24). Analysing the role played by song lyrics in the meaning of popular music, Stone therefore criticises Gracyk’s above-mentioned claim that in rock music lyrics do not matter very much. She does agree, however, that song lyrics do not primarily communicate a message to listeners on a symbolic level. Instead, she argues that Gracyk overlooks the fact that lyrics matter on a semiotic level as they are sung (Stone 2016: 231). This does not mean, however, that she completely dismisses the symbolic meaning of popular music lyrics, which follow the conventions of everyday language, in her view, and should therefore—following Frith’s above-­ mentioned ideas—be approached as speech (Stone 2016: 233–5; see also Middleton 1990: 226). Still Stone argues that it is not the symbolic dimension of lyrics that plays a primary role in the song’s meaning as a whole. Stone puts this into words as follows, reflecting on the ways in which lyrics are generally approached within popular music studies: Usually the content of lyrics is either treated as unimportant compared to the sounds of the words and music or, when lyrical content is given importance, this is because it is used to articulate meanings already embodied in the music and in the words qua sounds. Either way, explicit meaning is treated as secondary to semiotic meaning… (Stone 2016: xxi)

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What is mainly important about the meaning of lyrics, Stone concludes in other words, is how they rhyme, how they sound when they are sung, and how they work together with the rhythm, melody and other musical aspects of the song (Stone 2016: xxii). A clear illustration of this observation is formed by lyrics that border on symbolic meaninglessness. Astor and Negus, for example, discuss Kurt Cobain’s often indecipherable lyrics in this context and link them to avant-garde poetry (2014: 203–5), an artform that Kristeva praises for foregrounding semiotic elements of language like sound and rhythm.3 In many Nirvana songs, we indeed hear Cobain screaming and singing words that mainly seem to be put together because they sound good, because they rhyme and work with the rhythm and melody of the music as they are sung in his typical raw, raspy and sneering voice. The message these lyrics communicate on a symbolic level is rather indecipherable or even non-existent. Cobain himself collaborated with William S. Burroughs (on The “Priest” They Called Him) and it could be argued that the latter’s cut-up technique influenced the writing of Nirvana lyrics, making the semiotic break through the structure of the symbolic and through the hold that the symbolic order might have on our lives and selves.4

Affectivity and Performativity In the following, I want to explore these arguments more systematically. It is again important to notice, first of all, that even though it might be possible to approach Cobain’s lyrics as avant-garde poetry, these arguments do not imply that we can sever these lyrics from the specific way in which Cobain sings them; that we can grasp their meaning as we read them from a page, like we often do with poetry. Most of the arguments regarding the unimportant or, put less drastically, secondary role played by the symbolic and conceptual elements of lyrics in popular music, therefore not only target the idea that we should or that we even can read and interpret lyrics of popular songs as primarily communicating a conceptual message to the listener, but also the idea that we can or should approach them as poems that we can read from a page, disconnected

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from the music of which they form part and from the particular way in which they are sung by a particular singer (Astor and Negus 2014: 195). This is a strong argument: the observation that lyrics are always part of a song implies that the semiotic meaning of popular music lyrics is inherently entwined with the particular song as a whole. It means, as described above, that the meaning of lyrics revolves around a specific employment of sound (Walser 2003: 21–2). Stone, for example, shows in an analysis of the song ‘Orgasm Addict’ by English punk band Buzzcocks (on Singles Going Steady), how the two first lines of the song’s lyrics contain the words ‘kicks’ and ‘sticks’ on specific moments in the musical structure of which they form part. Not only do these words rhyme and emphasise each other, they also sound harsh and embody the rawness of punk through the specific ways in which singer Pete Shelley pronounces them (Stone 2016: 232).5 Furthermore, the words fit within the musical composition as a whole, working together with the music, following its constraints and emphasising that which the music already means, according to Stone. Another convincing aspect of the argument against separating lyrics from music revolves around three ways in which different aspects of corporeality and of our existence as embodied selves play a constitutive role within popular music: concerning the embodiment of the musician, of the listener, and the interplay between the two. The first is based on the above-mentioned observation that the meaning of popular songs is constituted differently than the meaning of a text or a poem that we read from a page, since these lyrics are sung and played, which means that they are tied to the specific corporeality of the musician, his voice, bodily movements, and even his specific bodily constitution on the day of the recording or on the day of a concert (Frith 2007: 97–8).6 In his essay ‘The Grain of the Voice’, Roland Barthes foregrounds similar aspects of music and embodiment (and, more generally, art and corporeality) by defining the ‘grain’ of music as ‘the body in the voice as it sings’ (1990: 254). Secondly, the experience of listening to music is tied to the corporeality of the listener. Songs, Richard Middleton describes for example, form an ‘invitation to map, trace, fill out, the patterns of movement offered by [their] rhythmic structure and texture’ (1990: 251), often constituting the pleasure and fun that most people have when listening to music.

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Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological analyses form the basis of many of these ideas. In Phenomenology of Perception, for example, the French philosopher stresses the importance of the embodied experience of listening to a sonata as follows: ‘The musical meaning of a sonata is inseparable from the sounds which are its vehicle: before we have heard it no analysis enables us to anticipate it; once the performance is over, we shall, in our intellectual analyses of the music, be unable to do anything but carry ourselves back to the moment of experiencing it’ (2002: 212).7 In a fascinating study, furthermore, Michael Bull analyses how listening to a personal stereo is tied to the individual’s existence in modern urban life.8 Often, Bull observes, we pick out specific songs to structure and shape our experience of the environment in which we are embedded as feeling and perceiving beings (2000).9 Again, the body and the emotional, sensual, sentimental and affective aspects of experience play constitutive roles in this analysis (see also Hennion 2014: 167–8). Simon Frith observes, furthermore, that listening to music is itself a performative and corporeal act, which suggests that when we play a record for ourselves, we ‘perform’ this music through evaluative and embodied processes that are activated while we listen (see Frith 1996: 203–25). Another strong analysis of the links between music and embodiment can be found in Tia DeNora’s Music and Everyday Life, which revolves around the idea that music embeds us in the world through ‘regularized relationships between tensions and resolutions, sounds and silences … and rhythmic arrangements over time that afford expectancy’ (2004: 85). Even though DeNora does not mention Kristeva’s notion of the semiotic, she refers to feelings of affective soothingness that are similar to those that the Hungarian-French philosopher links to our development as children, experienced before we learned the symbolic elements of words. In another work, DeNora analyses the different ways in which music may resonate with our bodies: through conventional and recognisable meanings (keys, patterns, styles), through the ways in which music ‘moves through time’ and shapes our experience of temporality, through the expectancies it creates because of built-up harmonies, through its non-representational structuring of feelings, and through the ways in which brief aspects or moments in a musical composition may suddenly touch us (2003: 103–4).

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Thirdly, popular music constitutes a specific relationship between musician and listener in which our existence as embodied selves, again, plays a crucial role. Popular music, after all, is about performance and performativity: during concerts, for example, it is acted out through ritualised and repeated performative gestures to which audiences respond and influence the musician(s) in turn.10 Antoine Hennion puts this observation into words as follows: ‘Paying attention to living music and surrendering to it induces the audience into a sort of movement of soul and body, or self-­projection, and this in turn heightens the performer’s sensitivity to the reality of the piece of music as performance, gesture produced by another body’ (2014: 173).11 Philip Auslander (2004) highlights yet another important aspect of the interplay between popular music and audiences; he focuses on the visual aspects of musical performances and analyses the ways in which musicians act out their music on stage and interact with the audience, often through the creation of musical ‘personas’. He observes, for example, how glamrock foregrounds the performative aspects of gender, using David Bowie’s persona Ziggy Stardust as an example (see also Oakes 2009: 229; Moore 2012: 179–214). Auslander also shows that audiences respond to the performative elements of popular music in performative manners, constituting links between themselves and the music and musicians they listen to. They do this not only by dancing or moving in ways that are specific to particular genres of music (head-banging, moshing, popping, copying the movements of the musicians), but also by ‘embodying’ and ‘acting out’ the genre-specific dimensions of what it means to be a fan of a particular type of music, or of what it means to idolise the persona created by a musician. This can be done with help of clothes, vocal expressions, fan-clubs, magazines and more (see Auslander 2004). Nathan Wiseman-Trowse adds, with help of references to Frith, Judith Butler and Jacques Derrida, that popular music songs can also ‘perform social class’, acting out discursively shaped aspects of class identity in ways that audiences recognise and to which they respond performatively as well, constituting a social identity (2008: 63–5).

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Defining Popular Music The above-mentioned characteristics—sound, rhythm, melody, performance, performativity, corporeal experience, affectivity and embodiment—also play important roles in other forms of music and, more generally, in other forms of art.12 Before continuing with an analysis of popular music and lyrics, I therefore want to briefly reflect on the definition of ‘popular music’ itself. As Hesmondhalgh and Negus observe, ‘popular music’ is notoriously difficult to pin down (2002: 3–4), with John Street stating that ‘only sweeping generalisations can work’ (1986: 4). Both the concepts of ‘music’ and of ‘popular’, after all, have different meanings in different social, cultural and historical contexts and are constantly challenged by artists and movements that resist that which is considered ‘popular’ and that which is considered ‘music’.13 This problematises the idea that we may find a definition or essence of this type of music. A helpful distinction is sometimes made between ‘art music’ and ‘popular music’, suggesting that the latter form of music may be characterised as ‘non-elite’ and ‘aimed at the urban masses in industrial, modern, commercial contexts’ (Stone 2016: xxx). Popular music, furthermore, is often defined by its entwinement with technology, which embeds it in the market, contributes to its availability and accessibility, and to its democratisation. Technological developments, after all, are crucial in constituting the music’s popularity and shaping its presence and form: from recording techniques, concerts, radio, television and the internet to the ability to reproduce and sell music in the forms of sheet music, gramophone records, cassette tapes, CD’s and digital formats as commodities on the market (Frith 2014: 10–11; DeNora 2003: 98). The latter formats, furthermore, have also introduced the ability for listeners to copy music and distribute it themselves. Even though these observations might enable us to sketch the contours of ‘popular music’, what also makes it difficult to arrive at a precise definition of this ‘slippery concept’ (Frith 2014: 305) is that it refers to a type of music characterised by fragmentation. Within the realm of ‘popular music’, distinctions are made between styles like ‘pop’, ‘rock’ and ‘folk’, often based on the importance attributed to a band’s ability to play live,

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on a band’s type of audience or on their supposed ‘authenticity’ (Frith 1978: 200–202; Frith 2007: 218–19; Street 1986: 5,9; Erraught 2018: 58; Wiseman-Trowse 2008: 32–61). The latter two styles are frequently understood and presented by musicians, audiences and the record industry as more ‘authentic’ or ‘real’ than ‘pop music’, a distinction that often results in a rejection of pop as ‘commercialised’ and therefore ‘standardised’, ‘fake’ or ‘mere entertainment’ (Barker and Taylor 2002), an approach that echoes through Edwards’ above-cited statements as well. These observations on ‘authenticity’, in turn, cannot be severed from the important role they play in subcultural and countercultural movements that present themselves as distinct from the music that those belonging to these movements consider ‘mainstream’, ‘commercial’ or ‘populist’.14 Another aspect of popular music that makes it difficult to arrive at a concise definition is its hybrid or ‘multi-textual’ (Born 1995: 16–28) character: not only do most songs belonging to this type of music include both lyrics and music, the meaning of releases within this art form is also constituted with help of album sleeves, liner notes, video-clips, concerts, interviews on radio, television, the internet, social media and in magazines. These aspects link it to other cultural dimensions like film, video art, design and fashion. Furthermore, its wide availability and its entwinement with other aspects of our lives makes popular music play an important role in the construction of identities, of representations of generations—for example by shaping specific notions of ‘youthfulness’ and ‘youth culture’ (see Eisentraut 2013: 75)—and, as mentioned above, of subcultures and countercultures. This means that popular music, on different levels and in different ways, is entwined with social, cultural and economic structures as well as with mass and consumption culture. Eisentraut describes popular music therefore as part of a ‘postmodern subculturalism in flux’ (2013: 22), in which references, links, connections and meanings are rapidly constructed and deconstructed between, in and through different dimensions of social, economic and cultural life. Again, this not only means that the term ‘popular music’ refers to a wide range of musicians, bands, songs and styles that generate their own meanings in opposition to other musicians, bands, songs and styles that still fall under the same conceptual umbrella of ‘popular music’. It also means that the boundaries between popular music and other art forms

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and social dimensions are difficult to determine. Following Hesmondhalgh and Negus, I will therefore refrain from providing a concise definition of this concept. Instead, this book is based on the idea that bands that were and are commercially successful, as well as musicians who operate on the fringes of popular culture and adopt an underground, experimental, DIY or avant-garde approach to music—ranging from Manic Street Preachers to bIG⋆fLAME to Frank Zappa, and from Scritti Politti to Throbbing Gristle to Gang of Four—show that the boundaries between different ‘genres’, as well as between ‘music’ and ‘noise’ and between ‘popular’ and ‘unpopular’, ‘anti-popular’ or ‘populist’, are continually destabilised and challenged by musicians on different levels, constituting a reciprocal and often antagonistic relationship with the cultural and social discourses in which these terms are shaped.

Lyrics and the Status of Popular Music These observations on the difficulty of defining the concept of ‘popular music’ play an important role in the above-mentioned debate on song lyrics. This is the case because many authors who claim that the symbolic elements of lyrics only play a secondary role in the overall meaning of popular songs and that the semiotic elements of lyrics can only be understood as they are sung (to use Kristeva’s terminology again) attempt to show that there is something unique, valuable and meaningful about popular music that makes it into an autonomous, independent and unique art form. In this way, they aim to provide arguments against the idea that popular music, as a hybrid and fragmented phenomenon embedded in mass and consumption culture, would be unable to carve out its own position, like the art forms of literature, painting or poetry would do. This rejection of popular music as an autonomous art form is often entwined with cultural critique, resulting in the extreme claim—in Chap. 3, we will see that Adorno defends a similar idea—that popular music is ‘just’ a standardised consumption product and therefore not worthy of the academic scrutiny paid to ‘serious’ music created by the likes of Beethoven, György Kurtág, La Monte Young, John Cage or Arvo Pärt.15 Alison Stone, for example, cites a characteristic statement on pop music by

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music journalist Paul Morley, which summarises this view in its most culturally pessimistic form: ‘Pop music is now a form of skilfully engineered product design, the performers little but entertainment goods … whose ultimate job is to market phones, tablets, consoles, films, brands, not express ideas’ (qtd. in in Stone 2016: 10—I return to arguments like these in Chap. 3). These ideas seem to be substantiated by the observation that several Manic Street Preachers songs were used in commercials: the melody of the anti-consumerist song ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’, for example, was included in advertisements for T-Mobile; their song-title ‘Stay Beautiful’ turned up in a Renault car commercial; and the song ‘Australia’ was used for a commercial of the Australian Tourist Board (see Price 1999: 229). Defences of the autonomous and unique status of popular music as an art form are often entwined with the argument that lyrics only play a secondary role in the meaning of this music as they form part of the semiotic elements of the song as a whole, because one way to ‘save’ popular music from the diagnosis that it would ‘simply’ be a standardised consumption product is to argue that at least the lyrics of certain songs may be ‘artistic’, well-constructed or ‘intellectual’ (‘express ideas’), and would provide this music with its own status.16 However, such an approach eventually only undermines the idea that popular music is an autonomous and unique art form that should be taken seriously on its own terms, because it dismisses almost all of its above-described characteristics and suggests that only those aspects that popular music shares with already established and respected art forms like poetry or literature might save it from being a superficial consumption product.17 It is therefore that the aim to protect popular music against its most radical criticisers frequently results in an approach that downplays the role of the symbolic elements of lyrics and emphasises those aspects that would provide this music with an autonomous and unique status and character: the distinctive way in which it assembles semiotic aspects like rhythm, melody, bass, voice and tone into a song in which each element plays a necessary part; a part that can only be appreciated as part of the song as one semiotic whole, not apart from it.18 I return to this argument in Chap. 3.

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Baby and Bathwater I agree with many of these arguments as they are developed within the discipline of popular music studies; I believe it is not convincing to argue against the observation that the embodied and affective dimensions of popular music are crucial for their reception, understanding and meaning. But I also think that in some cases popular music itself problematises this issue; a problematisation that is embodied by Edwards’ above-cited statements. Edwards, after all, is a musician who forms part of the realm of popular music and still denounces the biggest part of this same type of music as ‘just entertainment’, even to the point of almost rejecting the art form altogether by claiming that he wants to ‘make music redundant’ and explicitly formulate a critical message with help of the symbolic content of his lyrics. Of course, it could be argued that Edwards simply contradicts himself because the moment one sets lyrics to music and releases the resulting songs within the realm of popular music, the meaning that these lyrics have as they are written on a page is overshadowed by the specific way in which they are sung and by the semiotic aspects of the song as a piece of music. Furthermore, it could be argued that Edwards only defends these claims to carve out the position of Manic Street Preachers in the popular music landscape, giving his band an elitist and critical image, embracing notions of ‘authenticity’ and ‘realness’ without, essentially, doing anything different from other musicians making popular music. The analyses that I will develop in this book will be based on the idea that this way of approaching Edwards’ claims is not entirely convincing, since it does not take into account the specific character of the releases of a band like Manic Street Preachers. This approach, I want to argue, does not take these releases seriously as artworks that want to do something in a very specific manner. In the case of analyses of a band like Manic Street Preachers, arguments revolving around the secondary role played by the symbolic elements of lyrics, make the pendulum swing back too far towards an emphasis on the affective, corporeal and semiotic dimensions of popular music. By doing this, these arguments throw the baby (the observation that some bands write songs in which symbolic elements of lyrics play an important role as well) out with the bathwater (the unconvincing idea that in popular music only lyrics really matter and/or ‘save’ this music from being a mere consumption product).

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Critique Let me focus on that which Manic Street Preachers releases, in my view, try to do with help of both the semiotic and the symbolic elements of their music and lyrics; an aim that is ignored by approaches that mainly focus on the semiotic elements of popular music and therefore mainly on the semiotic elements of lyrics as they are sung. This aim concerns the explicit formulation of forms of political, social and cultural critique and can be illustrated with help of that which Edwards, in the interview cited above, observes about the content of most popular music lyrics in his lifetime. In a helpful passage on this issue, which I want to quote in its entirety, Stone provides the following overview of analyses of the content of lyrics: Not surprisingly, content analysts have found that most lyrics deal with romantic relationships, at least in the chart hits on which these analysts tend to concentrate. Thomas Scheff, for example, estimates that since 1930 a steady 75 % of lyrics has concerned romance. Nonetheless, over time notable shifts have occurred in these broadly romance-centred lyrics. James Carey found that lyrics had changed since the 1950s in ways that mirrored changes in gender relations, more liberal attitudes towards sex, and greater regard for individual autonomy. Scheff, less favourably, takes changes in lyrics to reflect growing social atomisation, with lyrics becoming increasingly preoccupied with the feelings of single individuals rather than with loving relationships. (2016: 224)19

Stone eventually moves away from this concern with lyrical content, since it ignores her claim that the semiotic and musical aspects of songs play a more important role in their meaning. Edwards, however, encourages us to reflect on the observation that the content of most popular music lyrics does matter, which implies that if most of these lyrics revolve around ‘true’ love or romantic relationships, then they, in his view, play an escapist role and implicitly accept a social and political context that, according to him, should be rejected.20 To a certain extent, however, I believe that arguments like Edwards’ are based on an overly narrow understanding of the critical aspects of the

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content of lyrics. Jason Toynbee writes, for example, that even though many songs about love do consolidate the hegemony of capitalism and middle-class morality, and might even prepare individuals for consumer society by specifically targeting and shaping their feelings and emotions, it should also be observed that they emphasise what he calls a ‘cosmopolitan urbanity’ that might undermine more conservative approaches to love or relationships (2002: 152). More generally, Frith argues from a sociological point of view that popular songs always matter in specific ways to specific audiences, and that love songs often present ideal notions of romanticism to audiences that might make them reflect in a critical way on their everyday lives (1978: 204). This observation is strengthened by Stone’s above-cited idea that historical and social changes are always mirrored by the changing descriptions of romantic love in the realm of popular music. I agree with Frith and Toynbee that many popular music songs do have these critical dimensions and that different songs always matter in different ways to different people. Even more generally, I believe that the idea that popular music should be critical or express social and political perspectives—an idea that Gracyk characterises as ‘the social relevance thesis’ (2007: 46–51)—is not fruitful either, since it reduces this music too simplistically to a social function and overlooks its many other aspects. I therefore also reject the argument that music is necessarily ‘better’ or more ‘valuable’ if it adopts such critical perspectives, as Edwards seems to suggest (I will discuss these arguments about critique and popular music more comprehensively in Chap. 3). My point, however, is different: I want to argue that even if we do not agree with Edwards’ rejection of most popular music, the observation that this rejection returns within most Manic Street Preachers releases means that these releases force us to approach them in a specific way. And this ‘specific way’ revolves, I will argue, (1) around taking the band’s lyrics seriously not only on a semiotic but also on a symbolic level; (2) around understanding that these levels both express a critical message about the cultural, political, social, economic and religious contexts in which they come about; and (3) around analysing the way in which this results in the constitution of different layers of meaning that, within songs, sometimes

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even struggle with each other. As Edwards observes, in his last television interview, about Manic Street Preachers’ music and lyrics: I think we all play in quite a cheap traditional rock format musically. I don’t think there’s any ground-breaking music left at all, anymore. I like a lot of techno, I like a lot of rave, but nothing ever sounds like new to me. I think the words are not that special as regards literature or poetry, because it’s all been done before. But in terms of being in a rock context … My lyrics are not really ‘Baby I love you, Baby I need you’ or ‘Baby come back’ or ‘Baby go away’, which is like 95% of every record in every record shop in the world. … If I wrote lyrics constantly about relationships, I would think I was walking around with a plastic back over my head, ignoring what goes on, pretending things don’t exist. (‘Richey Edwards’ last tv interview part 2’ [video fragment])

Emphasising the idea that his lyrics should not be read as poetry or literature and that they only constitute their specific critical meaning within the realm of popular music and as part of songs, Edwards here still foregrounds the importance of the content of his ‘words’. By doing this, he not only constitutes a schism between his band’s releases and those by others, but also within his own music made by his own band: between what he characterises as their ‘cheap rock format’ on the one hand, and the critical aspects of his lyrics on the other. Between music and words that form part of a composition that does not allow us to ignore the latter or argue that it is determined by the former. Of course, I do not want to reduce the artwork to the artist’s intention by arguing that, simply because Edwards claims that he wants to make music redundant, this is what happens in his music. But I do believe that his observations provide stepping stones to the development of a framework that enables us to highlight specific aspects of, in this case, Manic Street Preachers releases. If we want to take the art that the Welsh band create seriously on this art’s own terms, this suggests, we have to approach it in ways that are shaped by these terms. And in the case of a band like Manic Street Preachers, I want to argue, this means that we cannot ignore the primary role played by lyrics that explicitly formulate political, social and cultural critique. More specifically, this means that we should focus

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on the way in which this band’s releases constitute a balance between the semiotic and the symbolic elements of their lyrics; a balance that refuses to let the latter elements play a secondary role. More generally, by adopting this approach I want to explore the question of how some bands formulate political, social and cultural critique within the realm of popular music, mainly with help of their lyrics.

‘A Design for Life’ I want to briefly discuss an example to illustrate my point and link it to the above-discussed tension between the symbolic and semiotic elements of popular music: the Manic Street Preachers song ‘A Design for Life’ (on their fourth album Everything Must Go). In The Value of Popular Music, Stone analyses this song and emphasises the way in which James Dean Bradfield sings the phrase ‘a design for life’ as follows: ‘Contrary to the usual emphasis in speech, the stresses in this phrase are on ‘a’ and ‘for’, whereas ordinarily one would stress ‘-sign’ and ‘life’. Yet ‘a’ and ‘for’ fall on the metrically accented beats—the first beat of the measures in which they appear’ (Stone 2016: 230).21 She argues that even though this distinguishes the song from most popular songs, in which the placement of stresses mirrors the ways in which we are used to put stresses in ordinary speech, this still does not make these lyrics play a primary role: A key semiotic aspect of the words – the placement of stresses – Is organised so as to highlight the meaningful, semantic aspect of the sentences and not their syntax. There are exceptions – one being ‘A Design for Life’ […] but these stand out as being unusual. And anyway they do not necessarily disprove the rule that emphasising meaningful sentence constituents is desirable, other things being equal – In this case, that rule is overridden by the song’s overarching message that the ‘design’ at issue is hollow and empty, and the unusual placement of the stresses reinforces that meaning. (2016: 235)

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Even though Stone here acknowledges that in some songs the symbolic elements of lyrics are important, she again concludes that the meaning of lyrics is primarily constituted with help of semiotic elements: [W]hen lyrical content is treated as important, this is on the grounds that lyrics can articulate the meanings conveyed in the music. In that case the symbolic is granted importance just inasmuch it draws out connotations conveyed by the music at a semiotic level. Either way the semiotic is given primary importance. (2016: 243)

I disagree. It is impossible to understand the ‘overarching message’ of ‘A Design for Life’ without also paying equal attention to the symbolic elements of its lyrics; without reading these lyrics from the sleeve of the album, thinking about them, reflecting on them and discussing them with others. Of course, the meaning of these lyrics is also constituted with help of the semiotic elements that Stone highlights, but, so my argument goes, only or primarily focusing on these elements makes us ignore crucial aspects of what the song means. If we also focus on its symbolic elements, we see that a more convincing interpretation revolves around the idea that ‘A Design for Life’ does not just characterise the titular design for life as ‘empty and hollow’, an interpretation that, Stone claims, is strengthened by the irregular emphases on ‘a’ and ‘for’. Instead, I want to argue, the song’s lyrics reflect two dimensions of this design. On the one hand, the lyrics express the idea that belonging to the working classes—in this case embedded in a context shaped by the band’s experiences of the miners’ strikes in Wales and the eventual victory of Thatcherism in the 1980’s—determines and designs one’s life in an optimistic and empowering way. Its opening lines, for example, refer to the Marxist notion of realising oneself through work, as well as to the libraries that were set up by miners’ communities in Wales to educate the working classes: ‘Libraries gave us power / Then work came and made us free’.22 On the other hand, the lyrics also reflect the critical observation that forming part of the working class limits one’s options because this class is subjected to forms of exploitation and repression: ‘What price now for a shallow piece of dignity’. The song then works through different

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experiences of repression by linking them to semi-ironic affirmations of stereotypical representations of working class life: ‘I wish I had a bottle right here in my dirty face / To wear the scars / To show from where I came / We don’t talk about love / We only want to get drunk’. I will return to this song in Chap. 6 and the Conclusion, but I believe that this brief analysis shows that it is impossible to decipher the subtle meaning of the song’s lyrics by primarily analysing their semiotic elements, such as their (poetic) form or the specific way in which Bradfield sings them: only if we also approach these lyrics on a symbolic level, we reach a full understanding of what the song is trying to communicate to us, a ‘what’ that is strengthened by the song’s music and the different semiotic elements of its lyrics. Again, I want to stress that this does not mean that I want to claim that this is the case with all popular music songs or that all popular music bands should write these kinds of lyrics. Again, I also do not want to claim that Manic Street Preachers songs are necessarily ‘better’ than other popular releases because they contain lyrics like these. Instead, my claim is less general and less absolutist: employing a more flexible and complex form of normativity (see Zuidervaart 1990: 74–5), I want to argue that the meaning of certain popular music songs is constituted to a large extent by the symbolic elements of these songs’ lyrics and that we do not do justice to the specific form of these songs, as well as the specifics of the critical message they aim to get across, if we primarily focus on their semiotic elements. Again, this also does not mean that I want to argue that we can ignore these semiotic elements or that they do not play a role in the meaning of Manic Street Preachers songs. It only means that the relationship between the semiotic and the symbolic can be more equal than Stone and other authors suggest. Furthermore, I will argue that the balance between the two can sometimes even shift to the side of the latter, precisely because the semiotic and the symbolic form different layers of meaning that struggle for dominance within the Manic Street Preachers songs that I will discuss. When Manic Street Preachers sing ‘If you tolerate this, then your children will be next’ (on This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours), a phrase taken from a poster encouraging Welsh miners to go to Spain to fight fascism—‘a subtle rallying cry to stand against things you know are inherently wrong’ (Price 1999: 247)—it is impossible to argue that the meaning of these

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lyrics is already part of the music and that the symbolic content of these lyrics merely affirms this meaning. Furthermore, when they release a song called ‘All We Make Is Entertainment’ (on their 2010 album Postcards from a Young Man), then this statement means something on a symbolic level, ironically reflecting on the above-discussed (im)possibility of making critical music in a business, this same song suggests, that mainly revolves around entertainment and consumerism.

Auteur Theory These claims make me disagree—at least partly—with two other arguments. The first is Simon Frith’s observation that we cannot understand popular music as the expression of one person who directly transmits his ideas, through his music and/or lyrics, to the audience. Since popular music is always embedded in an industry, Frith’s argument goes, different people—from the other musicians in a band to recording technicians to sound engineers to record label executives—are responsible for the final product: the songs that are released on the market, some only on an album, others as singles accompanied by video-clips. As John Street observes as well: ‘A single is not a piece of pure art; it is the result of countless choices and compromises, using criteria that mix the aesthetic, the political and the economic’ (1986: 6; see also Frith 1978: 200–202). Music, this argument implies, is the product of different structures as well as of a group of people, many of whom are not the musicians themselves. Frequently, arguments of this kind are directed against the idea that we can use auteur theory, developed within film studies, to argue that a body of music is created by one ‘Auteur’ to whose unifying presence we need to turn to understand and analyse the different albums and songs she released (Frith 1978: 201; Frith 2007: 233).23 The second argument from which I depart is discussed by Dai Griffiths in an analysis of lyrics and popular music. Griffiths observes that one of the reasons why sociologically oriented authors like Simon Frith are wary of focusing on lyrics is that this would imply that we can objectively define the inherent meaning of a song by linking this meaning to the ideas expressed in the content of these lyrics, disconnected, again, from the

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productive, social and cultural contexts in which they come into being (2003: 39). Not only is this meaning shaped by these specific contexts, John Street argues as well, it is also permeated with the emotional and personal aspects of the individual listener’s psyche, concluding: ‘No two people hear a pop song in the same way’ (1986: 6). Even though I partly agree with these observations, again I also believe that it is possible to argue that lyrics sometimes play an equally important role in the meaning of a song without implying that we can find the song’s ‘objective’ meaning or that this meaning completely depends on the individual listener. In this book, I will develop specific and often speculative interpretations of song lyrics with help of philosophical frameworks without arguing that my interpretations are the only correct ones. And although I am sympathetic to Frith’s cynicism regarding the overly romantic notion of the popular musician as an Auteur whose genius unifies the meaning of all of his art 24—he observes, for example, how John Lennon’s lyric-writing was frequently compared to Plato (1978: 201)—this furthermore means that I also think that in some cases this critique, again, throws out the baby with the bathwater by overlooking the important role that lyricists sometimes play in the songs a band write. It is true that these lyrics eventually come to form part of a whole to which many different people have contributed: sound engineer Mike Hedges, for example, played a pivotal role in the sound of the above-­ mentioned ‘A Design for Life’, especially his use of string sections; and the dry postpunk and grunge sound of Manic Street Preachers’ 2009 album Journal for Plague Lovers was constituted for a large part with help of producer Steve Albini, to whom the band deliberately turned to emulate the sound of Nirvana’s In Utero or of 1000 Hurts by Albini’s band Shellac. Still, however, this does not mean that sometimes lyrics do not play a fundamental role in the meaning of songs or even whole albums. In some cases, I will argue, these lyrics were written down by one writer or a pair of writers, whose writing abilities are strong and recognisable, giving these lyrics a unique and individual character that surpasses the form of everyday speech and makes both their semiotic and symbolic elements play equal roles in the song’s meaning. Again, this does not mean that I want to reduce the meaning of these songs to the intention of their author

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or to the writing process during which they came about, but it does mean that I will argue that the lyrics on which I focus in this book are unified by a distinctive form that makes them play a specific role within a popular music landscape that often problematises such a role.

‘Faster’ This latter aspect frequently gives Manic Street Preachers songs, I will argue in this book, a rather alienating dimension precisely because they are embedded in the realm of popular music; a realm in which we often expect music to be mainly about above-described aspects like sound, rhythm, bass and melody; about the semiotic elements of lyrics as they are sung; or around lyrics as ordinary speech. This aspect can be illustrated with help of Manic Street Preachers’ performance of their song ‘Faster’ (on The Holy Bible) on Top of the Pops, in June 1994 (see ‘Manic Street Preachers—Faster (Top Of The Pops 1994)’ [video fragment]). During the performance, singer James Dean Bradfield wore a black balaclava on which white letters spell ‘JAMES’, the other band members were dressed in militaristic clothes and wore communist medals, their speakers were covered with camouflage nets and on the stage two burning torches were placed. The broadcast resulted in a record number of 25,000 complaints, mainly caused by Bradfield’s balaclava, which was associated with the IRA (Price 1999: 126). During the performance, however, the audience and the show’s presenters are dancing enthusiastically to the song, which, although aggressive and militaristic, with Bradfield angrily shouting lyrics into the microphone while taking in bodily postures that remind of The Clash’s Joe Strummer, follows a recognisable rock format that eventually makes it easy to move to its rhythm. I want to argue that it is therefore not this rock format that makes the performance stand out, nor the band’s militaristic or terroristic image: musicians and groups as diverse as The Clash, the Sex Pistols, Duran Duran, Public Enemy, Throbbing Gristle, Madonna, Laibach and Adam and the Ants, after all, already wore militaristic outfits, medals or political symbols long before Manic Street Preachers did this. During their 1980 shows, furthermore, Echo and the

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Bunnymen already used camouflage nets and dry ice to create what music journalist Simon Reynolds characterises as an ‘Apocalypse Now atmosphere’ (2006: 1134) on stage as well. What does make the performance stand out as a Brechtian form of Verfremdung is that the audience is oblivious to the song’s lyrics, dancing happily and smiling into the camera while we hear James Dean Bradfield sing misanthropic and elitist lines like ‘I am stronger than Mensa, Miller and Mailer, I spat out Plath and Pinter’, ‘Life is for the cold made warm’, or ‘So damn easy to cave in, man kills everything’. These lines communicate a radical message to the listener, rejecting life and humanity, and referring to authors, playwrights, poets and the high IQ society Mensa International, that we only manage to decipher after we have listened to the song several times, have become aware of the words that are sung, and have read the lyrics as they are printed in the booklet of The Holy Bible. The moment we have done this, I will argue throughout this book, the different semiotic and symbolic elements of lyrics like these gradually make these lyrics carve out their own position within the song. Then, the lyrics refuse to be ignored, and sometimes even come close to colonising a song’s overall meaning, encouraging critical forms of thought and reflection. I will return to ‘Faster’ in Chap. 4.

Introducing the Band Before providing an overview of the structure of this book and concluding this introductory chapter, I want to discuss one last question: why explore the critical role played by popular music lyrics by focusing specifically on Manic Street Preachers? To be able to answer this question, it is important to provide a brief overview of the rather unique history of the band. They were formed in 1986 as ‘an intellectual working class band making noisy music’25 (Connolly 1998) in the former mining town of Blackwood, South Wales. After going through several early line-up changes, until 1995 the band (often called ‘the Manics’) consisted of lead vocalist and guitarist James Dean Bradfield, his cousin Sean Moore on drums, bassist and occasional singer Nicky Wire (born Nicholas Jones), and guitarist Richey Edwards (born Richard Edwards).26

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Having degrees in politics and political history, Wire and Edwards wrote the lyrics of the band’s songs and designed their records and promotional material, while Bradfield and Moore composed the music. As Simon Reynolds observes, by doing this they copied the ‘drastic compartmentalization of function’ that characterised many postpunk bands of the late 1970s and early 1980s (2011a: 131). This division of labour, I will furthermore argue in this book, was and is crucial for the role that the band’s lyrics play in their music, resulting in music journalist Simon Price’s rather harsh characterisation of the band’s singer as a ‘voice box disembodied from the intellect’ (1999: 99).27 Bradfield himself observed that this division of labour was driven by the idea that ‘there had to be a focal point for the lyrics in the band…’, explaining: ‘we realised there had to be a clarity and purpose of vision, because I think even back then we thought that all good music came from great lyrics’ (qtd. in Cummins 2014: 169). Later in the band’s existence these roles sometimes changed, with Wire writing music and singing on several songs, and Bradfield writing lyrics. As the band observe in the 2015 documentary No Manifesto, however, most Manic Street Preachers songs still come about during a process that starts with Wire writing lyrics, and then proceeds with Bradfield and Moore composing music to these lyrics (Marcus 2015). Even though he could hardly play guitar and only sang backing vocals (the volume of his guitar was often tuned down at concerts and Bradfield recorded almost all guitar parts on their releases), Edwards soon became the ‘frontman’ (qtd. in Connolly 1998) of the band, having a decisive influence on their image and aesthetic: he designed many of the band’s album booklets (often consisting of collages of cultural influences), determined their lyrical direction, and voiced their ideas in interviews. His role was therefore frequently compared to that of Professor Griff, Public Enemy’s controversial ‘minister of information’ (see Price 1999: 17; Connolly 1998). Edwards was also the band’s most complex member. He suffered from severe depression, anorexia and forms of addiction, and frequently mutilated himself, sometimes on stage. Most famously, he carved ‘4 REAL’ in his arm with a razor during the above-mentioned interview with Steve Lamacq. The NME journalist claimed that the band were not sincere, to which Edwards responded by cutting himself, resulting in one of the most disturbing photos in the history of rock (see Price

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1999: 46–56; Thompson 1997: 11–15).28 In February 1995 Edwards disappeared, aged 27. His car was discovered next to the Severn Bridge, a renowned suicide location, but his body has never been found (see Price 1999: 174–192; Jovanovic 2009; Hawys-Roberts and Noakes 2019). In November 2008, Edwards was officially declared ‘presumed dead’. The band continued as a three-piece and broke through to the mainstream with their fourth and fifth albums, entitled Everything Must Go (1996) and This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours (1998), releasing singles that reached number 1 positions in several international charts. Promoting their 2001 album Know Your Enemy, furthermore, Manic Street Preachers played in Cuba, where their concert was attended by Fidel Castro, with whom the band also met (as shown on their 2001 DVD Louder Than War). After Know Your Enemy, the band lost some of their mainstream appeal and has so far released seven more albums: Lifeblood (2004), Send Away the Tigers (2007), Journal for Plague Lovers (2009), Postcards from a Young Man (2010), Rewind the Film (2013), Futurology (2014) and Resistance is Futile (2018). They also released two best-of complications: Forever Delayed (2002) and National Treasures—The Complete Singles (2011), as well as a compilation of B-sides and rarities in 2003: Lipstick Traces (A Secret History of Manic Street Preachers). Furthermore, Manic Street Preachers contributed to several charity albums and collaborated with other musicians and artists, most notably Wire’s brother, Welsh poet and playwright Patrick Jones.29 Lastly, Wire and Bradfield each released a solo-album in 2006 called I Killed the Zeitgeist and The Great Western, respectively, and in 2016 Bradfield wrote the soundtrack to Ben Parker’s film The Chamber.30 In 2020 Bradfield released a second solo-album called Even in Exile, revolving around the Chilean artist and political activist Victor Jara and containing lyrics written by the aforementioned Patrick Jones.

Why Manic Street Preachers? Now that I have briefly discussed the history of the band, I want to return to the question of why I focus on Manic Street Preachers to explore the role of critical popular music lyrics. I will do this with help of ideas developed by French philosopher Roland Barthes. In Camera Lucida, which influenced the Manic Street Preachers song ‘Enola/Alone’ (on Everything

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Must Go), Barthes describes two approaches to photographs: the first one, which he calls studium, lies in line of his lifelong contributions to the realms of cultural analysis and semiology (1982: 26). From this perspective, we analyse photographs by embedding them in their cultural and political contexts, describing how they acquire cultural connotations and reproduce myths and representations of people, countries and political and cultural ideologies, for example. Barthes calls the other approach the punctum of the photograph. This concept can be translated as ‘puncture’ or ‘wound’ and concerns the ways in which specific aspects of a photograph may suddenly touch or affect us as particular persons (Barthes 1982: 26). Barthes describes, for example, how he is overwhelmed by the punctum constituted by certain elements of a photograph of his mother as a young child (1982: 63–73). What makes his analysis helpful in the context of the last part of this chapter is that, in contrast with most academic analyses, Camera Lucida emphasises the deeply personal dimensions of aesthetic experience: the experience of a punctum, after all, is to a large extent tied to one’s specific life, psyche and individual history. The first three of my four answers to the question why I focus on Manic Street Preachers belong to the realm of the studium, the last one to that of the punctum.31 The first is formed by the observation that the band took the idea of being a political and intellectual band to the extreme, mainly inspired, we will see, by groups like Public Enemy, McCarthy and The Clash, with the latter band showing, in Bradfield’s words, that ‘politics can be entertaining’ (qtd. in Marcus 2015). In his review of the band’s Futurology, Simon Price indeed describes the band’s releases as creating ‘a pop-up museum in the mind, sending the listener on a potentially endless exploratory journey, pursuing the pointers and chasing the clues’ (2014). Nicky Wire himself expressed the idea that they understand themselves ‘as transistors, like Stockhausen said’ (qtd. in Barry 2014). The second reason is that Manic Street Preachers’ music is often characterised by a self-reflective level. The band consistently combine the attempt to voice a critical message in their songs with references to a point of view that reflects on the (im)possibility of voicing this same critical message. This gives their lyrics a reflective dimension, to which I will return in the next two chapters.

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A third reason is that a body of literature has gradually been forming around Manic Street Preachers, with some books presenting compelling and extensive analyses of their releases, other studies and fictionalised accounts (which I will not discuss) focusing, sometimes in an overly sensationalist manner, on Edwards’ disappearance. As Simon Price observes in a rather exaggerating manner: ‘No other popular artist of the last quarter-­century has done more to inspire academic investigation’ (in Jones et al. 2017: 9).32 The most influential book written on the band is Price’s own 1999 Everything (A Book About Manic Street Preachers). More recent examples are formed by three publications that are entirely devoted to a Manic Street Preachers album: 2017’s Triptych  – Three Studies of Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible by Rhian E. Jones, Daniel Lukes and Larissa Wodtke, David Evans’ 2019 entry on The Holy Bible in Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series, and Stephen Lee Naish’s 2018 Riffs & Meaning, which discusses the band’s sixth album, Know Your Enemy. Especially Triptych presents an impressive and fruitful analysis of many aspects of the band’s third album, which is approached in the book’s three parts from a political, literary and philosophical angle. Furthermore, several documentaries have recently been released about the band, such as Rebecca Marcus’ 2015 No Manifesto: A Film About Manic Street Preachers, and a number of films by Welsh director Kieran Evans. Examples are 2012’s Culture, Alienation, Boredom and Despair: A Film About ‘Generation Terrorists’, 2016’s Be Pure Be Vigilant Behave (about the band’s The Holy Bible anniversary tour) and 2019’s Truth & Memory (about their album This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours). I aim to contribute to this body of texts and films by embedding the band in a wider theoretical and academic context, driven by questions about the critical dimensions of popular music and the meaning of song lyrics. The three reasons discussed so far are mainly of a general, theoretical or academic nature; they belong to the studium. When writing about music, however, there is another factor involved; a factor that I want to characterise with help of Barthes’ notion of the punctum. In his analysis of Bob Dylan and Zen Buddhism, Steven Heine makes the following insightful observation: ‘Any book on Bob Dylan’s music is bound to feature two interlocking perspectives: the impersonal, or an objective examination and assessment of his works; and the personal, or an expression of the

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author’s subjective awareness of and interest in the significance of Dylan’ (2009: xi). I would argue that this point can be made about any study of music and, especially, popular music, since this type of music is often entwined with our personal development at a young age, when we are more vulnerable to the experience of the punctum or to the constitution of meaningful memories that make us experience the punctum when listening to this music at a later age. We then remember the first time we heard a specific song or saw a band perform, bought an album, understood the lyrics to a song (especially when growing up in a country where English is not a first language), read an interview with a band or just saw a picture of the band members (particularly in the pre-internet age). Our appreciation of a band and of their music is therefore always permeated with memories of that time and entwined with our identity. These observations on the punctum make it necessary to include a brief reflection on my own personal history with Manic Street Preachers, since this history plays a role in my reasons for writing this book as well. I started listening to the band between the releases of their albums Everything Must Go (1996) and This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours (1998), but quickly became fascinated with their earlier albums, especially The Holy Bible (1994). What initially drew me to the band was the radical image they had before the disappearance of Edwards, as well as their above-­ mentioned intellectualism. Their music introduced me to authors like Octave Mirbeau, Margaret Atwood and Emily Dickinson, and made me appreciate movies like Reflections in a Golden Eye, If… and Apocalypse Now. Together with my friend Thijs, I created the website MANICS.NL, which we built to present an encyclopaedic overview of all of the references, audio-fragments, phrases and artworks that we could find in Manic Street Preachers releases. Working on this site, the band showed me that it is possible to connect films to philosophical analyses, and to combine ‘high’ with ‘low’ culture, creating dialogues between the writings of Guy Debord, the music of the Sex Pistols, and the comic-magazine 2000 AD; or between the poems of Arthur Rimbaud, Mike Leigh’s film Naked, and William Wharton’s novel Birdy. The band’s music also punctured and still punctures me on a different level: the aggressive bleakness of The Holy Bible affects me; the melancholic and often cathartic songs of Everything Must Go and Lifeblood

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move me; the noisy and rambling rock of Know Your Enemy gives me energy; the fragile and tender music of Rewind the Film recalls south Welsh landscapes in me; and the sound of Futurology now reminds me of the times I lived in Berlin and wrote a large part of this book. Writing about Manic Street Preachers, in other words, is deeply linked to my own formation and the ways in which their music and lyrics touched me and continue to do so.

Approach Before concluding this chapter, I want to discuss the content of this book, which revolves around the critique formulated in Manic Street Preachers releases. One of the main points I will be making, as observed above, is that the band primarily formulate this critique with help of lyrics in which symbolic and semiotic elements play equally important roles. The meaning of these lyrics, I will argue furthermore, is emphasised and strengthened by the other aspects of their existence as a popular music band: their music, album and single covers; interviews; video-clips; clothes; body-art and more. My primary concern with the role of lyrics results in this book in an approach that takes Edwards’ claim that he wants to make music redundant quite literally: even though I will discuss many of the aspects mentioned above, I will primarily develop interpretations and sometimes close readings of the different layers of meaning that are shaped within the band’s lyrics. I will analyse the semiotic elements of the form that they have when written down, the semiotic elements they have when sung and have become part of specific Manic Street Preachers songs, and their symbolic elements. Often, I will observe, these different layers of meaning are entwined—with each other and with the other aspects of the band’s releases, like music, album sleeves or body-art—but always in such a way that the symbolic elements of lyrics play an equal and sometimes even primary role. It is important to emphasise that this means that I will not include detailed musicological analyses of the band’s compositions. At places, I will describe their music, but these descriptions will consist of rather

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general characterisations of the sound of songs or even of whole albums. The same will hold true for my descriptions of the musical contexts in which these songs and albums were released. For more intricate and specialised analyses of popular music compositions, I refer the reader to excellent publications like Middleton’s Studying Popular Music or Stone’s The Value of Popular Music. I realise that this approach might be frustrating for a book about popular music, but the main drive behind this book is precisely to show that if we accept the above-described characteristics concerning the semiotic, corporeal and affective elements of popular music, what makes the releases of a band like Manic Street Preachers compelling—and often alienating—is their attempt to confront the listener with something she does not expect within a realm defined by these same characteristics: with lyrics of which we can only understand the meaning if we focus not only on the realm of the semiotic but also on the symbolic. My interpretations of the band’s lyrics will revolve around the argument that Manic Street Preachers releases formulate different forms of critique with help of explorations of both of these realms. I will characterise these forms of critique as ‘critical models’, a term taken from the works of German philosopher and cultural critic Theodor W.  Adorno. Sometimes, I will show, such a model is embodied by one Manic Street Preachers album, sometimes it is constructed by a group of albums, together representing a critical perspective. To a certain extent, this means that I will adopt the above-mentioned auteur theory to approach Manic Street Preachers: instead of focusing on particular albums or even individual songs, and instead of discussing the multiple factors that played a role in their creation, I will approach all of these albums and songs as unified and permeated by the aim of one band to formulate a specific kind of critique. I will not argue that the critical models discussed in this book are the only available ones: of course, there are countless more ways in which bands and artists develop ideas about voicing critique. I do believe, however, that the models that I will discuss in this book, as well as the notion of the ‘critical model’ in general, can be applied to releases by other bands or musicians. This also does not mean that I will argue that the band’s releases can be reduced to these critical models: again, there are different angles from

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which their music can be interpreted and approached. We could, for example, focus more on the ways in which the Welsh group have been received in social and cultural contexts and during the different eras of their existence, on the awards they have won, on chart positions or on the manner in which other musicians, the music industry or music journalists respond(ed) to them. Another approach would be to embed the band in their working class background, exploring notions of class identity33 or analysing the ways in which growing up in South Wales shaped the lives of the band members and their fans. Similar analyses could be developed about the role that gender or ethnicity play in the band’s meaning.34 As mentioned above, furthermore, we could also focus on the musical aspects of their releases, developing musicological analyses of Manic Street Preachers songs and of the ways in which these song respond to past or contemporary compositions and styles. However, since these kinds of approaches have been developed extensively in the realm of popular music studies and, more generally, cultural studies, this book is driven by the attempt to go against the grain and adopt an unexpected approach without completely ignoring these aspects. Furthermore, I will argue that this unexpected approach enables us to emphasise critical aspects of popular music that other approaches overlook; aspects that are crucial to fully understand the meaning of the releases of a band like Manic Street Preachers.

Structure and Content To set up this argument, I will provide a brief initial overview of the ‘language’ that Manic Street Preachers use to communicate their critical message in Chap. 2. I will focus on the different aspects of the band and show that the method of intertextuality plays a crucial role in this language. What this method emphasises, we will see, is the band’s reflective observation that everything they aim to do has already been done before within the realm of popular music, a claim that I will substantiate with brief discussions of postpunk bands such as Gang of Four, Scritti Politti and Joy Division. This will form a stepping stone towards my claim that Manic Street Preachers releases suggest that, if a rock band want their

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message to be heard by as many people as possible and still express radical critique in the specific historical era in which they started releasing music, this critique has to be formulated in the realm of lyrics. These lyrics, I will argue furthermore, revolve around the normative understandings of autonomy and reflection, making these two notions into standards necessary for formulating a particular kind of critique. By emphasising these standards, I will be able to show in this chapter that Manic Street Preachers releases contain traces of a tradition that can be characterised as ‘popular modernism’. To construct a clear understanding of what the idea of a ‘critical model’ entails, I will focus on several ideas developed by Theodor W. Adorno in Chap. 3. This is the most theoretical and technical chapter of this book, and it may be of interest mainly to philosophers or those working within the disciplines of popular music studies or cultural studies. We will see that the German philosopher and cultural critic forms one of the proponents of the argument that popular music merely forms a standardised consumption product that is unable to criticise political, social or cultural contexts. This makes him an ideal author to foreground the critical ideas that Manic Street Preachers releases express, since he not only forces me to show how the band voice critique, but also, I will argue, formulated ideas that return in the content of Manic Street Preachers lyrics. Chapter 3 will end with my definition of the critical model, in which the standards of autonomy and reflection (introduced in Chap. 2) return in a more substantial manner. With help of Adorno, I will argue that a critical model is characterised by the specific way in which an artwork distances itself from the context in which it comes about, a distance necessary to criticise this same context from an autonomous position. Paradoxically, the critical model is also characterised by the specific way in which the artwork acknowledges that it is unable to really preserve such an autonomous position, since it is constantly pulled back and made part of this same context. It is this latter acknowledgement that provides the artwork with a reflective dimension. Chapters 2 and 3 form stepping stones to my analyses of Manic Street Preachers releases in Chaps. 4–7. In these chapters, I will mainly study the lyrics of the band’s albums, often by developing close readings. But I will also focus on many of the band’s B-sides, which form, as the subtitle of their

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2003 compilation of B-sides and rarities suggests, a ‘secret history’ within the band’s catalogue.35 The notions of ‘critique’, ‘politics’, ‘culture’ and ‘economy’, we will see, are shaped in different ways within the different critical models constituted by the band, which means that I will refrain from providing one essentialist definition of these terms. Some passages in which I will analyse the meaning of lyrics will read like I am bombarding the reader with references, ideas and theories. I will only do this a few times, however, but hope that these passages mirror the intertextual networks that Manic Street Preachers create to bombard the listener in a similar way with their critical models. Although this means that I will, as mentioned above, not develop psychological analyses of the band’s lyrics, I will not ignore events that resonate through the band’s art —most importantly the disappearance of Edwards—or interviews in which band members reflect on their releases or on the society of which they form part. However, I will always approach Manic Street Preachers releases as artworks that should be taken seriously on their own terms, which means that I will discuss these events and interviews as only a minor part of the meaning that their releases constitute. In Chap. 4, I will then argue that the band’s first three albums can be understood as attempts to constitute three different critical models. Analysing lyrics and their interplay with other aspects (music, sleeve art, body-art, semiotic elements of lyrics and more), I will argue that Generation Terrorists (1992) is characterised by a critical model created with help of Guy Debord’s critique of capitalism and his ideas about Situationism, which I will discuss with help of Fredric Jameson’s understanding of postmodernism; that Gold Against the Soul (1993) erects a model based on subjective expressions of life in a specific historical era; and that The Holy Bible (1994) presents us with a critical exploration of the meaning of culture and of language that I will characterise, with help of British music journalist Mark Fisher, as ‘popular modernist’. In Chap. 5, I will (unchronologically) focus on songs that accompany lyrics left behind by Richey Edwards before his disappearance, released on the albums Everything Must Go (1996) and Journal for Plague Lovers (2009), as well as the song ‘Judge Yr’self ’ (on 2003’s Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of Manic Street Preachers). With help of the ideas of French philosopher Georges Bataille, I will argue that these lyrics are driven by the attempt to create a critical model that is characterised mainly by Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas about becoming one’s own truth in an age of

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nihilism. Nietzsche and Bataille’s analyses of embodiment self-destruction and what the latter author calls ‘madness’ will play important roles in my discussion of this critical model as well. In Chap. 6, I will focus on the following four Manic Street Preachers albums: Everything Must Go (1996), This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours (1998), Know Your Enemy (2001) and Lifeblood (2004). I will argue that these four albums are primarily concerned with observations on time, memory and history, shot through with doubts about the fragmenting character of postmodernity. With help of observations on Marxism by French philosopher Jacques Derrida and Mark Fisher, as well as Jameson’s analysis of postmodernity, I will argue that these albums constitute a critical model that is based on Marx’s ideas, mainly driven by the attempt to imagine a different—and better—future in an age in which it is becoming more and more difficult, these same releases suggest, to imagine change and progress. In Chap. 7, I will discuss two of the band’s later albums: Rewind the Film (2013) and Futurology (2014). With help of references to Bertolt Brecht’s ideas about ‘complex seeing’ and Paul Willemen’s observations on avant-garde film, I will argue that the critical model constituted on these two albums revolves around references to locality—shaped with help of representations of Wales and of South Welsh landscapes—and internationality—mainly embedded by an embrace of Europeanism— that are presented to reflect the socio-economic structures that shape the selves constructed within these lyrics and to criticises discourses revolving around nationalism. My discussion of this critical model will be entwined with observations on the ways in which the band is struggling—and failing—to constitute a solid critical model on other albums released in this later period: Send Away the Tigers (2007), Postcards From a Young Man (2010) and Resistance is Futile (2018). These albums, I will argue, are shot through with critical ideas about post-postmodernity and especially digimodernism, but fail to solidify into a critical model. The book ends with a brief conclusion, in which I reflect on several aspects found in all Manic Street Preachers lyrics.

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Notes 1. For an extensive analysis of these arguments, see Stone 2016: 226 and further. Schleifer addresses similar aspects by analysing how the interplay between speech and music constitutes meaning in songs by Billie Holiday and Gershwin (Schleifer 2013: 161–166). 2. Astor and Negus criticise this statement, for example, see 2014: 195–6. 3. Examples are formed by Kristeva’s appraisal of futurist poetry and Mayakovsky (Kristeva 1980: 32–4), and of Mallarmé and Joyce (Kristeva 1994: 88). On montage and avant-garde art, see also Bürger 1984: 73–82. 4. Another example is formed by the abstract and indecipherable lyrics of David Bowie’s ‘Subterraneans’ on his album Low, which were the result of his embrace of Dadaist cut-up techniques. 5. For a discussion of the difficulty of pinning down the meaning of ‘punk’, see Wiseman-Trowse 2008: 126–8. 6. For a discussion of the distinction between ‘liveness’ and recordings, see Frith 1996: 226–245. For an analysis of ‘the pop body’, see Middleton 2014: 660–7. 7. In her analysis of the embodied and affective nature of ‘listening’, Voegelin develops a phenomenological analysis of listening to lectures Merleau-­Ponty recorded for radio broadcasts, again stressing the embodied aspects of sound (see Voegelin 2010: 9). 8. Bull’s analysis of the active and empowering ways in which listeners use personal stereos finds its critical counterpart in the Manic Street Preachers anti-consumerist statement that we hear ‘Sony control’ in ‘Walkman sounds’ (in their song ‘Democracy Coma’, on the single of ‘Love’s Sweet Exile’ and later on Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of Manic Street Preachers). Since the band themselves were signed to Columbia (belonging to Sony), the line illustrates the paradoxical nature of formulating critique on capitalism while being part of the popular music industry – I return to this issue in Chaps. 2 and 4. 9. For examples of the application of the notion of ‘affect’ in the realms of literature and imagery, see Van Alphen 2008; Koivunen 2013. 10. For a helpful analysis of how the performative aspects of popular music are related to the performativity of gender, see Oakes 2009; Griffith 2003: 59.

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11. Epstein develops a helpful overview of the cultural dimensions of the relations between music and body through rhythm, sound, dissonance and noise, see 2014: xx–xxi. 12. For a more general defence of the idea that artworks can be both performative and affective, playing an active role by problematising and working though the culture in which they are embedded, see Van Alphen 2005. 13. For a helpful overview of definitions of ‘popular music’ and the meaning of notions like ‘folk’ or ‘populist music’, see Kassabian 1999: 116–17. 14. For an analysis of the role that the value of ‘authenticity’ played in distinguishing the image of American ‘authentic’ rock from the image of British ‘inauthentic’ rock, see Faulk 2010: 9. For an analysis of the interplay between ‘authenticity’ and technological practices in dance music, see Harley 1991. For a more general overview of the complex and often vague use of the notion of ‘authenticity’ within popular music and popular music studies, see Middleton 2006: 199–246. 15. For discussions of this argument, see Hesmondalgh and Negus 2002: 6; Walser 2003: 15–8; Jones 2014: 48; Laing and Marshall 2014: 2. For a typical critique of the standardising influence of mass culture and popular music, especially of the constitution of ‘false needs’ and ‘standardised emotions’ within mass culture, see Collingwood 1958. 16. Griffith develops a helpful overview of this approach to musicians as poets (2003: 41–3). For a discussion of this issue in the context of Simon Firth’s ideas, see Astor and Negus 2014: 195. Stone finds this approach embodied by works like Richard Goldstein’s The Poetry of Rock (2016: 225). 17. Frequently, the argument that lyrics can and should be read as poetry goes hand in hand with the attempt to distinguish the ‘intellectual’ status of musicians like Neil Young, John Lennon, Morrissey, Lou Reed or Bob Dylan from artists who are, in turn, rejected as ‘low’ or ‘superficial’ (see Shuker 1994: 105). Stone observes that this approach often perpetuates the notion of the white male as the rational and intellectual keeper of civilisation, which implies that those who fall outside of the scope of ‘white masculinity’ are linked to notions of emotionality, corporeality, sentimentality, rhythm, primitivity or even musicality in general (2016: 42). 18. On this argument in relation to Bob Dylan’s music, see Street 1986: 7. 19. Stone refers in this passage to Carey 1996 and Scheff 2011.

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20. In the lyrics of the Manic Street Preachers song ‘Last Exit on Yesterday’ on the New Art Riot E.P. (the title of this song might refer to Hubert Selby Jr.’s novel Last Exit to Brooklyn), love songs are compared to valium and drug addiction (see also Price 1999: 29). In a 1989 interview with Arsenio Hall, Frank Zappa expressed a similar critique, arguing that ‘love lyrics have helped to create an atmosphere of bad mental health in America’ (see ‘Frank Zappa interview (6/19/89) Arsenio Hall Show’). 21. In an article on the sound of Britpop, Derek B. Scott observes that irregular stresses like these, which he calls ‘oddities’, mean that Manic Street Preachers are not able to tackle ‘the thorny problem of word stress’ correctly (2010: 118). Scott overlooks the observation that semiotic aspects like these play a role in the meaning of pop songs, and inconvivincingly suggests that there is only one way in which word stresses can be used in songs: as they are used in everyday speech. What makes Stone’s approach helpful, is that she approaches aspects like these not as ‘faults’ but as necessary parts of a song’s meaning. I agree with Stone, but, in this book, will argue that in some cases we also need to look at the symbolic elements of lyrics. 22. The libraries that the song refers to are discussed in the 1981 documentary So That You Can Live, which I will analyse in Chap. 7. In his text in the sleeve of the anniversary edition of Everything Must Go, Stuart Maconie argues that the phrase ‘work made us free’ refers to ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’, placed above the entrance of Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps. Within the context of the text, however, I believe this phrase mainly refers to Marxist analyses of the liberating and emancipating aspects of labour. 23. Stone illustrates this point with an analysis of how Joy Division’s singer Ian Curtis is generally perceived as the locus of the band’s meaning (2016: 214–15). 24. Stone observes how this idea gained strength within Romanticism and found its way into the modernist emphasis on particular artistic explorations (2016: 11). 25. Their working class background distinguishes Manic Street Preachers from most other British rock bands. For an analysis of the way in which rock bands, hailing from the British middle classes, started to adopt a ‘working class image’ to appear more ‘authentic’, see Bradby 2014: 12–13. 26. On many releases, Edwards uses the name ‘Richey James’ as well. The band later also included tour-musicians, such as Dave Eringa, Nick

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Nasmyth (both on keyboard), Wayne Murray (guitar) and others. Some of these musicians also play on Manic Street Preachers albums, but never became official members of the band. 27. Stone observes that a similar division of labour was present in The Who and Oasis. She concludes, however, that this does not necessarily mean that lyrics determine the meaning of a song (2016: 215–6). I will argue that this division of labour results, in the case of Manic Street Preachers, in a more explicit emphasis on the important role of lyrics. 28. In 2015, Kanye West wore this picture on his jacket (WENN 2015). Manic Street Preachers bassist Nicky Wire responded positively, rejecting the critique that this would sensationalise or romanticise Edwards: ‘Kanye’s a maverick in his own right, so seeing that made me smile’ (qtd. in WENN 2015). 29. Jones made several of the band’s videoclips. He can also be heard reading lines from his poem ‘The Eloquence in Screaming’ (on Commemoration and Amnesia) in the Manic Street Preachers song ‘Love’s Sweet Exile’, as well as lines from his poem ‘Torying’ in ‘Crucifix Kiss’ (both on Generation Terrorists). 30. Since I will focus on this book on Manic Street Preachers releases, I will not discuss these two albums. Bradfield also contributed to a remix of Massive Attack’s ‘Inertia Creeps’ on their 1998 release of the song’s single, as well as to ‘Turn No More’ on Public Service Broadcasting’s 2017 album Every Valley. 31. In his introduction to Rip It Up and Start Again, Simon Reynolds refers to a similar distinction by discussing ‘objective’ and ‘personal’ reasons for writing the book (2016: 28–32). 32. Examples are formed by the following official and unofficial biographies, collections of quotes and photo-books: Gray 1992; Clarke 1997; Heatley 1998; Shutkever 1996; Thompson 1997; Wise 1997; Middle 1999; Ikeda 2002; Cummins 2014; Hawys-Roberts and Noakes 2019; Wire et  al. 2011. In 1997, artist Jeremy Dellar organised an exhibition of Manic Street Preachers fan art, which resulted in the 1999 book The Uses of Literacy (see Wire et al. 2011: 6). 33. For an exploration of performance of class identity in popular music, see Wiseman-Trowse 2008. 34. On ethnicity and especially The Holy Bible’s critique of the hegemony of ‘whiteness’, see Jones, Lukes, Wodtke 2017: 237–38.

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35. Manic Street Preachers also released countless remixes of their songs as B-sides, made by Stealth Sonic Orchestra, Saint Etienne, Mogwai, Stereolab, The Chemical Brothers, Andrew Weatherall and many others. I will not focus on these remixes in this book, however, since I am concerned with the original releases of the band.

2 An Exclusive Language

Introduction In a 2014 interview with Gigwise, Manic Street Preachers’ singer James Dean Bradfield reflected as follows on their then-released album Futurology: ‘That we could still trade in a language that is still exclusively ours, that we could still want to write songs that other people are just never going to go near…. We never laid claim to being the most ‘original’ band, but I think we’re unique in that sense’ (qtd. in Trendell 2014). In this chapter, I want to develop an initial understanding of Manic Street Preachers’ critical message and of the ‘language’ that they use to communicate it. In Chaps. 4–7, this understanding will be used as a stepping stone to detailed analyses of the group’s releases, with a specific focus on their lyrics. In the current chapter, however, I will approach the band in a more general manner and explore those elements of their critical message and of their ‘language’ that would make this language ‘exclusive’ and ‘unique’, but the band themselves ‘not the most original’. I will show that the exclusivity and uniqueness of their language is paradoxically born, to a large extent, in a concern with their own unoriginality, which

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is expressed with help of reflections on the difficulty of being authentic as a critical band within the realm of popular music. These claims will be developed in this chapter by exploring the roles that intertextuality, intratextuality and multitextuality play in Manic Street Preachers releases. To embed the band’s observations on their own unoriginality in a music-historical context, I will also show how specific aspects of their attempt to formulate critique as a popular music group already drove earlier musical traditions, most specifically postpunk as it developed in Britain roughly between 1978 and 1982. I will briefly discuss this tradition, as well as the tendency associated with it by British music journalist Mark Fisher: popular modernism. Based on this discussion, I will argue how and why Manic Street Preachers continue several aspects of postpunk’s political and modernist aims in the realm of their lyrics, while accompanying these lyrics with a more conventional and wider range of music styles than postpunk bands did. To be able to do this, I will first develop a general understanding of the critique that the band aim to formulate in their exclusive language.

Questioning an Entire Culture In the interview from which I quoted in the opening of the previous chapter, Richey Edwards not only criticises most of the popular music released during his lifetime for, in his view, providing false forms of escapism, but also argues that his lyrics critically address ‘political issues’ that concern the society in which he lives. He argues, in other words, that these lyrics communicate a critical message to listeners that makes them reflect on the musical context in which they are released, on the consumerist context of which this music, in his view, forms part, as well as on their even wider political context.1 I want to provide a general understanding of the nature of this critique and the ‘exclusive language’ in which this critique is formulated, by turning to the following quote, printed in Manic Street Preachers’ 2002 greatest hits album Forever Delayed: ‘We invite everyone to question the entire culture we take for granted’. This quote is taken from the manifesto-like ‘Calendar of Events’ that accompanied a 1980 exhibition of the New York

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art collective Group Material (see Avgikos 1995: 92). I want to argue that it embodies the kind of critique that Manic Street Preachers aim to develop in the realm of popular music and that it forms the driving force behind the constitution of the language in which they aim to do this: this critique is not focused on one specific political issue, but rather unsubtly aims to resist everything we ‘take for granted’. A similar radical aim drove Group Material. In a helpful overview of this art collective, Avgikos summarises the collective’s goals as follows, emphasising the broad character of the phrase ‘entire culture’ as well: ‘Their common interest was to provide a context for art and ideas that, in the broadest sense, dealt with the politics of representation and identified a range of themes related to gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class struggle, education, cultural imperialism, and otherwise “unmarketable” contents’ (1995: 87). An equally broad list of ‘unmarketable contents’ that, according to the band, make up the ‘entire culture we take for granted’, can be found in the lyrics of Manic Street Preachers songs. As we will see in this book, the band aim to criticise and resist phenomena as diverse as Christianity, consumerism, the British monarchy, racism, late capitalism, Thatcherism, sexism, Reagonomics, neoliberalism, political correctness, postmodern ennui, celebrity culture, the exploitation of Welsh and, more generally, working class areas in Britain, and more. These phenomena, the band argue in different—and, we will see, often conflicting—ways on their releases, hollow out one’s sense of self, of history and of the social and natural context in which this self is embedded. Often, we will see furthermore, Manic Street Preachers releases root the aim to ‘question the entire culture we take for granted’ in a leftist perspective, inspired by Marxist and socialist traditions. But at places the attempts to undermine and reject the structures that shape our lives are inspired by radical interpretations of Christianity or of the works of Friedrich Nietzsche and Yukio Mishima, which pull their ideas into different political directions. We will furthermore see that the rather general and radical nature of the critique they develop on their early releases gradually transforms into more focused and systematic critical approaches on later ones.

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Autonomy and Reflection To develop a more comprehensive understanding of the general characteristics of their critique, I want to briefly discuss an insightful segment in From There to Here. This 1998 BBC documentary came out when Manic Street Preachers were, as the documentary’s narrator tells us, ‘one of the biggest bands in Britain’ (Connolly 1998). In the documentary, Bradfield talks about what it was like to grow up in South Wales, which he experienced as an environment defined by the miners’ strikes and the eventual victory of Thatcher’s neoliberal capitalism. This context played an important role in the band’s rejection of the, in their view, escapist and a-political music that was popular when they began making music, as briefly discussed in the previous chapter. As Bradfield puts this in Kieran Evans’ documentary Culture, Alienation, Boredom and Despair: ‘None of us couldn’t actually believe that bands weren’t writing with a political angle whatsoever’ (on the 20th Anniversary edition of Generation Terrorists). In the beginning of their existence as a group, they therefore aimed to revive the revolutionary and political spirit that, in different ways, drove bands like The Clash and the Sex Pistols. They did this by vowing never to release a love-song and to only write songs about resistance, explicitly linking this vow to their experiences of the closing of the mines (see Jones et al. 2017: 16–17). Indeed, Manic Street Preachers’ first song ‘Aftermath’, which was written in 1985 but never released, dealt with the strikes and was born in the experience of ‘the whole area’ as an ‘enclave of pits’ (Wire et al. 2011: 11). Bradfield observes that the eventual failure of the miners’ strikes also made it necessary, in the band’s view, to replace the optimism and hope that played an important role in the forms of political resistance to which he refers—inspired in different ways by Marxism, labourism, socialism, notions of a Welsh identity and, more generally, of an identity ‘othered’ by the hegemony of ‘London’—with a different and more obscure standpoint. He states: The way the miners’ strike ended had a massive effect on us. At that point we hated words like ‘sincerity’, ‘passion’, ‘ideology’, ‘belief ’. Suddenly we wanted to turn all those words into something else. We didn’t want to

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believe in those little sayings like ‘better to die than to live on your knees’ – that kind of glorious going down in a blaze of glory. We wanted to be so intelligent that we were never gonna get beaten. You don’t want to just rely on the passion of a true heart. You want to be so intelligent that you’re never gonna get bludgeoned, as our history was bludgeoned…. (Connolly 1998)

By contrasting the notion of ‘intelligence’ with ‘ideology’ and ‘belief ’, as well as with the political optimism and hopeful activism that, in his view, characterised the different political movements that fuelled the strikes in South Wales and other mining areas in the UK, Bradfield suggests that the form of critique that Manic Street Preachers aimed and still aim to formulate, cannot be tied to an already existing perspective or to a theory that shows us how things really are and that, in turn, presents us with a clear image of how things should be. Instead, the band mainly aim to problematise the perspectives that already exist, and force their listeners to reflect on these perspectives by confronting them with radical forms of critique. This means, I want to briefly argue, that the band’s critical message is shaped by the standards of reflection and autonomy. The first standard is embodied by the idea that this critique has to be permeated with the reflective realisation that it might fail; that people have tried to resist ‘the entire culture we take for granted’ many times before (illustrated by the observation that this phrase itself is a quotation from a 1980 pamphlet and that the band were inspired by countless bands from the past—I return to this latter observation below), and that it is becoming increasingly difficult to constitute a distance between the artist’s critical standpoint and the context she aims to criticise (I return to this latter issue below, and in the following chapters, as well). The second standard implies that the band’s critique has to be formulated from an autonomous standpoint that cannot depend on the ideologies and theories in which the, in the band’s experience, failed forms of resistance against Thatcherism were born. More generally, this implies that this critique has to distance itself in radical and unique ways from the context in which it comes about, to be able to criticise this same context and to ‘question the entire culture we take for granted’.

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Nine Building Blocks In the next chapter, I will put more flesh on the bones of the notions of reflection and autonomy with help of a discussion of the ideas of Theodor W. Adorno. In the remainder of the current chapter, however, I want to turn to the ‘exclusive language’ that Manic Street Preachers shape to ‘question the entire culture we take for granted’ with help of these notions. Again, I will develop more detailed analyses of this language in Chaps. 4–7, but for now it is important to construct an overview of the general nature of this language, since this will eventually enable me to show why the band’s lyrics play such an important role on their releases. This language consists, I now want to argue, of the following nine ‘building blocks’, which are constituted by the different media that make up the realm of popular music. First, of course, there are the band’s lyrics. Many of these, we will see, reject the economic, cultural and social structures in which their music comes about. Others express what it means to live in a country, culture or historical age and critically reflect on what this existence entails. Most of these lyrics are also filled with references to authors, books, political figures and ideas, sometimes as explicit as in the titles of songs,2 sometimes in more obscure ways. In his analysis of the band’s sixth album, Know Your Enemy, Stephen Lee Naish summarises this aspect of the band’s lyrics as follows: ‘The lyrical content of a Manic Street Preachers song is akin to a found collection of footnotes and citations in which the main body of the thesis has been ripped out. Using these footnotes, it requires the listener to seek out the original source material and piece together the main text and build the narrative up from scratch’ (Naish 2018: 4–5). To a certain extent, this is what I will do in Chaps. 4–7, using the clues and references found mainly in Manic Street Preachers lyrics to construct the critical narratives and perspectives that their releases, in my view, aim to tell and shape. Second, there is the band’s music, which is characterised by a wide range of styles—from rock ‘n’ roll, punk and glamrock to postpunk and stadium rock. Together with the semiotic elements of their lyrics, this

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music constitutes the sound of the different albums released by the group (I will return to this ‘building block’ below). Third, Manic Street Preachers songs often contain audio samples taken from interviews, films or musical compositions. This partly mirrors the use of samples by hiphop groups like Public Enemy, who present musical collages of radio interviews, political speeches, police sirens and musical fragments to critically reflect (on) the social, political and historical reality in which they make their art.3 Partly, however, Manic Street Preachers also use these samples in their own way: by including only one or two audio-fragments in a song, they specifically use these samples to emphasise a song’s particular critical content. Fourth, there are the countless quotes—by authors, politicians, activists, architects and painters—printed on album-, single- and DVDsleeves, written on tour programmes, projected on stage, and shown in video-­clips. An example is formed by the following quote by the British socialist and union activist Arthur Scargill: ‘My father still reads the dictionary everyday. He says your life depends on your power to master words’ (see Brannigan 2003: 60). The quote is printed on the sleeve of the 1993 single of ‘Roses in the Hospital’ and emphasises the band’s fascination with the power of words, as well as with the notion of self-education as a working-class value, which I will discuss in Chaps. 6 and 8. Fifth, the band often spray-paint slogans and quotes on clothes worn during concerts, interviews or photo shoots. These vary from Situationist phrases like ‘bomb the past’, ‘destroy work’, ‘Cultural Chernobyl’ or ‘aesthetic debris’, to more poetic citations, like lines from Philip Larkin’s poem ‘This Be The Verse’ or Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell.4 Another example is formed by photographs on which, Nicky Wire can be seen wearing a jacket with the statement ‘I’m so modern that everything is pointless’ written on the back (see Cummins 2014: 67). Sixth, the band often use artworks (mainly paintings and photographs) for their sleeve covers and in the sleeve booklets of albums or singles. Seventh, in interviews and on their official website, the band members often explicitly reflect on their existence as a critical group within the realm of popular culture, frequently listing books, theorists, films and musicians as inspirations.5

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Eighth, we will see that Manic Street Preachers also use clothing and make-up to transmit critical ideas. This varies from clothes reflecting the decadence of Hollywood glamrock, to military uniforms (worn during the Top of the Pop performance discussed in the previous chapter, for example) or bland white or khaki clothes. Furthermore, especially Nicky Wire frequently employs genderbending techniques, performing in skirts or dresses, wearing make-up and adopting forms of representation generally associated with cultural notions of ‘femininity’.6 The ninth aspect of the band’s ‘exclusive language’ concerns embodiment. In the following chapters, I will describe the role that body art plays in the band’s critical message; James Dean Bradfield, for example, has the Kierkegaard-line ‘Anxiety is freedom’7 tattooed on his arm, as can vaguely be seen on the cover of this book. I will focus as well on the role that auto-mutilation and anorexia play on their releases.

Multitextuality and Intertextuality One of the main aspects that these nine ‘building blocks’ have in common, I now want to argue, is the employment of intertextuality. Jacques Derrida famously characterised this concept by stating that ‘each “text” is like a machine with multiple reading heads for other texts’ (1979: 107). If we ‘connect’ words, concepts, metaphors or textual structures of one ‘text’ to those of another ‘text’, the meaning of both texts changes, Derrida suggests with help of this metaphor. This results, he goes on, in a network of interlinked ‘texts’ that, together, constitute meanings that change the moment new ‘texts’ are added to this network or the moment different interpretations and connections are made. These connections and links can be constituted with help of subtle and implicit allusions, but also in the form of citations, pastiches or even copies. We can link this understanding of ‘intertextuality’ to Georgina Born’s observation that popular music has a ‘multitextual’ character.8 Popular music, Born argues, forms a hybrid of radio, television, performativity, clothes, album art, lyrics and music in a constantly changing constellation of influences and aesthetic dimensions (Born 1995: 16–28). To a large extent, it is by creating intertextual links between these different

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‘textual’ dimensions of popular music that Manic Street Preachers create their ‘exclusive language’. I want to discuss several examples to provide an initial idea of how intertextuality functions within the band’s output. One example is formed by Manic Street Preachers’ third album The Holy Bible, the title of which, of course, refers to the Christian collection of holy texts. Its used typeface (a fake Cyrillic font with the letter ‘Я’ replacing the Latin ‘R’) and cover design, furthermore, are based on Simple Minds’ third album Empires and Dance (albeit without Simple Minds’ ‘И’ replacing the Latin ‘N’), and its cover shows an already existing painting: Jenny Saville’s ‘Strategy (South Face/Front Face/North Face)’ – I return to this painting in Chap. 4. And on the cover of their 2005 E.P. God Save the Manics—a self-referential wink, of course, to the Sex Pistols—we see a picture, made by photographer Mitch Ikeda, of bassist Nicky Wire with make-up, a hairstyle and a facial expression that copy the looks of Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious (see Ikeda 2002: 70). In the band’s early years, furthermore, Wire frequently adorned his face in a way similar to the bank-robber style make-up worn by one of the protagonists and her fans in the 1980 film Times Square. Manic Street Preachers referred to this film as well by covering the song ‘Damn Dog’— performed in the film as an expression of a punk-infused rejection of the adult world—on Generation Terrorists, and by printing a quote from the film in the same album’s sleeve booklet. The Manic Street Preachers album Gold Against the Soul, furthermore, contains the song ‘Roses in the Hospital’, which refers to a scene in which Time Square’s then hospitalised protagonist eats rose flowers in an attempt to cheer up her friend (see Moyle 1980). The song’s lyrics express the film’s combination of existentialist angst, social alienation and a rejection of the social order as well. Many of the band’s releases also refer to avant-garde movements, artists and artworks. In 2000, for example, they released the DVD Leaving the 20th Century, which contains the concert they gave on New Year’s Eve of 1999 in the Cardiff Millennium Stadium, during the height of their popularity. The title of the DVD refers to the 1974 study Leaving the 20th Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situationist International (see Gray 1998). On the DVD’s sleeve, we find the following quote from an advertisement in the Situationniste Internationale, which is printed in Gray’s

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study as well (1998: 1): ‘Young Guys, Young Girls / Talent wanted for getting out of this and playing / No special qualifications / Whether you’re beautiful or you’re bright / History could be on your side’. The same quote returns in Greil Marcus’ study of avant-garde, punk and counterculture called Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (see 1989: 343), the title of which refers to the ‘lipstick traces’ mentioned in Iggy Pop’s song ‘Don’t Look Down’ (on New Values). In 2003, Manic Street Preachers paid tribute to Marcus’ study by releasing a compilation of B-sides, rarities and covers called Lipstick Traces (A Secret History of Manic Street Preachers). Another, more obscure reference is found on a B-side called ‘Locust Valley’ (on the 2001 single of ‘Ocean Spray’), which refers to American artist Ray Johnson, the lyrics mentioning his ‘correspondence art’ and his isolated existence in New  York’s Locust Valley.9 For the band’s 2001 album Know Your Enemy (the title of which refers to a line from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and to a song by American band Rage Against the Machine, on their album Rage Against the Machine), furthermore, paintings by Welsh artist Neale Howells were used.10 The band’s name and the album’s title, as well the list of songs on its back sleeve, are printed over this artwork in large capital letters, with words breaking up in ways that ignore grammatical rules. This style returns on the two singles of ‘Found That Soul’ and ‘So Why So Sad’ as well, and continues, in a different way, on the band’s greatest hits album Forever Delayed: in the sleeve booklet of the latter compilation album, we find photographs of paintings on which song titles are printed in large capital stencilled letters, again containing breaks that ignore grammar. This style not only reminds of the word art of American artist Christopher Wool, but also recalls the style used by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in his 1906 woodcut Manifesto of the Brücke Artists’ Group. Countless of these intertextual references can be found in the different ‘texts’ of Manic Street Preachers releases. Sometimes, these references are implicit or created simply by covering songs: on the cassette version of their ‘A Design for Life’ single, for example, we find a cover of ‘Bright Eyes’, which may function as a reference to the dystopian 1978 film Watership Down, in which the song is featured. But sometimes, these references are so explicit that they form postmodern pastiches that almost

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turn into mere copies. On the cover of the 1991 single of ‘Stay Beautiful’, for example, we find a picture of Sue Lyons, who played Dolores Haze in Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 Lolita. Lyons’ image is presented by the band as a symbol of the entwinement of youthfulness and the demand to ‘stay beautiful’ within celebrity culture, a demand that they ironically and fatalistically embrace in the lyrics of the song. The name of the band is written on the single’s cover with lipstick and includes an image of the lipstick itself: a reference to the way the name of American avant-punk band New York Dolls is written on the covers of several of their releases (an example is formed by the cover of their debut album New York Dolls). Furthermore, the typeface used on the cover of the band’s first album Generation Terrorists and their above-mentioned Lipstick Traces (A Secret History of Manic Street Preachers), mirrors the typeface used on Nirvana’s Nevermind and In Utero, as well as on Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction. Manic Street Preachers also appeared on the cover of the November 1998 issue of Select, eyes closed and covered with a Welsh flag: a reference to the cover of The Who’s 1997 soundtrack album The Kids Are Alright. In 1994, furthermore, they had already constituted a similar reference by posing for press photographs in a military setting inspired by Apocalypse Now, covering themselves with an American flag (see Ikeda 2002: 109). Another example of the band’s use of intertextuality that I want to discuss is formed by the cover of their 1992 single ‘Slash ‘N’ Burn’. Depicting a torso pierced with arrows, the cover recalls the image of the Christian saint Sebastian. St. Sebastian plays an important role in the sexual awakening of the protagonist of Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask, which uses a passage about the abject aspects of beauty and desire from Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov as its epigraph. Phrases from this same passage return in the lyrics of the Manic Street Preachers song ‘She is Suffering’ (on The Holy Bible). Mishima’s photobook Ba-ra-kei: Ordeal by Roses, furthermore, inspired the cover of Manic Street Preachers’ 1994 album Gold Against the Soul, and in the beginning of the band’s existence, singer James Dean Bradfield posed for several pictures on which he copied Mishima’s copying of Sebastian (see Ikeda 2002: 180). Also, St. Sebastian was interpreted from a homoerotic angle by avantgarde filmmakers Derek Jarman and Paul Humfress in their 1976 film

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Sebastiane. Jarman is quoted in the booklet of the Manic Street Preachers album Postcards From a Young Man. And on the single ‘Break My Heart Slowly’, taken from bassist Nicky Wire’s solo album I Killed the Zeitgeist, a B-side is included called ‘Derek Jarman’s Garden’.11 Together with Mishima’s writings on the erotic aspects of the entwinement of beauty and death, of martyrdom and sexual ecstasy, these references emphasise the idea that if we value the beauty of bodies and turn them, within celebrity culture, into commodities, we implicitly expect these bodies to die young and become images of sublime beauty. To refer to this idea as well, the band often included photographs of Marilyn Monroe on their single sleeves and on their clothes in the beginning of their existence.12 Furthermore, Richey Edwards and James Dean Bradfield posed for pictures on which their naked torsos were covered with stamps of Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe (see Cummins 2014: 19–25; Shutkever 1996: 71), fatalistically suggesting that celebrity culture had turned their bodies into Warholian consumption products.13 Lastly, it could even be argued that Edwards’ auto-mutilation contains an intertextual element. It is embedded, after all, in a tradition of self-­ mutilating performers like Sid Vicious, Iggy Pop, GG Allin or The Dead Boys’ Stiv Bators. Furthermore, David Pattie describes how the use of the ‘4’ in the phrase ‘4 REAL’ that Edwards carved into his arm, links this gesture to a discourse shaped by Prince’s ‘I Would Die 4 You’ and ‘I Feel 4 You’ (1999; see also Wiseman-Trowse 2008: 58–9). The use of ‘4’ instead of ‘for’ returns as well in later Manic Street Preachers songs, like ‘4 Ever Delayed’ (spelled on the 2003 reissue of their ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’ single as ‘Forever Delayed’, but with a ‘4’ on the 2003 compilation Lipstick Traces) and ‘The Future Has been Here 4Ever’ (on Postcards From a Young Man).

Intratextuality This latter observation illustrates that instances of intertextuality, re-­ presentation and repetition of past movements and artistic explorations return as well within the ‘text’ of the band’s catalogue, shaping a form of intratextuality: after signing to Columbia, for example, Manic Street

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Preachers re-released a re-recorded version of the song ‘You Love Us’ as a single, and in 2003 they re-released ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’ as well as a single, albeit as a remixed version with added string sections. Furthermore, as we will see in Chap. 5, the album Journal for Plague Lovers repeats several aspects of The Holy Bible: it again has a painting by Jenny Saville on its cover, uses a typeface with Cyrillic Я’s (which returns as well on the albums Send Away the Tigers and Futurology), and contains a similar musical style influenced by postpunk and grunge. An even clearer example of re-presenting already made material is manifested by the cover of the 20th Anniversary edition of the band’s Everything Must Go, which re-presents the original CD-version of the album, photographed as an object on a white background. A similar technique was already used when the band re-released their early New Art Riot E.P., presenting the E.P.’s original cover—a European flag—surrounded by a blue frame. This self-archival tendency returns as well in the many anniversary editions the band released of their own albums, accompanied by interviews, documentaries, concert DVD’s and textual reflections: 10th Anniversary Editions of The Holy Bible, Everything Must Go and Send Away the Tigers; 20th Anniversary Editions of Generation Terrorists, The Holy Bible, Everything Must Go and This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours (the latter with a slightly different cover and with one song replaced by a former B-side), a deluxe re-issue of Gold Against the Soul in 2020; and Record Store Day releases of The Holy Bible and the single of ‘A Design for Life’. Furthermore, the band accompanied these anniversary editions with tours during which they played these albums in their entirety; in 2019 Kieran Evans released a concert film of the anniversary tour of The Holy Bible, entitled Be Pure Be Vigilant Behave. Lastly, the band sometimes constitute references to themselves within their own lyrics and music: the title of the greatest hits album Forever Delayed and of the above-mentioned ‘Forever Delayed’/‘4 Ever Delayed’, for example, refers to the use of the same phrase in the lyrics of ‘Roses in the Hospital’ (on Gold Against the Soul); a loop of Bradfield singing in ‘Epicentre’ (on Know Your Enemy) returns in ‘Masking Tape’ (a B-side to the single of ‘Let Robeson Sing’); and the lyrics of ‘Your Love Alone Is Not Enough’ (on Send Away the Tigers) contain the line ‘You stole the sun

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from my heart’, which refers to the song with the same title on their album This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours.

Repetition and Unoriginality One aspect that this use of intertextuality and intratextuality continually emphasises is the band’s own unoriginality; an aspect that I briefly linked above to the notion of reflection. This unoriginality is caused, many of these same releases suggest, by the observation that they are part of a consumerist spectacle—popular music—that is dominated by repetition and standardisation. This observation forms an explanation as well for Bradfield’s above-cited claim that they might not be ‘the most original band’. In a 2004 interview, bassist and lyricist Nicky Wire indeed observed: ‘We’ve always been honest that the things we’re trying to pass on are better than what we can do as a band’ (qtd. in Lynskey 2014). With help of intertextual and intratextual references, Manic Street Preachers re-present already developed ideas and styles, continually suggesting that modernist notions like ‘authenticity’, ‘originality’ or ‘artistic progress’ seem to have lost their relevance in the postmodern spectacle of popular music. The inescapable nature of this spectacle is emphasised in a different way by the CD version of Manic Street Preachers’ 1992 E.P. Theme from M.A.S.H. (Suicide Is Painless), which contains a recording called ‘Sleeping with the NME’. On this track, recorded for a radio documentary about NME, we hear journalists from the British music magazine discuss the incident of Edwards cutting ‘4 REAL’ into his arm, debating the question whether they should publish a picture of him showing his wounds. Not the incident itself, but a reflection on this incident is presented to the listener, making it part of the sensationalist spectacle in which the band, as I will discuss in Chap. 4, ironically embedded themselves to try to become as big as possible and get their critical message across. The sleeve of the band’s 1991 single of ‘You Love Us’ embodies this idea in a different way: on the single’s back sleeve, we see a wall with Situationist-inspired graffiti: ‘Molotov cocktails of fantastic destruction’. On its front cover, however, we find one of the band member’s blouses

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hanging on a wall, showing the phrase ‘You Love Us’, with pictures of Brigitte Bardot and Edvard Munch’s Madonna pinned to it. Instead of wearing this blouse, the band present it to the public on this single, almost showcasing it as a museum piece; blurring the lines between presentation and re-presentation, and between authentic expression and reflective, ironic posturing.

Aims and Intentions Above, I have given several examples of how intertextual references are constituted on Manic Street Preachers releases, which refer not only to other artists, artworks and art movements, but also to the band’s own output. Similar observations can be made about their more general aims and intentions, which revolve around the above-cited attempt to ‘question the entire culture we take for granted’. Again, I want to argue, these aims and intentions can be embedded in an intertextual network that, again, illustrates the band’s own unoriginality. Edwards’ statement regarding the redundancy of their music, for example, reminds of the proclamation made by members of the anarcho-­ syndicalist punk band Crass that ‘politics’ is ‘primary over music’ (qtd. in Wells 2004: 37; see also Dee 2009: 61). Furthermore, we will see that the critical and political aims of Public Enemy return several times in Manic Street Preachers releases as well, suggesting that the critical ideas that drove punk and postpunk mainly continued in the second half of the 1980s in the realm of hiphop. Public Enemy is referenced, we will see, on Manic Street Preachers releases in the form of samples and quotes (see Heatley 1998: 55), and on Generation Terrorists we find a remix of their song ‘Repeat’ (which, on the album, is entitled ‘Repeat (UK)’) by Public Enemy’s production team The Bomb Squad, entitled ‘Repeat (Stars and Stripes)’.14 Another aspect that Manic Street Preachers took from Public Enemy was their rejection of the DIY mentality, adopted by bands like the above-­ mentioned Crass.15 This mentality is born in the idea that if one wants to criticise capitalist structures, consumption culture or the entertainment industry, one should distance oneself as far as possible from these same

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structures. Rejecting this idea, Richey Edwards observed: ‘The whole indie mentality that grew up from punk onward just seemed so bullshit to us, because the most subversive, really important group in the world were Public Enemy, and they were on Columbia. The level of corruption on an indie label is just on a smaller scale’ (qtd. in Price 1999: 62). The idea that one can only criticise ‘the beast’ from within its belly will return in Chaps. 3–7. Not only did Manic Street Preachers take this approach from Public Enemy, however, it also played a major role in the postpunk tradition. Indeed, most aspects of Manic Street Preachers’ struggles with voicing a particular type of critique are rather explicit repetitions of that which bands associated with postpunk, like Public Image Ltd., The Mekons, Scritti Politti, Josef K, Gang of Four, Throbbing Gristle, Delta 5, Devo or Pop Group, aimed to do a decade earlier. In the following, I want to briefly reflect on several aspects of these bands to embed Manic Street Preachers in a music-historical context, again emphasising the rather unoriginal nature of what they aim to do. Furthermore, I will use this discussion of postpunk to work towards my claim regarding the primary role that lyrics play on the Welsh band’s releases. This overview of postpunk will be mainly based on English music journalist Simon Reynold’s Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984, since I believe this compelling study helpfully pinpoints those aspects of postpunk that return in Manic Street Preachers releases.

Question Everything The postpunk tradition, Reynolds writes, was born in the conviction that the punk movement of the 1970s had failed to realise its radical aims (Reynolds 2006: 42–3). Indeed, punk bands had tried to declare an avant-gardist ‘Year Zero’ by wanting to destroy the rock ‘n’ roll movements that preceded them or that had become mainstream in the 1970s. They therefore rejected bands like The Beatles or Pink Floyd, and the generation that embraced these bands, as conventional, uncritical or elitist. In Lipstick Traces, Greil Marcus famously links this attempt to the historical avant-gardes, especially to these movements’ attacks on the

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elitism of art, and the political and critical aspects of their aim to ‘destroy language’ with help of experimentations with form, meaninglessness, absurdism and shock tactics (1989: 354–5).16 Johnny Rotten had indeed claimed that the Sex Pistols aimed to ‘destroy everything’ (qtd. in in Faulk 2010: 148) and were ‘the anti-Beatles’ (qtd. in Faulk 2010: 19). The Clash presented a similar form of iconoclasm with their manifesto-­like statement ‘No Elvis, no Beatles or Rolling Stones’ (in the song ‘1977’, a B-Side to ‘White Riot’; see also Savage 2019).17 However, Reynolds observes, punk bands had communicated this declaration of a Year Zero in a recognisable form that paradoxically formed the basis of the same rock ‘n’ roll tradition they aimed to overthrow. Their songs, after all, were based on musical scales that, instead of rejecting this tradition, continued it. Punk, Reynolds writes, ‘attempted to overthrow rock’s status quo using conventional music (fifties rock ‘n’ roll, garage punk, mod) that actually predated dinosaur megabands like Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin’ (Reynolds 2006: 42–3).18 The generation of postpunk bands that arose at the end of the 1970s was therefore driven by the idea that, after punk had imploded because of its ‘conventional’ form and its fossilisation into a ‘style’, something more progressive and radical had to be done. This crystallised in the notion of ‘radical content’ demanding ‘radical form’ (Reynolds 2006: 43; see also Eisentraut 2013: 98). This ‘radical form’ was constituted by a turning away from several of the traditional and, it was believed, overly conventional aspects of rock ‘n’ roll: many postpunk bands shunned guitar solos, for example, and adopted a minimalist, dissonant and ‘spiky’ guitar sound that, unlike punk, did not ‘fill up every corner of the soundscape’ (Reynolds 2006: 43). This opening up of musical space made it possible, in turn, to include aspects of music that punk had rejected, mainly the prominent role that bass plays in roots reggae and dub, as well as danceable rhythms found in funk and disco. Reynolds observes: ‘One curious by-product of this conviction that rock ‘n’ roll had outlived its usefulness was the mountainous abuse heaped on Chuck Berry. A key source for punk rock via the guitar playing of Johnny Thunders and Steve Jones, Berry became a negative touchstone, endlessly name-checked as a must to avoid’ (2006: 43). This embrace of a new musical form was accompanied by the attempt to voice a different form of social and political critique, rooted in a

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rejection of the explicit and direct ‘agit-pop’ lyrics of bands like the Sex Pistols and The Clash. Whereas the latter bands combined music based on rock ‘n’ roll structures with angry political, nihilistic or controversial slogans and statements, the postpunk generation embraced a language that was more obscure, indirect, abstract and theoretical, often born in the radical political climates of the universities and art schools from which they hailed. Furthermore, postpunk also embraced themes of vulnerability, existential angst and self-reflection in their lyrics, replacing punk’s bombast and militancy with radical self-doubt. In Grant Gee and Jon Savage’s documentary on Joy Division, this transformation is summarised with the idea that punk’s ‘Fuck you’ evolved within the Manchester band into the diagnosis that ‘We’re fucked’ (see Gee 2007), adding a self-reflective and fatalistic dimension to their music. Reynolds provides the following helpful characterisation of these aspects of the postpunk movement, which I want to cite in full because it emphasises the unoriginal character of Manic Street Preachers’ attempt to ‘question the entire culture we take for granted’: … rage or agitprop protest … seemed too blunt or too preachy to the postpunk vanguard, and they tried to develop more sophisticated and oblique techniques. Gang of Four and Scritti Politti abandoned tell-it-like-it-is denunciation for lyrics that exposed and dramatized the mechanisms of power in everyday life. “Question everything” was the catchphrase of the day. These bands demonstrated that “the personal is political” by dissecting consumerism, sexual relationships, commonsense notions of what’s natural or obvious, and the ways in which what feel like spontaneous, innermost feelings are actually scripted by larger forces. (2006: 52)

Not only does this description imply that Manic Street Preachers’ attempt to ‘question the entire culture we take for granted’ was already explicitly present in the postpunk movement, which started a decade before the Welsh band began releasing music, but the ‘oblique’ and ‘more sophisticated’ techniques that Reynolds refers to also already revolved around an adaptation of the above-described use of intertextuality. Of course, the use of this technique is not unique to postpunk: countless bands have inspired their listeners to discover other musicians,

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painters, films or plays with help of this technique, ranging from The Beatles (think of the collage on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, made by pop artists Peter Blake and Jann Haworth) to David Bowie, Frank Zappa, The Clash, Patti Smith, Sonic Youth or Velvet Underground. However, I want to argue that the dense and theoretical nature of Manic Street Preachers’ intertextual references finds its clearest predecessor in postpunk. Again, I want to cite a large passage from Reynolds to emphasise the similarity between this aspect of postpunk and Manic Street Preachers releases: The entire postpunk period looks like an attempt to replay virtually every major modernist theme and technique via the medium of pop music. Cabaret Voltaire borrowed their name from Dada. Pere Ubu took theirs from Alfred Jarry. Talking Heads turned a Hugo Ball sound poem into a tribal-disco dance track. Gang of Four, inspired by Brecht and Godard’s alienation effects, tried to deconstruct rock even as they rocked hard. Lyricists absorbed the radical science fiction of William S.  Burroughs, J. G. Ballard, and Philip K. Dick, and techniques of collage and cut-up were transplanted into the music. Duchamp, mediated by 1960s Fluxus, was the patron saint of No Wave. The record cover artwork of the period matched the neomodernist aspirations of the words and music, with graphic designers like Malcolm Garrett and Peter Saville and labels like Factory and Fast Product drawing from constructivism, De Stijl, Bauhaus, John Heartfield, and Die Neue Typographie. This frenzied looting of the archives of modernism culminated with the founding of renegade pop label ZTT – short for Zang Tuum Tumb, a snatch of Italian futurist prose-­ poetry – and their conceptual group the Art of Noise, named in homage to Luigi Russolo’s manifesto for a futurist music. (2006: 41–2)

In Grant Gee and Jon Savage’s above-mentioned documentary on Joy Division, furthermore, the Manchester band are characterised as an ‘advent calendar’, opening windows into universes created by the books of Ballard, Kafka and Dostoyevsky (Gee 2007). Again, this characterisation could be used to describe Manic Street Preachers releases as well.

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Gang of Four and Scritti Politti I want to briefly discuss two other bands, to foreground the similarities between Manic Street Preachers and postpunk in a more detailed manner. The first are Gang of Four, named after the four party officials who played a crucial role in Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Embracing the above-­ mentioned ‘radical form’ by rejecting characteristics of rock ‘n’ roll, Gang of Four played what they called ‘anti-solos’—a silence at those places in songs where people would expect a solo to appear in rock ‘n’ roll compositions—and shaped a minimalist sound that was driven by the aim to create ‘cold’ music that was ‘against warmth’ (Reynolds 2006: 204). Gang of Four combined this ‘radical form’ with ‘radical content’. Reynolds describes how the Leeds band was born in a left-wing university climate in which, among works by Adorno and Benjamin, the above-­ mentioned collection Leaving the 20th Century was ‘the radical-chic fetish object’ (2006: 198). The band were also inspired by Brechtian notions of Verfremdung and by Gramsci’s ideas about hegemony, using their art to de-naturalise the ideologies in which we are embedded and that shape our lives. In his analysis of Gang of Four’s 1979 album Entertainment!, Kevin Dettmar indeed describes this album as ‘an experiment in the musical demystification of the politics of everyday life’ (Dettmar 2014: 29).19 This aspect is exemplified by the album’s sleeve booklet, which shows black and white scenes as projected on television screens, accompanied by statements that illustrate the ideological messages that they transmit to the viewer as if these messages were natural. As on Manic Street Preachers releases, furthermore, these critical ideas also found their way into Gang of Four’s lyrics, which address themes like commodity fetishism and consumerism. The song ‘Natural’s Not in It’ (on Entertainment!), for example, criticises the way in which feelings and ideals we experience as natural are shaped by consumerist and economic structures. Gang of Four lyrics, furthermore, often specifically criticise romanticised images of love as well. ‘Damaged Goods’, for example, describes a form of love that turns into exploitation, and ‘Love like Anthrax’ (both on Entertainment!) critically reflects on the inescapable influence of idealised notions of love in pop songs.

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Lastly, Gang of Four’s decision to sign to EMI—in contrast to postpunk bands who aimed to stay away from major labels by building an ‘independent infrastructure’ of ‘labels, distribution and record stores’ (Reynolds 2006: 57)—was ‘justified’ by the band in a way very similar to Edwards’ above-cited rejection of the faux-purity of indie music. Guitarist Andy Gill claimed that the dream of ‘escaping Babylon was bollocks hand-wringing… The point for us was not to be ‘pure.’ Gang of Four songs were so often about the inability to have ‘clean hands’. It just wouldn’t be on our agenda to be on a truly independent label, as if such a thing could even exist’ (qtd. in Reynolds 2006: 217). The other band who I briefly want to discuss is the Leeds group Scritti Politti, since their experiments with critical and political popular music return explicitly in Manic Street Preachers releases as well. Again, one of these experiments is found in their employment of intertextuality. The name of the band, for example, refers to a collection of ‘political writings’ by Gramsci, and their 1979 song ‘Hegemony’ (on Early) explicitly reflects on one of the key terms developed by the Italian Marxist. What makes Scritti Politti especially relevant for my discussion, however, is the particular way in which the band struggled with the attempt to voice critique on a context of which they themselves formed part. Reynolds puts this struggle into words by referring to Scritti Politti’s singer Green Gartside’s interests in Austrian-British philosopher Wittgenstein: ‘Ludwig Wittgenstein … argued that all of humanity’s problems stem from our bewitchment by language. The problem, then, was: How do you think your way out of the cage when the only tools are made of language?’ (2006: 590).20 Influenced as well by Derrida’s poststructuralism—the French philosopher is referenced on their 1982 double A-side ‘Asylums in Jerusalem’/‘Jacques Derrida’—Scritti Politti reinvented themselves in the early 1980s. Instead of presenting radical lyrics in an equally radical form, recording their own music in an attempt to ‘break’ the record industry and de-naturalise the spectacle of capitalism (the band printed the details of production costs on their early releases, for example), they decided to reject their early minimalist and raw postpunk sound and to speak the ‘language’ of that which they aimed to criticise. Reynolds writes:

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[Green Gartside] hadn’t totally abandoned the idea of subversion, but his ideas of how that might work became more oblique and subtle. He envisioned a strategy of unsettling and undoing (deconstruction, the French called it) that took place inside the very language of pop. Instead of searching for some alternative zone of authentic purity and truth that supposedly existed outside the conventional forms, Green decided, it might be more productive to work within those structures. Rather than avoiding the love song altogether, it might be possible to locate and accentuate the internal contradictions and tautologies that already limned what Barthes called the “lover’s discourse”. (Reynolds 2006: 981–2)

Adopting this form of ‘entryism’, Scritti Politti now released commercial songs aimed at achieving high charting positions, presenting themselves in slick video-clips as models, following the discourse of celebrity culture. The technique of entryism, they argued, might enable their songs, once inside ‘the system’, to open people’s eyes and to eventually de-naturalise this same system. Scritti Politti’s 1981 single ‘The “Sweetest Girl”’ forms the clearest example of their entryism. The song embraces a commercial, warm and poppy sound, with Green Gartside singing as slickly as possible. Furthermore, at first glance its lyrics read like a conventional love song as well, sketching a romantic relationship between two people. Only later in the song, the lyrics describe how the ‘sweetest girl’ runs away from the boy who idealises her, rejecting the male gaze that forces her to identify with a stereotypical notion of ‘girlhood’. By doing this, the band use the ‘language’ of the mainstream pop songs of the time to present the notion of ‘the sweetest girl’ as a consumerist and harmful construct, deliberately placed within quotation marks. In Chap. 4, we will see that the notion of ‘entryism’ returns in Manic Street Preachers releases as well.

Popular Modernism Reynolds refers several times to the notion of ‘modernism’ to characterise postpunk, mainly to emphasise the observation that the bands he discusses aimed to do something radically new and original by

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experimenting with musical form and by including intertextual references to modernist artists and artworks. In the following, I want to briefly reflect on this term by exploring the concept of ‘popular modernism’, which I will use in my discussion of Manic Street Preachers lyrics in Chaps. 4 and 5. A fruitful understanding of this concept21 can be found in the works of British music journalist Mark Fisher, who writes in his book Ghosts of My Life: In popular modernism, the elitist project of modernism was retrospectively vindicated. At the same time, popular culture definitively established that it did not have to be populist. Particular modernist techniques were not only disseminated but collectively reworked and extended, just as the modernist task of producing forms which were adequate to the present moment was taken up and renewed. (2014: 22–3)

Fisher characterises brutalist architecture, several postpunk bands, Penguin paperbacks and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop as ‘popular modernist’ phenomena within the British cultural landscape in which he grew up (2014: 22). The diverse nature of this wide range of phenomena, of course, does not really clarify the concept of ‘popular modernism’. I therefore want to zoom in on Fisher’s observations on music. Distinguishing ‘populist culture’ from ‘popular culture’, Fisher suggests that even though popular modernist music appeals to the taste of mass audiences and is part of the entertaining spectacle of popular music, it also tries to distance itself from this same spectacle. Phrased in the discourse of Andreas Huyssen’s influential analysis of modernism and postmodernism (1986), this music is inspired by the modernist emphasis on erecting a ‘Great Divide’ between art and everyday life, protecting art from what are perceived to be the standardising influences of consumerism and, more generally, modernisation processes. What makes popular modernism ‘popular’, however, is that the elitist constitution of this divide still takes place within the democratic realm of popular culture, and never reaches the dense complexity of form that can be found in modernist musical compositions (Schoenberg and Webern) or modernist texts (Kafka, Beckett and Joyce).

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Popular modernist music, I want to argue, constructs this Great Divide in two ways. The first is by experimenting with form, inspired by the radical experimentations that were adopted by modernist and avant-­ garde movements of the early twentieth century. As discussed above, Reynolds focuses on musical form and indeed characterises postpunk as modernist because of its departure from the guitar-dominated approach of punk and, more generally, from those musical structures that they understood as conventional and traditional. In this way, these musicians aimed to distance themselves from the society that they criticised, exploring unconventional musical routes to confront listeners with something new (still, however, making music to which one could dance and that did not completely alienate mass audiences). This, in turn, was meant to encourage them to think and reflect; to ‘de-naturalise’ their environment. In Chaps. 4 and 5, I will show that what makes several Manic Street Preachers releases popular modernist in character is that they shift this concern with musical form to a modernist exploration of the realm of lyrics, words and language. The second way in which popular modernist bands aim to carve out an autonomous position is by expressing critical observations on modernity and modernisation processes. To my knowledge, Fisher does not mention Manic Street Preachers in his writings, but I want to focus on his analysis of Joy Division to eventually argue—mainly in Chaps. 4 and 5—that his analysis of the critical content of popular modernist music can be used to highlight several characteristics of the Welsh band as well. Again, we will see, this critical content is mainly expressed in the band’s lyrics. What makes Joy Division into a popular modernist phenomenon, Fisher suggests, is that the Manchester postpunk band problematise modernisation processes similar to the way in which modernist artists like Beckett, Kafka or Joyce did this. This observation can be illustrated with help of the quote that opens Grant Gee and Jon Savage’s above-­mentioned documentary about the band: ‘To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world – and at the same time that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are’ (Gee 2007). The quote is taken from Marxist philosopher Marshall Berman’s 1982 work All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity.22

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By including this quote, the documentary embeds Joy Division in a tradition of artists and authors who critically respond to processes of modernisation, encapsulated by German sociologist Georg Simmel’s observation that ‘the deepest problems of modern life flow from the attempt of the individual to maintain the independence and individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers of society…’ (1981: 324). On the one hand, Simmel and Marshall suggest in these statements, modernisation processes contain a promise of social change and of happiness; of creating better societies in which individuals are free to live the lives they want, no longer dependent on tradition or religion, or on natural circumstances beyond their control. Modernity, in other words, promises progress and autonomy, in this view. On the other hand, however, they argue that modernity has resulted in societies in which these same individuals are usurped by anonymous capitalist and bureaucratic machineries, which rob them of their individuality—Simmel’s ‘sovereign powers of society’. Tony Wilson, co-founder of record label Factory Records, illustrates this idea by observing that Manchester used to be ‘the centre of the modern world’ where ‘the industrial revolution was invented’ and where, it seemed, human beings gained a form of mastery over their social and natural environment. At the same time, he goes on, processes of modernisation eventually created urban working and living conditions that he describes as ‘grimy and dirty’; conditions that shaped the life of the working class when Joy Division came into existence (qtd. in Gee 2007). These conditions reduced workers to mere cogs in a machine, corroding the ability to live a life of autonomy and dignity, and undermining the promises of modernity. What makes Joy Division’s response to modernity specifically modernist in nature, Fisher suggests, is that their music revolves around two characteristics, which both critically reflect modernisation processes: loss and control (2014: 50–2). The notion of control, which will return in my discussion of Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible in Chap. 4, characterises not only the minimalism of their album covers, it also surfaces in the lyrics of several Joy Division songs (most explicitly in the song ‘She Lost Control’ on Unknown Pleasures).23 This notion, I want to argue, has a double meaning in the band’s universe. On the one hand, Joy Division songs describe living in a modern society in which one has the feeling of

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being controlled by the above-mentioned political and economic structures and institutions that one cannot really perceive, understand or grasp. This form of control is exemplified by Burroughs’ Kafkaesque ‘interzone’, the title of a song on Unknown Pleasures. On the other hand, the band describe a loss of individual control caused by the experience of being permeated and shaped by this ‘interzone’ (see also Savage 2014: xxi, xxvi–xvii). Reynold’s above-cited reference to the way in which ‘larger forces’ script our seemingly natural everyday feelings and experiences point to a similar aspect of modernity. Joy Division, in other words, mourn the broken promise of modernity, describing how hopeful notions of progress, autonomy, dignity and control eventually turned into their opposite and constituted a world, their songs suggest, in which all hope is lost. On Joy Division’s releases, this mourning is shaped in lyrics and music. In his foreword to a collection of Ian Curtis’ lyrics, Jon Savage reflects as follows on the former aspect of the band: ‘Ian Curtis’ great lyrical achievement was to capture the underlying reality of a society in turmoil, and to make it both universal and personal. He felt the human cost of the economic and social restructuring that was occurring in the late seventies’ (2014: xxvii–xxviii). As mentioned above, the technique of intertextuality returns in these lyrics as well: Curtis was deeply inspired by Kafka, Burroughs and Ballard, but Fisher also refers to Schopenhauer’s rejection of the world to characterise the bleakness of the band’s music and their alienation from the disappointing world that modernity, in their view, had shaped (2014: 59). In The Value of Popular Music, furthermore, Alison Stone describes how this mourning is expressed as well by the semiotic elements of the band’s releases. For example, she analyses the Joy Division song ‘Transmission’ as follows, emphasising characteristics that point towards the feeling of being trapped in a controlling, ungraspable structure that she associates as well with processes of modernisation: ‘We are in industrial modernity, a place where machinery exercises vast power  – but we’re subjected to this realm, trapped in it, not able to prevail over it’ (2016: 187). Instead of rejecting the technological advancements of the modernity that they criticise, in other words, the band use these advancements to produce technologically advanced music that reflects the

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inescapability of these same technological structures, again forming an embodiment of control. A similar ‘machine-like’ regularity, Matthew Boswell observes in his analysis of Joy Division and National Socialist imagery, even characterised the dancing of singer Ian Curtis, which, in his words, ‘replicates a frenzied kind of marching’ (Boswell 2012: 120) and presents a body trapped in its own rhythmic movements and convulsions, having lost control and being controlled by something else. I want to combine these observations on Joy Division with several insightful arguments developed by Allan F. Moore in an article on modernism and British rock band Jethro Tull. Moore argues that the notion of ‘modernism’, if applied to popular music, encompasses ‘an ambivalence towards the products of modernity’ (2003: 169) that is expressed in the form of feelings of alienation and, again, loss of control. Instead of focusing, as Stone and Reynolds do, on the modernist aspects of the musical form developed by popular modernist bands, Moore mainly discusses the critical content of their approach to modernity. Arguing that Jethro Tull is a popular modernist band, he observes with references to David Harvey that this does not mean that ‘Jethro Tull’s music is stylistically modernist, but instead that it represents what Harvey defines as a ‘troubled and fluctuating aesthetic response to conditions of modernity” (Moore 2003: 169; see Harvey 1990: 99). Jethro Tull, again in Moore’s words, therefore hint at a site ‘wherein contemporary music practices can be conceptualized to accommodate aspects of both modernism and mass culture, enabling them to be viewed […] as sibling expressions of modernity’ (2003: 172). Combining Moore and Fisher’s observations with those of Reynolds, I believe we arrive at a fruitful description of the tendency of ‘popular modernism’ in the context of popular music: a form of music that is embedded in mass and consumption culture—both products of processes of modernisation—but that still critically expresses concern with the social and economic processes that characterise modernity. As discussed, this expression can be found in the musical form of these releases but, as Moore and Fisher observe, also in their lyrics, album sleeve designs, clothes and image. Modernisation processes, in other words, are presented within popular modernist art as a threat to the autonomy of the

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artwork, but simultaneously as processes from which the artwork cannot escape and by which it, to a large part, is even shaped.

Dream Pop and Madchester To understand how Manic Street Preachers relate to the tendency of popular modernism and to the movement of postpunk, it is crucial to realise that they formed in 1986 and started releasing music in 1988. This means that they did this in an era in which postpunk—and the popular modernism of bands like Joy Division and Gang of Four—had unravelled. Instead, the British musical landscape of this era revolved around styles, forms and approaches in which, the Welsh band argued, ‘political issues’ were not discussed anymore. In the 1990s, we will see, they would respond in different ways to Britpop and grunge, but the two main musical movements that Manic Street Preachers targeted as unpolitical in the late 1980s were Dream Pop and Madchester. The former style, also called ‘shoegaze’, was characterised by a dreamy, psychedelic sound, distorted guitars and the use of feedback and noise. To a large extent, this sound was created by musical experimentations dominated by the use of guitar pedals—hence the name ‘shoegazing’, referring to guitarists looking down at their guitar pedals on stage (see Wiseman-Trowse 2008: 147). Compared to the clear and dry sound of postpunk, in which each instrument is discernible and plays a more or less equal role, in Dream Pop instruments blend together.24 This often went hand in hand with an emphasis on the semiotic aspects of lyrics, downplaying the symbolic aspects of words in favour of a singing style in which the singer’s voice drowns in the song’s overall ‘dreamy’ sound. Madchester, in turn, rejected the inward look of Dream Pop and revolved around music in which alternative rock with a 1960s’ guitar sound was mixed with more outwardly oriented forms of music: acid house, Detroit techno, psychedelia and dance, influenced strongly by rave culture (Luck 2002: 12; Wiseman-Trowse 2008: 157). This mixture of musical styles resulted in a sound referred to with the word ‘baggy’, after the loose clothes worn by Madchester bands and fans. In the

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Madchester scene, centralised for a large part around New Order’s nightclub The Haçienda, alcohol and drugs played an important role as well. Indeed, the lyrics of Madchester bands like The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays often revolve around that which Richard Luck defines as ‘the baggy’s brigade … overriding obsession with having a good time’ (Luck 2002: 41). Simon Reynolds notices as well that even though the music of Madchester bands was ‘teemed with futuristic textures and strange noises’ that are reminiscent of postpunk, ‘the context (crazed collective hedonism) and the emotion (euphoria with a mystic tinge) were totally different’ (2006: 1224). Releasing their first singles in a musical climate that they experienced as dominated by both Madchester and Dream Pop, Manic Street Preachers’ explicit defence of critical and political lyrics—discussed in the previous chapter—often directly targeted these two musical movements for, in the band’s view, turning away from political critique. By doing this, they implicitly suggested that, in the era in which they started releasing music, authenticity could only be reclaimed by embracing critical political music and, especially, by writing critical lyrics. In a 1991 interview with Simon Reynolds for Melody Maker, for example, Edwards observed the following about shoegaze bands like Slowdive, Chapterhouse and Ride, emphasising Manic Street Preachers’ own working-class background: ‘All those bands are educated and middle class, but all they have to say is, “We don’t want to say anything.” A lot of those groups are as wrapped up in musicality as the supergroups of the seventies. There’s so much emphasis on pedals and getting the right sound’ (qtd. in Reynolds 2011a: 125). In the same interview, Nicky Wire added: ‘It’s nullifying, there’s nowhere you can go with it but into your bedroom. We’ve done that all our lives, that’s the last thing we wanna do. It’s an aesthetic of blanking out everything’ (qtd. in Reynolds 2011a: 125).25 Wire furthermore stated the following about Madchester band Happy Mondays’ 1991 single ‘Loose Fit’ and their singer: ‘Shaun Ryder’s great political statement was ‘Loose Fit’, about jeans being baggy. It fitted in perfectly and I can see the point in it, the whole baggy ethic. But for us we wanted to take it a bit further. It just didn’t have enough depth for us, it was just about music or drugs’ (qtd. in Connolly 1998).

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After Uniqueness26 Rejecting contemporary popular music that, in their view, revolved mainly around ‘music and drugs’, and aiming to ‘speak about political issues’ within the realm of popular music, Manic Street Preachers started mining the past instead. They adopted the above-described technique of intertextuality to refer to bands, artists and art movements that had addressed political issues before Madchester and Dream Pop. Often, the bands that inspired them had done this with help of the technique of intertextuality as well, like the above-discussed Joy Division, Gang of Four or Scritti Politti. What distinguishes Manic Street Preachers from these postpunk bands, however, is that, as Reynolds and Fisher argue, postpunk mainly referred to modernist and avant-gardist movements from outside the realm of music, and presented the musical form of their own releases as ‘new’ and ‘modernist’. Their music, after all, was presented as born in autonomous explorations of form that rejected the conventional rock ‘n’ roll structures of punk and the bands that preceded punk. Releasing music from 1988 onwards, however, Manic Street Preachers started mining the past in a more inclusive manner than postpunk had done. Again, of course, this was not unique: not only, as Reynolds argues in his 2011 study Retromania, is popular music ‘addicted’ to its own past and continually goes through cycles of nostalgia (1970s’ glam rock echoing 1950s’ rock ‘n’ roll, for example, or the neopostpunk of the 2000s echoing the postpunk of the late 1970s and early 1980s), it was specifically in the era following postpunk (and, according to Reynolds, following the electronic experiments that made New Pop bands like The Human League progressive and modernist as well) that the alternative scene came to be dominated by ‘retromania’. This resulted, Reynolds argues with Scottish rock band The Jesus and Mary Chain as an example, in ‘record collection rock’ in which influences were ‘signposted’, almost by copying the sound, style and melodies of previous bands (2006: 1213). Since Manic Street Preachers mined the past in a much less exclusive manner than postpunk did, similar claims could be made about the ‘record collection’ aspects of their releases. In chaps. 4–7, I will go into the details of this claim, but for now I want to discuss several examples to develop an

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initial understanding of how they did this: I briefly want to argue that their releases, to use Reynold’s terminology, signpost their influences in different ways, again often in the form of intertextual references that use the multitextual nature of popular music to create palimpsests of past art movements. In different ways, for example, the band refer to postpunk: we will see that The Holy Bible partly copies a postpunk sound,27 showing the influence of bands like Magazine, Public Image Ltd., Joy Division and Wire. The band also took over the elitist postpunk-characteristic of never doing encores (see Marcus 2015), and in their early years they refused to encourage audiences to clap their hands above their heads (see Heatley 1998: 49). Furthermore, Manic Street Preachers embraced the academic rigour of postpunk by, again in their early years, shaping a manifesto-like iconoclastic philosophy they characterised as ‘denialism’, revolving around statements like ‘never write a love song’, ‘no humour in music or lyrics’, ‘don’t take any drugs’, ‘don’t have a fan club’, and ‘don’t like The Beatles or admit to liking The Beatles’ (qtd. in Marcus 2015). On the sleeves of their early releases (such as ‘Love’s Sweet Exile’), we even find an address to which the listener could mail ‘for regular manifestos’. Other references to postpunk can be found on Manic Street Preachers releases as well. In the lyrics of the song ‘Some Kind of Nothingness’ (on Postcards from a Young Man), for example, the phrase ‘unknown pleasures’ turns up, and in the original lyric sheets printed in the sleeve of Journal for Plague Lovers, we find a reference to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ song ‘A Box for Black Paul’ (on From Her to Eternity). ‘Between the Clock and the Bed’ (on Futurology), in turn, is sung by Bradfield and Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside. Lastly, it could even be argued that the modernist minimalism of the cover of The Holy Bible, which, as discussed above, explicitly refers to Simple Mind’s Empire and Dance, implicitly refers to the design of the covers of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures or Closer, or to the cover of Scritti Politti’s 1985 single ‘Perfect Way’. The latter cover is dominated by a white background as well, shows one or two centralised squares of images (depending on the version of the single), and presents the band and song’s names in a font of black capital letters reminiscent of The Holy Bible’s typeface. As mentioned above, however, Manic Street Preachers also mined the tradition of punk and explicitly signposted this influence (mainly on

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their early releases) as well. For example, the cover of their first single, ‘Suicide Alley’, is a re-presentation of the cover of The Clash’s debut album. It replaces the iconic picture of The Clash’s band members with the—then—three members of Manic Street Preachers. As we will see in Chap. 4, the band’s early releases also copied the musical style of the early The Clash. In the song ‘Roses in the Hospital’ (on Gold Against the Soul), furthermore, we hear James Dean Bradfield singing ‘Rudie gonna fail’, a pessimistic re-interpretation of The Clash’s ‘Rudie Can’t Fail’ (on London Calling). Furthermore, the band covered ‘What’s My Name’ and ‘Train in Vain’ by The Clash (live versions were released as B-sides to the singles of, respectively, ‘La Tristesse Durera (Scream to a Sigh)’ and ‘You Stole the Sun From My Heart’). Lastly, the same version of ‘You Love Us’ not only opens with a sample from Krzysztof Penderecki’s 1961 ‘Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima’, but also ends with a sample from the drum pattern of Iggy Pop’s ‘Lust for Life’ (on Lust for Life). Another influence signposted by Manic Street Preachers is rock ‘n’ roll. To distance themselves from Dream Pop and Madchester, for example, we will see in Chap. 4 that on their first album they adopted a fusion of punk and rock ‘n’ roll that was based on L.A. glamrock, rejecting not only the psychedelia and dance of these movements but also the minimalism of postpunk. Perhaps the most explicit example of this embrace of rock ‘n’ roll is formed by the band covering ‘It’s So Easy’ by Guns ‘N Roses (a live-version was released as a B-side on the 1992 single of ‘You Love Us’) and Alice Cooper’s ‘Under My Wheels’ (released as a B-side to ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’).28 A later example is formed by their cover of ‘Rock ‘N’ Roll Music’ (a B-side to their 2000 single of ‘The Masses Against the Classes’), written by the musician who, as Reynolds notes above, embodied everything that postpunk had wanted to get away from: Chuck Berry.

Three Bands To work towards my ideas about the specific role that lyrics play within Manic Street Preachers songs, however, I want to briefly go back to the 1980s and discuss the way in which the Welsh group responded to three bands who released music between the end of postpunk (the beginning

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of the 1980s) and the release of Manic Street Preachers’ first single in 1988. The first of these are The Smiths. Active between 1982 and 1987, The Smiths’ use of intertextuality (their lyrical references to poetry and literature, for example, as well as their use of film stills for album covers) inspired Manic Street Preachers’ entwinement of high and low art and of poetry and entertainment. In an early interview, however, they rejected The Smiths’ singer Morrissey’s focus on existential issues, because they stated, there is ‘no point in just standing on stage saying life hurts you’ (qtd. in Reynolds 2011a: 126). The second band who I briefly want to mention is bIG⋆fLAME (active between 1983 and 1986). This Manchester group formed a radicalisation of the avant-garde elements of postpunk and embodied the opposite of The Smiths’ accessible and commercially viable music. Named after a feminist-socialist organisation from Liverpool, bIG⋆fLAME only released a small number of 7” singles, presenting experimental compositions that at places remind of the musical assemblages of artists like Captain Beefheart. Furthermore, they split up on a predetermined date to make sure that they would not repeat themselves and that they would not be pulled into the consumerist spectacle of popular music. Their songs, which contain no guitar solos, are fast, characterised by atonal guitar sounds, a dominant bass, fast drumming and a singer who croons and screeches often indecipherable lyrics. Furthermore, bIG⋆fLAME’s songs frequently change pace, with instruments following different time signatures. Edwards stated about the band: ‘The ‘80s for us, was the biggest non-event ever ... All we had was Big Flame. Big Flame was the most perfect band’ (qtd. in Gabriel 1991).29 However, and this is an observation to which I will return below, Edwards added in the same interview that they could not play bIG⋆fLAME because they were ‘too avant garde’.30 The third band is the English group McCarthy (active between 1985 and 1990). This band from Barking, ironically named after American senator Joseph McCarthy, combined radical Marxist lyrics with the accessible, almost gentle guitar pop sound that characterised the indie pop of the era; a throwback to the guitar sound and clean, folky singing style of the 1960s. They had a crucial influence on Manic Street Preachers. Nicky Wire described their 1987 album I Am A Wallet as ‘a Communist

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manifesto with tunes’ and characterised them as ‘the great lost band of the ‘80s’, observing furthermore: ‘[McCarthy] redesigned my idea of politics and pop, it could be intelligent, it could be beautiful. They were frail, tragic, romantic idealists. The songs soothed your body but exercised your brain. They were my education, my information and they are partly to blame for the realization of the Manic Street Preachers’ (qtd. in Royston n.d.). Again, Manic Street Preachers signposted the influences of these three bands in different ways. In the song ‘1985’ (on Lifeblood), for example, it is stated that, in the titular year, The Smiths’ ‘Morrissey and Marr gave me choice’, and the title of their DVD Louder Than War recalls the title of The Smiths’ 1987 compilation album Louder Than Bombs. Furthermore, Edwards frequently wore a self-made shirt of bIG⋆fLAME during concerts and press photographs (see e.g. Ikeda 2002: 65). Lastly, Manic Street Preachers covered McCarthy’s ‘We are all Bourgeois Now’ (on Know Your Enemy), ‘Red Sleeping Beauty’ (on the single of ‘Autumnsong’) and the anti-monarchy song ‘Charles Windsor’ (on ‘Life Becoming a Landslide’), turning the tender sound of the latter song’s original version into an aggressive punk anthem. An early version of Manic Street Preachers’ ‘Spectators of Suicide’ (on the 1992 single of ‘You Love Us’ and later on Lipstick Traces), furthermore, contains an audio-sample taken from a speech by Black Panther Bobby Seale. A fragment from the same speech was used in McCarthy’s ‘Throw Him Out He’s Breaking My Heart’ (on The Enraged Will Inherit the Earth).

Critical Lyrics Now that I have developed a brief overview of several of the band’s influences, as well as of their critical message and of the ways in which they use the technique of intertextuality to signpost their influences, I want to turn to the question of why lyrics play such an important role in Manic Street Preachers releases. So far, I have tried to make three points in this chapter: (1) that Manic Street Preachers, as a group releasing popular music, use all aspects of this multi-textual realm to transmit their critical message, from music to lyrics, from clothes to sleeve art, and from

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samples to body art; (2) that they do this by continually emphasising the unoriginal nature of their attempt to ‘question the entire culture we take for granted’, foregrounding the idea that what they aim to do has already been done countless times before; and (3) that they link this idea to their embedment in the same music and entertainment industry, and the same consumption culture, that they aim to reject, repeating (again) The Clash, Public Enemy, Gang of Four and Scritti Politti’s observation that there is no escape from this system. At the same time, however, I want to argue that Manic Street Preachers’ attempt to ‘question the entire culture we take for granted’ is formulated in a language that, to use Bradfield’s terminology again, is ‘exclusive’; a claim that contradicts their problematisation of the notions of originality and authenticity. This exclusivity, I believe I am now in a position to argue, is constituted primarily in their lyrics; an argument that implies that it is in these lyrics that the band aim to reclaim a form of critical authenticity. I want to substantiate this point with help of Simon Reynolds’ observation on the Leeds university climate in which postpunk bands Gang of Four and The Mekons originated: T. J. Clark, the department head, had been a member of the short-lived British chapter of the Situationist International. Terry Atkinson, the studio-­painting tutor who wandered around discussing the students’ work, had once belonged to the ultra-rigorous movement Art and Language. […] The Mekons’ Tom Greenhalgh enjoyed Art and Language’s sarcastic, combative approach, the way they ripped into other critics for being “wooly-­ minded and promoting the mystique of Art.” Absorbing this sensibility, the Mekons and Gang of Four created a kind of metarock, radically self-­ critical and vigilant. (2006: 199–200)

This description, emphasising the entwinement of art and theory, of art and critique and of art and political activism, could be applied to the ‘metarock’ of Manic Street Preachers as well: as discussed above, after all, the Welsh band present assemblages of references to previous artworks, art forms and art movements, in an attempt to criticise the context in which they release their art, even to the point of ‘making music redundant’.

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Whereas, like Manic Street Preachers, however, The Mekons and Gang of Four (and countless other bands and musicians) included intertextual references in their works, unlike Manic Street Preachers, we have seen, these bands also aimed to construct a radically new form of music and adopted a modernist approach to musical composition. In Manic Street Preachers releases, as I have argued above, this latter attempt is replaced with an embrace of a wide range of already existing styles, even though some of these styles, we will see in Chaps. 4–7, still express forms of aggression or coldness and distance themselves from their musical context. After all, Manic Street Preachers reject the avant-garde music of bIG⋆fLAME as too obscure and praise the music of The Smiths. At the same time, however, they celebrate the radical aims of bIG⋆fLAME and, in spite of their more intellectual dimension, criticise the lyrics of The Smiths for being too sentimental. Both aspects, in turn, come together in their appraisal of McCarthy for ‘soothing the body but exercising the brain’. I therefore want to argue that Manic Street Preachers releases are driven by the aim to combine rather accessible music—soothing the body—with unconventional and alienating explorations of the realm of lyrics—exercising the brain, creating different layers of meaning within songs. This implies, the band suggest, that the latter realm forms a dimension in which, they argue in a popular modernist fashion, something new can still be done within the context of popular music. Partly, this means that several of Manic Street Preachers’ more commercial releases continue Scritti Politti’s above-described entryism, accompanying accessible and democratic music that, the idea goes, will be heard by as many people as possible, with a radical and unexpected message. However, as I will show in this book, the abstract and intellectual density of Manic Street Preachers lyrics gives these lyrics an almost autonomous status within their songs, continuing postpunk’s modernist leanings exclusively in the realm of lyrics. This distinguishes them from Gang of Four songs and from the rather cryptic lyrics of later Scritti Politti releases, which bury their critical message rather deeply beneath the language of the system that they eventually aim to criticise. Furthermore, this also makes these lyrics gain a theoretical consistency that makes it possible to argue, as I will do in Chaps. 4–7, that they construct different theoretical critical models. In the next chapter, I will argue that what

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distinguishes Manic Street Preachers from the Wittgensteinian and Derridean approach adopted by Scritti Politti as well is the Welsh band’s more totalising and much darker rejection of the status quo, which they shape with help of a critical message that targets both political structures and humankind; both social and economic contexts and the selves shaped in and by these contexts.

Conclusion Taking the above-listed nine ‘building blocks’ into account, I want to conclude this chapter with the observation that the first block—the band’s lyrics—plays a primary role in their aim to question ‘the entire culture we take for granted’. This aim is foregrounded, I will show in chaps. 4–7, by the eight other elements of the band’s language, often because these other elements emphasise the impossibility of accomplishing the aim that drives these lyrics. Whereas a band like Gang of Four aimed to find a balance between theory and academic insights on the one hand and music on the other—a balance that, as Reynolds describes, often led ‘traditionalists’ to accuse them of ‘too much concept and theory, not enough emotion, sensuousness, warmth’ (Reynolds 2006: 213)—Manic Street Preachers explore the realm of concepts, theory and words in an even more extreme and ‘cold’ manner, balancing it, however, with more traditional and conventional music. Indeed, most of their songs are around five minutes long and follow recognisable pop music patterns (intro-verse-prechorus-chorusverse-prechorus-chorus-bridge-verse-chorus-outro) that make them catchy, commercially viable and easy to remember. As Richey Edwards reflected on Manic Street Preachers’ approach in a 1991 interview: ‘We might sound like the last 30 years of rock ‘n’ roll, but our lyrics address the same issues as Public Enemy’ (qtd. in NME Originals: Manic Street Preachers 2002: 22). This conclusion, I want to argue, is embodied by the sleeve of Manic Street Preachers’ 2001 album Know Your Enemy. On its cover, we see the wild and aggressive materiality of the above-mentioned painting by Neale Howells. On a turquoise-coloured background, red paint is splattered, dripping down at the bottom, reminding of the red dripping blood on the cover of American band Suicide’s 1977 debut album. Over these colours, a text is painted in black letters, presenting us with fragments of

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phrases that are only partly readable. Over this artwork, however, the name of the band and the title of the album are printed in an uncompromising way in white capital letters, breaking up in a manner that reminds, as mentioned above, of Christopher Wool’s word art: MANIC ST / REET PREA / CHERS KN / OW YOUR E / NEMY. This means that the cover presents a palimpsest of layers and dimensions of meaning. Nevertheless, the prominent and uncompromising role played by these white letters foregrounds the band’s focus on transmitting a conceptual message in the form of lyrics. Especially the observation that these phrases are broken up, I want to argue—a ‘breaking up’ that frequently returns, we will see in Chaps. 4 and 5, in the way Bradfield tries to ‘squeeze’ lyrics into the musical structures of songs—encourages us to decipher these letters and to focus as well on the conceptual message that they transmit. In this way, the letters on the album’s cover represent the band’s emphasis on the important role that lyrics play in their releases, eventually pushing the other dimensions of these releases to the background and making them into a horizon that highlights these white letters. This horizon, again, forms a palimpsest of the other meaning-generating layers of the band’s releases, but also of the history of critical political bands discussed above. Had this background been white, then the letters would not have been discernible. Had these words not been broken up, furthermore, we would not have been encouraged to decipher their meaning. As such, I will argue in the following chapters, semiotic and symbolic elements (to use Kristeva’s terminology again) are present within Manic Street Preachers releases as different layers or dimensions of meaning (some ‘soothing’ the body, others ‘exercising’ the brain). These layers struggle for attention in a fight in which, eventually, both the semiotic and the symbolic elements of their lyrics push these lyrics to the forefront and make them express a critical message.

Notes 1. In the lyrics of the Manic Street Preachers’ song ‘Dead Yankee Drawl’, a B-side to the 1992 single of ‘Little Baby Nothing’, we find an implicit defence of this fusion of contexts. The song’s lyrics target both political and social structures as well as consumption culture: they embed

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r­ eferences to the Vietnam War, Saddam Hussein and Rodney King in a context that is presented as shaped and turned into entertainment by mass media, Superman and Disney. 2. An example of references embodied by song titles is the song ‘A Vision of Dead Desire’ (a B-side to the 1992 single of ‘You Love Us’ and a slightly changed version of the earlier ‘UK Channel Boredom’), which is named after a photograph made by American photographer Clarence John Laughlin (see Kaplan 2016: 55). Another example is ‘R.P. McMurphy’ (a B-side to the 1991 single of ‘You love Us’; a live version was released on CD2 of the single of ‘Little Baby Nothing’), which refers to the protagonist of Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and combines descriptions of the novel’s narrative and worldview with a critique of capitalism. Manic Street Preachers also used a quote from Kesey’s novel as the opening of their 1997 VHS concert registration Everything Live: ‘The truth, even if it didn’t happen’ (see Kesey 1962: 8). Another example is formed by the title of the otherwise instrumental song ‘Ostpolitik’ (a B-side to the single ‘It’s Not War (Just the End of Love)’. 3. John Encarnacao argues, for example, that The Bomb Squad’s production of Public Enemy songs, ‘characterised by an onslaught of samples’, presents an instance of the avant-garde (2013: 51). Alison Stone observes, in turn, that the use of samples has also been understood as a postmodern challenge to distinctions between ‘original’ and ‘copy’ (2016: 55). Furthermore, Neal discusses how the musical genre of hiphop, ‘like Be-Bop, […] appropriated popular texts, often refiguring them to serve Hip-Hop sensibilities. This phenomenon contextually questions and ultimately undermines the notion of corporate ownership of popular music…’ (1997: 128). 4. Richey Edwards can be seen wearing the Larkin-shirt in the documentary Close-Up: From There to Here (Connolly 1998). For a description of this shirt, which was made by artist Jeremy Deller, see Wire et al. 2011: 5. 5. Examples can be found in NME Originals: Manic Street Preachers 2002: 26–27, 64; Price 1999: 47; Middles 1999: 43, 68; Heatley 1998: 55–57. Lists like these are also updated and presented on the band’s official website www.manicstreetpreachers.com. 6. It is important to note, however, that adoping a genderbending persona on stage may also function, within popular music, as a way to constitute a distance between the ‘performing persona’ and the ‘real person’. This sometimes paradoxically means that genderbending personas are adoped

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to emphasise the masculinity of the ‘real person’ underneath (see Hawkins and Wermer-Colan 2019: 154). On gender, Richey Edwards and Nicky Wire, see Price 1999: 96–113, 197–223. 7. The same line returns in the lyrics of the song ‘Stay Beautiful’ on Generation Terrorists. It is taken from the following passage: ‘Anxiety is freedom’s possibility, and only such anxiety is through faith absolutely educative, because it consumes all finite ends and discovers all their deceptiveness’ (Kierkegaard 1980: 155). 8. On different manifestations of intertextuality within popular music, see Burns and Lacassa 2018. 9. For a discussion of Johnson’s mail art, see Home 1991: 69–73. 10. Paintings by Howells were also used for the covers of the singles ‘So Why So Sad’, ‘Found That Soul’ and ‘Ocean Spray’, all designed by Farrow Design. 11. The title may refer to Jarman’s 1990 film The Garden or to his shingle cottage-garden, about which Jarman wrote several books, one titled Derek Jarman’s Garden. 12. Images of Monroe can be found, for example, in the sleeve of Manic Street Preachers’ 1991 single ‘You Love Us’. In the same sleeve, a Marilyn Monroe quote is printed, in which the actress and singer links the emptiness of celebrity culture to an existentialist observation on the emptiness of her own life. In this way, the brand present the relationship between spectacle and public—between celebrity and audience—as one in which both sides are equally dependent on each other, since both do not want to be confronted with the meaninglessness of the context in which their relationship comes about. The band also aimed to use Bert Stern’s photographs of Marilyn Monroe for the cover of their first album; photographs that Monroe defaced with paint (see Price 1999: 68). The cover of the 1992 single of ‘Little Baby Nothing’ refers to these photographs, showing a painting of a woman’s face, covered with brush strokes. The lyrics of ‘So Dead’ (on Generation Terrorists) mention Monroe in a similar context as well. 13. On the cover of the 1991 single of ‘Love’s Sweet Exile’, we find a muscular torso – reminding of the torso on ‘Slash ‘N’ Burn’ – with a bulls’ eye target drawn over it. 14. Edwards not only praised Public Enemy, but also crititiced the homophobia and anti-semitism expressed in some of their lyrics (see Price 1999: 49).

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15. Crass criticised the, in their view, hypocritical political stance of The Clash for being merely driven by consumerist values (see McKay: 91). As punk author Mark Perry summarises their standpoint: ‘Punk died the day The Clash signed to CBS’ (qtd. in Andersen 2013: 2). 16. In his overview of avant-garde movements, Stewart Home also includes a chapter on punk. Since punk very quickly fragmented into different musical and political directions, Home observes that ‘as a movement punk was finished very soon after it began’ (1991: 84). For an analysis of the modernist and self-reflective aspects of the Sex Pistols, see Faulk 2010: 129–103. Faulk observes that Malcolm McLaren, the Sex Pistols’ controversial manager, eventually embraced a postmodern worldview in which explicit political critique disappeared, whereas the band themselves defended a more radical political form of resistance, which they coupled to ideas about working-class values and authenticity. 17. For an analysis of the critical dimensions of The Clash, especially the band’s ambivalent relation with the music industry, see Andersen 2013. 18. In his analysis of British rock modernism, Faulk observes that the Sex Pistols created music that the audience could, to some extent recognise because it followed a familiar blues scale, but accompanied this music with the dissonant voice of Johnny Rotten, which rejected this scale. In this way, he observes, the music of the British punk band confronted the audience with something they did not expect (see Faulk 2010: 150). This gives the punk band a more modernist dimension than Reynolds claims. 19. It could be argued that this album’s title echoes through the Manic Street Preachers song ‘All We Make Is Entertainment’ (on Postcards from a Young Man). 20. It is unclear to which phase in Wittgenstein’s oeuvre Gartside refers. He might refer to the argument, developed in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, that ‘The limits of my language mean the limits of my world’ (2001: 68). He might also refer to the ‘second’ Wittgenstein, embodied by the statement in Philosophical Investigations that ‘the meaning of a word is its use in the language’ (2009: 25). 21. A comprehensive analysis of modernism and British music can be found in Faulk’s British Rock Modernism. In this fascinating study, Faulk argues that The Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Sex Pistols should not be understood as primarily driven by the aim to resist and rebel, but as part of a self-reflective and modernist attempt to distance themselves from

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the commercial dimensions of popular culture. For an analysis of the ­‘cultural modernism’ that characterises early twentieth century translations of modernism, see also Schleifer 2013. 22. The quote is taken from Berman 1982: 15. 23. The phrase also found its way into the title of Anton Corbijn’s 2007 film about Joy Division, part of the revival of postpunk in the 2000s. 24. For a discussion of the differences and similarities between punk, postpunk and Dream Pop, see Wiseman-Trowse 2008: 147. 25. On the ‘retreatist’ aspects of Dream Pop, see Wiseman-Trowse 2008: 150. Reynolds (1990) even argues that Dream Pop expresses the desire to return to Kristeva’s semiotic realm and to completely let go of the symbolic order. 26. I have taken this title from  a  book on  avant-gardist and  experimental film: Balsom 2017. 27. Reynolds observes that The Holy Bible ‘makes some anguished noises in the direction of [postpunk bands] Magazine and Joy Division’ (2011a: 131). 28. Another examples is formed by the band’s cover of The Faces’ 1971 song ‘Stay With Me’ (a B-side to ‘She Is Suffering’). 29. Manic Street Preachers would later also cover songs by other bands from this era, all released in 1985. On their 1996 single of ‘Australia’, for example, we find a cover of Camper Van Beethoven’s ‘Take The Skinheads Bowling’; the 2007 single of ‘Indian Summer’, furthermore, contains a cover of American indie band Beat Happening’s ‘Foggy Eyes’. The single of ‘Some Kind of Nothingness’, in turn, contains a cover of Green on Red’s ‘Time Ain’t Nothing’. 30. A song by bIG⋆fLAME was included on the cassette compilation C86, released in 1986 by NME to provide an overview of the British indie scene of the mid 1980s. The cassette also contains the song ‘Velocity Girl’ by Scottish band Primal Scream. Manic Street Preachers would later release a cover of this song as a B-side to their single of ‘Australia’.

3 The Windowless Monad

Introduction In this chapter, I want to construct a framework that will help me develop a clearer understanding of the notion of critique and of the general (im)possibility of formulating critique within the realm of popular music. More specifically, this will eventually enable me to analyse how Manic Street Preachers releases are shaped by the aim to ‘question the entire culture we take for granted’. In the previous chapter, I have touched on several aspects of this issue in my brief discussions of Gang of Four and especially Scritti Politti, as well as in my references to autonomy, reflection and the tendency of popular modernism. In the current chapter, however, I want to approach this issue in a more theoretical and comprehensive manner by focusing on Theodor W. Adorno, who rejected popular music as a mere consumption product. Adorno’s rejection follows from his totalising condemnation of what he dubs the ‘culture industry’, a phrase referring to the idea that consumption culture has become ‘unified’, forming part of a late capitalist society in which the individual, like the products of this industry, is squeezed into a standardised mall (see Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: © The Author(s) 2020 M. Peters, Popular Music, Critique and Manic Street Preachers, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43100-6_3

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104). Adorno’s arguments against popular music have been discussed extensively,1 and in this chapter I will therefore only present an overview of those ideas that are relevant for my analysis of Manic Street Preachers. The observation that Adorno rejects the realm of popular music so vehemently makes his presence in popular music studies (as well as in this book) rather paradoxical: why would someone who is so dismissive of this kind of music play such an important role in its analysis? And why would someone who is so critical of direct action be used to analyse a radically critical band like Manic Street Preachers? Whereas Adorno’s Frankfurt School colleague Herbert Marcuse, after all, embraced the radical student movements of the 1960s as well as the emancipating power of protest music (1969: 38–9, 47), Adorno continually distanced himself from these phenomena and took refuge in the critical and challenging complexity of philosophical reflection. Furthermore, he combined this refuge with defences of the equally complex explorations of form that characterise modernist art, becoming ‘the theorist par excellence of the Great Divide’ between art and praxis and between art and politics (Huyssen 1986: ix). He alienated himself, for example, from the radical student movements who demanded that theory should lead to social change, resulting in the infamous scene of bare-breasted student activists throwing flowers and chanting that ‘Adorno as an institution is dead’ (Wilding 2009: 19, 36). Even though his observations on art are indebted to the radical experimentations with form and the revolutionary ideas that drove the historical avant-gardes,2 furthermore, his understanding of the all-permeating character of social and economic structures in modernity eventually even made him suggest that the tactics of the avant-gardes might be too direct, explicit and therefore naive to resist the reifying processes of consumption culture (Adorno 2005b: 182).3 As Huyssen therefore observes, the hope of changing society only lives on ‘residually’ in Adorno (Huyssen 1986: 32).4 Nevertheless, Simon Frith describes that it was impossible to ignore Adorno when analysing music in the leftist academic climate of the 1960s: ‘If you were writing about Popular Music you could not not deal with Adorno, just because you had to think about the culture industry’ (qtd. in Cloonan 2014: 105). In an article on Adorno and Marxist music

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analysis, Adam Krims observes that a similar focus on Adorno still characterises popular music studies today. He writes that the German philosopher’s ideas form a ‘foundational trauma’ (Krims 2003: 131) of the discipline, which continues to be haunted by his ghost (Krims 2003: 157). In Krims’ own words: ‘Adorno’s presence in popular music studies seems most often to resemble that of a pinball bumper, against which we all at some point fling ourselves in order to bounce somewhere else with renewed energy and theoretical momentum, but always with the horrifying threat that gravity will bring us back down in the same direction’ (2003: 132).5 As we will see below, Krims therefore proposes a different approach to popular music that lets go of the continual need to defend this music against Adorno. In his study of noise and music, John Epstein adopts a more positive approach and argues that one, in some way or another, has to ‘work through’ Adorno when analysing popular music. As he observes with reference to Richard Middleton’s detailed and very strong study of Adorno and popular music, this means that we need to ‘absorb him to go beyond him’ (Epstein 2014: xxxii; Middleton 1990: 35). In his analysis of Adorno and popular music, Erraught makes a similar point by arguing: ‘Engagement with Adorno can draw out the hidden assumptions and unexamined prejudices that inform [our] position and make us come up with much better arguments’ (2018: xxii). I agree with Epstein, Middleton and Erraught. Even though many aspects of Adorno’s critique of popular music are outdated or unconvincing, I believe that his reflections on aesthetics and art still provide us with a constellation of concepts that forms a fruitful theoretical framework. In this chapter, I will therefore use Adorno’s ideas to develop a clearer understanding of the notions of autonomy and reflection that I discussed in the previous chapter. This, I eventually aim to argue, will enable me to show what precisely happens within Manic Street Preachers lyrics and their attempt to formulate critique, even though Adorno himself would reject the band’s musical form.

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Modernity In order to discuss Adorno’s observations on art, we first have to briefly explore his political and social critique, of which, we will see in the following chapters, many elements return in the content of Manic Street Preachers releases, especially in their lyrics. These elements concern philosophical, sociological and cultural analyses of modernity; an age that, according to Adorno’s diagnosis, resulted in the development of totalitarian and bureaucratic regimes in the USSR and China, in Nazi Germany and death camps, as well as in the rise of consumption culture and late capitalist societies. Andreas Huyssen therefore observes that his theory ‘may appear to us today as a ruin of history, mutilated and damaged by the very conditions of its articulation and genesis: defeat of the German working class, triumph and subsequent exile of modernism from central Europe, fascism, Stalinism and the Cold War’ (Huyssen 1986: 20). The forms of thought and experience that Adorno associates with these regimes and structures, he argues throughout his works, revolve around a dialectical relationship between whole and part, in which the whole— whether this concerns fascist structures, philosophical rigid concepts, a specific and historically shaped form of rationality, the culture industry— dominates the parts, overshadows and reifies them, eventually eradicating that which makes these parts—individual human beings, particular objects, fragile experiences—into individual parts (Jameson 2007: 140). These tendencies, in other words, erase that which, according to Adorno, distinguishes these parts from the frameworks that are projected upon them and eradicate that which makes them ‘non-identical’; that which cannot be identified by squeezing them into an identitarian structure or framework—into forms of ‘identity thinking’.6 Following Marx’s arguments in Capital, Adorno observes that in modernity this process extends to human beings, who are used, exploited and approached as mere things; as cogs in a machine aimed at making profit; as beings whose needs and desires can be influenced and manipulated—and here Adorno again refers both to the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany, to late capitalism and to the culture industry—to turn them into atomised beings who believe themselves to be happy and free, but in

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reality are manipulated and standardised by political and economic ideologies that perpetuate and legitimate exploitation, suffering, war and the wasting away of natural resources. This process goes so far that Adorno famously characterised existence under the social, cultural and economic conditions that he rejects with the phrase ‘The whole is the false’ (Adorno 1974: 50), an inversion of Hegel’s claim that ‘The whole is the true’ (Hegel 1977: 11).

Embodiment and Modernity An important aspect of Adorno’s diagnosis is formed by the role of the body, which I want to discuss here since, as we will see below, it returns in responses to Adorno’s critique of popular music. This dimension of his works can be illustrated with the first excursus in Dialectic of Enlightenment, a book that Adorno wrote with Max Horkheimer during their exile from Nazi Germany in the United States. In this excursus, Adorno presents a reinterpretation of Hegel’s master slave dialectic through an analysis of the passage on Odysseus and the Sirens in Homer’s The Odyssey (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 35–62; Jameson 2007: 130). The idea that Odysseus had to bind his body to the mast of his ship to be able to enjoy the song of the Sirens and survive their potentially deadly music, makes Homer’s hero into the prototype of what Adorno calls ‘the bourgeois individual’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 35) and into an embodiment of, in his view, several characteristic tendencies of modernity. This argument is based on the observation that Odysseus employs his rationality to understand, map, oversee and control his environment and master it, shaping the above-mentioned dialectical tension between a rational whole and its individual, particular ‘other’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 46). Using his intellect, Adorno writes, Odysseus was able to break the eternal, pre-modern and mythical cycle of enjoyment and death, Eros and Thanatos, that revolved around the idea that one could only truly enjoy the Sirens’ luring songs if one would completely throw oneself into their promise of sublime happiness, forget oneself and be killed on the cliffs below the mythical creatures. Odysseus breaks this spell, enjoying the

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Sirens’ songs but, at the same time, surviving them. But this survival comes at a price: not only do the Sirens collapse, their mythical spell being broken by modernity’s emphasis on rational reflection and secularisation, Odysseus also has to bind his own body to the mast of the ship and to fill the ears of his rowers with wax (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002a: 47). Odysseus, Adorno observes, has created a situation in which he is able to enjoy the Sirens’ music but has to repress his body, pushing it away and instrumentalising the bodies of his rowers. For Adorno, this passage therefore represents the idea—which he largely takes from his own interpretation of the works of Freud, Marx, Nietzsche and Weber—that in modern, Western civilisation the body, including passions concerning sensuality, sexuality, happiness and desire, become problematised: they are repressed, reified and mastered, pushed away as uncontrollable and dangerous, but they are also, in his view, simultaneously permeated with structures that manipulate and instrumentalise them. It is no coincidence, furthermore, that Homer’s narrative revolves around song and music: aesthetic experiences, Adorno observes, may contain promises of fulfilment and happiness that become blocked in modernity, addressing a body that is bound and that is driven by the attempt to survive by using the self ’s ability to oversee and rationalise her natural environment— including her own body—to control and master this same environment and this same body (Chua 2006: 6–7; Jameson 2007: 129). With these standardising mechanisms, Adorno again refers to fascist celebrations of bodily strength and purity, turning the corporeal into a reified fetish; to the reduction of individuals to anonymous numbered objects in concentration camps; to the ways in which workers are turned into appendages of industrial machines under capitalism, or to mere atoms in late capitalist administered societies. He also refers to the manipulation of bodily experiences and perceptions by the above-­mentioned culture industry, resulting, in his view, in a ‘neutralisation of sex’ (Adorno 1998a: 76). The culture industry’s images of false pleasure—shaped in Hollywood films, popular music, magazines and more—master and repress our bodies, he suggests. Like Odysseus had to bind his body to the mast of his ship, these images reduce life to a standardised series of meaningless gestures—or standardised

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notions of ‘beauty’ presented by Hollywood films (Jameson 2007: 128)—in which individual experiences or moments of happiness have disappeared.

The Windowless Monad Adorno’s concern with a tension between part and whole also returns in his understanding of art, as well as in his ideas about the relationship between art and society and, we will see below, his understanding of the critical model. I want to focus on these ideas by analysing Adorno’s concept of the ‘windowless monad’ and link this concept to his defence of the standards of autonomy and reflection, both briefly discussed in the previous chapter as characteristics of the releases of Manic Street Preachers.7 I will specifically focus on the concept of the ‘windowless monad’, since describing this concept will enable me to develop a systematic understanding of Adorno’s approach to the notions of critique, autonomy and reflection, even though it is important to realise that all of his analyses of art are permeated with history—in this case with reflections on the era of modernity—and should not be understood as referring to an ahistorical essence of art or to ‘rules’ about art in general. Adorno writes in Aesthetic Theory: The process that transpires in artworks and is brought to a standstill in them, is to be conceived as the same social process in which the artworks are embedded; according to Leibniz’s formulation, they represent this process windowlessly. The elements of an artwork acquire their configuration as a whole in obedience to immanent laws that are related to those of the society external to it. (Adorno 2002a: 236)

Adorno refers here to German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz’ metaphysical monadology to develop an analysis of the ways in which certain art represents what he calls a ‘social process’. Within Leibniz’ metaphysical system, the monad is a ‘substance’ or element that forms the building block of everything that exists. Each monad, Leibniz

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argues, is in harmony with other monads, together forming or constituting the universe. What makes his monadology helpful for Adorno’s aesthetics is that Leibniz’s monadology presents a combination of two seemingly contradictory ideas, which I will use in the following to construct an understanding of the critical model. On the one hand, Leibniz claims, an infinite number of monads form the building blocks of the universe and structure it in a harmonious way, following his idea that this is the ‘best of all possible worlds’ (see Leibniz 2007: 69, 131–2), created by the perfected synchronisation of all monads. This is the case, since each monad, in his view, mirrors or represents this universe, ‘expressing’ all other monads. As he writes in §56 of The Monadology: ‘This interconnection, relationship, or this adaptation of all things to each particular one, and of each one to all the rest, brings it about that every simple substance has relations which express all the others and that it is consequently a perpetual living mirror of the universe’ (Leibniz 1992: 79). On the other hand, Leibniz argues, monads are not causally connected to each other; they do not influence each other and are therefore, as Adorno observes, ‘windowless’. Leibniz writes in §7: There is … no way of explaining how a Monad can be altered or changed in its inner being by any other created thing, since there is no possibility of transposition within it, nor can we conceive of any internal movement which can be produced, directed, increased or diminished there within the substance, such as can take place in the case of composites where a change can occur among the parts. The Monads have no windows through which anything may come in or go out. (Leibniz 1992)

This means that the monads that constitute the universe are not cogs that are connected to each other within some large machinery, determined by the laws of physics. Instead, they are ‘substances’ that, since they all autonomously express each other as ‘living mirrors’ of the universe, function ‘on their own’; ‘next to each other’ without being influenced by each other. Adorno employs this model to develop two seemingly contradicting understandings of art, working towards his definition of the notion of

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autonomy. Following his radical social critique, he does this in a context based on a rejection of Leibniz’ claim that the universe would be ordered harmoniously, determined by God (see Adorno 1973: 361; see also Peters 2014: 6). Instead, Adorno approaches Leibniz’ understanding of the ‘harmonious whole’ of the universe as reflecting the standardised and oiled working of a social totality that, as briefly discussed above, in his view robs individuals of their particularity. The first idea that Adorno therefore defends is the claim that, in modernity, the artwork forms part of the social whole in which it is embedded, representing and reflecting, as a ‘living mirror’, the ways in which this social totality structures ‘social materials’ through ‘social processes’. A historical example is formed by compositions of Richard Wagner, which, Adorno argues in his most critical observations on the German composer, mirror or represent reified and totalitarian social structures.8 Within these compositions, Adorno observes, musical themes are squeezed into temporal structures and overarching mythical narratives that obliterate that which makes these themes particular or individual (Huyssen 1986: 41). In this way, these compositions affirm the unfreedom of the individual in modern societies, representing this particular society as a ‘living mirror’ (Epstein 2014: 61). In several of his works, Adorno therefore eventually criticises Wagner’s compositions for not being able to distance themselves from the social totality that they reflect, instead mirroring it in an uncritical manner. Another historical example is formed by the twelve-tone technique, developed, among others, by Austrian modernist composer Arnold Schoenberg. This technique revolves around the rule that all twelve tones of the chromatic scale must be present in equal numbers in a musical composition, a rule that forces the composer to turn away from structuring her compositions around one dominant note. Again, Adorno argues,9 this form of composing mirrors extreme forms of social rational control. The twelve-tone technique, after all, forces the composer to submit herself to a structure that controls artistic spontaneity, mirroring a historical reified social whole in which the individual is overshadowed by social and cultural domination: there is not one individual note anymore that is dominant or that enables the composition to resolve in tonal harmonies.

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The second and seemingly contradictory idea that Adorno presents about art, is exemplified by the monad’s ‘autonomy’, which it preserves because it is windowless; disconnected from the universe of which it paradoxically also forms part as an ‘expression’ of all other monads. Adorno does not completely solve this paradox, but deliberately constitutes a tension between social determination and autonomy by claiming that the monad preserves an internal freedom because of the way in which it, autonomously, organises its own material according to its own principles: ‘Music is an ideology insofar as it asserts itself as an ontological being-in-­ itself ’ (Adorno 2007b: 96). Again, we can use the technique of twelve-tone composition as an example, based on Adorno’s defence of autonomy in contrast with Wagner’s compositions. As discussed above, this technique embodies or represents reifying social structures, in Adorno’s view: since this technique makes it impossible to let any of the twelve tones play a primary role, it reflects society’s standardising approach to the individual, (almost always) resulting in atonal compositions that are difficult to follow and are characterised by an iron grip on the ‘material’—notes, themes, historically transmitted ideas about composing, social approaches to art—that they consist of. However, this iron grip is so extreme, Adorno observes in turn, that it may result in compositions that are so unconventional, dense and difficult to follow, that they constitute an internal form of freedom, shielding themselves off from the social whole that they reflect—closing their windows—and constituting an autonomous position. As he observes in Philosophy of Modern Music: ‘Twelve-tone technique is truly the fate of music. It enchains music by liberating it’ (2007b: 49).10 Gaining this autonomy, Adorno goes on, certain twelve-tone compositions manage to positions themselves in opposition to the social, reified whole, and force the listener to question the social structures of which he forms part (Epstein 2014: 8). Whereas certain Wagner’s compositions are compared by Adorno to Hollywood film music, following a recognisable and predictable pattern that takes the viewer by the hand until a musical climactic catharsis takes place (2007a: 36), the modernist compositions that he praises deny the social whole. Whereas Wagner’s music, in other words, rather uncritically mirrors the social whole and affirms it, certain modernist compositions mirror it in a critical manner with ‘closed

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windows’. They do this, not by confronting this whole with clear and explicit critical images of freedom or by realistically showing forms of exploitation, but by bearing notice to the observation that the social totality is unescapable and that any (artistic) representation of such an escape would be naïve and uncritical. The artwork, in other words, therefore takes over the tendencies and structures of the social totality, but then—and this is how it becomes critical and turns itself against the same totality it mirrors—radicalises these tendencies to the point where they become incomprehensible from the standpoint of society: ‘Abstaining from praxis, art becomes the schema of social praxis: Every authentic artwork is internally revolutionary’ (Adorno 2002a: 228—emphasis added by me). As Daniel L. Chua observes in an insightful passage on Adorno’s perspective on Schoenberg: Schoenberg is the outsider who constructs his music from the inside, pursuing the dialectical laws latent in the material to fashion a language so hermetic in its search for meaning that society can only shun his work as incomprehensible and arbitrary. (2006: 4)

A different way of describing the idea that the artwork constitutes internal freedom is stating that art has a ‘truth content’. Inspired by Hegel, Adorno uses this concept to argue that the artwork creates an internal, windowless universe in which it shapes its own truth. This truth mainly points towards the internal logic of the artwork, referring to the ways in which this logic is shaped through the artwork’s organisation of materials: ‘The truth content of artworks is not what they mean but rather what decides whether the work in itself is true or false…’ (Adorno 2002a: 130—emphasis added by me).11 This truth can therefore not be expressed in words or in descriptions of the emotional dimensions of sounds, for example: it is constituted by the law constituted within the artwork.

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Internal Freedom Because the artwork constitutes an internal form of freedom by confronting society with a radical density that resists society’s attempt to understand it, Adorno goes on, it might show us fleeting moments or experiences of otherness within itself. As he writes in an often-cited passage on Beethoven: In great music such as Beethoven’s  – and probably this holds true far beyond the range of the temporal arts  – the so-called primal elements turned up by analysis are usually eminently insubstantial. Only insofar as these elements asymptotically approximate nothingness do they meld – as a pure process of becoming – into a whole. As differentiated partial elements, however, time and again they want to be something previously existent: a motif or a theme. […] When artworks are viewed under the closest scrutiny, the most objectivated paintings metamorphose into a swarming mass and texts splinter into words. As soon as one imagines having a firm grasp on the details of an artwork, it dissolves into the indeterminate and undifferentiated, so mediated is it. This is the manifestation of aesthetic semblance in the structure of artworks. Under micrological study, the particular – the artwork’s vital element – is volatilized; its concretion vanishes. (Adorno 2002a: 100–1)

Again, we can turn to Leibniz to interpret this passage. In §67 of The Monadology, we find the following observation on monads as the metaphysical ‘building blocks’ of matter: ‘Every portion of matter may be conceived as like a garden full of plants, and like a pond full of fish. But every branch of a plant, every member of an animal, and every drop of the fluids within it, is also such a garden or such a pond’ (Leibniz 1992: 82). Matter, Leibniz argues in other words, can infinitely be subdivided into monads, each of these monads forming a world on its own that cannot be reduced to an essence. Rejecting Leibniz’ positive approach to the universe as a harmoniously ordered whole, Adorno translates his ideas into a critical perspective that is based on the aim to resist the reifying impulse to define the essence of art, to ahistorically pin down the nature of aesthetic experiences, or to

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reduce artworks to a statement that can be phrased or conceptualised with help of the same language that structures the social totality. In Aesthetic Theory, he connects this observation to the techniques of cubism and, again, the Second Viennese School: Cubism and composition with twelve tones related only to one another are, in terms of their idea, universal procedures in the age of the negation of aesthetic universality. The tension between objectivating technique and the mimetic essence of artworks is fought out in the effort to save the fleeting, the ephemeral, the transitory in a form that is immune to reification and yet akin to it in being permanent. (2002a: 219)

These two techniques, in other words, represent the ‘monadological’ tension between mirroring or representing the universe—their ‘mimetic essence’—on the one hand, and constituting internal freedom on the other. Again, furthermore, they do this within a specific era, critically reflecting tendencies and characteristics of the social, cultural and economic totality in which they came into being. In both passages cited above, furthermore, Adorno refers to an ungraspable ‘something’ within the artwork as ‘fleeting’, ‘ephemeral’, as ‘the particular’ or as its ‘vital element’. In certain compositions resulting from the twelve-tone technique, for example, sudden tones may strike us only once, but nevertheless powerfully, since they immediately disappear in the iron grip of the whole. In Beethoven’s compositions, themes or melodies may briefly develop, again only because this happens within the structure of the overall composition, which mirrors the historical conditions of Beethoven’s age (DeNora 2003: 15–16). Often, this ‘something’ appears in a negative manner: because atonality or dissonance mirror the idea that harmony, synthesis, catharsis or redemption are blocked in modernity, they negatively point towards their importance. Similar ideas return in Adorno’s description of other art forms. He refers to Proust, for example, and observes that fleeting experiences of happiness—Joy Division’s ‘unknown pleasures’—may suddenly appear in an ungraspable form against the background of the French author’s dense exploration of words and memory. In Beckett’s play Endgame, almost ungraspable moments of compassion may briefly show themselves

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precisely when any form of interpersonal warmth seems to have disappeared. It is in this way that the material organised within the artwork ‘speaks’ or ‘pushes’ back, gaining a voice of its own because it is submitted to an overarching ‘objective’ form (see also DeNora 2003: 13–14). Furthermore, it is this same aspect that also provides some artworks with a utopian element in Adorno’s view. This element arises when artworks present an ‘ever broken promise of happiness’ (Adorno 2002a: 136) with help of dissonance and formal density, which emphasise the impossibility of finding happiness in a historical and social totality that Adorno, as discussed above, characterises as ‘false’.

Adorno’s Paradoxes Following this brief overview of several of Adorno’s ideas, I want to conclude that his ideas about aesthetics—as embedded in a historical analysis—revolve around two paradoxes that are important for my analysis of popular music. The first paradox revolves around autonomy and concerns the relationship between art and society, the second paradox foregrounds the standard of reflection. Both paradoxes, Adorno suggests, need to be preserved as paradoxes to constitute a critical form of meaning in the social totality that he rejects: the two seemingly contradictory poles that shape these paradoxes, in other words, need to exist ‘next to each other’, like the monad should be understood as both mirror and windowless substance. The first paradox concerns the social nature of art. Adorno writes: Art … is social not only because of its mode of production, in which the dialectic of the forces and relations of production is concentrated, nor simply because of the social derivation of its thematic material. Much more importantly, art becomes social by its opposition to society, and it occupies this position only as autonomous art. By crystallizing in itself as something unique to itself, rather than complying with existing social norms and qualifying as “socially useful,” it criticizes society by merely existing… (2002a: 225–6)12

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Art is embedded in the social whole, Adorno paradoxically argues, because it rejects this social whole. And, again paradoxically, the artwork does this by mirroring structures of this whole—structures that have a controlling function—and by constituting autonomy and freedom within this same controlling context. He writes: ‘At the risk of its self-­ alienation, radical modernity preserves art’s immanence by admitting society only in an obscured form…’ (2002a: 226). This first paradox suggests, in other words, that the meaning of the music that Adorno praises is not the way in which it is received by the social totality in which it comes about—by that which it means to specific social groups, movements or individuals. Nor is it found in that which it would express or represent if we understand ‘expression’ or ‘representation’ as referring to processes during which ideas, feelings or experiences are communicated to the listener. The meaning of music is also not found in the psychological state of its creator. As Adorno observes in his analysis of Beethoven’s ‘late style’, to which I return in Chap. 7, reducing a composition to the psychological state of its creator means not doing justice to the ‘formal law of the work’ and crossing the line that ‘separates art from document’ (2002b: 564). The meaning of this music is found, in contrast, in the ways in which a composition internally organises its own material and constitutes its own truth content: ‘Praxis is not the effect of works; rather, it is encapsuled in their truth content’ (Adorno 2002a: 247). As Adorno puts this somewhere else, radically emphasising the autonomy of the artwork: ‘It is more essential for the listener to please the Beethoven symphony than for the Beethoven symphony to please him’ (qtd. in Hullot-Kentor 2006b: 209). For the realm of (popular) music, this observation implies that this music’s meaning cannot be ‘found’ if we analyse the relationship between music and listener/audience or focus on that which the listener/audience attribute(s) to it. Nor should we explore that which this music presents to the listener, like the use of musical sounds that express a feeling by emulating it. It is also impossible, and this is specifically important for my analysis of Manic Street Preachers, to present a conceptualised form of resistance against the status quo in the realm of lyrics. Instead, Adorno observes that ‘art’s asociality is the determinate negation of a determinate society’ (2002a: 226). And in an even more complex formulation: ‘The

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artwork’s nexus, as its immanent life, is the afterimage of empirical life on which the reflection of the artwork falls and bestows a reflection of meaning’ (Adorno 2002a: 296). As Erraught puts this into words: ‘The muteness of the autonomous artwork, for Adorno, is that of the prisoner who refuses to testify: her silence, her presence, an affront to the regime’ (2018: 89). This art is critical, in other words, not because it expresses critique, but because it exists in a social totality that denies the possibility of its existence. The second paradoxical aspect of Adorno’s aesthetic theory is closely related to the first and is, again, born in the observation that, in a historical context that Adorno characterises as unfree, certain artworks mimic those social structures that cause unfreedom to constitute their own internal freedom. It is because of the laws that are applied to shape and structure the ‘raw material’ within the artwork, Adorno argues, that the ‘particular’ or the artwork’s ‘life element’ might show itself. This means that these laws cannot be avoided and that we cannot directly focus on the ‘raw materials’ that the artwork shapes. Would we do this, then we would presuppose a direct form of access to the ‘non-identical’ and ignore the observation that the ‘non-identical’ can only be understood as the opposite of the identical. We would then, in other words, presume that the artwork can escape from processes of commodification and, more generally, from the standardising processes of modernity. Buhler puts this dialectical relation into words as follows by reflecting on the liberty encapsulated by a musique informelle, which Adorno explored as a possible future for modernist music: ‘Liberty creates from itself a set of laws, within which the unforeseen and the other can also emerge. Without this lawfulness the life of the particular would not even be possible; on the other hand, pure lawfulness would be sterile without the energy that arises from unplanned detail’ (Buhler 2006: 61). This second paradox can be described differently and with help of the standard of reflection. For Adorno, modernist art is born in the idea that the artwork should always acknowledge the reflective realisation that it aims to constitute an autonomous position in a historical and social totality that makes this impossible. Again, this can only be done if the artwork mirrors and reflects the social totality that it opposes, providing the notion of reflection with two meanings. The control that the twelve-tone

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technique holds over its material, for example, reflects the reified structure of the social totality in which it comes about by taking this totality to the extreme. But it also embodies a critical reflection on the apparently paradoxical nature of the autonomous status of the artwork, employing ‘terrible discipline as an instrument of freedom’ (Adorno 2007b: 86; see also Paddison 1982: 204). Jameson helpfully puts this idea into words in an early text on postmodernism in film: ‘As the position of the artist becomes jeopardized, reflexivity increases, becomes an indispensable precondition for artistic production…’ (1981: 103).

Embodiment and Art I want to illustrate this observation with help of Adorno’s references to embodiment, since these references will return in my analysis of popular music. As partly discussed above, a concern with the body, corporeal vulnerability and physical suffering plays an important role in Adorno’s philosophy and especially in his analysis of art. He approaches this suffering as vulnerable, complex and fleeting, and frequently discusses compassion with suffering bodies as an ungraspable ‘addendum’ to moral thought that cannot be put into words—this addendum also remains ‘non-­ identical’.13 Would we put it into words, conceptualise it or make it part of a robust moral theory, then we would pull it into a false social totality again. These observations return in the realm of art: the above-mentioned ‘ephemeral’, ‘fleeting’ or ‘particular’ moments that, according to Adorno, might be present in the work of art, are often of a bodily or sensual nature (see also Peters 2013). For example, he observes in Aesthetic Theory that the body becomes a substratum, buried at the bottom of the artwork, almost disappearing but still present ‘in’ the dense explorations with form that he praises in his writings on modernist art (Adorno 2002a: 258). In this way, these artworks might present bodily forms of compassion with suffering bodies; fleeting experiences during which the body, in its vulnerability, is briefly present as something that is buried beneath the artwork’s dense explorations of form. Again, however, these fleeting moments can only be present as part of the internal universe of the windowless

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monad and, therefore, as structured by the organising technique that shapes the artwork as a whole—its internal law. An example is formed by Adorno’s writings on Schoenberg and Weber, in which the suffering body is present, he writes, because the techniques employed by the composer move towards ‘gestures of shock resembling bodily convulsions’ as well as towards ‘a crystalline standstill of a human being whom anxiety causes to freeze in her tracks’ (Adorno 2007b: 30).14 Bodily suffering, this idea implies, cannot be shown by the artwork; it cannot be directly addressed or explicitly demonstrated in a realist manner. It can only be present ‘in’ the work of art if this work simultaneously works through its own unfreedom in a social totality, mirroring the same social structures that cause bodily suffering. Similar observations on embodiment return in Adorno’s writings on other art forms. An example is formed again by Beckett’s play Endgame, in which the bodies of its protagonists are reduced to reified, mangled objects. Put within the above-mentioned discourse revolving around a dialectical tension between part and whole: these artworks represent the idea that the body and bodily experiences have become the particular and highly individual aspects of life that are repressed and usurped by the standardising mechanisms of modernity. Another example is formed by Picasso’s Guernica, in which the suffering of both human and animal bodies is represented as fragmented, torn apart by the universal technique of cubism, which ‘accepted the heteronomous geometrication of the world as its new law, as its own order…’ (Adorno 2002a: 301). In a powerful passage, Adorno furthermore describes Guernica as follows: ‘strictly incompatible with prescribed realism, precisely by means of inhumane construction, [it] achieves a level of expression that sharpens it to social protest beyond all contemplative misunderstanding. The socially critical zones of artworks are those where it hurts; where in their expression, historically determined, the untruth of the social situation comes to light’ (2002a: 237). Again, these passages show, Adorno’s observations on art should always be understood within the historical context in which both these observations and the artworks that he analyses came about. It is therefore impossible to reduce these observations to a general law about aesthetic creation or essentialist definitions of art. Following his ideas, for example, we cannot defend twelve-tone composition or cubist painting

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techniques without understanding them as part of the history of their specific art forms and of the social conditions that shape modernity. Would we do this, then we would rob these techniques of their specific social and historical dimensions and reduce them to uncritical fetishes or general rules.

Atoms with Windows Based on Adorno’s analysis of the windowless monad, we can conclude that the dialectical tension between part and whole, in which the artwork is born, should not, in a society that is false and under the conditions that permeate the era of modernity, implode into either of these two poles; it cannot and should not be solved or resolved in the form of a synthesis or a sublimation. If we would only focus on the particular or non-identical, we would fetishise it and uncritically ignore the observation that this part is always mediated by specific historical and social structures—by the whole. Would we only focus on this whole, then we would overlook the particular, the non-­identical, and affirm the social totality. Instead, the dialectical relationship has to stay negative, according to Adorno, constituting a continuing tension between two poles that protects the nonidentical without fetishising it. He concludes: ‘Art keeps itself alive through its social force of resistance; unless it reifies itself, it becomes a commodity’ (Adorno 2002a: 226). This brings me to his analysis of popular music, which I want to discuss by referring to autonomy and reflection again, showing how these notions function as normative historically shaped standards within his critical observations on art and modernity. Firstly, Adorno suggests that this type of music cannot be autonomous, since it is too standardised by the demands of consumption culture and too deeply embedded in this culture to be able to distance itself from the social totality. In short, it reifies itself and does become a commodity. In his text ‘On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening’, which can be understood as a critical (and rather pessimistic) response to Benjamin’s more positive and hopeful ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (see Erraught 2018: 93), Adorno writes the following

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about popular music compositions: ‘No longer do the partial moments serve as a critique of that [social] whole; instead, they suspend the critique which the successful aesthetic totality exerts against the flawed one of society’ (Adorno 2005a: 32). Secondly, his critique suggests that this music is not reflective enough; it is not conscious of itself and not born in the realisation of its own problematic position in ‘the social totality’. Both aspects, in his view, undermine this music’s ability to place itself in opposition to society. Instead, he argues that this music even plays a role in constituting the wrongness of the social totality under late capitalism: it ‘seems to complement the reduction of people to silence, the dying out of speech as expression, the inability to communicate at all’ (Adorno 2005a: 30). Before analysing the details of Adorno’s critique of popular music, it is important to stress that this critique does not target ‘mass culture’, ‘mass art’ or ‘low art’ in general. ‘Low art’, Adorno and Horkheimer observe in Dialectic of Enlightenment, might arise within mass culture as a representation of societal needs, wants or concerns. As such, it might contain a liberating impulse, resisting the manipulating influence of the consumer culture produced by the culture industry (Huyssen 1986: 145; Buhler 2006: 114). This industry, Adorno therefore argues, corrodes both ‘high art’ and ‘low art’. It replaces ‘low art’ with consumer products that are presented as rising from mass culture, manipulating people’s needs and concerns (Bernstein 2005: 12–19; see also Buhler 2006: 114–5). But it also affects music that is considered ‘high art’. It results, for example, in the labelling of serious music as ‘classical music’, a ‘barbarous name’ (Adorno 2005b) that not only pushes this music into a ‘classical’ and fossilised past and ignores its modern and contemporary aspects, but also enables the music industry to sell it as an ‘elitist’ commodity in record stores. Adorno, in other words, criticises all kinds of music and all forms of art that are unable to resist the demands of the culture industry and of the social whole. His works erect a split—another Great Divide—between a wide range of traditions, styles and forms of music that accept their existence as commodities on one side, and the few modernist compositions that self-reflectively and autonomously resist what Max Paddison characterises as their ‘fate as commodity’ on the other (Paddison 1982: 204).15

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Furthermore, it is important to emphasise that these ideas, like his defences of certain modernist artworks, are implicitly based on notions of historical progress: all forms of art respond to past ones, he observes, and since the music that he rejects merely repeats what has already been done, it is a mere standardised commodity that can do nothing but affirm the status quo. Phrasing this idea in contrast with the metaphor of the windowless monad, Adorno criticises this music for shaping seemingly ahistorical atomistic entities with windows.

Arguments Against Popular Music I now want to briefly zoom in more systematically on several of the arguments that Adorno presents for his rejection of popular music. Many are driven by the general idea that, since the culture industry is ultimately propelled by profit, the music it produces will never be anything but an unoriginal product, only created to manipulate costumers into the idea that they need to buy it, determined by a ‘totality’ that is permeated by a ‘market place mentality’ (Adorno 2007b: 3). Adorno also reflects on the ways in which the ability to record music, produce records and sell them as commodities on the market influences both our experience of listening to music and the commodification of music, a process set in motion with the production (and commodification) of sheet music in Tin Pan Alley stores in the late nineteenth century (see Stone 2016: 45). Recording music and releasing it on gramophone records (and other formats) literally reifies this music, makes it into a thing that does not change and can endlessly be heard in a repetitive fashion (Adorno 1990: 52; see also Erraught 2018: 82).16 And again, the predictability that comes with the idea of a standardised ‘genre’ makes it easier to manipulate people into buying records, he argues. Other arguments that Adorno develops against popular music revolve around the idea that it produces the illusion of freedom. Popular music compositions include small variations on already familiar themes, he argues, addressing the listener as an embodied being through a catchy hook, a solo, a variation or a riff that grasps her, fills her with energy and enables her to have an experience of ‘breaking free’ from the standardised

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movements and gestures of everyday life through dance and other forms of movement. In reality, however, these songs only affirm the overall structure of society, in his view: these brief moments work within the overall composition of the song because these songs always return to a recognisable melody or chorus, which means that the ‘hook’ or bridge mainly forms a catchy ‘excursus’ that eventually only affirms this overall structure (Adorno 2005a: 49–50), like Hollywood films that superficially present a worldview critical of the same capitalist structure they are a product of and that they eventually substantiate. Adorno writes that listeners ‘become victims of the superior power of self-propelled wheels who think they are determining their direction’ (Adorno 2005a: 47).17 As such, the structures of popular songs, like those of the monad, mirror the social and economic structures of a society in which every individual is a merely replaceable cog in a machine (see Buhler 2006: 117). But since this popular music has windows, the song itself is a mere cog in this machine as well, providing the illusion of freedom without really changing anything and without placing itself in opposition to the social totality: ‘These products manipulate their listeners with the most modern techniques of psycho-technology and propaganda’ (Adorno 1998b: 84). Again, it is important to note that Adorno here describes several kinds of music. His observations refer, for example, to the Tin Pan Alley-­ Hollywood period, which Jason Toynbee characterises as ‘industrially manufactured music’ that gained ‘mass distribution for the first time through the media of records, radio and film’ (2002a: 150). Furthermore, Adorno infamously targeted jazz, which, according to Frith, is his term for ‘all mass music’ (1978: 194). Again, Adorno argues that jazz provides a form of escapism and a false experience of freedom and spontaneity, presenting a ‘pseudo-freedom’ that eventually only affirms the song’s beat or its division in refrains and choruses (Adorno 2005a: 54–5).18 He observes in a characteristic passage, which makes it easy to see why he is often rejected as a conservative critic, blind to the intricacies of different types of music: ‘The population is so accustomed to the drivel it gets that it cannot renounce it, even when it sees through it halfway. […] Jazz sets up schemes of social behaviour to which people must in any case conform. Jazz enables them to practise those forms of behaviour, and they

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love it all the more for making the inescapable easier to bear’ (Adorno 1983: 125–6). Jazz is experienced as a windowless atom, Adorno suggests; as an ‘island of freedom’, spontaneity, liveliness and improvisation that would break away from the standardising aspects of the culture industry. In fact, however, presenting jazz as made ‘outside’ of this industry—as an atom disconnected from the social totality—only blinds people to the controlling structures of society, in his view, and makes them believe, falsely, that one can escape from the social totality, resulting in what Adorno calls ‘atomised listening’ (2005a: 49). Adorno furthermore targets the, in his view, essentialist and even racist ideas that, he argues, form part of discourses around jazz: he observes that those who praise jazz for being ‘passionate’ and ‘free’, and therefore as critical of society, implicitly link the music to notions of ‘primitivism’ and ‘direct embodied experience’ and, in turn, to essentialist notions of a ‘Blackness’ that would be free from social structures.19 He does this in passages, however, that have made him vulnerable to the charge of racism himself: ‘The archaic stance of jazz is as modern as the ‘primitives’ who fabricate it. The improvisational immediacy which constitutes its partial success counts strictly among those attempts to break out of the fetishized commodity world which want to escape that world without ever changing it, thus moving ever deeper into its snare’ (qtd. in Buhler 2006: 208).20 Adorno’s focus on the artwork as a windowless monad also makes him reject the idea that art would be meaningful or critical if it would enable people to identify with it, for example because this music gives a voice to social or economic minorities or because it expresses specific feelings or represents specific conditions. Popular music, he argues instead, only presents us with superficial stereotypes of masculinity, femininity or family life that are as standardised as the administered society in which this music, in his view, plays an affirmative role (see Frith 1978: 194). Furthermore, he observes that popular music provides the individual with the ability to identify with false forms of collectivity. This might make the collective experience of visiting a concert, or enjoying art as part of a mass of people, into a false and uncritical phenomenon; into a state of being in which the pre-individualistic aspects of listening to music are manipulated. For Adorno, Epstein indeed observes, ‘collectively

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experienced rhythms of culture are always suspect’ (Epstein 2014: xxx; see also Hesmondalgh 2002: 124, 140). Lastly, Adorno claims that popular music regresses the ways in which individuals listen to music, since they are constantly presented with variations of the same themes and structures. As he observes in a characteristic passage: ‘Not only do the listening subjects lose, along with the freedom of choice and responsibility, the capacity for conscious perception of music … but they stubbornly reject the possibility of such perception. They fluctuate between comprehensive forgetting and sudden dives into recognition. They listen atomistically and dissociate what they hear…’ (Adorno 2005a: 46).21 Popular music, in other words, reduces listening experiences to brief, ahistorical moments—reduce music to a spatial presence—in which ear for detail, musical tradition, composition styles and aesthetic reflection—which all contribute to active, structural and ‘responsible’ (Adorno 2007b: 7) forms of listening—disappear (Middleton 1990: 58; Erraught 2018: 105; Hullot-Kentor 2006a: 170). Erraught observes that this form of listening is embodied, in Adorno’s texts, by his emphasis on being able to ‘listen’ to music by only reading its score, analysing and understanding its structures and movements in a highly cognitive manner (see Erraught 2018: 75). Again, an example of this kind of listening is formed by the ability to hear and understand how the twelve-­ tone technique formed as a (critical) response to earlier composition techniques, such as those developed by Wagner, providing different and historically shaped ways of letting the musical material ‘speak’. Popular music, in Adorno’s view, makes this ‘silent listening’ impossible and saturates our everyday lives by ‘drowning out the silence’ (see Erraught 2018: 77) in the ‘omnipresent hit tune’ (Adorno 1998b: 7).

Critical Popular Music This brief overview, I hope, again illustrates the observation that Adorno’s critique can only be understood against the historical background of his analysis of ‘the social totality’, a totality that he rejects as ‘false’. Since the culture industry, in his view, forms part of this false totality, it forms a machine driven by an ideology that, as Jameson puts it, revolves around

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‘the notion that pleasure or happiness (‘entertainment’ would be their spurious synthesis) already exists, and is available for consumption’ (2007: 147). It is therefore that the notion of ‘entertainment’ is problematic for Adorno: popular music, he suggests, is dominated by an ideology of happiness that does not take the observations into account that (1) there is no such thing as an ahistorical or essential experience of happiness that can be presented to the listener as such; and (2) that this experience is extremely difficult to express in a historical social totality that is wrong. It is for this reason that the most critical and sometimes hostile side of Adorno’s critique comes to the surface when he discusses music that seems to escape the tendencies of this false whole or that seems to be able to criticise it and become more than entertainment. Adorno uses a Nietzschean hammer in these passages, smashing through anything that might even suggest that it is possible to escape the dialectical tension between vulnerable part and false whole; Paddison calls this the deliberate ‘irritation value’ of his observations (1982: 203).22 Famous, for example, is Adorno’s dismissive and almost comical diagnosis of The Beatles: What can be urged against the Beatles … is simply that what these people have to offer is … something that is retarded in terms of its own objective content. It can be shown that the means of expression that are employed and preserved here are in reality no more than traditional techniques in a degraded form. (qtd. in Müller-Doom 2005: 420)

The aggressive nature of Adorno’s rejection is fuelled here by the aim to pierce through those arguments that aim to present The Beatles as a resurgence of avant-garde or modernist traditions.23 It is no surprise that Adorno therefore also rejects artists who aim to explicitly formulate a critical message. Fellow critical theorists like Benjamin and Marcuse struggled as well with the ability to formulate critique in a society that, they argued in line of Adorno, increasingly destabilised and undermined the ability to do this. Still, however, Benjamin praises the hybrid, ‘messy’, fragmented and sometimes disturbing nature of avant-garde art as capable of moving audiences into forms of critical thought. The realm of avant-garde film, he argues for example,

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shapes a framework that is ‘useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art’ (Benjamin 1968: 218; see also Huyssen 10; Frith 1978: 196). Furthermore, Benjamin argues that the distracting aspects of forms of modern entertainment provide unique opportunities to present political and critical ideas to the spectator.24 Marcuse argues in turn (at least during a certain period of his life) that social change can be propelled by marginalised groups, such as civil rights movements or student organisations.25 He therefore praises jazz and blues, as well as folk and protest music, for providing us with empowering notions of social reconciliation and utopian images of liberation that would break through the ‘repressive continuum’ of the societies in which we live (1969: vii, 47; see also Huyssen 1986: 146). Adorno’s negativity, however, makes him turn away from Benjamin and Marcuse’s positive evaluations of the critical dimensions of popular culture. In a television interview on protest music—perhaps he has Bob Dylan in mind here—Adorno observes in contrast: I believe … that attempts to bring political protest together with “popular music” – that is, with entertainment music – are for the following reason doomed from the start. The entire sphere of popular music, even there where it dresses itself up in modernist guise, is to such a degree inseparable from past temperament, from consumption, from the cross-eyed transfixion with amusement, that attempts to outfit it with a new function remain entirely superficial. And I have to say that when somebody sets himself up, and for whatever reason sings maudlin music about Vietnam being unbearable, I find that really it is this song that is in fact unbearable, in that by taking the horrendous and making it somehow consumable, it ends up writing something like consumption-qualities out of it. (‘Theodor Adorno – Music and Protest’ [video fragment])

Again, Adorno here explicitly contrasts entertainment with critique, the former pole, in his view, corrupting or undermining the latter because of its focus on consumption and standardisation. Instead of really presenting us with art that shapes its inner truth content, Adorno observes here furthermore, popular bands and musicians who aim to voice critique do this in a rather recognisable form—using words and/or music that

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follows recognisable patterns and express directly recognisable emotions, feelings or moods—that immediately makes them complicit to the whole that they claim to criticise.

Responses A wide range of authors have, within various disciplines, responded to Adorno’s ‘notoriously snobbish’ (Dee 2009: 54), ‘scathing’ (Middleton 1990: 34), ‘irritating’ (Buhler 2006: 103; Erraught 2018: vii), seemingly ‘prejudiced, arrogant and uninformed’ (Paddison 1982: 201) critique of popular music. Some focus on the observation that the German philosopher lived between 1903 and 1969, which means that he formulated his ideas about popular culture and capitalist societies more than half a century ago (see Middleton 1990: 37–8; DeNora 2003: 23). This implies that his conceptualisation of the culture industry as one ‘monolithic’26 totalitarian whole might be blind to the ways in which not only forms of popular music have developed, but also to the ways in which political and economic structures have been shaped in the more recent past. Middleton, for example, observes that Adorno does not really analyse specific songs and mainly makes generalising, sweeping statements that ignore the details of popular music (1990: 54).27 He also argues that Adorno’s focus on specific types of Western music makes his analyses ethically and culturally centrist (Middleton 1990: 35–45). Indeed, Adorno overlooks the many different ways in which tonality, scale, musical tradition and cultural context shape the experience and construction of music created in the Global South, for example. Paddison therefore claims that Adorno uses the notion of ‘popular music’ as a ‘blanket term’ to refer to a wide range of ‘light music, hit tunes, dance music, jazz and folk’ (1982: 208). Jameson, in turn, writes that Adorno’s notion of the culture industry mainly refers to Hollywood Grade-B genre films, radio comedies, Paul Whiteman28 and Toscanini’ (Jameson 2007: 141). He therefore argues that, without completely rejecting his theory, we need to infuse his ideas with new critical observations to be able to define the specifics of postmodern culture and the commodification of social life (2007: 150). As an example, Jameson (2007: 142, 230) discusses

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Raymond Williams’ influential understanding of hegemony, which is focused on the ways in which internal forces like the education system, family work and different forms of culture are involved in ‘a continual making and remaking of an effective dominant culture’ on which our ‘lived reality’ depends (2005: 39; see also Williams 1983: 145).29 Middleton makes a similar point by arguing that we should historicise the historicity of Adorno’s theory (1990: 61–2) and, with help of a ‘turn to Gramsci’ (1990: v) and his notion of hegemony, understand popular music as neither dominated by pure resistance nor by pure domination. To a certain extent, I agree with these responses: this book, after all, revolves around the idea that popular music can be critical of the social status quo, as well as around the idea that there is something valuable and unique about this kind of music that distinguishes it from other types of music without making it into a dismissible part of consumption culture. I agree, therefore, with Huyssen’s argument that Adorno’s observations should be combined with the more positive and subtle evaluations of popular culture as developed by traditions fuelled by the ideas of Benjamin and Brecht (Huyssen 1986: 156–7).30 This suggests that Adorno overlooks several values that are as important for the critical dimensions of art as the ability to shape a truth content. Furthermore, it suggests that he overlooks the idea that in a postmodern age the notion of ‘autonomous art’ has been replaced with that of ‘heteronomous art’, which refers to art that can be entwined in complex and creative ways with different social and economic structures without completely losing its critical dimensions and without losing all of its autonomous aspects (see Zuidervaart 1990: 69). At the same time, I will argue below, the observation that popular music is always, to some extent, embedded in a problematic manner in a culture of consumption and entertainment is helpful if we want to analyse the music of those musicians who themselves (like Manic Street Preachers) explicitly struggle with this observation and make this struggle part of their art, sometimes by shaping an internal resistance against the same music that expresses this resistance. To be able to show how I want to use Adorno’s ideas in my analysis of Manic Street Preachers, I will first reflect on several ways in which both musicians and scholars have responded, explicitly or implicitly, to his critique. In this analysis, several of the observations on popular music that I discussed in Chap. 1 will return. This time, however, I will explicitly analyse them through a lens formed by questions regarding the (in)ability of

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popular music to formulate critique. Since these responses have been extensively evaluated by other authors, I will only focus on responses that concern the following four (interrelated) categories: (1) industry, (2) identity, culture and representation, (3) form, and (4) embodiment.31 I will follow this overview with an analysis of Adorno’s possible responses, which will bring me to the conclusion of this chapter and will form a stepping stone to my analyses of Manic Street Preachers releases.

Industry The first category of responses to Adorno’s critique concerns his grim analysis of capitalism and of an ‘industry’ that would only be able to produce music as a commodity, released on a market revolving around consumerism. This response is implicitly formulated by musicians and bands who set up their own record labels, organise their own concerts, distribute their music themselves and try to stay ‘outside’ of that which Adorno calls the culture industry.32 We can think in this context of musicians who are grouped together under labels like ‘folk’, ‘avant-garde’, ‘experimentalism’, ‘underground’ or ‘DIY’; of bands who, as John Encarnacao observes in his analysis of folk and punk, aim to make ‘outsider music’ (2013: 103–131). Many different forms, styles and traditions fall under this umbrella. The English punk band Crass, briefly mentioned in the previous chapter, forms an extreme example.33 Originating in anarchist and grassroots collective movements, Crass consciously aimed to own and control the means of production by creating, recording and spreading their music through cassette tapes and self-produced records, autonomously organising festivals and concerts that, in their view, could not be influenced or manipulated by the industry (see Dee 2009: 58). Crass, in other words, can be understood as, to some extent, sharing Adorno’s critique of the culture industry but, simultaneously, as suggesting that it is possible to criticise this industry from an external point of view, creating uncommercial music accompanied by radical political lyrics. Steve Albini’s band Shellac forms another example. They only released their second album (aptly titled The Futurist) by spreading a limited amount among friends instead of releasing it through a label. In this way, they honoured Albini’s (who produced the Manic Street Preachers album Journal for Plague Lovers) observation that

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the process of being signed by a label is like having to swim through a trench ‘filled with runny, decaying shit’ (Albini 1993).34 When recording In Utero, Nirvana followed a similar idea and hired Albini themselves, to some extent avoiding the influence of their record company and taking control over mixing, editing and recording processes. A last example is formed by the experimental Sheffield group Cabaret Voltaire, who created their own distribution network and set up what Simon Reynolds calls ‘a kind of postsocialist microcapitalism’, which gave them ‘an autonomy that represented if not exactly resistance, then a form of grassroots resilience in the face of top-down corporate culture’ (Reynolds 2006: 331). Other bands belonging to the postpunk tradition developed alternative routes. Public Image Ltd., for example, shaped themselves as a company (‘Inc’) to ‘demystify’ the record business and, while seemingly accepting that they were only focused on making money, presented capitalism as both unavoidable and as a system that could be used against itself by making money with radical unmarketable music (Reynolds 2006: 94). Whereas a band like The Clash, in other words, departed from the tactics of the above-mentioned Crass by signing to a major label in order to let their music and their political lyrics be heard by as many people as possible, they still resisted the idea that their message would merely be used as a selling tactic. Public Image Ltd., in contrast, took this one step further and suggested that ‘money making was a potentially subversive strategy of working from within’ (Reynolds 2006: 94). Another response within this same category rejects Adorno’s critique of capitalism as outdated. The above-mentioned Adam Krims, for example, argues that ‘the character of social life to which Adorno responded is itself historical and did not carry nearly the longevity that he imagined’ (Krims 2003: 133). Capitalist structures, Krims goes on, changed since Adorno described them, mainly because of the post-Fordist rise of the phenomenon of flexible accumulation.35 This transformed the music industry into a more open realm that was able to respond—at least to some extent—to the needs of both audiences and musicians, resulting in more diverse forms of music and more critical and creative lyrics than Adorno predicted (Krims 2003: 135–136).36 Frith makes a similar point by referring to Walter Benjamin’s claim that ‘it is precisely the technological and socialised basis of mass production that makes cultural struggle possible’ (1978: 196). In his descriptions of Frith’s political engagement, Martin

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Cloonan indeed describes Frith’s ideas as ‘inspired not by the pessimism of Adorno, but by the cautious optimism of Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Stuart Hall and Antonio Gramsci’ (2014: 109). Krims, in contrast, rejects both Adorno’s critique of the culture industry and those authors who, in his view, rather uncritically embrace the possibilities shaped by capitalist structures.37 Instead, Krims aims to develop a ‘non-Adornan Marxist popular music analysis’ (2003: 142) that is based on the idea that we should ‘theorize capital as simultaneously diversifying culturally and segregating economically and spatially’ (2003: 140). As an example of his approach, Krims analyses the relationship between different forms of hiphop and the changing urban landscapes in which they came and come into being. This analysis is not based on the notion that music should resist ‘the’ culture industry, but on a Marxist concern with the material, urban basis of different forms of music and the way they change in, through and in spite of capitalist structures (see Krims 2003: 156–7).38

Identity, Culture and Representation Another category of responses to Adorno’s rejection of the culture industry concerns the notions of ‘identity’ and ‘culture’. This category can be summarised with help of Huyssen’s observation that Adorno’s approach bypasses ‘the struggles for meaning, symbols, and images which constitute cultural and social life even when the mass-media try to contain them’ (Huyssen 1986: 22). Gracyk, for example, observes that ‘adolescent and young childhood is a distinctive stage of our musical lives, uniquely configured so that an individual’s relationship plays a profound role in the formation of identity’ (2007: 181). This identity formation, Gracyk claims in turn, is based on an interplay between self and culture. As Toynbee argues as well, this idea departs from the Marxist notion of a materialist base—‘the’ culture industry—that would shape culture in one direction: ‘Culture depends upon the economic base, and is shaped by it, yet cannot be reduced to economic factors. For culture has its own emergent province and powers, so that it may well ‘act back’ upon the base’ (2014: 210). This ‘acting back’, Toynbee observes, takes place in the form of expressive outbursts of creativity that might enlighten the

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inherent contradictions within capitalism, such as confronting a consumption culture revolving around individual freedom with the impossibility of finding freedom within this same culture (2014: 210–11). This second category of responses often revolves around the observation that the value and meaning of popular music is intersubjective and discursive, and that these aspects should therefore mainly be analysed from a sociological perspective (Walser 2003: 23) which can concern both music and lyrics.39 Middleton, for example, argues that Adorno’s concern with autonomy makes him focus too much on individual compositions and on the ways in which these compositions reject the social totality (1990: 40–5). Adorno, in his view, therefore overlook the socially shared aspects of music, which are shaped in the interplay between music and groups/classes/crowds of people. DeNora’s After Adorno is inspired by a similar idea: she develops a comprehensive and detailed sociology of music that takes Adorno’s critical perspective into account, but is more sensitive to the ways in which popular music addresses the self in modernity (DeNora 2003). She therefore adds an empirical sociological layer to Adorno’s ideas, analysing the ways in which music envelops us, shapes our memory, structures our everyday lives, permeates our collective consciousness and invites us in different ways to ‘act upon it’ (DeNora 2003: 134). She also focuses particularly on the affective aspects of music to counterbalance Adorno’s mostly cognitive analyses (DeNora 2003: 89–90). Other responses are inspired by the ideas developed by authors associated with poststructuralism and postcolonialism and revolve around the argument that popular music may embody the voices of those who they define as the ‘other’, the ‘subaltern’ or the ‘marginalised’.40 From this angle, music forms a space in which the perspectives and identities of those who are ignored by the social majority, who are discriminated against, pushed away or framed as ‘different’ and ‘abnormal’ because of their gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, corporeality or mental condition, can manifest themselves and be heard (Erraught 2018: 62). By foregrounding these forms of diversity, in music, lyrics, video-clips, album, interviews and on album covers, sometimes presenting them as a power, popular musicians may destabilise hegemonic notions of identity and force us to think about forms of representation.41 This idea echoes the

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following observation by David Harvey, made in a passage in which he argues how and why Marxism should be adapted to be able to grasp the realities of postmodernity: The treatment of difference and ‘otherness’ not as something to be added on to more fundamental Marxist categories (like class and productive forces), but as something that should be omni-present from the very beginning in any attempt to grasp the dialectics of social change. The importance of recuperating such aspects of social organization as race, gender, religion, within the overall frame of historical materialist enquiry (with its emphasis upon the power of money and capital circulation) and class politics (with its emphasis upon the unity of the emancipatory struggle) cannot be overestimated. (Harvey 1989: 355)

An illustration can again be found in certain forms of hiphop, which provide a platform to voice, through music and lyrics, frustration about institutionalised racism or to present ideas and perspectives that are ignored by mainstream media.42 Jim Vernon, for example, explores the rise of hiphop through a Hegelian lens and argues that this genre represents humanity’s ‘essential drive to produce an increasingly inclusive, emancipatory collective against the various forces that seek to contain communities through differentiation and fragmentation’ (Vernon 2018: 230). Vernon links this observation to critical analyses of capitalism and postmodernity, observing: ‘Against the most brutal forms of late-­capitalist atomization, [hip-hop] found a way to aesthetically preserve the historical struggle for objectively actualized freedom…’ (2018: 236). Toynbee, in turn, discusses Gastarbeiter youth in Germany and their use of hiphop and rap as ways to carve out their own place in a society that largely ignores their viewpoints (2002: 158–9). Similar arguments have also been developed about different forms of jazz and their role in civil rights movements (Frith 1978: 180–1; Neal 1997).43 This focus on music and identity is related to reflections on the interplay between music and lyrics on the one hand, and audiences on the other. Adorno’s emphasis on the standardising influences of the culture industry implies, after all, that popular music renders listeners completely passive: they would receive this music, which would permeate them,

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constitute false consciousness and false needs, and eventually even damage their listening capacities. This would change them from listeners who have to struggle with the music and ‘think like composers’ (DeNora 2003: 19), to passive receivers—‘victims’—in whom simplistic emotions are triggered; it would reduce them to the zombies walking around aimlessly in a shopping mall in George A. Romero’s 1978 Dawn of the Dead. In his analysis of performativity and popular music, Auslander indeed criticises this idea as follows: ‘Pop music audiences are not made up of mere dupes who are sucked into a maelstrom of mindless consumerism with music as the lure; rather, pop music listeners are savvy consumers who are well aware of their role in the industrial production of music and music culture and able both to enjoy that role and critique it self-­ consciously’ (2004: 9; she also Middleton 1990: 56).44 Simon Frith criticises this idea as well. He argues that, as briefly discussed in the first chapter, the popularity of popular music implies that there is something about this music that grasps the audience by embodying what matters to them. Applying this observation to the genre of rock, he observes for example: ‘Rock is a capitalist industry and not a folk form, but its most successful products do, at some level, express and reflect its audiences’ concerns’ (Frith 1978: 204). Rock might have a critical potential, Frith argues furthermore, because it portrays idealised versions of reality—ideas about freedom, individualism or sexuality— pointing at the contradictions that are already present within a society as fantasies or repressed desires (Frith 1978: 207). I briefly return to these ideas, as well as to Frith’s observations on rock and the experience of (and struggle for) fun, in Chap. 7. Frith strengthens this observation by referring to Greil Marcus, who argues that mass culture might be able to express ‘unconventional visions’ if this is done in a powerful and uncompromising manner (qtd. in Frith 1978: 204). John Street makes a similar point by addressing the idea that ‘pop can give a voice to desires which would otherwise be unspoken’, referring to the sexual confusion expressed in different ways by artists like Little Richard, Boy George, Annie Lennox and David Bowie (1986: 3). Street therefore concludes: ‘pop cannot change the world, it cannot turn audiences into movements or musicians into politicians; but popular music is one of the ways that we come to know who we are and what we want’ (Street 1986: 226).

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In Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Dick Hebdige furthermore shows how the Gramscian notion of ‘hegemony’ can be used to identify the critical role that rebellious music plays within societies at large, creating an interplay between music and audience, often by performatively ‘acting out’ aspects of a subculture.45 Hebdige, to some extent, acknowledges Adorno’s critique that these forms of protest, eventually, always get usurped by an entertainment industry and are turned into commercial products that lose their critical dimensions. However, he also claims that this process is a cycle, leading from opposition to defusion, and from resistance to incorporation (Hebdige 1979: 100). This implies that popular music can play a critical, political and/or subversive role in the social totality, but that this dimension only erupts during specific moments and eras (see also Frith 1978, 200).46 Toynbee, in turn, distances himself even more from Adorno’s ideas and criticises the negative connotation of ‘mainstreaming’. Instead, he argues that it is precisely mainstream culture that gets ideas and points across, since it constantly needs to negotiate and argue with dominant discourses to preserve its hegemonic position (Toynbee 2002: 149).

Form A third category of responses to Adorno concerns explorations of musical form and comes the closest to the German philosopher’s own ideas about music and about the artwork as a windowless monad. An example is formed by several postpunk bands who I discussed in the previous chapter. These bands, we have seen, adopted a popular modernist approach to musical (and lyrical) form, born in a rejection of the rock ‘n’ roll structures they saw as conventional. Instead, they aimed to create a sound that, at the time, was new and progressive without presenting the idea that it could completely escape from the tendencies that they criticised. An illustration of this idea is formed by Red Krayola’s guitarist Mayo Thompson, who observes in a rather Adornian fashion that the bleak and fragmented nature of his compositions mirrors the fragmented nature of the society in which he found himself: ‘I didn’t fragment the world – I just happened to notice that it is fragmented’ (qtd. in Reynolds 2006: 610).

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Authors defending these responses therefore argue that we need to take Adorno’s ideas seriously, work though them and then show that his own insights, norms and ideas may be used to defend music that he himself rejected. An example of this approach can be found in Jacques Attali’s 1977 Noise: The Political Economy of Music, which presents a detailed analysis of the history of music and the ways in which it responds to processes of modernisation. Attali argues that music forms a realm in which ‘noise’ becomes sublimated, mirroring the ways in which individuals are shaped, sublimated and standardised by social and economic structures.47 This implies, Attali goes on, that it might be possible that these same structures can be criticised with help of music that breaks through their subsuming and dominating tendencies with help of its form. As an example, Attali discusses free jazz, which he characterises as ‘a profound attempt to win creative autonomy, to effect a cultural-economic reappropriation of music by the people for whom it has a meaning’ (Attali 1985: 138). We can also think of ‘noise music’ in this context, which Nick Smith approaches as follows from an Adornian angle: In order for music to be dissonant with contemporary consumer culture, it must risk its very identity as music. Noise makes this sacrifice in order to be heard as art rather than mere cultural commodity. Noise appears to critique the prevailing cognitive and social habits of modernity  – what T.W. Adorno named identity thinking – by providing concrete and particular art objects that demand attention and jar us from one-dimensional life. (2005: 44)48

In Sublime Noise, Josh Epstein also approaches ‘noise’ as ‘the other’ of what we call ‘music’ and therefore as ‘taboo’ (2014: xxv–xxvi): the moment we start recognising structures or patterns in sounds, he observes, we characterise them as ‘music’ and reject the remainder as ‘just noise’. This distinction is cultural in nature: what defines ‘music’ and what defines ‘noise’ depend on cultural history, social ideals, accepted or already familiar patterns and more. Epstein writes: ‘As music grapples with noise, it also redefines it; as audiences grapple with music, they do so in contextual relation to other forms of sound’ (2014: xxix).

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Following this idea, artists may include noise in their music to break through accepted or conventional structures, shocking, destabilising or encapsulating the listener. As Voegelin observes in her analysis of noise and listening: ‘Noise does not only demand my attention but grasps it literally to the exclusion of all other sensorial possibilities’ (2010: 47). This idea is most explicitly formulated in Italian futurist Luigi Russolo’s 1913 manifesto The Art of Noises, in which the sounds of city life and industrial machines are celebrated as revolutionary aspects of modernity, urging the reader to ‘break at all cost from [the] restrictive circle of pure sounds and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds’ (Russolo 1967: 6). In his overview of the influence of avant-garde composers on punk, Clemens Marschall describes in turn how the ‘Intonarumori’ or ‘noise generators’ built by Russolo influenced several proto-punk artists who explored (and crossed) the lines between what we perceive as music and what we perceive as noise (2016: 11; see also Epstein 2014: xv). We can think in this context of the Berlin group Einstürzende Neubauten, in whose early compositions industrial noise is often more prevalent than musical structure.49 Another example is formed by the early industrial releases of Slovenian group Laibach, who hailed from the former mining town of Lrbovje and let the sounds of machinery dominate their compositions in an attempt to perfect ‘the industrialisation of consciousness’ (Goddard 2018: 70). Yet another example is the American electronic music group Suicide, of whom a live performance was described by a Melody Maker journalist as ‘musical vomit’ (Reynolds 2006: 298).50 Explorations with forms of noise can also be found on the releases of the Japanese noise project Merzbow or of British industrial band Throbbing Gristle. Using noise as an avant-gardist instrument to break through the social order, the latter group continually attempted to find a ‘disengagement from the entire mundane world and an attack at the level of musical and psychological conventions’ (Dee 2009: 61). A more extreme use of noise and loudness is found in drum ‘n’ bass and dub music in which sub-bass frequencies are used to ‘evoke war’ in a way that actually hurts the listener (Zuberi 2010: 189). Stan Erraught, furthermore, observes that ‘noise’ plays a transgressive role in hiphop as well, analysing Public Enemy’s aptly titled song ‘Bring the Noise’ (on It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back) as follows:

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‘Noise is valorised as transgressive, as liberating: in ‘Bring the Noise’, Public Enemy, from within the song itself, dare the music to get louder, more physically punishing… The noise of the needle on the record being spun backwards is itself sampled as a metonym for the process of bringing the noise into the work’ (Erraught 2018: 85). Noise, according to many of these analyses, can therefore play a similar critical role in the social totality as the unexpected notes from free jazz compositions. Jazz indeed returns in Buhler’s analysis of Adorno’s critique as well. With help of an insightful exploration of Adorno’s critique of jazz and the compositional structures of this type of music, Buhler argues that the actual purpose of Adorno’s extremely negative approach to jazz (and other types of music) is that we have to work through his arguments instead of accepting their conclusion (2006: 104). He does this by using Adorno’s emphasis on the freedom contained in the windowless monad of a musical composition to argue that the occurrence of the ‘blue note’ in jazz plays the role that Adorno, in the passage cited above, attributes to themes or notes in Beethoven’s compositions or in some of Schoenberg’s compositions (Buhler 2006: 110).51 In a careful analysis of Adorno’s views, Max Paddison makes a similar point and argues that we should subject Adorno’s views ‘to his own medicine’ (1982: 201). By using Adorno’s positive analyses of Satie, Mahler and Kurt Weill, Paddison claims that certain ‘radical popular music’ is becoming ‘increasingly aware of its function and of the nature of its own material’ (1982: 215), which means that this kind of music incorporates a form of reflection and does come close to Adorno’s standards. As examples, Paddison mentions The Velvet Underground, John Cale and Frank Zappa. The latter artist forms the focus of Ben Watson’s Negative Dialectics and Poodle Play. With help of an elaborate analysis of compositions, lyrics, writings, concerts, interviews and reviews by and of Zappa, Watson uses Adorno’s aesthetic theory, as well as the theories of the Situationists and Jacques Attali’s above-mentioned ideas about music and modernity, to show that the music created by the American musician revolves around an intense focus on form and experimentation, as well as a continuing exploration of the boundaries of recording techniques (1993). Combined with the absurdist, reflexive and often humorous nature of his lyrics, as

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well as with his performative parodies of commercialism and consumption culture, Zappa’s art resists the standardising tendencies of the culture industry, Watson argues, not by moralistically preaching against this industry but by forming part of it and highlighting its internal contradictions (1993: xvi).52 This means that Adorno’s ideas are not so much rejected by Watson, but are used to develop diagnoses and analyses of music that conflict with the German philosopher’s own ‘mandarin’ (1993: xxv) conclusions about specific forms of music.53 Liam Dee, in turn, rejects Watson’s analysis of Zappa as elitist and criticises him for approaching Zappa’s art as a Bourdieuan form of ‘cultural capital’. This means, Dee argues, that Zappa’s music does not manage to escape from the clutches of the culture industry, which sells Zappa’s art (and we could include the above-mentioned references to forms of jazz as well) as an ‘exclusive’ commodity. This reduces this music, in Dee’s words, to ‘restricted avant-garde festivals; contemplative consumption through talks and performances in rarefied venues like upscale galleries and university halls; and niche marketing to discerning consumers in the form of specialist arms of the culture industry’ (2009: 55).54 Dee therefore argues that we should turn to grindcore and death metal—aggressive musical genres in which noise and distortion play important roles—to find art that does justice to Adorno’s observations. These characteristics make this music difficult to process, understand and digest—like Schoenberg or Zappa’s music—but less elitist, Dee claims. This is especially the case, he goes on with help of references to Kristeva’s notion of the abject (to which I turn in Chaps. 4 and 5), since most grindcore and death metal bands focus, in their lyrics and on their album covers, on bodily suffering, torture, exploitation of humans and animals, and gruesome forms of pain.55 In Dee’s view, this ‘brutal realism’ emphasises Adorno’s concern with the problematic ways in which the body is approached in modernity.

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Embodiment and Popular Music Dee’s discussion of embodiment returns—albeit in a more positive form—in two recent works on popular music and Adornian aesthetics, which I want to discuss as a fourth category before analysing Adorno’s possible response and developing my own approach to his thought. The first of these is Stan Erraught’s On Music, Value and Utopia: Nostalgia for an Age Yet to Come?. Erraught argues that we should read the above-­ mentioned articles, in which Adorno criticises popular music, in the wider context of his ideas, mainly by linking them to his work Aesthetic Theory, as I have done in this chapter as well. This makes it possible, Erraught observes with help of a reading of Kant’s aesthetics, to understand music as a ‘situated human practice’ that ‘locates us in the world’ (2018: 45). Following this idea, he argues that ‘pop has a capacity to reacquaint the mind of the listener/participant with the fact of the necessary embodiment of that mind’ (2018: 115). Through its association with dance, he suggests furthermore, pop music addresses the embodied mind as situated in the world with help rhythm, sound and noise that envelop the listener and embed her in a community of people (Erraught 2018: 117).56 Like many of the above-discussed authors, Erraught does not specifically discuss the role that lyrics play—or might play—in popular music. Like these authors, he follows Adorno’s own focus on musical compositions as structures that internally organise their materials in a specific way; an approach that makes it difficult to argue that artworks express something to their audiences with help of words. Lyrics are extensively discussed—albeit in a critical way—in the other recent work on popular music and Adornian aesthetics that I want to discuss: Alison Stone’s The Value of Popular Music, to which I briefly referred in Chap. 1 and to which I now want to turn as a comprehensive and compelling recent response to Adorno’s critique of popular music. Stone adopts the German philosopher’s defence of autonomy but simultaneously argues that he was wrong to claim that popular music cannot gain an autonomous position. Staying as close as possible to Adorno, she specifically focuses on the

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meaning and value of popular music—their ‘truth content’ (Stone 2016: 76–9)—which she connects to the realm of corporeality. Stone’s main argument is that the realm of popular music is not, as Adorno claims, dominated by a continuous repetition of different elements in similar structures. Instead, using Adorno against himself, she argues that many popular songs are composed in such a way that they, on the one hand, create a dense structure that safeguards their autonomy, and, on the other hand, constitute an internal form of freedom. In an analysis of The Beatles’ ‘A Day in the Life’ (on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band), for example, she observes: [T]he track’s disparate sections come to form an integral unity, in which each has the meaning it does only in relation to the other. It is not a harmonious unity but one to which the difference between the sections is essential, yielding an overall quality of ambiguity. The orchestral and piano parts add to the song’s already disparate character, but in doing so, ironically, they help to unify the song by reinforcing its unifying qualities of disparateness and ambiguity. Thus, these passages add to the song’s coherence by consolidating its meaning. (2016: 114)

Many popular songs, Stone argues in this line, are characterised by a form that brings together the song’s different elements—riffs, phrases, melodies, rhythms, bass lines or themes—in a meaningful way (2016: 143; see also Middleton 1990: 50). What makes ‘A Day in the Life’ stand out, she observes furthermore, is that it presents a form of self-reflectivity because of the song’s deliberate combination of different musical styles (Stone 2016: 114). Stone characterises these elements as materials and develops two reasons for doing so. One is that, because they are parts that can be organised as materials, they can be repeated, contrasted and combined in different ways to constitute a meaningful whole (2016: 135). A popular music song, she argues convincingly, is therefore not so much composed but is shaped in an assembling of different materials that are eventually incorporated in the song (Stone 2016: 101). The second reason is a concern with the material body, sensitivity and affectivity. Using Kristeva’s

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distinction between the symbolic and the semiotic, discussed in Chap. 1, Stone argues: By deriving form from materials, popular music presents form as dependent on materials and materials as capable of generating form, having a kind of agency in their own right. By giving salience to rhythm, popular music appeals to our bodies and takes on a bodily, energetic character. It thereby presents the truth that our bodies are creative and intelligent agencies in their own right, and that it is good for our bodies to achieve self-­ realisation, as they can when we move creatively to music. By giving priority to semiotic meaning, popular music presents the truth that bodily-­ based meaning is prior to symbolic meaning, and thus again that material, bodily processes are the root source of explicit meaning and intellectual understanding. (2016: 251)

Popular music, Stone argues in other words, speaks to us, affects us, touches us, addresses us as material beings because of the ways in which its materials are organised internally. It does not do this directly, mechanically or biologically, completely avoiding the ways in which we are structured, as embodied subjects, by affective and socio-cultural contexts (2016: xxiii-xxiv). Instead, this music, through the interplay of bass, melody and rhythm, resonates in and through the semiotic dimension of our existence; a dimension we already had before we started speaking a language: it recalls movements, feelings, emotions and affects, and addresses us as bodies that can recognize and learn how to pick up rhythms, dance or be moved my music. Stone positions this argument against a horizon formed by Adorno’s above-described concern with embodiment, which I exemplified with his analysis of Odysseus and the Sirens. Popular music, she argues, confronts us with the Adornian observation—which, in her view, forms this music’s truth content—that our bodies are bound in modernity, bound by what she characterises as ‘the tyranny of the intellect’ (2016: xxv) but also by the tyranny of the clock, which forms another example, taken from Marx’s Capital, of Adorno’s claim that general forms and structures—constituting the social totality—reify our individual lives (2016: xxv).57 Since the different materials (melodies, phrases, bass lines, beats, riffs and

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hooks—see Middleton 1990: 50) in popular songs are brought together in specific ways, they challenge our bodies to make sense of them in the form of dance and movement, and implicitly criticise the reifying dominance of clock time and of social structures that rob the body of its spontaneity.58 It is the critical realisation of such a ‘pathology’ of modernity—the body being overshadowed and reified—that Stone defines as the critical value of popular music (2016: xxvii–xxviii). She observes: ‘form need not suppress or restrict our bodies and it is undesirable for it to do so. This truth is presented in that popular music offers us instances, or examples, of cultural creations in which form is employed to promote the intelligent movement and thus self-realisation of our bodies’ (2016: 167). It is for this same reason that, as discussed in Chap. 1, Stone rejects the idea that the symbolic elements of lyrics play a primary role in a popular song’s meaning: only if we approach the song as an autonomous whole that forms a unity on a semiotic level (and is not fragmented by the combination of both symbolic and semiotic elements), and only if we specifically analyse the ways in which songs address our bodies (and not our minds through the symbolic elements of lyrics), can we understand what the song means, preserve Adorno’s focus on the artwork’s autonomy, and argue that the song has a critical dimension, Stone claims. Would we accept that this music is a hybrid of different aspects—music and words, the symbolic and the semiotic—then we cannot distinguish it completely from poetry, prose or even sloganeering, which undermines this music’s autonomy as a unique and critical form of art that shapes its own truth content. In Stone’s words: ‘While including lyrics … popular music not only remains fundamentally continuous with the semiotic realm, but also treats the symbolic as being dependent on the semiotic’ (2016: 251).

Adornian Feedback Of course, this overview of different responses to Adorno is not comprehensive. Furthermore, it should be observed that most of these responses overlap: the observation that some hiphop represents the identities of marginalised social groups, for example, can be linked to the observation

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that this type of music explores specific forms through the use of samples and the inclusion of different voices.59 I hope to have exemplified, however, that the different ways in which authors work through Adorno’s ideas, processing his rejection as that which Krims characterises as a ‘foundational trauma’ of popular music studies, prove that analysing popular music does not end if one wants to take Adorno’s critique seriously. Paradoxically, his often unsubtle observations do inspire helpful analyses that emphasise those aspects that make popular music unique or valuable. Most of the above-discussed responses, however, imply that Adorno’s critique cannot be completely refuted, worked through or overcome: like an unprocessed trauma, to use Krims’ terminology again, it keeps haunting the discipline of popular music studies and forces theorists to defend popular music. This means, I want to argue, that for many authors Adorno’s ideas still form a problem for popular music, mainly because of his specific and historically situated defence of the standards of autonomy and reflection as well as his grim diagnosis of the ‘social totality’. These aspects of his thought, for example, undermine the critical nature of that which, above, I have rather generally characterised as folk, underground, DIY or experimental music, with Crass as an example. Even though this music might be made—to some extent—outside of the culture industry, it does not take the reflective aspects of Adorno’s aesthetic theory and his social critique into account and does not present the standard of autonomy as mediated by a social whole in which the artwork paradoxically gains this same autonomy. Instead, it could be argued from an Adornian point of view, this music embraces naive and undialectical notions of directness, as well as a false aura of ‘authenticity’ in which romanticised images of escape from a social totality are presented as possible (see also Buhler 2006: 114).60 Adorno, after all, does not approach the culture industry as an isolated realm in an otherwise just or open society, but understands it as a manifestation of capitalist structures that permeate the social totality as a whole. A similar idea formed the basis of Gang of Four’s Andy Gill and Manic Street Preachers’ Richey Edwards’ statements that it is impossible to escape the ‘Babylon’ of the music industry (as discussed in Chap. 2). Observations like the latter form one of the driving forces behind the above-discussed poststructuralist idea that popular music might present

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us with traces of otherness and give room to the voices of the subaltern. This approach, after all, is born in a rejection of the notion of ‘authenticity’ and of romanticised understandings of an autonomous ‘external’ position to the social totality; an external position from which the artist would, in some way or another, be able to directly express herself. Within poststructuralist theories, to some extent, the musical subject is always part of a social and cultural context to which there is no clear ‘outside’: the only thing the artist might be able to do is destabilise existing ideas and forms of representation, showing us traces of otherness without, in any way, presenting this ‘otherness’ as categorically or ontologically different from this context.61 In spite of the observation that this approach shares its rejection of false notions of authenticity with Adorno, however, it ignores his dialectical focus on autonomy and reflection (see also Krims 2003: 132). Adorno’s modernist understanding of artworks as ‘windowless monads’, after all, problematises a direct link between music and the ways in which cultural representations re-shape, re-present or re-imagine identities that revolve around ethnicity, gender or class. If we do this, the monad is given windows, embedded in a social whole that, he argues, is so pervasive that it undermines the artwork and either reduces it to a mere consumption product or provides it with a social and political function. And this, in his view, robs the artwork of its internal consistency and its autonomous position again.62 Put differently, artworks are then reduced to what Adorno characterises as ‘their external history’, rather than pursuing what he defines as ‘their own historical content’ (Adorno 2002a: 182–3; see also Jameson 2007: 158, 185).63 To a certain extent, this observation also undermines the sociological analysis developed by DeNora. I agree with her that Adorno does not focus specifically enough on the ways in which listeners react to music, often using it actively to structure, shape or reshape their environments, their memories, or their (embodied) experiences of events. Nevertheless, however, I believe that Adorno’s continuing concern with a specific understanding of the artwork’s autonomy does make it difficult to describe the meaning of music by primarily exploring the ways in which this meaning is shaped by listeners. After all, Adorno’s notion of the windowless monad forces us

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to distinguish the artwork from listeners without overlooking the historical context in which both artwork and listener are embedded. I believe that Adorno’s negativity, furthermore, affects Alison Stone’s approach to popular music as well. As discussed above, Adorno argues that, in modernity, the sphere of corporeality is reduced to a ‘substratum’ in art. This makes it impossible, within Adorno’s philosophy, to address the body in ways that would ‘liberate’ it or provide an experience of corporeal catharsis (see also DeNora 2003: 8–9). The kernel of Adorno’s critique of jazz, after all, is that it presents a form of bodily spontaneity that mimics freedom in a society that is not free. In some way or another, we have seen, art in modernity therefore has to acknowledge this unfreedom—its reflexive aspect—while at the same time internally preserving a sense of freedom—its autonomous aspect, he argues. Even though Stone does emphasise the idea that popular music does not speak to the body in a direct and unhistorical manner, but instead argues that it addresses the body’s intelligence as it is shaped by historical conditions, she does distinguish embodiment from ‘the tyranny of the intellect’. And this means, in my view, that she emphasizes the standard of autonomy—by focusing on the compositional structures of popular songs—in a way that overlooks the standard of reflection—by presenting popular music as a gateway to an otherwise repressed body, as liberating Odysseus from his shackles and enabling him to dance. I want to illustrate my disagreement with Stone with help of her critique of prog rock. This type of music, Stone observes, revolves around unconventional time signatures, which means, in her view, that even though it contains passages that are sensory and affective, it is eventually ‘head music’ that is ‘ill-suited for dancing’ and therefore ‘lessens the music’s bodily appeal, calling for thought about rhythm rather than immediate participation in it’ (2016: 46). This critical approach to prog rock implies that popular music would only gain a certain autonomy if it speaks to the body’s intelligence and not to the mind’s intelligence. By adopting a distinction between what we could characterise as ‘body music’ and ‘head music’, however, Stone in my view presents an undialectical understanding of bodily intelligence, corporeal creativity and affective sensitivity that, I want to argue, Adorno would reject. From his perspective, this distinction is not critical enough because it presents the

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false idea of a bodily sphere that music, in some way or another, would have access to ‘outside’ of the mind. In other words, this approach only reinforces a social distinction between body and mind that Adorno criticises as follows in a passage in Aesthetic Theory, in which he discusses undialectical attempts to present embodied intuition as the opposite of rational thought: The puristic and to this extent rationalistic separation of intuition from the conceptual serves the dichotomy of rationality and sensuousness that society perpetrates and ideologically enjoins. Art would need rather to work in effigy against this dichotomy through the critique that it objectively embodies; through art’s restriction to sensuousness this dichotomy is only confirmed. The untruth attacked by art is not rationality but rationality’s rigid opposition to the particular; if art separates out intuitability and bestows it with the crown of the particular, then art endorses that rigidification, valorizing the detritus of societal rationality and thereby serving to distract from this rationality. The more gaplessly a work seeks to be intuitable and thus fulfill aesthetic precept, the more its spiritual element is reified. (2002a: 98)

Again, this does not mean that the body is ignored by Adorno—this would affirm the distinction between body and mind in an equally uncritical manner, in his view—but it does mean that this body becomes a ‘substratum’, almost completely buried beneath the surface of the artwork, its suffering manifesting itself in the iron grip of the twelve-tone technique, its spontaneity reduced to a sudden note or flash of freedom that almost immediately disappears the moment one becomes aware of it (Adorno 1985: 157).64 As Adorno writes, in a different artistic context, about Beckett’s Endgame: ‘Because there has been no life other than the false life, the catalog of its defects becomes the counterpart of ontology’ (2003b: 275). Art, this suggests, has to become such a catalogue of defects as well, not a realm that turns to the body as an ontological entity, even if this body is approached as a form of intelligence that might rebel against the way in which it is pushed into ‘clock time’. Adorno’s scrutiny also affects the focus on form as it is conceptualised in the above-mentioned analyses of Frank Zappa. Zappa’s lyrics, which

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concern explicit and often humorous references to sexuality and taboo aspects of modern life (Watson 1993: xx), as well as his postmodern attempts to mimic and parody already existing forms of music, provide his musical monads with too many windows to survive Adorno’s criticism, I believe. Dee is right, furthermore, that this steers us towards a form of elitism that pushes these compositions into the realm of a snobbish ‘high culture’. However, Dee’s own defence of death metal and grindcore as expressing the ‘brutal realism’ of life overlooks Adorno’s concern with the internal musical structure of compositions in my view, as well as his rejection of the idea that art would directly ‘express’ a message, feeling or worldview to the audience. As Jay Bernstein argues, after all, an elitist stance follows directly from Adorno’s negative diagnosis of the society in which he lived: ‘One can only defend culture by indicting the reasons for and not the fact of its existence’ (Bernstein 2005: 17; see on this issue also Huyssen 1986: 19). Modernist art might be elitist, in other words, but in Adorno’s view this is a consequence of a social totality in which complex and difficult art is either marginalised or squeezed into elitist genres like ‘classical music’ (see also Holloway et al. 2009: 8).65

Why Adorno? With this evaluation of responses to Adorno’s critique of popular music, I believe we have arrived at the seemingly unsatisfying—and perhaps rather predictable—conclusion that it is, in my view, impossible to defend popular music within a completely Adornian framework, driven by his exclusive focus on autonomy as constituted by the shaping of an internal ‘truth content’. The moment a composition is produced by an industry primarily focused on entertainment; the moment a composition has a recognisable and catchy beat; the moment a composition directly represents or expresses emotions or identities, either through its sound or through its lyrics; or the moment a composition has melodies that follow a pattern that becomes predictable once we have heard it once or twice, emphasised by brief hooks or moments during which the song appears to briefly do something new, it fails to place itself in opposition to the social totality, whether this concerns Tin Pan Alley, The Beatles, jazz, Wagner, Rachmaninov, Madonna, Stravinsky or Tchaikovsky.

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This again sparks the question why I keep returning to Adorno—to, using Krims’ terminology again, the foundational trauma of popular music studies? Why do I force myself to go through the masochistic exercise of discussing Adorno and concluding—like many others before me—that popular music cannot be reconciled with his aesthetic theory? Why Adorno still?66 The answer to this question revolves around my defence of an alternative way of including Adorno’s ideas in popular music studies. Most of the above-discussed responses to his critique of popular music aim to show that this music still, in some way or another, satisfies Adorno’s ‘standards’, often resulting in defences of some music as valuable (‘serious’) and most other music as standardised and dismissible (‘entertainment’). In contrast with these ideas, I find Stone’s approach more convincing because it takes popular music seriously on its own terms. Still, I want to adopt a different strategy. This strategy departs from the idea that popular music, a hybrid art form embedded in a postmodern realm shaped after the crumbling down of Huyssen’s Great Divide, could or should constitute an Adornian truth content. However, it still results in the observation that this music can constitute different and critical forms of autonomy and reflexivity, but since I do not link them to the notion of a ‘truth content’, these forms are more open, diverse and fragmented than Adorno argues they could or should be. Instead of applying Adorno’s ideas to popular music compositions, this strategy revolves around the claim that some popular music releases implicitly shape, construct or suggest standards ‘within themselves’ that we can still highlight with help of Adorno’s ideas. Regardless of whether this music survives Adorno’s scrutiny (which it does not), this strategy, in other words, uses his theory to discern what happens within certain popular music releases. What makes this approach appealing, I believe, is (1) that it rejects the elitism that comes with the construction of schisms between valuable and dismissible music, or between serious music and entertainment; and (2) that it enables us to take the inner workings of certain popular music releases as seriously as possible. This is what I aim to do in in my analyses of Manic Street Preachers releases in the following chapters. The main drive behind the inner working of the Welsh band’s releases, I will argue, is born in a paradox that can best be highlighted with help of aspects of Adorno’s thought, especially

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with help of the different ideas that shape his notion of the windowless monad and result in a defence of the notions of autonomy and reflexivity. This paradox is born in the following question: how can we criticise a context if we are part of this context ourselves? In order to criticise our own context, his discussion of the windowless monad suggests after all, we have to be able to create a distance between ourselves—or our critical standpoint—and that which is criticised. This does not have to be an Archimedean point, completely disconnected from the criticised context, but in some way or another the critic needs to pull himself loose and find some wiggle room to diagnose and criticise this same context. The question of how to create this distance returns throughout the history of philosophy and the history of art and aesthetics.67 As discussed in the previous chapter, for example, it shapes the ideas behind releases by bands like Gang of Four and Scritti Politti. However, and this is what makes Adorno’s theory crucial to analyse Manic Street Preachers, it becomes especially urgent if the diagnosis that the critic develops of this context rests on two observations: first, the observation that it is impossible to find any critical values outside of this context; and second, the observation that this context is completely false. It is precisely the combination of these two observations, I will argue in the following chapters, that forms the drive behind Manic Street Preachers releases and that results, on these releases, in the aim to strive towards autonomy and reflection, primarily in the realm of their lyrics, even though they let go of the Adornian attempt to shape a truth content. Furthermore, it is also this combination that distinguishes Adorno from other thinkers, which means that Adorno’s theory enables us to highlight the intricacies of the releases on which I will focus in this book, even though this same theory rejects the manner in which this music voices, expresses or represents this critique. We then see that Manic Street Preachers releases are born in the modernist and Adornian assumption that what they aim to do is impossible, resulting in songs that are shaped by notions of totalising resistance, rejection and a continuing struggle against themselves. This means that Manic Street Preachers releases present what Stan Erraught defines as commodities that have become ‘allergic’ to themselves (2018: 99).

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Munchausen Before concluding this chapter, I want to zoom in a little bit more on the way in which this paradox comes about within Adorno’s works. It can be illustrated with a famous passage in his essay ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, in which Adorno writes: ‘Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today’ (Adorno 2003a: 162). The fact that Auschwitz could take place, Adorno suggests in this complex and often misunderstood passage, forces us to face the question whether value like progress, autonomy, freedom, human rights, emancipation or rational self-reflection still mean anything and if they therefore still enable us to criticise this same fact. As he observes in Minima Moralia: ‘We shudder at the brutalisation of life, but lacking any objectively binding morality we are forced at every step into actions and words, into calculations that are by humane standards barbaric…’ (Adorno 1974: 27).68 For Adorno, in other words, there is no ‘outside’ or external ‘standpoint’ (Adorno 1973: 4): we are imprisoned by a context that permeates us and shapes us, and that we, therefore, cannot escape. This is the first observation that constitutes the paradox mentioned above. The second observation returns in his claim that ‘the whole is the false’. All values, ideas or truths available to the critic, Adorno argues, have been corrupted and corroded by the totalitarian ideologies of fascism, communism or capitalism. An example is formed by his analysis of the culture industry: if notions like happiness, love, freedom, beauty, sensuousness or sexual satisfaction are permeated and shaped more and more by the one-­ dimensional cliché’s presented to us in Hollywood films, popular songs, commercials or simplistic political discourses, and if we ourselves are shaped as well by these same discourses, it becomes more and more difficult to criticise these processes. After all, this implies that we do not have alternative understandings of love, happiness, freedom or sexuality available to show the falseness of our experiences or to argue why they are wrong.

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Paradoxically, however, this is precisely what Adorno aims to do: radically criticise, resist and reject a social and cultural context as wrong, even though this same critique implies that this is not possible. In Minima Moralia, he illustrates this paradox by referring to the legend of Baron Munchausen, who pulled himself and his horse out of a swamp by his own hair. This made it possible for the Baron to escape the situation in which he was stuck without using any external objects or foundations to cling to. Adorno writes: ‘Nothing less is asked of the thinker today to be at every moment both within things and outside them—Münchhausen pulling himself out of the bog by his pig-tail becomes the pattern of knowledge which wishes to be more than either verification or speculation’ (1974: 74). It is this same attempt to develop a specific, negative form of immanent critique, I will argue in the following chapters, which forms the aim shaped within Manic Street Preachers releases. Like Munchausen, these releases are driven by the attempt to pull themselves out of a swamp that, these releases state themselves, is inescapable. In the previous chapter, I already referred to one understanding of such a ‘swamp’: the music industry that the band criticise but, simultaneously, present as inescapable on music released within this same industry. A more general understanding of such a ‘swamp’ is formed by that which Adorno calls the ‘social totality’: the inescapable social and cultural whole that, in his view, reduces people to standardised cogs in an economic machine. As I observed in Chap. 2, similar ideas already shaped the releases of bands who aimed to voice critique in eras before Manic Street Preachers, most explicitly Scritti Politti’s Wittgensteinian and Derridean references to the claim that we are always stuck in a language that we can only criticise with help of words from that same language. Again, however, what makes Adorno, in the context of my analysis of Manic Street Preachers, into a more helpful thinker than Wittgenstein or Derrida, is (1) his negativity, revolving around the idea that the social totality is completely false; and (2) the way in which he combines the standard of reflection with an emphasis on the autonomy of the artwork, positioning himself in a modernist tradition. In different ways, I believe, both Wittgenstein and Derrida accept that we are always already part of a linguistic or cultural context and that everything we do, say or think is shot through with discourse. This idea

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implies that we can only criticise this context by analysing or deconstructing the rules, norms and structures that—implicitly or explicitly— shape this context and constitute its meaning. Furthermore, this emphasis on immanence also implies that we cannot escape this context; an observation that led Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside to the conclusion that he needed to speak the language of mainstream love songs to criticise this same language.69 But even though Adorno does not claim that we can escape from this context either, he still rejects it as completely false, and therefore prompts the artwork to resist it by constituting a distance between itself and this same context. A similar claim can be made about the differences between Adorno’s negativity and approaches based on the notion of hegemony, which I mentioned several times above because it returns in many Marxist responses to Adorno’s rejection of the culture industry. As Raymond Williams writes in his influential entry in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, the concept of ‘hegemony’ follows from the idea that there is a dominant culture that presents a ‘particular way of seeing the world and human nature and relationships’ (1983: 145). This hegemonic culture, he observes, shapes the ways in which we perceive, experience and live as if these ways are natural and not constituted by the interests of a ruling class. Furthermore, even though this culture justifies forms of exploitation or oppression by presenting them as natural, Williams argues that it permeates the existence of everyone in this society, regardless of class or identity (see also Jameson 2007: 134). Again, this implies that the only way in which we can criticise and resist this hegemonic culture is not by removing ourselves from it, but by introducing new and critical ideas and perspectives into, for example, the realm of popular culture to try and shift, or at least destabilise, the hegemonic balance. As briefly discussed above as well, these ideas are more open to the manner in which critique functions within the realm of popular music— and popular culture in general—than those of Adorno. Furthermore, Manic Street Preachers’ own claim that they want to ‘question the entire culture we take for granted’ seems to point precisely at a Gramscian or Williamsian attempt to de-naturalise the hold of a hegemonic culture. However, I will argue in the following chapters, Manic Street Preachers releases are driven by the aim to constitute a form of autonomy in a realm

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in which, these releases state themselves, this is not possible because this same realm is rejected as simultaneously all-corrupting and completely false. Furthermore, the negativity that permeates Manic Street Preachers releases targets not only political and economic structures, but also the selves—including the lyrical ‘I’ of their songs—that are shaped by these structures, at places resulting in an extremely critical assessment of the inability of human beings to constitute just societies. Again, I therefore believe that, more than Wittgenstein or Derrida, and more than Gramsci or Williams, the negativity of Adorno enables us to highlight the inner workings of these releases. Even in those cases in which Manic Street Preachers present ideas taken from more postmodern authors like Guy Debord (as I will argue in Chap. 4) or Derrida (as I will argue in Chap. 6), I will show that they are still driven by Adornian tendencies, trying to constitute a form of autonomy and create as much distance as possible between themselves and that which they aim to critique. This means, again, that even though they do not shape a truth content, these albums are still primarily driven by an Adornian emphasis on negativity and distance, instead of a Derridean or Wittgensteinian concern with contextuality and immanence. Furthermore, as I will argue in these chapters as well, it is precisely because these specific releases themselves strive towards this autonomy, but do this with help of postmodern thinkers like Debord and Derrida, that they fail in the light of the Adornian standards that they suggest themselves.

The Critical Model I will make this point in the following chapters by characterising the different ways in which Manic Street Preachers releases struggle with Munchausen’s above-described paradox, as constituting different ‘critical models’. This will enable me to argue that certain aspects of Adorno’s specific defence of the notions of autonomy and reflection can be used to analyse and interpret the return of these same notions within Manic Street Preachers releases and to show that they are shaped in different ways within each critical model.

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The definition of the ‘model’ that I will use should not be understood as a universal or rigid structure that is disconnected from the material it is applied to. Instead, it is born in Adorno’s concern with the dialectics between part and whole.70 Understanding the model as a ‘whole’, as the theory we use to approach and analyse particular and individual aspects of the world and ourselves—‘raw material’—, a model enables these individual aspects to unfold, to ‘show themselves’.71 Whereas Adorno uses the notion of the ‘model’ to refer to the ways in which his own texts struggle with the material that they aim to analyse and understand, I will use it to refer to the ways in which Manic Street Preachers shape their critical ideas and analyses in the form of songs and albums. Sometimes, I will argue, these releases try to set up a critical model but fail; sometimes they succeed. As stated in the previous two chapters, I will argue furthermore that Manic Street Preachers create these critical models primarily with help of the critical, sometimes aggressive and often uncomfortable message they express through their lyrics. Whereas their music, as discussed in the previous chapter as well, turns away from modernist experimentation and mainly presents us with conventional and traditional forms, emulating styles akin to rock ‘n’ roll, punk, postpunk, glamrock and stadium rock, it is in their lyrics that particular forms of autonomy are constituted in different ways. This means that these lyrics not only struggle against the social and cultural contexts in which they are embedded, but sometimes also against the music of which they form part, or even, as I will mainly discuss in Chaps. 4 and 5, against their own semiotic elements. Even though these lyrics present different critical models that sometimes conflict with each other because they shape different forms of autonomy and reflexion and do this in different ways, I will also argue that what unites them is the systematic aim to ‘question the entire culture we take for granted’. Sometimes, we will see, this aim results in lyrics that rather explicitly communicate a critical message, sometimes it crystallises in a critical model in which dense and complex explorations of the semiotic elements of language and of lyrics as sound play an important role as well. In each case, however, the critical model constituted by the band is shaped in lyrics in which the symbolic elements play an equally important role and cannot be ignored.

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Conclusion This brings me to the conclusion of this chapter. After working through Adorno’s defence of the windowless monad, his critique of popular music, several responses to this critique by academic scholars and popular music groups, and the observation that these responses do not completely bridge the gap between Adorno’s ideas on aesthetics and the realm of popular music, I have developed a different way of thinking about this gap. Even if we accept that popular music does not meet the standards that Adorno sets to art, I believe it is possible to argue that his ideas can still play a fruitful role in popular music studies because they enable us to highlight the presence of these standards as they are raised in and by some popular music releases themselves. Adorno’s ideas, in other words, enable us to show how critical models are constructed on these releases, crystallizing around standards that they implicitly express by constructing these models. In the following chapters, as I have stated as well, I will argue that these standards are primarily constituted in the lyrics of Manic Street Preachers releases. Again, this does not mean that this makes these releases better or more valuable than popular music that revolves around different ideas, values, feelings or identities. Rejecting Adorno’s rather rigid normative focus on the shaping of an autonomous truth content, my approach embraces more fluid understandings of normativity and autonomy that are open to the idea that different kinds of art require different normative and analytical frameworks (see Zuidervaart 1990: 74-5), and shape different forms of autonomy—and of reflexivity—in different ways. And this means, in turn, that different forms of popular music constitute meaning in various ways, and that the way in which Manic Street Preachers releases do this can still be highlighted with help of Adorno’s modernist ideas. Again, it is also important to emphasise that the German philosopher himself would reject my approach. He would argue, after all, that these lyrics open a too direct ‘window’ to the society that they aim to reject, constituting a form of communication between artwork and audience that corrodes the internal solidity of the former and departs from his emphasis on the shaping of a truth content as the only way in which art can become autonomous and critical (see also Zuidervaart 1990).

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Still, however, I will show that Adorno’s continuing emphasis on expressing resistance from an autonomous point of view, as well as his almost categorical rejection of the world as wrong, result in the most fruitful framework to interpret the ideas expressed in and by the lyrics of Manic Street Preachers. Unlike other approaches to popular music, his focus on negativity makes it possible to show that if this music wants to express the idea that its own realm is in constant danger of being overshadowed by consumerism, commercialism and reification—an idea that follows Adorno—this observation can be used to explain why and how this same music is shaped by self-critique, self-reflection and an awareness of the fragility of its own paradoxical condition, mainly expressed in lyrics that gain a high theoretical density.

Notes 1. For diverse but comprehensive discussions of Adorno’s arguments against popular music, see for example Frith 1978: 193–6; Middleton 1990: 34–63; Shuker 1994: 16–18; DeNora 2003; Krims 2003; Buhler 2006; Stone 2016: 69–108. 2. An example is found in Adorno’s appraisal of artists who mix different art forms with film (Adorno 2005b: 183; Adorno 2002a, b: 269). 3. Adorno even left open the possibility that we become used to the dissonances that play important and uncomfortable roles in the modernist music he defended, implying that high modernist explorations of form will eventually also lose their critical and autonomous character (see Jameson 2007: 171). 4. On the distinction between avant-gardism and modernism, see also Willemen 1994: 143–9. On Adorno’s analysis of avant-­gardist forms of ‘shock’ as ways to confront listeners with truths about their social existence, see Eisentraut 2013: 103. 5. On this issue, see also Huyssen 1986: 19–20. It could be argued that a similar pinball bumper is formed by the countless responses to Adorno; responses through which one has to work as well before one can develop one’s own analysis of popular music. 6. DeNora reflects on this issue in her study of Adorno and popular music (2003: 4).

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7. My analysis of Adorno’s notion of the ‘windowless monad’ is indebted to Jameson’s discussion of Adorno’s aesthetic theory (Jameson 2007: 185–88). My analysis of Adorno’s critique of music, furthermore, is indebted to Middleton’ detailed analysis in Studying Popular Music (1990). 8. Adorno also observes that Wagner’s compositions contain emancipatory potentials, which means that he is not entirely dismissive of his music. For an analysis of Adorno’s ambivalent approach to Wagner, see Erraught 2018: 102–3. 9. It is important to note that this is Adorno’s interpretation of Schoenberg, not Schoenberg’s own theory about his compositions (see also DeNora 2003: 19). 10. An example of these arguments can be found in Adorno’s rejection of György Lukács’ emphasis on critical realism as simplistic and naive, undermining the autonomy of the artwork by reducing it to a social function (Adorno 1991: 225–6). Lukács, in turn, criticised Adorno for defending elitist and bourgeois art that would not be able to generate social critique. For a discussion of Adorno and Lukács’ ideas about avant-garde art, see Bürger 1984: 86. 11. On these two aspects of art, see also DeNora 2003: 11–12. 12. Jameson analyses this passage as well (see 2007: 178). 13. See my discussion of embodiment and Adorno’s moral philosophy in Peters 2013. 14. For a more extensive analysis of this passage and, more generally, Adorno’s ideas on embodiment and aesthetics, see Peters 2014: 188–216. 15. For a more detailed discussion of Paddison’s analysis, see Buhler 2006: 118. 16. Adorno is ambivalent about gramophone records: he also argues that records make music more ‘autonomous’ and that they illustrate music’s historical dimensions through the scratches that gradually appear on the record’s surface. Furthermore, he observes that the directly perceived link between the record and the music comes close to what can be called a ‘universal’ language. For a comprehensive analysis of this aspect of Adorno’s thought, see Middleton 2006: 145–6. 17. This observation is similar to Adorno and Horkheimer’s reference to ‘the Hollywood rebel’, who is presented, in their views, as a ‘deviation from the norm’ but in reality only affirms this norm by presenting the illusion of freedom (see Jameson 2007: 69). 18. For a comprehensive analysis of Adorno’s analysis of jazz, see Witkin 1998.

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19. From an Adornian point of view, it could be argued that these aspects return in the role that jazz plays in the ending of Sartre’s Nausea. For an analysis of ‘Blackness’ as a white fantasy identity, see Bradby 2014: 13. On the role that ‘Blackness’ played in the identity of British rock musicians who hailed from the white middle classes and adopted American rock ‘n’ roll to appear more authentic, see Faulk 2010: 9. 20. Adorno’s writings on music also contain parts that have been accused of sexism. An example is his claim that the male voice can better be reproduced on a gramophone record because a female voice ‘requires the ­physical appearance of the body that carries it’ (Adorno 1990: 54), rooting femininity in corporeality and presenting masculinity as bodyless. 21. For an analysis of this argument, see also Hesmondalgh 2002: 133. 22. For an analysis of the performative aspects of Adorno’s texts, see DeNora 2003: 31. 23. For a comprehensive defence of this argument, mainly concerning The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour, see Faulk 2010: 47–76. 24. In Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, Jonathan Crary develops a thorough analysis of the ways in which economic processes influenced and shaped the ways in which we perceive the world. He specifically focuses on the manner in which ‘capitalist modernity has generated a constant re-creation of the conditions of sensory experience, in what could be called a revolutionizing of the means of perception’ (1999: 13). Crary, furthermore, argues that ‘the changing configurations of capitalism continually push attention and distraction to new limits and thresholds, with an endless sequence of new products, sources of stimulation, and streams of information’ (1999: 14). On modern art and distraction, see also Van Alphen 2017. 25. For a comparison of Marcuse’s ideas about revolution and marginalised groups with the theory of Situationism (discussed in Chap. 4), see Eagles 2017. 26. Toynbee uses this term to discuss Simon Frith’s observation that ‘far from imposing commodified forms and values, [the music industry] has to respond to music cultures which are active and often recalcitrant’ (Toynbee 2014: 218). In his foreword to Bürger’s analysis of the avant-­ garde, Schulte-Sasse criticises the, in his view, limited aspects of this monolithic approach as well (1984: xxx; see also Bernstein 2005: 21). 27. For a defence of Adorno against this claim, see Bernstein 2005: 21.

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28. Jameson even argues that for Adorno ‘jazz’ mainly refers to Whiteman, an observation that is not entirely convincing if we take his analysis of racism and jazz into account. Paddison refers to Whiteman as Adorno’s embodiment of ‘jazz’ as well (1982: 209). 29. For a general overview of the notion of ‘hegemony’ and the many ways in which it has been embedded in political and philosophical discourses, see Anderson 2017. For a discussion of this idea in the context of Gramsci and Williams, see Jameson 2007: 45. 30. In his analysis of noise, Epstein argues in a similar way that the positive evaluation of the liberating aspects of music as developed by Attali may be used to counterbalance Adorno’s monolithic negativity (2014: xxvii). 31. This division is partly based on Middleton’s analyses of Adorno’s critical perspective on popular music under the headers of ‘production’, ‘form’ and ‘reception’ (Middleton 1990: 35–60). 32. For an analysis of distribution techniques and cassette culture as (among others) a way of protesting the anonimity of the internet, see Eley 2011. 33. Another example is American band Fugazi, see Andersen 2013: 13–16. 34. Albini later argued that the internet plays an important role in emancipating the musician, pulling her out of the dependency on the music business (see Tan 2014). 35. Harvey understands post-Fordist flexible accumulation as playing an important role in the transition to the era of the postmodern, especially postmodern experiences of space and time (1990: 141–72). 36. For an analysis of Frith’s critique of dogmatic Marxist ideologies within the development of the discipline of popular music studies, see Jones 2014: 47–9. 37. As an example, Krims mainly refers to Burnett 1996. 38. For an analysis of the antagonism between industry and the creativity of musicians, see Chapple and Garofalo 1977. 39. For another example of a sociological approach to the role that popular music might play in the formation of ideas about gender, class, race, family life and more, see Kotarba and Vannini 2009. 40. On the dominance of this focus on reception and affectivity, see Hesmondalgh 2002: 125. 41. An example is formed by Stuart Hall’s analysis of representations of racial and ethnic differences in the realm of popular culture (2013). Another example is formed by McKay’s analysis of popular music and disability, in which the corporeal aspects of popular music are linked to

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the representation, inclusion and exclusion of different forms of corporeality (McKay 2013). 42. In his analysis of hiphop, M.K. Asante Jr. connects this idea to the notion of ‘artivism’ (2008: 202–10). For a more general overview of ‘Black voices in popular music’, see Middleton 2006: 37–89. 43. In his analysis of Zappa, Watson describes how jazz forms one of the main musical realms in which Adorno’s ideas are realised. He especially focuses on the presence of ‘blue notes’ in jazz compositions (Watson 1993: 54–55). 44. John Street makes a similar point, see 1986: 92. 45. For an analysis of the performativity of the fandom of Grateful Dead— ‘deadheads’—see Auslander 2004: 13. 46. For an analysis of this idea in the context of punk, see Albiez 2003. Bayer makes a similar point in an article on the perception of German metal band J.B.O. (see 2000: 111). 47. A similar approach can be found in an influential passage in The Long Revolution, in which Raymond Williams analyses how culture becomes part of everyday life by way of ‘learned rules’ and aspects like gesture, language and image (1965: 40). Williams also reflects on ‘rhythm’, which he characterises as ‘a way of transmitting a description of experience, in such a way that the experience is re-created in the person receiving it, not merely as an ‘abstraction’ or an ‘emotion’ but as a physical effect on the organism; ‘on the blood, on the breathing, on the physical patterns of the brain’ (1965: 40–1; see also Epstein 2014: xxxi). De Nora writes in this context about the ‘internal impact’ of music on the body (DeNora 2003: 100). 48. This passage is also analysed in Dee 2009: 65. 49. For an exploration of the futurists defending the idea that noise should take over music, see Epstein 2014: 7. 50. The phrase was adopted by Ian Craig Marsh as the name for an avant-­ garde music project, which included performances during which band members vomited on stage (see Reynolds 2006: 298–99). 51. Erraught argues that the ‘formal poverty of rock’ is one of the reasons for the observation that, in reviews of pop music, we do not find structural forms of analysis, but mainly descriptions of ‘impressions’ (2018: 114). 52. The Zappa-inspired Czech band The Plastic People of the Universe used Zappa’s emphasis on complex musical form and absurdist humour to play a critical role within the totalitarian, repressive structures deter-

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mined by the Czechoslovakian Communist Party, resisting its official policy of ‘Normalisation’ by embracing abnormality and bizarre creativity. 53. For Zappa’s own reflections on ‘the norm’ in music—Tin Pan Alley songs, jazz standards—and deviating from this norm, see Zappa 1989: 185–9. 54. For another characterisation of the elitism of avant-garde art movements in contrast with the non-elite backgrounds of American proto-­punk artists, see Marschall 2016: 9. Paddison also observes that ‘if a radical popular music attempts to renounce consumption and aspires towards the predicament of the serious avant-garde, it immediately runs the risk of alienating itself from the general public, and then becomes a minority music which can no longer be regarded as popular’ (1982: 217). 55. Bands like Carcass and Cattle Decapitation form examples. 56. Schleifer argues as well that ‘popular music calls into question the austere aesthetics of Kantian disinterested judgment’ (2013: 5), and shows how this type of music mirrors and reflects the invasive and more affective and embodied aspects of modernity. 57. For an analysis of ‘clock time’ as the core of modernity and as resulting, as observed by Foucault and Lewis Mumford, in forms of discipline incorporated by the body, see Rosa 2013: 167. 58. On the way in which music encourages us to dance, but also on how rhythms resonate with the rhythm of our heart, see DeNora 2003: 47. Several of Stone’s arguments come close to Jacques Attali’s observations, especially those regarding the ways in which music addresses the body as it is constituted by historical structures, as well as the idea that music symbolises the sacrifice—of the imaginary, of the body—that is necessary for entering the symbolic order and becoming part of a society. Since music signifies this sacrificial ‘channelling of violence’ towards the body, Attali argues, it is also the realm in which this body can be released (1985: 25–6; see also Epstein 2014: xxx; Lefebvre 2004: xii). For an exploration of rhythm as it permeates different sides of our social and cultural existence, see Hoogstad and Stougaard Pederson 2013. 59. An example is formed by Dutch cross-over band Urban Dance Squad, who combined anti-racist social critique with a mix of musical styles from different traditions, ranging from hiphop and metal to bossa nova, salsa and soul. For an exploration of the political aspects of Urban Dance

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Squad and different cultural conceptions of their 1996 concert in Sarajevo, see Van Hengel 2019. 60. For a discussion of this rejection of authenticity in the realm of avant-­ garde film, see Balsam 2017: 187–189. 61. In Chap. 6, I will discuss Derrida’s notion of the ghost as one of these traces of otherness. 62. For a critique of this focus on ‘a multiplicity of differences and singularities’ and a defence of Adorno’s concern with negativity and resistance, see Holloway et al. 2009: 3. 63. This aspect of Adorno is illustrated by the difference between Benjamin’s approach to Baudelaire and Adorno’s approach to Schoenberg. As Huyssen observes, Benjamin is interested in the ways in which aspects of modern life seep into Baudelaire’s poetry, whereas Adorno mainly focuses on the artwork’s material itself (Huyssen 1986: 30). For an analysis of Adorno’s critique of Benjamin, see Hullot-Kentor 2006a: 174–6. 64. In Against Epistemology, Adorno explicitly rejects a phenomenological tradition that focuses primarily on the idea that we have a form of access to bodily experiences. This implies that Stone’s focus on embodiment lies more in line with the existential phenomenological tradition, especially Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of embodied perception and the schemata of our corporeal embedment in the world, as well as Gilles Deleuze’s ideas about affectivity and the ‘planes of immanence’ that we form part of as embodied beings, than of Adorno’s Hegelian focus on social mediation. For a comparison of Adorno’s negativity and Deleuze’s more positive embrace of difference, see Bonnet 2009. 65. Jochen Eisentraut observes how this embrace of modernist experimentation alienated the leftist ideology of Frankfurt School thinkers from the working class (2013: 65). 66. This phrase was inspired by the title of a collection of essays on Nietzsche’s contemporary relevance (Why Nietzsche Still, see Schrift 2000), by Middleton’s discussion of similar issues under the header ‘Why Adorno?’ (1990: 34), and the title of Holloway’s analysis of Adorno and revolution (2009). 67. This problem forms the main concern, for example, of Michael Walzer’s overview of different forms of social critique, ranging from Plato to Locke to communitarian approaches to critique (1987). For a comprehensive discussion of this problem in the context of Adorno’s philosophy, see Freyenhagen 2013.

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68. Jameson later used this phrase to characterise the era of postmodernity as follows: ‘The question about poetry after Auschwitz has been replaced with that of whether you could bear to read Adorno and Horkheimer next to the pool’ (Jameson 2007: 248). 69. The messianic aspects of Derrida’s thought, as manifested for example in his notion of ‘hauntology’ (which I will discuss in Chap. 6), can be interpreted as driven by the attempt to think about an ‘outside’ that shines through the immanence of cultural and linguistic structures. Still, however, this idea is driven by deconstruction and immanence, instead of by Adornian resistance and negativity. 70. This phrase was inspired by the collection of Adorno essays called Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. In Negative Dialectics, furthermore, Adorno refers to his analyses of history, freedom and metaphysics as ‘models’ that are driven by the attempt to understand these difficult and complex issues with help of theoretical structures or concepts, but at the same time providing a certain freedom to this material – metaphysical experiences, specific movements of history – that enables this material to speak for itself (Adorno 1973: 211–299). 71. This makes that these models are similar to the models used by composers, making Adorno’s texts almost into compositions in which words, rhythm, emphases and neologisms are structured like notes in a musical piece (see DeNora 2003: 11). In Late Marxism: Adorno or the Persistence of the Dialectic, Jameson indeed observes that Adorno’s use of the notion of the ‘model’ is taken from the writings and composition techniques of Schoenberg (2007: 61). The ‘model’, this implies, refers to that which, as we have seen in the previous chapter, Adorno characterises as the ‘universal technique’ that Schoenberg uses to constitute the windowless monads of his compositions, organising its materials in specific ways.

4 Détournement, Subjectivity and Popular Modernism: Generation Terrorists, Gold Against the Soul and The Holy Bible

Introduction In this chapter, I will analyse the three albums Manic Street Preachers released before the disappearance of Richey Edwards: Generation Terrorists (1992), Gold Against the Soul (1993) and The Holy Bible (1994). I will argue that each of these albums struggles in a different way with the attempt to constitute a distance between itself and its cultural and social context, driven by the standards discussed in the previous chapter: autonomy and reflection. Each of these albums, I will argue in other words, aims to constitute a specific critical model that is based on the necessity of complying, in some way or another, to these two standards. Employing the framework developed in the previous chapter, this means that I will argue that these releases are born in a paradox constituted by the following three aims: (1) the aim to criticise a context of which the critic herself forms part; (2) the aim to show that there is no ‘outside’ to this context, which means that the critic cannot refer to external values; and (3) the aim to develop critique that revolves around the claim that this context is completely false and does not provide values or foundations for the critic to cling to either. Even though, as argued in the © The Author(s) 2020 M. Peters, Popular Music, Critique and Manic Street Preachers, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43100-6_4

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previous chapter as well, Adorno rejects the ability of popular music to successfully combine these three aims, it is from his works that I have taken this framework. Furthermore, I will argue that it is precisely this framework that enables me to highlight what happens within the releases that I discuss in this chapter, since they are characterised by the continual attempt to reject the context in which they come about as false. I will develop arguments for my interpretations on two levels. I will briefly discuss, in general, how these models can be and are adopted by popular bands—but sometimes also by artists working within other art forms—to provide their art with a critical dimension. On a more detailed level, I will then show how these critical models are specifically developed on the three above-­mentioned Manic Street Preachers albums. This discussion as a whole will crystallise around the above-mentioned standards of autonomy and reflection, which, I will argue, these albums implicitly suggest themselves by constructing critical models that make these standards necessary to formulate critique. Based on these same standards, I will eventually conclude in this chapter that it is only on their third album that Manic Street Preachers create an artwork on which we find a critical model that is convincingly employed. My discussion of this third album— The Holy Bible—will also be the most extensive and detailed analysis presented in this chapter.

Postmodernity and Critique It is impossible to understand the early releases of Manic Street Preachers without referring to a specific, mainly critical understanding of the notion of ‘postmodernity’; an understanding that I want to briefly link to Adorno’s ideas as discussed in the previous chapter.1 Even though Adorno did not write about this notion, many of his observations on the culture industry and, more generally, his critical approach to modernity contain ideas that can be translated to a diagnosis of the postmodern.2 An example is formed by the following observation in Dialectic of Enlightenment: ‘The whole world is passed through the filter of the culture industry. The familiar experience of the moviegoer, who perceives the street outside as a continuation of the film he has just left, because the film seeks strictly

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to reproduce the world of everyday perception, has become the guideline of production’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 99). Furthermore, he observes the following in Minima Moralia: ‘The never-changing quality of machine-produced goods, the lattice of socialization that enmeshes and assimilates equally objects and the view of them, converts everything encountered into what always was, a fortuitous specimen of a species, the doppel-gänger of a model’ (1974: 235). In his influential analyses of postmodernity, Fredric Jameson indeed argues that, in this era, ‘Adorno’s prophetic diagnosis has been realised’ (1992: 17). In the following, I will mainly use Jameson’s Marxist and, again, critical approach to postmodernity, since it comes the closest to the critical message that is expressed by the Manic Street Preachers releases analysed in this chapter. Referring to what he calls ‘the dissolution of an autonomous sphere of culture’ (1992: 48), after all, Jameson famously argues that in postmodernity ‘everything in our social life – from economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself – can be said to have become “cultural”’ (1992: 48). This process, he observes furthermore, is driven by the ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’, which has resulted, in his view, in a culture in which advanced ‘collective productivity and technology’ are left ‘free to ‘express’ nothing but itself: a process whose end-product is at once no longer works of art but commodities’ (2007: 198). Jameson, therefore, argues that the postmodern is characterised by ‘a new kind of flatness or depthlessness’ (Jameson 1992: 9), similar to that which Lyotard describes as a ‘lack of reality’ (1984: 77) and to the experience of Adomo’s above-mentioned movie-goer. Put simplistically, this has resulted, in his view, in an inescapable, ‘depthless’ whole in which, driven by the aims of capitalism and consumerism, everything has been turned into a commodity and in which it is impossible to really do something new anymore. A similar idea can be found in Sadie Plant’s analysis of postmodernism and avant-gardism, in which she employs a metaphor that echoes Adorno’s references to Munchausen: ‘We find ourselves in a morass, certain that there is nothing to be done, overwhelmed by the failures of the past, and convinced of the culpability of our theoretical frameworks’ (1992: 185).

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Indeed, Jameson observes that these aspects of the postmodern directly result in the increasing difficulty to formulate critique within the realm of art. Using the notion of a ‘critical distance’, he puts this idea into words as follows, describing that which I, in the previous chapter, have discussed with help of the notions of reflection and autonomy: No theory of cultural politics current on the Left today has been able to do without one notion or another of a certain minimal aesthetic distance, of the possibility of the positioning of the cultural act outside the massive Being of capital, from which to assault this last. What the burden of our preceding demonstration suggests, however, is that distance in general (including “critical distance” in particular) has very precisely been abolished in the new space of postmodernism. (1992: 48)

This means, Jameson goes on, that ‘even overtly political interventions like those of The Clash are all somehow secretly disarmed and reabsorbed by a system of which they themselves might well be considered a part, since they can achieve no distance from it’ (1992: 49). He therefore ends his original 1984 article on postmodernism and consumption culture with the following question: ‘We have seen that there is a way in which postmodernism replicates or reproduces – reinforces – the logic of consumer capitalism; the more significant question is whether there is also a way in which it resists that logic. But that is a question we must leave open’ (1984: 95). The first critical model that I want to discuss in this chapter forms an attempt to answer this question by referring to the movement of Situationism. This model is born, I will argue, in the aim to resist Jameson’s ‘logic of consumer capitalism’ and to ‘question the entire culture we take for granted’ by confronting what Avgikos in a discussion of Group Material (mentioned in chap. 2) characterises as ‘the complexity of the postmodern world’ (1995: 111). Within Manic Street Preachers’ catalogue, this model gradually came into being in roughly the same period in which Jameson formulated his diagnosis of postmodernity: it was shaped, between 1988 and 1992, in fragmented ways on the band’s early singles and more robustly on their first album Generation Terrorists.

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In general, this first critical model revolves around an acceptance of the above-described ‘depthlessness’ of postmodern culture, which Huyssen famously characterises by referring to the idea of a corrosion of the modernist Great Divide between art and society. While flirting with the avant-­ gardist concern with, again in Huyssen’s words, ‘the cultural transformation of everyday life’ (1986: 7), this model gives this entwinement of art and everyday life an ironic and reflective twist that acknowledges the impossibility of escaping from the structures and contexts that the critic targets. In a description of Group Material, Avgikos points to a similar tactic: ‘In what can be referred to as “sleeping with the enemy,” Group Material acknowledged the power of the institution in society as a cultural producer, and thus made a tactical attempt to appropriate its authority with respect to the social issues the collective addressed’ (Avgikos 1995: 107). When Manic Street Preachers were signed to the label Columbia, on which they released Generation Terrorists in 1992, singer James Dean Bradfield framed their decision in a similar way: ‘We’ve never been the trade unionists of rock; we know that we could never reach as many people as we wanted unless it was on a major [label]. We were willing prostitutes’ (qtd. in Price 1999: 62). These ideas echo statements made by The Clash’s Joe Strummer, who had criticised Crass (after they accused The Clash of ‘selling out’ when signing to record label CBS) for being ‘a storm in a teacup’, and argued that in order to mean something ‘you’ve got to be heard’ (qtd. in Andersen 2013: 3).

Situationism To understand the critical model that the band adopted while ‘sleeping with the enemy’, I first want to briefly explore this model’s theoretical and historical roots, which are formed by the movement of Situationism and the writings of Marxist critic and philosopher Guy Debord.3 In the latter’s 1967 The Society of the Spectacle, a collection of statements embodying the spirit of the Parisian left of the late 1960s, Debord aims to revive the critical ideas of Marx while rejecting the totalitarian regimes in which they resulted in the twentieth century. Forming the basis of several of Jameson’s observations on postmodernism and its ‘culturalisation’ of

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‘everything’, one of Debord’s most important claims is the diagnosis that relations between self and world, self and nature and self and others have been replaced by images produced by consumption culture, creating an all-encompassing ‘spectacle’ in which the possibility of ‘real’ experiences or of constituting a unique individuality have been eradicated (see Plant 1992: 1).4 In Debord’s own words: ‘The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation’ (1995: 12). Debord struggles with the possibility of criticising this ‘spectacle’, which brings us to a version of the paradox discussed at the end of the previous chapter: if everything is ideology or ‘mere representation’, and if one is therefore always already part of a spectacle from which one cannot escape (the first two conditions), and if every possible experience is standardised and pre-fabricated by the same ideology of consumerism and therefore false (the third condition), then how can one criticise this same spectacle? An important implication of Debord’s analysis, after all, is that it is not possible anymore to discern ‘right’ from ‘wrong’ since both have become part of an equally false representation—the spectacle—in which all evaluative differences between critical values have corroded. Put within the framework shaped by Adorno’s terminology: according to Debord’s analysis, it is impossible to constitute an autonomous position, distanced from society to such an extent that this same society can be criticised from this same position: Jameson’s ‘critical distance’.5 It is here that Debord turns to art, about which he argues that if it loses its specific—and harmless—status as ‘art’ and becomes entwined with society, it may be able to create disrupting situations and bring about radically different experiences during which people, for brief moments, are thrown out of their comfort zone, out of the ‘spectacle’, and forced to reflect on themselves and their social context. It is during these brief moments, Debord argues in other words, that a critical distance may come about because one is shocked, moved a bit and therefore forced to perceive oneself and the world in a slightly different way. The Situationists named one of the procedures they adopted for creating these disruptive experiences ‘détournement’, which they defined as follows: ‘The integration of present or past artistic productions into a

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superior construction of a milieu. [... D]étournement within the old cultural spheres is a method of propaganda, a method which reveals the wearing out and loss of importance of those spheres’ (‘Definitions’ 1958). Critique formulated within the spectacle, they argued, can only take place by hijacking the cultural images that already exist in this spectacle, parodying them by taking them to the extreme, and turning them against themselves in art that they themselves defined as ‘propaganda’. Again, of course, this idea reflects key aspects of Jameson’s highly critical understanding of postmodernity. As Philip Auslander observes in a statement through which Green Gartside’s Wittgensteinian observations echo as well: ‘the postmodern political artist has no choice but to operate within the culture whose representations he or she must both recycle and critique’ (89).

Artistic Manifestations of Détournement The notion of détournement, of course, has been immensely influential and has resulted in the development of different tactics to criticise the standardising influence of consumption culture with help of the techniques of this same culture.6 Various anarchist movements and artists in favour of direct action and radical destabilisation, for example, adopted Debord’s ideas to shape their art: Situationist ideas return in the practice of ‘culture jamming’, celebrated by Naomi Klein in her influential critique of modern capitalism (2010: 282–3). Inspired by Debord, Klein observes that our daily lives, our forms of communication and the products that we surround ourselves with are permeated with structures that revolve around commercialism and advertising, resulting in what she calls a ‘new branded world’ (2010: 3). This has made it difficult (and here the above-described paradox returns again) to create critical and political art without that art being immediately pulled into this same consumption culture, its critical dimension turned into consumable images. In his overview of protest songs, Dorian Lynskey gives the following examples from the realm of popular music to substantiate Klein’s observations:

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The formerly outspoken rapper KRS-One updated “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” (which actively mocked advertising) to shill for Nike, changing the refrain to “The revolution is basketball.” Jello Biafra had to veto his ex-bandmates’ decision to lease “Holiday in Cambodia” to Levi’s. Across the musical spectrum, underground movements became declawed by success: punk rock was neutered into mainstream grunge; British indie music softened into Britpop; illegal raves were superseded by superclubs; Public Enemy’s guerrilla iconography gave way to Puff Daddy’s fashion line. Musical rebels suffered the same fate as Che Guevara, reduced to a face on a T-shirt, an nth-generation reproduction of radicalism. (2011: 1201–2)

By ironically using the tactics used by consumerist culture, commercials or forms of mass entertainment, Klein argues that culture jamming forms an opportunity to resist these developments by shocking people into critical thought, surprising them with unexpected messages or images. Klein, in other words, presents this practice, influenced by the Situationists, Dada and Surrealism, as a way of resisting Jameson’s ‘logic of consumer capitalism’, even though this same practice, she observes, is in constant danger of being usurped by the spectacle and of being marketed as ‘antimarketing’ (2010: 296–7). An early example is formed by the aforementioned Group Material, who bought up advertisement space in buses driving on New York’s Fifth Avenue and created posters that were designed to look like regular bus advertisements. Avgikos writes: Here was art that exploited the accessibility of the media to communicate ideas radically different from those that motivate advertising campaigns. Before the public could mount its accustomed resistance to contemporary art (It’s alienating! It speaks a language I don’t understand! It’s not for me!), it had been afforded an art experience and, more important, a perspective on social issues that otherwise might receive very little play in the course of daily life. (1995: 104–5)

Similar tactics return in the realm of popular music, frequently in those areas where this music overlaps with the avant-garde. Often, furthermore,

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these tactics are adopted to criticise the commodifying influence of copyright laws (see Cantsin’s 2010 A Neoist Research Project for an illustration of this idea). A famous example is formed by the 1991 E.P. U2 by Negativland, the American experimental group who coined the notion of ‘culture jamming’ as a more general version of the notion of ‘radio jamming’ (Lynskey 2011: 1867). The E.P. hijacked the name and image of Irish band U2, not only ridiculing the band’s artistic status—arguing that they had become a commodity like Coca-Cola—but also questioning copyright issues (Lynskey 2011: 1201–2). Other artists use these tactics to criticise the more general commodifying influence of capitalism on the music industry. American band Devo, for example, aimed to, in Simon Reynolds’ words, ‘mimic the structure of those who get the greatest rewards out of the upside-down business and become a corporation’ (Reynolds 2006: 72), dressing uniformly and presenting themselves, on stage and for press photos, like a corporate and standardised machine.7 Situationist tactics have also been used to question and undermine specifically political structures. An example is formed by the Slovenian band Laibach. Taking over the structures and representational images adopted by the totalitarian regime under which they lived, for example by organising concerts in the form of communist state rallies, the art group hijacked these structures and took them to such an extreme that they became, in Slavoj Žižek’s words, one ‘big question mark’ (qtd. in Benson 1996). The art produced by Laibach, in other words, is not focused on escaping from the manipulating influences of the political system they criticise, but on adopting the techniques of this same system and ‘perfecting’ them within the realm of art. In this way, they blur the lines between aesthetics and politics and force the audience to think and reflect without presenting this audience with values or concepts that explicitly criticise these same structures.8

Early Releases To show how the method of détournement returns on Manic Street Preachers’ first album, driven by a struggle with the critical paradox discussed in the previous chapter, I first want to briefly reflect on the

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prologue to Generation Terrorists: the band’s early releases. Before signing to Columbia, they released five singles and an E.P.: ‘Suicide Alley’ (1988, recorded in a disused miner’s institute, see Naish 2018: 14) and ‘UK Channel Boredom’ (1990, a split with English indie band The Laurens), both self-released and given away with fanzines; the New Art Riot E.P. (1990), released on the independent label Damaged Goods; ‘Motown Junk’ (1991) and ‘You Love Us’ (1991), released on the independent label Heavenly; and ‘Feminine is Beautiful’ (1991), released with the fanzine CAFF Corporation on the independent label CAFF 15 and containing early versions of the songs ‘New Art Riot’ and ‘Repeat’. Lyrically, musically and aesthetically, these early releases form explorations of the possibility of formulating critique in the realm of popular music; explorations that eventually crystallised in the Situationist model of Generation Terrorists. They all, furthermore, entwine ideas about avant-­ gardist resistance with an embrace of youth, mirroring bands like the Sex Pistols in a rejection of the generations that came before them. These ideas return perhaps most clearly in a passage from William Burroughs’ essay on ‘Red China’, quoted on the sleeve of the single of ‘Suicide Alley’: ‘Young people pose the only effective challenge to established authority. Established authority is well aware of that challenge. Established authority is very against young people everywhere, it is now virtually a crime to be young’ (see Hawkins and Wermer-Colan 2019: 184). What makes a discussion of these early releases fruitful in the context of this book, is that they constitute a tension between the above-discussed standards of autonomy and reflection. On the one hand, they are driven by the attempt to reach towards autonomy: the distance that, as described in the previous chapter, is necessary to criticise a context of which one is part oneself, is created on these releases by resisting everything that shapes this same context. This is done with help of aggressive and underproduced music that accompanies equally aggressive lyrics. By doing this, the band not only distanced themselves from the social context that they aimed to criticise, revolving around the British monarchy, conservative values and a neoliberal focus on the market. They also distanced themselves from the music context in which these releases came about: a context in which, as discussed in Chap. 2, Dream Pop and Madchester were gaining momentum.

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Calling this their ‘Pol Pot phase’, this means that the band deliberately rejected everything and everyone around them, even though they later often contradicted themselves by praising these same bands or by covering their songs.9 An example of the radicality of this phase is formed by Richey Edwards stating that they would always hate the shoegaze band Slowdive ‘more than Adolf Hitler’ (qtd. in NME Originals: Manic Street Preachers 2002: 29).10 These early releases, in other words, form the equivalent of Baron Munchausen kicking around in his swamp and resisting and rejecting everything he can find, moving violently to constitute some kind of friction and create a brief moment of autonomy that enables him to change his own point of view and that of the audience, embedded in the same swamp. The other notion is that of reflection: these early releases are also permeated, I want to argue, with the reflective diagnosis that this way of constituting a distance between artwork and context, and to provide this artwork with an autonomous position, has been tried countless times before, mainly by bands forming part of the British punk movement. Furthermore, they are permeated with the observation that these past attempts have eventually all been usurped and undermined by the flattening influence of postmodernity, as Jameson observes about The Clash in the passage cited earlier. The notion of reflection, for example, returns in the observation that these six early releases borrow heavily from punk bands like The Clash, the Sex Pistols and early The Skids, attacking the UK’s monarchy and consumerism in songs consisting of a few chords, played aggressively on distorted guitars and accompanied by lyrics that are often more shouted than sung. This means that the music on these early releases is rather recognisable and conventional, not only because they copy the music of early punk bands, but also, as discussed in Chap. 2, because these early punk bands themselves made music in line of already existing rock ‘n’ roll traditions. Like the lyrics of these early punk bands, furthermore, the lyrics on early Manic Street Preachers releases directly and explicitly target political structures in a rather simplistic manner. The deliberate shock value of the following lines in ‘We Her Majesty’s Prisoners’, a B-side on ‘Motown Junk’, is exemplary: ‘England’s glory lives on in world-wide genocide/So

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celebrate Buchenwald as Her Majesty’s heir’. During early shows, the band attempted to create an antagonistic relationship with their audiences as well, trying to shock them with verbal abuse, simulating homoerotic sex and sometimes provoking physical fights (Shutkever 21).

Pastiches of Punk Before zooming in more on the lyrics of this early period, I want to briefly reflect on several other aspects of the band’s early releases to emphasise their reflective elements. These elements are mainly constituted with help of the method of intertextuality, which I discussed in Chap. 2 with the help of Derrida. Whereas Derrida (as well as Julia Kristeva) defended this method as a fruitful technique that could be used to create new forms of meaning or destabilise and deconstruct already existing ideas, however, a more pessimistic interpretation is inspired by Jameson’s influential notion of the postmodern artwork as a pastiche. In an era in which art has given up its autonomous position (or has stopped trying to gain one), in which the notion of historical progress has lost its relevance, and in which normative judgements and reflections have been hollowed out, Jameson observes, art can only present a repetition of already existing styles and products, echoing Marx’s statement that ‘all great, world-historical facts and personages occur … twice… the first time as tragedy, the second as farce’ (Marx 1978c: 594). Jameson writes: ‘with the collapse of the high-­ modernist ideology of style … the producers of culture have nowhere to turn but to the past: the imitation of dead styles, speech through all the masks and voices stored up in the imaginary museum of a now global culture’ (Jameson 1992: 17–18). This implies, again, that the only thing the artist can do is reshuffle already existing pieces and embed the artwork in a constellation that, at most, may critically reflect the impossibility of creating something truly new. As Jameson, again, phrases this idea in his analysis of film and surrealism: ‘We are left with that pure and random play of signifiers that we call postmodernism, which no longer produces monumental works of the modernist type but ceaselessly reshuffles the fragments of preexistent

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texts, the building blocks of older cultural and social production, in some new and heightened bricolage…’ (1992: 96). Jameson’s observations on this ‘bricolage’ can be used to characterise those aspects of the early releases by Manic Street Preachers that constitute their reflective dimension. Indeed, what we see the band do in this early stage of their existence is combining as many references as possible—in lyrics, on sleeves, in interviews—to a wide spectrum of movements, authors, books, paintings, musicians and politicians. All of these references are presented as examples of subversive attempts to criticise existing society or alienate oneself from the social order: punk, radical feminism, Marxism, Situationism, existentialism, surrealism, futurism, popism, Dada, occultism, absurdism, anti-Americanism, Beat poetry, anti-psychiatry (embodied, e.g., by references to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), and more. Bricolages return, for example, on the collages used for the sleeve covers that I described in Chap. 2. The cover of their 1991 single ‘You Love Us’ forms another example: it presents a collage of pictures taken from both ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, presenting the band’s inspirations as a postmodern collection of fragmented ideas and creations that, again, all revolve around alienation, subversion and resistance. It shows pictures of Robert Johnson, Karl Marx, Bob Marley, Marilyn Monroe, Aleister Crowley, Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver, Beatrice Dalle in Beineix’ 1986 film Betty Blue (the band was briefly named ‘Betty Blue’ in the beginning of their career), The Clash and more. In the inside sleeve of ‘You Love Us’, furthermore, we find several pictures of Marilyn Monroe, with the phrase ‘OVERDO$E’ presented in capital letters that copy the cut-out technique employed on the cover of the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks. During this era, the band released several press photos on which they posed in front of self-made collages of icons and figures as well, again taken from both high and low culture. The video-clip of the Heavenly version of ‘You Love Us’ (on Forever Delayed [DVD]), furthermore, presents a similar assemblage by showing pictures of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. Another example is formed by the 1990 New Art Riot E.P. The E.P.’s title song refers to the avant-garde emphasis on creating a completely new form of art that would make previous traditions obsolete. On the E.P.’s

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sleeve, however, we find the following quote by Andy Warhol, which replaces the radical political aims of the historical avant-gardes with a postmodern and ironic celebration of the realities of capitalism: You can be watching T.V. 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 Cokes are the same and all Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it. (see Horwitz 2001: 2008)

Printing this quote on a release entitled New Art Riot E.P., contrasts the ‘newness’ of this riot with the emptiness of postmodern culture, embracing the band’s own status as a commodity within popular consumption culture, linking themselves to the generation that Jean-Luc Godard described in 1966 as the ‘Children of Marx and Coca-Cola’ (Godard 2011). What gives the use of Andy Warhol’s quote a reflective dimension, however, is that Warhol’s ironic embrace of capitalist realism was original, provocative and – seemingly – driven by reflections on the death of originality (at least in the beginning of Warhol’s popism). Printing this quote on a 1990 release therefore adds an even more ironic layer to Warhol’s ideas. Put differently, the quote foregrounds the difficulty of creating something radically new and revolutionary—the aim of the avant-­ gardes—in an age in which, the group suggest themselves, everything has already been done and, as other artists have already concluded decades earlier, the notions of ‘new’ and ‘revolutionary’ have turned into hollowed out and commodified slogans. Even these observations on the postmodern, in other words, have turned into cultural clichés. On the New Art Riot E.P., the Warhol quote is followed by a political statement, printed in capital letters: ‘NATIONALISM IS A CREATED PRODUCT’. This provides the capitalist realism of the popist artist with a political dimension that is emphasised by the E.P.’s cover: a European flag. Inside the single’s sleeve, we find six exactly similar images of the flag: an artwork, the E.P.’s sleeve tells us, entitled Collapsed European Stars. On the one hand, this artwork might be understood as a reflection on the flag as a Warholian commodity that manipulates people’s needs

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and feelings by providing a Lacanian image on which hopes or fears can be projected. On the other hand, the attempt to embrace a form of ‘Europeanness’ might, in spite of the ‘collapsed’ nature of the European stars, be understood as a tactic to undermine a nationalist focus on the sovereignty of particular countries and to proclaim that the ‘New Art Riot’ should be international in nature, as most of the historical avant-­ gardes were as well.11 Again, the band’s emphasis on repetition and unoriginality also returns in the music of these early releases, as briefly mentioned earlier, and the band themselves present this unoriginality as a deliberate characteristic of their art. On the 1997 CD-single re-release of the New Art Riot E.P., for example, quotes taken from reviews of the single are printed. All of these quotes emphasise the unoriginal nature of the band: a review in Melody Maker, for example, refers to David Bowie (or Julien Temple’s film) by calling the single ‘“Absolute Beginners” revisited’, characterising the song’s music as ‘Clash ‘78 or early Kitchenware’; an NME review refers to ‘a late ‘70s up-against-it stance’ and compares the music to English punk band Sham 69; and a Sounds review calls the song’s main riff a ‘rip-off’ and states: ‘New Art Riot either heralds a new era in punk-pop or sets indie evolution back five years’. The style adopted on these early releases, re-releases of these same releases explicitly tell the listener, is not original: it forms an almost exact copy of the tropes of late 70’s punk rock, reminiscent of early The Clash, Sham 69 and the independent British label Kitchenware. Furthermore, the Melody Maker review suggests, it forms a mere repetition of the transformations that took place in British musical youth cultures in the late 1950’s, already re-presented in Temple’s 1986 film Absolute Beginners (based on Colin MacInnes’ book of the same name).

‘Motown Junk’ To argue that and how song lyrics already started playing an important role on these early releases, I want to focus on the song ‘Motown Junk’ before turning to their debut album Generation Terrorists. This song was released as a stand-alone single in 1991. Again, it embodies the

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entwinement of an attempt to constitute distance and autonomy on the one hand, as well as a reflective emphasis on the death of originality and the impossibility of creating a distance in the postmodern era on the other. This latter aspect returns again in the observation that the song repeats a recognisable punk-rock style that mainly copies the sound of the first The Clash album: it sounds harsh, its lyrics are sung aggressively, the musical structure consists of a few chords but still presents a catchy melody, it has a fast pace and its musical space is largely filled with a distorted guitar sound. Furthermore, the song emphasises the themes of repetition and unoriginality by using samples. It opens with a sample repeating the phrase ‘Revolution’, taken from the line ‘The revolution will not be televised’ as shouted by Professor Griff on Public Enemy’s ‘Countdown to Armageddon’ (on their 1988 album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back). The song ends with the repetition of a squeaky guitar sample, taken from Scottish punk band The Skids’ song ‘Charles’ (on Scared to Dance). The cover of the single of ‘Motown Junk’ depicts a watch found in Hiroshima, melted at the moment of the bomb’s detonation. This could be interpreted as representing an avant-gardist concern with aggression, destruction and the declaration of a Year Zero after civilisation and technological process culminated in the use of the atom bomb. It could also be understood as a representation of the popular music that the band criticise on the single, equating the influence of consumption culture with the destruction caused by the atom bomb, using the same hyperbole that made Adorno equate the speeches of Goebbels with the manipulative tactics of consumption culture (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 132). This brings me to the lyrics of ‘Motown Junk’: these lyrics, I want to argue, on the one hand repeat the punk-inspired attempt to shock and disturb people and form part of the band’s embrace of the punk tradition as a pastiche. On the other hand, these lyrics also formulate explicit forms of critique, communicating a critical message that is meant to encourage the listener to think and reflect. This message is mainly formed with help of an iconoclastic rejection of the, in the band’s view, affirmative and uncritical nature of popular music. The musical tradition that ‘Motown Junk’ criticises is embodied by The Beatles—we hear Bradfield singing

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that he ‘laughed when Lennon got shot’—and by the Motown Corporation.12 In an influential article on what he characterises as the commodification of soul, in which the phrase ‘Corporate America’ refers to processes similar to those captured by Adorno’s notion of the ‘culture industry’, Mark Anthony Neal observes about this record company, which was founded in Detroit in 1959 by Berry Gordy Jr.: ‘Gordy’s […] success in marketing black popular music to largely white audiences serves as the future blueprint for Corporate America’s later annexation of the black popular music industry … Subsequently, black music was no longer solely mediated by the communal masses within segregated black locales, but by Corporate America’s own mercurial desires for the marketplace’ (1997: 117). In an analysis of Adorno’s critique of popular music, Nathan Eisentraut writes as well that ‘the similarities between the working practices of the Detroit motor industry and the nearby Tamala Motown record company in the 1960s and 1970s are striking’ (2013: 126). In the lyrics of ‘Motown Junk’, Manic Street Preachers explicitly attack these similarities by approaching Motown music as a form of standardisation and commodification, comparing the consumers of Motown songs, created like consumption products (‘junk’ or ‘trash’) on an assembly line, with drug addicts (the other meaning of the word ‘junk’). The song’s lyrics indeed open with the claim: ‘Never ever wanted to be with you/The only thing you gave me was the boredom I suffocated in’. These lines could be read as a reversal of love songs, the ‘you’ representing another person. But the ‘you’ might also be the record industry, which constitutes a toxic relationship, these lyrics state, with the listener and does nothing to make his bored life in ‘piss towns’, mentioned in the song as well, more interesting. Of specific importance are the following four lines: Motown junk a lifetime of slavery Songs of love echo underclass betrayal Stops your heart beating for one to ten seconds Stops your brain thinking for one to ten seconds.

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In combination with the Hiroshima clock on the single’s cover, Manic Street Preachers imply that the products created on Motown’s assembly lines make one into a ‘slave’ of consumption culture, blocking one’s capacities to think critically but also one’s capacity to feel: they ‘stop your heart beating’ and ‘stop your brain thinking’. Furthermore, they suggest that these songs play an escapist and therefore affirmative role in a Thatcherist society, built around competition and inequality, ‘betraying’ the ‘underclass’. If we return to Stone’s discussion of Kristeva’s distinction between semiotic and symbolic elements in popular music, I believe that already at this point in the band’s career, we see that Manic Street Preachers are trying to shape their critical voice not only by exploring the semiotic elements of language, but also by foregrounding the symbolic elements of their lyrics. Even though the group, on these early releases, mainly repeat movements from the past and re-represent ideas about the death of originality by creating postmodern pastiches of punk rock (and the use of samples from hiphop) that are almost copies of what has already been done before, their focus on lyrical content emphasises the observation that the symbolic elements of lyrics do matter. The critical meaning of ‘Motown Junk’, after all, cannot be understood without reading the song’s lyrics and understanding their symbolic meaning—an explicit and iconoclastic attack on important names in the history of popular music that ends with Bradfield shouting: ‘We destroy rock ‘n’ roll!’. Of course, the song’s distorted guitar sound, its fast pace, the use of samples, the aggressive sound of the way Bradfield sings, the inclusion of statements that are clearly meant to provoke and shock listeners, as well as the album’s sleeve, contribute to this meaning (on punk and shock as artistic intent, see Eisentraut 2013: 100–102). However, these lyrics also communicate ideas to the audience and make this audience reflect on what it means to refer to (a) ‘Motown junk’ and to link this observation on popular music to the statement that the lyrical ‘I’ has experienced ‘twenty one years of living’ and that still ‘nothing means anything to me’. Before turning to an analysis of Generation Terrorists, I want to summarise this idea by looking at the two lines in the lyrics of ‘Sorrow 16’, released as a B-side on ‘Motown Junk’ and later on the 1992 single ‘Slash ‘N’ Burn’: ‘Cut your hair in front of business men / […] / Destroy words

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and ignore their truth’. The first line describes the creation of disrupting situations, forming an early flirtation with Situationism. The second line continues this idea, but also introduces a reflective layer that foregrounds the symbolic elements of these lyrics: whereas avant-gardist movements like the Lettrists, Dada and the Situationists aimed to actually ‘destroy words’ and ‘ignore their truth’ by embracing absurdist forms of wordplay and emphasising the semiotic elements of words—as discussed in Chap. 1, this aim returns in Kurt Cobain’s songwriting as well (Astor, Negus 2014: 203–5)—Manic Street Preachers paradoxically state that they aim to destroy words with help of words on which, this implies, we should focus; words communicating a truth that we should not and cannot ignore. Since most other aspects of these early releases emphasise the death of originality in the postmodern age—sleeve art, musical style, semiotic elements following from several tropes of punk rock—these symbolic elements constitute a schism within these songs by countering these aspects. They resist them by expressing the idea that, in contrast with these unoriginal and rather superficial elements that are presented as part of the spectacle of consumption culture—a postmodern spectacle that, the band suggest in their early artwork, has usurped both Marx and The Clash, both Marilyn Monroe and Warhol—the symbolic elements of words might still be able to pierce through this spectacle, trying to break free and alienate themselves from that which, as discussed in Chaps. 1 and 3, Alison Stone describes as the semiotic unity of popular music songs. It is this idea, I want to argue in the following, that is shaped into a critical model on Generation Terrorists with help of the Situationist technique of détournement.

Glamrock as a Trojan Horse13 Generation Terrorists, from which six singles were released, is permeated with references to avant-garde movements like the Futurists, the Situationists, and to an ironic Warholian embrace of capitalist realism. The album’s title, for example, not only refers to the entwinement of destruction and rock ‘n’ roll embodied by the name of Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction, it can also be understood as a nod to the radical

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nature of the historical avant-gardes. In his reflections on his role in the avant-gardist movement of surrealism, Luis Buñuel indeed describes this movement as aiming to ‘explode the social order, to transform life itself ’ (1985: 107), links it to Herbert Marcuse’s critical analysis of consumer society (1985: 124), and continues: The symbolic significance of terrorism has a certain attraction for me: the idea of destroying the whole social order, the entire human species. On the other hand, I despise those people who use terrorism as a political weapon in the service of some cause or other… […] No, the terrorists I admire are those like the Bande à Bonnot […] … those, in other words, who tried to blow up a world (and themselves along with it) that seemed to them unworthy of survival. (1985: 126)

Albert Moravia observes as well that ‘Terrorism in art is called the avant-­ garde’ (qtd. in Parfrey 1987: 115). The title also echoes a statement made by the Sex Pistols’ manager Malcolm McLaren in Julien Temple’s 1980 film The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle. Describing his ideas behind ‘creating’ the Sex Pistols (at least, that is what McLaren wants the audience to believe), he advises the viewer: ‘Terrorise, threaten and insult your own useless generation’ (Temple 2000). Following McLaren’s advice on cynically exploiting the music industry, and inspired by Russian futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky’s attempt to make art that gives ‘a slap in the face of public taste’ (qtd. in Jangfeldt 2014: 51), in many early interviews Manic Street Preachers expressed the idea that they would make one double album that would be as successful as Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction, sell 16 million copies, play Wembley Arena and then split up (partly inspired by bIG⋆fLAME’s planned dissolution). In alternative versions of this story, they would set themselves on fire on Top of the Pops (see Price 1999: 36; Boswell 2012: 124).14 The album, in other words, was meant to detonate a Situationist bomb in the realm of popular culture. To understand how the method of détournement is employed on the album, we first have to discuss its music. Instead of the raw punk sound that characterises their earlier releases and makes them into pastiches of early The Clash songs, and instead of the psychedelic Dream Pop and

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Madchester scenes that, as briefly discussed in Chap. 2, were popular at the time of Generation Terrorists’ release, Manic Street Preachers adopted a musical style that can best be characterised as a pastiche (again) of L.A. glamrock and hard rock, inspired by bands like Guns N’ Roses and Hanoi Rocks.15 Seventeen of the album’s eighteen songs16 have a slick sound and consist of catchy riffs that are accompanied by long guitar solos inspired by the musical structures of Guns N’ Roses Appetite for Destruction.17 Its standardised and manufactured sound is emphasised by the use of a drum machine on almost all of the songs; a decision, however, not uncommon in this time. For the American release of the album, which contains only 14 tracks and has a ‘Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics’ sticker on its cover, four tracks were remixed and feature live drumming. The band combined this musical style with the constitution of a musical persona. In his analysis of popular music and performativity, Auslander describes how such a persona ‘is usually based on existing models and conventions’ (2004: 15) and observes: ‘The performer may use all of the available means to define this persona, including movement, dance, costume, make-up, and facial expression’ (2004: 15). Auslander’s observations make it possible to argue that, on Generation Terrorists, Manic Street Preachers act out the persona of the ‘glamrocker’. During interviews, on pictures (including those included in the booklet of Generation Terrorists) and on stage, they wore sunglasses, make-up, dyed hair puffed up with hairspray, jewellery, leather jackets, tight white jeans, dresses, blouses and other clothes that are associated with femininity and, worn by artists in the realm of glamrock, a form of decadence. Having signed to a major label, the band turned their music and themselves into pastiches; into exaggerated versions of the spectacle of consumerism. As Edwards later summarised their approach: ‘The whole point was to be hypocritical, to be false’ (qtd. in Shutkever 1996: 30). Nicky Wire observed, in turn: ‘If we looked like we felt, then we would have to come on stage like Joy Division. We made a massive effort to be a glamorous band, because inside we know we’re not particularly glamorous…’ (qtd. in Price 1999: 96). This brings me to the method of détournement. L.A. hard rock and glamrock bands accompanied their music and image with lyrics mainly

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revolving around sexuality, alcohol, drugs and decadence.18 Generation Terrorists’ lyrics, in contrast, voice a highly critical political message that, the idea goes, is slipped into the listener’s consciousness by using the slick and accessible glamrock style as a Trojan Horse. Like the bus advertisements created by Group Material, in other words, Generation Terrorists spreads a critical message that, this model suggests, people consume before realising that they are consuming a critical and political message. Whereas, as discussed in Chap. 2, the postpunk generation had aimed to distance themselves from that which they wanted to criticise by adopting radical explorations with form, Manic Street Preachers instead presented a recognisable musical form, based on conventional rock ‘n’ roll structures that had a more democratic appeal, and combined this form with radical lyrics (see also Price 1999: 44–5).19 This tactic is symbolised by the band’s initial idea to give Generation Terrorists a sandpaper sleeve so that the record itself and the other records in one’s collection would slowly erode before one would realise this (Price 1999: 68). This was inspired by the sandpaper covers of Guy Debord and Asger Jorn’s 1959 book Mémoires and of postpunk band The Durutti Column’s 1980 release The Return of the Durutti Column, named after a Situationist comic revolving around the life of Buenaventura Durutti, an anarcho-syndicalist militant who fought in the Spanish Civil War (see Reynolds 2006: 388). The eventual cover of Generation Terrorists exemplifies this tactic as well: it displays a picture of Richey Edwards’ torso wearing a crucifix, his original tattoo—a rose with the phrase ‘Useless Generation’ underneath—changed into a rose accompanied by the statement ‘Generation Terrorists’.20 On the surface, the crucifix reminds of the crucifixes frequently worn as adornments by, for example, Guns N’ Roses members, entwining American rock decadence with religious kitsch. On a more critical level, however, the crucifix does have a function. As Edwards explained in a manner typical for the band’s early ‘Pol Pot’ iconoclasm: ‘[Christ] is the ultimate icon, isn’t he? The ultimate useless, fake symbol of all time, the biggest waste of space that’s ever been. The more you dehumanise Jesus Christ the better. The more he becomes like a Campbell’s soup tray, the better. The more he gets turned into a Coca-Cola tin, the more happy I’ll be’ (qtd. in Marcus 2015). Another example is formed by the video-clip of the 1992 version of ‘You Love Us’

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(on Forever Delayed [DVD]): inspired by New  York Dolls, we see the band playing in a studio, wearing the above-mentioned glamrock clothes, kissing pictures of themselves and flirting with homoerotic imagery. At the same time, images of Mao, Lenin and Malcolm X briefly flash in the background, and the clip ends with a destroyed stage showing the phrase ‘FAKE generation’. Before developing an analysis of the album’s lyrics, it is again important to note that the band’s embrace of decadent L.A. glamrock was not just driven by the attempt to secretly slip a critical message into the spectacle of popular music and to criticise and terrorise their, in the band’s view, ‘fake’ and unpolitical generation. This genre was not an arbitrary Trojan horse, in other words, randomly chosen to become part of the spectacle of rock. Instead, the genre was embraced for three reasons. The first one is its above-mentioned contrast with the Dream Pop and Madchester sounds described in the previous chapter, a contrast exploited to, again, terrorise the band’s own generation by referring to a rock ‘n’ roll tradition powerfully revitalised by bands like Guns N’ Roses. The second reason is that, the band suggest, Hollywood glamrock reflects the nihilism and decadence of the Los Angeles 1980s music scene, emphasising their critical idea that popular culture had hollowed itself out and had become, as the title of Penelope Spheeris’ infamous documentary about this music scene ironically suggests, The Decline of Western Civilization (1988). Third, the genre plays with representations of masculinity and femininity. As Auslander, in his aforementioned chapter, reflects on David Bowie’s glamrock era: ‘The gender ambiguities of glam rockers’ personae […] challenged the gender norms of American and European societies in the early 1970s. The performance of glam was a safe cultural space in which to experiment with versions of masculinity that clearly flouted those norms’ (Auslander 2004: 10).21 By repeating these ideas in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and infusing them with tropes of Hollywood glam, the band turned themselves into a ‘West Coast androgynous mess’ (Cummins 2014: 173). In this way, they aimed to constitute a distance between themselves and, as observed in the BBC documentary From There to Here, the ‘baggy’ aesthetic of the ‘Madchester’ scene, as well as ‘the male values of the dying mining culture around them’ (see also Connolly 1998; Edwards 2007: 151). Compared to the modernist experiments of postpunk, in other words, Generation Terrorists mainly presents

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a return to glamorous and more democratic and conventional music with mass appeal. Compared to the musical and social context of its release, however, it also played a provocative and distinctive role.

The Lyrics of Generation Terrorists Simon Price observes in the 20th Anniversary Edition of Generation Terrorists that the album was meant to detonate an ‘explosion of ideas’, mainly detonated in and through the album’s lyrics. This implies that the above-described ‘falseness’ of the band’s image and persona is eventually constituted to emphasise the ‘realness’ of their lyrics. As Price observes about the form of these lyrics: ‘The words were rarely written with singing in mind. As Stuart Maconie of Select put it: ‘You got the impression that often they hadn’t even been tried out in the mouth” (1999: 78). These lyrics are printed in the album’s booklet, accompanied by eighteen quotes from authors as diverse as E.E. Cummings, Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Rimbaud, George Orwell, Chief Ten Bears, Chuck D, Henrik Ibsen and Albert Camus. One of these quotes is taken from an article called ‘Basic Program of the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism’, published by Attila Kotányi & Raoul Vaneigem in the sixth edition of the Internationale Situationniste: ‘Modern capitalism, organising the reduction of all social life to a spectacle, cannot offer any other spectacle than that of our own alienation’ (Kotányi and Vaneigem 1961). Another quote, which also opens the above-mentioned video-clip of ‘You Love Us’ (on Forever Delayed [DVD]), is taken from the Manifesto of the Futurist Painters: ‘Regard all art critics as useless and dangerous’ (see Boccioni 2011: 12). The scope of this chapter does not allow me to analyse all of these lyrics in detail, but in the following I want to briefly summarise their content by describing five themes that they address. This makes it possible to show how these lyrics are interlinked: instead of being specifically tied to separate songs, I want to argue that they together constitute the critical model embodied by the album. The first and most obvious of the five themes discussed in these lyrics is an attack on different aspects of capitalism, often more specifically targeting American political and consumerist culture. An example is formed by the song ‘Born to End’, which

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fatalistically claims that Europe is ‘freed by McDonald’s and Levi’s’ and describes the capitalist spectacle as shaped by ‘Images that linger like repression’.22 Price observes, not unproblematically, that these lyrics form ‘a comment on the way citizens of former communist countries had been seduced by the cheap glamour of capitalism, and had emancipated themselves from state slavery only to leap willingly into slavery to multi-­ national corporations’ (1999: 76).23 The lyrics reflect on the emptiness of a life in consumption culture by eventually expressing the longing for an H-bomb, described as ‘the only thing that will bring our feelings to life’. In ‘Spectators of Suicide’, furthermore, we find a Situationist attack on democracy as a political system—characterised as an ‘empty lie’—that is presented as entwined with consumption culture and criticised for undermining the possibility of any real political influence. The song contains the slogan ‘The only free choice is refusal to pay’, taken from a Situationist comic (see Zurbrugg 1990: 136).24 The song ‘Slash ‘N’ Burn’, in turn, refers to the Warhol-quote cited above with a line stating that ‘Madonna drinks Coke and so you can too’. The song’s lyrics suggest that the only thing that can be done in a spectacle in which ‘nothing is very real’ is ‘Kill to live’ and proclaim the ‘Third world to the first’, using the agricultural technique of ‘slash and burn’ to radically destroy and renew the social status quo. The lyrics of ‘Nat West-Barclays-Midlands-Lloyds’, in turn, specifically target the four banks mentioned in the song’s title. They mainly criticise the banks’ credit system for undermining the autonomy of the poor, comparing the logo of the Barclays bank to the ‘iron eagle’ of the Nazis and referring to the logo of Lloyds with the phrase ‘black horse apocalypse’. The second theme is formed by the British monarchy, which is mainly attacked in the song ‘Repeat (UK)’. The song opens with another sample from Public Enemy’s ‘Countdown to Armageddon’ (on their 1988 album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back): Professor Griff shouting ‘London England, consider yourself… warned!’ The song’s lyrics reject the British monarchy as a ‘Royal Khmer Rouge’ and gain a militaristic character with phrases like ‘Repeat after me: fuck queen and country/ Repeat after me: Useless generation’.25 The third theme found on the album is religion: accompanied by a quote from Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human (I will return to this issue

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in the next chapter), the song ‘Crucifix Kiss’ expresses a Nietzschean and Camusian critique on the hostility of Christianity towards life. This critique targets Christian rejections of human existence and well-being in lines like ‘Make poverty your perfect home’ and ‘Why walk when you can crawl’. In these lines, Guy Debord’s idea that consumerism has taken over the role of religion returns as well, entwining a critique of consumerism with a critique of religious submission to imagery and tradition (see Debord 1995: 99–107, Plant 1992: 25). A fourth theme is sexism, mainly embodied by the song ‘Little Baby Nothing’, which contains lyrics written from two perspectives: a male perspective and the perspective of a woman exploited by men (Price 1999: 73). Lyrics expressing the latter perspective are sung by Traci Lords, a former porn star who the band understood as an embodiment of their critical ideas: Lords started acting in adult movies at the age of 16 and later appeared in several mainstream Hollywood films as well.26 In the inner sleeve of the song’s single, a feminist concern with exploitation returns: we see the famous picture of 15 year old Erika Szeles, holding a gun during the Hungarian revolution of 1956, with a speech bubble saying ‘This is the only answer to rape’. Other versions of the single show an image that became famous during the feminist movements of the 1970s: a female body covered with lines and words like ‘rump’ and ‘loin’, mirroring butcher’s guides to the different ‘cuts’ of pigs or cows. The song’s lyrics were inspired by American writer Tennessee Williams’ critical views on masculinity and machismo as well: not only do they refer to Williams’ poem ‘Lament for the Moths’ with the line ‘Assassinated beauty/Moths broken up, quenched at last’ (see Williams 2000: 17), but an early version of the song opened with an audiofragment taken from the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire. Tennessee Williams and A Streetcar Named Desire also return in Generation Terrorists’ song ‘Tennessee’, which refers to one of the play and film’s most famous lines with the statement ‘Always believe the comfort of strangers’ (see Kazan 1951). The phrase ‘Tennessee’ (originally a Cherokee name for the area) functions as well as a reference to the American state, criticising the genocide of Native Americans with the line ‘The white man is disease’, and a quote from Chief Ten Bears that accompanies the song in the sleeve booklet of Generation Terrorists.

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The last and fifth theme found on the album is an existentialist expression of angst; of suffering from meaninglessness in a culture dominated by consumerism. This theme is present in the lyrics of most songs on Generation Terrorists: in his book on the band, British journalist Mick Middles characterises alienation as ‘the eternal Manic theme’ (Middles 1999: 85). Indeed, the original title of Generation Terrorists was ‘Culture, Alienation, Boredom and Despair’ (a line from the lyrics of ‘Little Baby Nothing’). This feeling is often linked on the album to the above-­ mentioned embrace of L.A. glamrock: descriptions of the emptiness of life in postmodernity form the basis of the idea that the only thing one can do is become one with this nihilistic musical genre and disappear into a devotion to celebrities; an idea permeating the songs ‘Condemned to Rock ‘N’ Roll’, ‘Stay Beautiful’ and ‘You Love Us’. Whereas the first song expresses a worldview dominated by depression and emptiness, the second song fatalistically embraces a consumerist emphasis on beauty. The third song links these ideas to the band’s critical mission, revolving around the above-described attempt to conquer the spectacle of consumerism, blow it up from the inside, and then split up. It opens with a statement proclaiming the band’s critical authenticity, constituting a reference to Edwards carving ‘4 REAL’ into his arm: ‘We are not your sinners / Our voices are for real’. The lyrics, furthermore, instruct the listener to love the band ‘like a Holocaust’ and emphasise their critical shock tactics by stating that they have the ‘same PR-problem’ as electroshock therapy. Again, the song also echoes the historical avant-gardes by explicitly attacking the sanctity of the museum and ‘high art’, embodied by the line ‘Throw some acid in the Mona Lisa’s face’.27

The Failure of the First Critical Model This brief overview of several of the themes discussed in the lyrics on Generation Terrorists shows the wide range of issues that Manic Street Preachers group together under the umbrella of an ‘entire culture that we take for granted’; an entire culture that they aim to question by making a slick sounding and decadent rock record that, on a symbolic level, explicitly addresses these issues in its lyrics. Again, this means that the critical

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model employed on the album constitutes meaning on different levels: the band’s music, embodied postures, persona and clothes present us with an embrace of decadence, superficiality and rock ‘n’ roll tropes that repeat what had already been done before. In their lyrics, however, the band present a critical worldview that conflicts with this embrace of decadence and aims to resist it by aggressively attacking capitalism and consumerism, religion, sexism and experiences of alienation. The other aspects of the album slip this message into the mainstream not only by using shock tactics but also by adopting the democratic music of rock ‘n’ roll, using the Situationist technique of détournement. These different ‘levels’, furthermore, battle with each other on the album, on the one hand expressing the idea that nothing can be done anymore and we are ‘condemned to rock ‘n roll’, on the other hand contrasting this idea with lyrics that explicitly force the listener to think, reflect and resist the seemingly all-­ encompassing spectacle. In light of the notions on which the idea of the critical model is based, however, I want to argue that this critical model is not constituted successfully on Generation Terrorists, since the lyrics on the album are not complex enough. This is the case, since the band adopt the technique of détournement not only in their image and music, but also in these same lyrics. Even though these lyrics clearly aim to critically address specific issues on a symbolic level, they are shaped in the form of slogans, characteristic of commercials and consumerist culture. As Richey Edwards phrased this idea in an interview, adopting a sloganeering style as well: ‘Literature is dead in the twentieth century. It has been made bankrupt, and rock ‘n’ roll is the only culture the masses have got left. Books have gone, graffiti is all we’ve got left’ (qtd. in Price 1999: 43). He translated this observation as follows into the technique used for the lyrics of Generation Terrorists: ‘We took the abortion language of the Sun and turned it to our own means’ (qtd. in Clarke 1997: 59). Price indeed observes that the album’s lyrics are not ‘written in the English language as we know it, but in a peculiar Preachers patois in which the words ‘culture’, ‘suicide’, ‘alienation’, ‘holocaust’, ‘slut’, ‘decadence’ and ‘rock ‘n’ roll were more common than the definite and indefinite articles combined’ (1999: 78). A clear example of this tabloid ‘abortion language’ is found in

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two lines in ‘Nat West-Barclays-Midlands-Lloyds’: ‘Prosperity – exports for Pol Pot / Prosperity – Mein Kampf for beginners’. In his polemic attack on consumption culture, the controversial American journalist Adam Parfrey develops the following observation, helpful in this context: ‘Aesthetic Terrorism is a term more realistically applied to the faceless regime of consumer culture than the avant-garde. The onslaught of Muzak, ad jungles, billboards, top 40 tunes, commercials, corporate logos, etc., all fit the terrorist dynamic of intrusion and coercion’ (1987: 115). He goes on and criticises what he calls ‘the phrase-­ art hybrid […] in which an advertising-style slogan is combined with an implied message or visual cue’ which, in his view, is a product of ‘critic-­ centered postmodernism’ and a ‘hip cynicism’ (1987: 115).28 ‘Avant-­ garde art’, Parfrey therefore concludes, ‘has evolved into nothing more than a cultural benchwarmer, corporate tax write-off and public relations smokescreen. Art which openly espouses anti-corporate ideology is embraced as long as it hews to arbitrary standards invented by those taste-­ taste-­making and fixture-telling hirelings, the art critics’ (Parfrey 1987: 115). As mentioned earlier, in ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’ Jameson links the demise of the avant-gardes to the hollowing out of shock value as well, observing: ‘The most offensive forms of […] art – punk rock, say, or what is called sexually explicit material – are all taken in stride by society, and they are more commercially successful, unlike the productions of the older high modernism’ (Jameson 1998: 19).29 I believe Parfrey’s analysis of ‘aesthetic terrorism’, as well as Jameson’s observations on the death of avant-garde culture in postmodernity, can be applied to the lyrics of Generation Terrorists as well. I want to substantiate this observation with help of two examples. The first is the band’s attack on sexism, embodied by the lyrics of ‘Little Baby Nothing’: instead of destabilising and questioning the complex representations of gender in popular and especially celebrity culture, or representations of femininity and masculinity in the porn industry, these lyrics mainly affirm the idea of women as passive, as exploited and powerless, with the following exemplary lines sung by Traci Lords: ‘Your diet will crush me / My life just an old man’s memory’. Furthermore, the song’s lyrics blur the issue they address even more, by approaching the notion of ‘exploitation’ as a reflection of the way in which celebrity culture exploits people in general,

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shifting a concern with the exploitation of women to a fatalistic embrace of the consumerist exploitation of rock ‘n’ roll bands. By addressing this subject in a sensationalist language (Edwards’ ‘graffiti’), furthermore, the song’s lyrics do not destabilise our ideas about gender or exploitation by questioning their meaning or their wider socio-economic context, I want to argue. Instead, they border on the sentimental and mainly affirm a rather simplistic way of giving meaning to the notions of ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’, the former presented as powerless but ‘pure’, exploited by the latter for her ‘innocence’.30

‘Motorcycle Emptiness’ The second example is formed by the lyrics of ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’. The song was the result of the attempt to write, in Wire’s words, ‘the ‘Wild Horses’/‘Stairway to Heaven’/‘Sweet Child o’ Mine’ of the 90s’ (qtd. in Price 1999: 76) and was inspired by his brother Patrick Jones’ poem ‘Neon Loneliness’.31 Accompanied in the sleeve booklets of the album and the single by the Sylvia Plath quote ‘I talk to God but the sky is empty’, the song also refers to S.E. Hinton’s 1975 novel Rumble Fish (Price 1999: 76), adapted to film in 1983 by Francis Ford Coppola. Rumble Fish revolves around a group of youths whose lives are characterised by drug abuse, gang fights and absent parents. The story itself focuses on ‘Motorcycle Boy’, who suffers from the inescapable emptiness of his life and his disconnectedness from the world surrounding him (see Coppola 1983). In the lyrics of ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’, this theme of alienation is embedded in a Marxist critique of consumerism and descriptions of ways in which the individual is reduced to an alienated cog in the capitalist machine. They are attempts to undermine ideological notions of individuality and freedom as only constituting unfreedom; as revolving around survival in a capitalist whole focused on exploitation and alienation.32 I want to cite several lines from the song’s lyrics to make this point: ‘Culture sucks down words / […] / Life lies a slow suicide / Orthodox dreams and symbolic myths / From feudal serf to spender / This wonderful world of purchase power’. These five lines do not rhyme,

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are not connected on a semiotic level by emphases or rhythm, and are mainly phrased like Situationist slogans—‘The Sun’s abortion language’. What unifies these lines instead are their symbolic elements: a rejection of a meaningless culture and spectacle in which both words and life have lost their meaning, followed by references to the theory of Marxism as expressed in the historical materialist analysis of the economic transformation of feudal into capitalist societies that revolve around ‘purchase power’. In these lines, we see the method of détournement at work: after being seduced by the catchy and anthemic music of ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’—characterised by a distinctive and immediately recognisable melody—and the soothing voice of Bradfield, a phrase like ‘from feudal serf to spender’ then makes the listener reflect on what the lyrics actually express on a symbolic level, especially because they are combined with the phrase ‘motorcycle emptiness’. The link between motorcycles and a Marxist analysis of consumption culture and alienation, after all, can only be understood if the listener starts researching the ideas and themes behind the song and explores the intertextual way in which it shapes meaning by referring to the novel and film of Rumble Fish. Again, this does not mean that the semiotic elements of ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’ are unimportant. Not only those elements inherent to their form as written down in the album sleeve, but also those shaped by the way in which the lyrics are sung and form part of the music. In this song, for example, we find an example of what Dai Griffiths characterises as the ‘anti-lyric’: often following from a division of labour in which lyrics are not written by the same person who writes the music, he observes, the anti-lyric lacks what Griffiths describes as the ‘principle of ensuring that both words and music contribute to the one lyric unity’ (2003: 55). Griffiths discusses ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’ to illustrate this idea, observing the following: ‘Read this line aloud: ‘under neon loneliness, motorcycle emptiness’. The Manics: ‘under knee-’ on, lonely-n’ess, motorcy-kll, empty-n’ess” (2003: 55). These unexpected emphases, Griffiths argues in turn, result in a disconnect between music and words, and in songs in which focus is placed on lyrics, forcing the listener to pay attention to ideas, concepts, details and ‘the unexpected word’ (Griffiths 2003: 55). In Song Means, Allan F.  Moore makes a similar point about rhyme, arguing that in most popular music styles, apart from extreme metal,

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‘rhymes are to be assumed, such that their absence in many of the Manic Street Preachers’ lyrics is more meaningful, presumably a refusal of the ‘easy’ position offered by rhymes’ (2012: 177). Since these same lyrics are clearly shaped in the form of slogans or ‘graffiti’, however, I again want to conclude that phrases like ‘Culture sucks down words’ and ‘Life lies a slow suicide’ do not question ‘the entire culture we take for granted’ successfully. Their slogan-like style is too easily digestible because we are so used to the semiotic rhythm and style of slogans like these, whether they are formulated in commercials, by political parties, or by activist groups. As such, these slogans do not really explore the borders of meaning as, I will argue below, does happen on The Holy Bible, on which we find more complex experimentations with the ‘anti-lyric’. This means that these lyrics are not able to distance themselves far enough from the social totality to question this same totality. Formulated within a historical framework: whereas the critique of the Situationists eventually inspired the uprisings of Paris 1968 as attempts to break down ‘the spectacle’ (Faulk 2010: 135), these Manic Street Preachers lyrics are formulated in the language of a spectacle that consolidated itself more firmly and more inescapably in popular culture during the 24 years between 1968 and the release of Generation Terrorists, as this album also suggests itself. Even though the sheer audacity, bombast and decadent embrace of glamour that is manifested by a debut album like Generation Terrorists is impressive, I therefore want to conclude that its reflective side, which revolves around the postmodern realisation that everything the band try to do has already been done before in a social totality saturated with consumption culture, eventually undermines the attempt to constitute an autonomous, critical position. In some way or another, the failure of this first critical model tells us, the critical message one aims to communicate through one’s lyrics in the realm of popular music should be formulated in a more complex and dense manner, making these lyrics position themselves more in opposition to society and to the language we are used to.

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Gold Against the Soul: A Subjective Turn In 1993, Manic Street Preachers released the album Gold Against the Soul, which spawned three singles and an E.P. The album’s title might refer to the 1948 film Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which tells the story of three men searching for gold in the Sierra Madre Mountains, their feelings of greed slowly taking over their worldview.33 One of the movie’s most famous lines goes as follows: ‘I know what gold can do to men’s souls’ (see Huston 1948). This statement is translated in the lyrics of the album’s title song into an attack on the closing of the mines under the reign of Margaret Thatcher and, more generally, the disempowerment of the working classes in the UK.  The lyrics refer, for example, to Roy Lynk receiving an OBE.  Lynk was the leader of the Union of Democratic Mineworkers who refused to strike during the miners’ strikes of 1984 and 1985, undermining their potential. The specificity of the song’s attack on British politics, furthermore, is manifested in the following two lines: ‘Fossilize – make Yorkshire into a tourist resort / Dream of more ways to humble the poor’. Lines like these are then embedded in a more general critique of the hypocrisy and superficiality of leftist liberals: ‘White liberal hates slavery / Needs Thai labour to clean his home’. Another political component can be found on the album’s back sleeve, which shows a poem entitled ‘Song of Those Who Died in Vain’ (‘Canto dei morti invano’) by the Italian writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi. The poem is written from the perspective of those who died in the two world wars, urging the negotiators of the United States and the USSR to reach an agreement about nuclear weapons. Furthermore, they threaten with retaliation if these leaders do not succeed: ‘we’ll drown you in our putrefaction’ (see Cicioni 1995: 145). Apart from Levi’s poem and the above-mentioned song, however, the other nine songs on Gold Against the Soul do not express a political message.34 After the extravagant, politically charged bombast of Generation Terrorists, Gold Against the Soul instead represents a turn inwards, resulting in songs describing melancholia, depression, insomnia, (especially in the song ‘Sleepflower’), drug use and self-doubt in a rather unfocused manner. This subjective turn was already foreboded on the 1992 release

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of a cover of ‘Theme from M.A.S.H. (Suicide Is Painless)’ as a charity single for what was then named the Spastics Society, and is illustrated on Gold Against the Soul by song titles like ‘Life Becoming a Landslide’, ‘Yourself ’, ‘Drug Drug Druggy’, and ‘From Despair to Where’. Mainly driven by Edwards’ worsening alcohol addiction and insomnia (Thompson 1997: 46), the lyrics of Gold Against the Soul mainly express a longing for innocence, a disappointment in life, and a crippling sense of self-doubt. An example of this theme is formed by ‘Life Becoming a Landslide’, which contains the following lines: ‘My idea of love comes from / A childhood glimpse of pornography’. On the back sleeve of the Life Becoming a Landslide E.P., released in February 1994, we even find a dictionary entry about the word ‘child’. The album’s lyrics also reflect different perspectives on life, focalised, in the case of the song ‘Symphony of Tourette’, by a person with Tourette’s, who, predating the song ‘tourette’s’ on Nirvana’s In Utero, presents the syndrome as a ‘disorder’ that aggressively undermines the ‘social order’. One of the album’s most characteristic songs, furthermore, is ‘La Tristesse Durera (Scream to a Sigh)’, the title of which refers to one of the last lines spoken by Vincent van Gogh, in which the Dutch painter expresses his wish to die (see Middles 1999: 107). The lyrics of the song are written from the perspective of a war veteran and again illustrate the rather a-political turn inwards that characterises the album, expressing existentialist musings on the meaninglessness of life: ‘I am a relic / I am just a petrified cry / Wheeled out once a year: a cenotaph souvenir’. The musical style of Gold Against the Soul differs from its predecessor as well. Whereas Generation Terrorists mainly contains fast songs, long guitar solos and riffs that embrace the decadence and posturing of glamrock, the songs on Gold Against the Soul are less aggressive, set to a style of hard rock that was characterised as ‘dark glam’ (Middles 1999: 108). As on Generation Terrorists, the songs on Gold Against the Soul do contain choruses that, although accompanied by dark and personal lyrics, are catchy and memorable. The album presents a slowed down version of the glamrock of the band’s debut, mirroring what was happening in the United States during its release: a distancing from the perceived superficiality of L.A. glamrock and the rise of bands like Pearl Jam, Nirvana and Hole, who combined a raw guitar sound with emotional and

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introspective lyrics, resulting in music that was presented as ‘raw’ and ‘real’ and therefore as more ‘authentic’ than the Hollywood rock scene. This change in musical and lyrical style was furthermore accompanied by a change in the band’s image. On the pictures printed in the album’s booklet, the band members wear dark clothes, sunglasses and make-up, exchanging the extravagant glamrock persona of Generation Terrorists for a darker, ‘existentialist’ or ‘brooding’ one. This turn inwards is reflected as well by the darker tones of the album’s cover, which depicts arms wrapped around a muscular male torso whose face is covered with roses. Inside the album’s sleeve, in which its lyrics are printed in capital letters, we find other pictures of male bodies adorned with roses, the flowers expressing a decadent concern with beauty and decay that recalls Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal. As mentioned in Chap. 2, these photographs form a reference to Mishima’s photo-book Ba-ra-kei: Ordeal by Roses (Price 1999: 104), in which the Japanese author’s obsession with masculine beauty and bodybuilding is expressed by juxtaposing muscular bodies with roses as well. In this way, the album constitutes a loose intertextual link between its existentialist focus on experiences of despair, the loss of youthful innocence, sexual awakening, voyeurism, alienation and self-doubt, and the role that similar aspects play in Mishima’s melancholic novel Confessions of a Mask.

The Splinter in Your Eye Almost completely lacking the bold political statements of its predecessor, Gold Against the Soul sparks the question whether this album presents a critical model at all. I want to briefly argue that it, at least partly, can be understood as an attempt at formulating a critical approach to the status quo; to create a second critical model. Again, however, I will argue that this attempt eventually fails in light of the standards of autonomy and reflection. This second critical model is fundamentally different from the détournement that shapes Generation Terrorists and can be characterised with help of Adorno’s famous statement that ‘the splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass’ (1974: 50). If one focuses inwards, the idea behind

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the kind of critique goes—on one’s personal, subjective feelings and, in the album’s case, one’s experiences of alienation and despair—the question is implicitly addressed what kind of life can be lived in the context in which this despair is experienced. Linking this idea to the three above-­ discussed aims that together constitute a critical paradox, this suggests that if once describes how one’s worldview and existence are completely clouded and corroded by one’s own depression, insomnia and addiction (the first aim), then it becomes impossible to find any form of hope, anything to cling to, outside (the second aim) or inside (the third aim) this same existence. It is a similar approach that Adorno adopts in his work Minima Moralia, which combines highly personal reflections on themes like life, love and art with more general philosophical analyses of the social totality. If asked and addressed rightly, such an approach might enable us to initiate a critical perspective on the status quo, a perspective that is not primarily theoretical in nature but based on a depiction of experiences that, in turn, manages to present life as ‘false’. Because this form of critique is born in a turn towards the subject, however, it has to be formulated in such a way that it does not slide down to mere sentimentalism. If that happens, ‘the’ subject and his feelings are presented as disconnected from the social whole—as an inner realm from which the lyricist can express himself authentically in the form of words that seem to purely flow from this same realm—and the model loses its social and critical dimension. The uncritical aspect of this approach can be clarified with help of Adorno’s rejection of ‘subjective art’, which Jameson characterises, in a helpful passage, as driven by the following mechanisms: [T]he cultivation of subjective refinements and of heightened ethical discriminations enabled by social exclusion and class privilege, the fetishisation of Experience as a kind of spiritual private property, an aesthetic individualism which becomes a private substitute for the life and culture of groups in business society. (2007: 125)

Subjectivist art created by the culture industry, Adorno claims, revolves around the constitution of such an inner realm in which feelings and sentiments are presented as ‘authentic’, perpetuating the illusion that the

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individual is an atomised and free island unto herself (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 101). As Jameson summarises Adorno’s standpoint: ‘the ‘subjective’ in art is never truly grasped until we reach a standpoint from which it is revealed as part of social and historical objectivity’ (see Jameson 197). I want to argue that the lyrics of Gold Against the Soul eventually fail at constituting a critical model, since they revolve precisely around that which Jameson characterises as a ‘fetishisation of Experience’. Even though these lyrics focus on negative feelings concerning insomnia, drug use and depression, these descriptions are not presented as permeated by the social whole in which they come about. A song like ‘Yourself ’ embodies this idea, with lyrics focusing exclusively on feelings related to alienation and despair: ‘You go on day after day / Dreaming on a lie / That you keep locked inside / Of yourself, yourself, yourself ’. To strengthen this argument, I want to discuss two examples of more successful constructions of this critical model, taken from two different art forms. The first is American author Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (1991). Manic Street Preachers constituted an intertextual connection with this novel in their song ‘Patrick Bateman’, which is named after its protagonist, and which was released as a B-side on the Gold Against the Soul single ‘La Tristesse Durera (Scream to a Sigh)’.35 In an insightful interview, Ellis stated about American Psycho: ‘It initiated because of my own isolation and alienation at a point in my life. I was living like Patrick Bateman. I was slipping into a consumerist kind of void that was supposed to give me confidence and make me feel good about myself but just made me feel worse and worse and worse about myself ’ (Baker 2010). American Psycho indeed criticises American postmodern culture as shot through with Jameson’s ‘logic of consumer capitalism’ in a form that reflects the alienated aspects of this same culture: the language used in the novel is devoid of sentimentality or of a normative point of view, forming a ‘mirror’ of the social totality. As such, the impossibility of the novel’s protagonist—Patrick Bateman—to constitute himself as an autonomous subject who is connected to his fellow human beings, American Psycho reflects the eradication of individuality in the spectacle of consumerism in both form and content. Its disconnected, alienated and cold style becomes the most pressing in those passages that describe the only way in

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which Bateman is able to constitute some form of ‘contact’ or have experiences at all: by brutally torturing and killing people and animals, even though it remains unclear whether these killings actually happen or whether he fantasises about them. The novel disconnects itself from the social totality that it simultaneously presents as inescapable, forcing the reader to think, reflect and question this totality from a position of autonomy. Another example is formed by the realm of postpunk, mainly as embodied by bands like Gang of Four and, again, Joy Division. Simon Reynolds makes the following helpful observation in a passage that I partly cited in Chap. 2: These bands demonstrated that “the personal is political” by dissecting consumerism, sexual relationships, commonsense notions of what’s natural or obvious, and the ways in which what feel like spontaneous, innermost feelings are actually scripted by larger forces. At the same time, the most acute of these groups captured the way that the political is personal, illustrating the processes by which current events and the actions of government invade everyday life and haunt each individual’s private dreams and nightmares. (2006: 52)

As discussed in Chap. 2 by referring to Joy Division, the notion of ‘popular modernism’ revolves around representations of ‘control’, in which subjective expressions of having lost control are coupled to a critique of the controlling influences of social and economic structures. Below, I will return to the way in which this understanding of popular modernism returns in The Holy Bible. For now, I want to conclude that Reynold’s description again implies that if one sets up a critical model by taking a ‘subjective turn’, the ways in which the subject is shaped and structured within the artwork should, at least to some extent, reflect the ways in which this subject is also shaped—controlled—by cultural, social and economic discourses, turning aspects of the subject’s suffering into a critical perspective on those same discourses (see on Adorno’s notion of subjectivity in art also Hullot-Kentor 2006a: 177). Unfortunately, this does not happen on Gold Against the Soul. The album’s subjective lyrics, mainly revolving around descriptions of despair,

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loneliness and existential angst, are pulled so deeply into the realm of subjectivity that they uncritically present this realm as disconnected from the social totality, overlooking the observation that any experience of ‘subjective authenticity’ is a by-product of ‘the impoverishment of modern experience’ (Balsom 2017: 188). Issues like these could have been criticised on the album by problematising the ability to put these experiences into words, and by letting these words reflect the difficulty of finding meaning in a social totality that corrodes meaning, as is done, as I will argue now, on The Holy Bible. Looking back on Gold Against the Soul, Manic Street Preachers themselves expressed the same opinion, echoing Adorno’s idea that if one becomes part of the culture industry, one immediately enters a standardised realm in which it becomes more difficult to formulate critique in a complex manner. Wire claimed, for example, that they got ‘subconsciously compromised’ (qtd. in Clarke 1997: 115), and Bradfield stated: ‘All we wanted to do was go under the corporate wing. We thought we could ignore it but you do get affected…’. He continued about their next album: ‘Now we’re back to speaking in tongues’ (qtd. in Price 1999: 113).

The Holy Bible In 1994 Manic Street Preachers released their third album, The Holy Bible, which was recorded in a demo studio in the red-light district of Cardiff (see Price 1999: 120; Middles 1999: 120; Clarke 1997: 106). Bradfield stated about the coming about of the album: ‘The Holy Bible was created through an almost academic discipline. We sat down and gave ourselves headings and structures, so each song is like an essay’ (qtd. in Heatley 1998: 38). About 70% of The Holy Bible’s lyrics were written by Edwards, 30% by Wire (Heatley 1998: 37). Again, this approach was inspired by postpunk’s controlled focus on songwriting, echoing, for example, Gang of Four’s refusal to ‘jam’ and, as Reynolds writes, instead ‘work out everything in advance’ (Reynolds 2006: 205). The album did not fare well commercially, but is generally considered the band’s masterwork. A 10th anniversary edition was released in 2004 with a subtitle taken from Keith Cameron’s description of the album as

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‘A triumph of art over logic’. A 20th anniversary edition came out in 2014, with the Malcolm X-inspired phrase ‘The white liberal is the V.D. of the revolution’ printed in its sleeve booklet, distancing the album’s message from those forms of leftist critique that it rejects as superficial. The album was released as well as a picture disk for Record Store Day 2015. Its importance and influence are illustrated, furthermore, by two books that are entirely devoted to its content: 2017’s Triptych—Three Studies of Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible, and a 2019 entry in Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series. In the following, I want to argue that The Holy Bible can be understood as a work of art that belongs to the tendency of popular modernism, discussed in Chap. 2. This means, I aim to show, that the album presents the listener with a third critical model, in which the two standards of autonomy and reflection return in a successful manner. Among the topics addressed by the album, we will see below, are the instrumentalisation of the body within celebrity culture and within forms of prostitution; Auschwitz and Hiroshima; anorexia and self-harm; and questions regarding evil and punishment. Primarily discussed in its lyrics, I will argue, these topics present the listener with the claims that the world is completely false, that the critic herself is part of this same falseness, and that there are no values to be found outside of this falseness either; the three conditions constituting the critical paradox described above and in the previous chapter. Formulating this critical perspective, I will argue that the album constitutes an autonomous position by critically exploring the limits of the structures that shape our lives and give our existence meaning: structures of a social, cultural, political and religious nature. In contrast with the popular modernist postpunk bands who I discussed in Chap. 2, this is done primarily, I will argue again, in the lyrics of the album. This means that the borders of these social, cultural, political and religious structures are approached as the same borders that safeguard the meaning of words. Since this is done with help of a modernist emphasis on exploring the limits of language without completely breaking through this language, I will argue furthermore, the album also contains a reflective dimension: the structures that we use to give our existence meaning are problematised and criticised but, at the same time, the album expresses the

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reflective observation that we cannot completely escape or break through them, embracing forms of fatalism and negativity.

Britpop Before focusing on these aspects, as well as on its music and sleeve booklet, I first want to briefly describe how The Holy Bible distances itself from the musical context in which it came into being. The album was released in the Britain of the mid 1990’s, during the peak of the Britpop and ‘Cool Britannia’ movements (see Evans 2019: 1–2; Scott 2010: 111). These movements encapsulated a wide range of styles and forms of music: for example, Derek B. Scott observes that, whereas Britpop bands like Oasis and Blur developed a guitar-oriented style that drew back on British rock music of the 1960s, other groups referred more to punk, postpunk and indie rock (2010: 111). As several authors observe as well, the Britpop sound was also shaped in reference to different aspects of British Music Hall traditions and British cabaret (see Scott 2010: 109; see also Laing 2010). What united the result of this mixture of traditions and styles, however, was the representation of a form of ‘Britishness’ that was constructed in different ways. Britpop not only responded critically to British dance music, for example, but also rejected what was perceived as the concern of American grunge bands like Hole, Alice in Chains, Nirvana and Pearl Jam, who had come to dominate the international musical landscape from the early 1990s on (see Hawkins 2010: 145). Whereas these American bands mainly expressed themes of misery and angst (influencing Manic Street Preachers’ Gold Against the Soul, as briefly mentioned earlier), the lyrics and music of Britpop bands expressed a more positive outlook on life, and linked this optimism to the above-mentioned constructed notion of ‘Britishness’ (Scott 2010: 122). This was done by presenting ‘the’ Britpop sound as part of a national tradition of music in which bands like The Beatles, The Who, The Kinks and The Jam were major reference points; by adopting Mancunian accents (see Edwards 2007: 144); or by incorporating references to what was presented as ‘British life’. Lynskey describes, for example, how Blur

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referred to music-hall and dog racing traditions as typical forms of British leisure (2011: 1990). A major role was played in this movement as well by the presentation of a form of ‘British masculinity’: that of the ‘ordinary lad’ whose ‘worldview was dominated by lager, sex and football’ (Scott 2010: 107). In this way, as Stan Hawkins observes in a critical analysis, Britpop created a ‘gendered subjectivity’ that, in his view, constituted a ‘lad culture’ (2010: 145), ‘supported by binary perceptions of gender’ and ‘dependent on a form of compulsive gendered behaviour that is reinforced by homophobia and anti-femininity’ (2010: 153). The constitution of this notion of ‘Britishness’ was entwined with the ‘Cool Britannia’ movement, which gained momentum during the 1990s as well and resulted, for example, in a renewed embrace of the British flag and its colours as cultural icons (Edwards 2007: 144). J. Mark Percival, furthermore, describes ‘Cool Britannia’ as ‘an attempt to represent British popular culture as capable of world-beating leadership in music, film, contemporary art and fashion.’ He goes on, and this observation applies to Britpop as well: ‘Despite the ambitions of the campaign to replace established perceptions of Britain as rural, conservative and upper class with a celebration of outward-looking creative multiculturalism, Cool Britannia remained stubbornly English…’ (2010: 125). Indeed, the mythical ‘British’ identity that Britpop constituted was mainly shaped with help of references to English cultural phenomena, and the movement itself was, again in Percival’s words, ‘London-centric and deeply exclusivist’ (2010: 123—in Chaps. 6 and 7, I will reflect on the role that this construction of ‘Englishness’ played in discourses revolving around notions of ‘Welshness’). Many authors observe that another crucial aspect of Britpop was that it, together with Cool Britannia, developed in parallel to Tony Blair’s change of the Labour Party into ‘New Labour’. Blair aimed to transform Labour from ‘a party of protest to a party of government’ (qtd. in Huq 2010: 93), replacing its socialist foundation with an embrace of neoliberalism and ‘new capitalism’. This does not mean that Britpop was unified by one systematic political message, like the Red Wedge collective of musicians that was formed in 1985 to encourage people to vote Labour. Still, however, Tony Blair associated himself strongly with both Cool Britannia and Britpop. He posed with members of Oasis, for example,

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and attempted to present ‘New Labour’ as a youthful movement that positively embraced upcoming youth cultures like Britpop (Huq 2010: 95). Blair’s rejection of the socialist foundation of Labour, furthermore, was eventually mirrored by Britpop’s rejection of critical protest music, which Lynskey mentions in the passage on Naomi Klein cited above. As Rupa Huq indeed observes in an overview of the politics of Britpop, this music ‘began as an offshoot of the independent British music scene but arguably ended up killing it, as a convergence took place between indie and mainstream, removing the distinctive ‘protest’ element of British-­ based independent music’ (Huq 2010: 93). In a critical analysis in Ghosts of My Life, Mark Fisher goes even further and describes what he calls the ‘reactionary pantomime’ (2014: 40) of Britpop as follows, also reflecting on the way in which its ‘laddism’ was linked, with references to the guitar rock of the 1960s, to a notion of ‘whiteness’: The phony face-off between Blur and Oasis which preoccupied the media was a distraction from the real fault lines in British music culture at the time. The conflict that really mattered was between a music which acknowledged and accelerated what was new in the 90s – technology, cultural pluralism, genre innovations – and a music which took refuge in a monocultural version of Britishness: a swaggering white boy rock built almost entirely out of forms that were established in the 1960s and 1970s. This was a music designed to reassure anxious white males at a moment when all of the certainties they had previously counted on – in work, sexual relations, ethnic identity – were coming under pressure. (2014: 40)36

Following these observations, Fisher argues that English musician Tricky, who explored the boundaries between different genres in his music and, in his performances, played with gender-bending personas, can be understood as critically resisting the ‘laddism’ of Oasis and Blur’s releases (Fisher 2014: 39–47). The popular modernism of The Holy Bible, I want to argue in the following, resists these movements as well, albeit in a different way. This is not only the case because the album’s musical form rejects the guitar-driven 1960s sound of the most dominant Britpop bands, instead adopting a bleak combination of grunge and postpunk—I return to this

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form below. It is also the case because the album rejects defences of ‘Britishness’, ‘Englishness’ or Cool Britannia, instead shifting its focus to explorations of the disturbing and problematic sides of nationalism, totalitarianism, European history, Western civilisation and, even more generally, the human condition. In this way, as I will argue below, the album distances itself from the hegemonic popular music culture of the time, taking an intellectual route that embeds the album in a context constituted by films like Taxi Driver and Naked, and the writings of George Orwell, Yukio Mishima, JG Ballard and Hubert Selby Jr. The latter author understood his own literature as ‘a scream looking for a mouth’ (qtd. in Dean 2007), and author Gilbert Sorrentino characterised Selby Jr’s texts with help of a description that can be used to define The Holy Bible as well: ‘He’s taking you into a world where you really don’t want to be… And he makes you live there. He sticks your face into it. There is no relief. It’s claustrophobia’ (qtd. in Dean 2007).

Post-Post-Punk Now that I have presented an overview of several aspects of The Holy Bible’s musical (and political) context, I want to zoom in on the album itself. To do this, I will first focus on its music, its cover and sleeve booklet, and the relationship between the album’s music and lyrics. Then, I will construct a framework that will eventually enable me to analyse the album’s lyrics in detail. This framework will mainly revolve around Julia Kristeva’s notion of the ‘abject’, as well as around references to modernism and popular modernism, discussed in Chap. 2. The music of The Holy Bible is characterised by a distinctive sound that has been described with help of references to a rather wide range of musicians and groups: The Cure, Sisters of Mercy, Canes, Public Image Ltd., Wire, Magazine, David Bowie’s Berlin albums Low and ‘Heroes’ (see Price 1999: 143; Boswell 2012: 123), but most of all Joy Division, to whom the band mainly listened while recording the album (see Heatley 1998: 37). The term that, in my view, characterises the album’s sound most comprehensively, is the popular modernist notion of ‘control’. Whereas Generation Terrorists and Gold Against The Soul contain music that still

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contain traces of spontaneity, represented by the inclusion of long guitar solos, catchy riffs and anthemic refrains, the music of The Holy Bible sounds like a prison that controls and represses musical outbursts. It is shaped by a clearly discernible bass, dry and militaristic drums, and a ‘spiky’ guitar tone, which accompany Bradfield’s sometimes eerily soothing, sometimes aggressively sounding voice. This makes the album echo aspects of the postpunk sound described in Chap. 2. However, since the postpunk tradition tried to develop new forms of music that alienated it from the status quo, the observation that The Holy Bible refers to this already developed tradition again points us towards the observation that it is not primarily with help of the band’s music that a radical form of resistance is shaped, even though this music did distance the album from the then hegemonic Britpop-sound. Another influence that was frequently mentioned to characterise the album’s sound was Nirvana’s In Utero, released 11 months before The Holy Bible. In Utero’s influence, which again distances the album from Britpop, returns on The Holy Bible in a distorted, sneering guitar sound that, to a certain extent, departs from the less guitar-oriented characteristics of postpunk.37 A foretaste of this musical style was developed on ‘Comfort Comes’, released as a B-side on the Life Becoming a Landslide E.P., the band’s last release in the Gold Against the Soul-era (see on this idea also Naish 2018: 73). On ‘Comfort Comes’, we hear the need for control take over the band’s music, turning away from the dark glam of Gold Against the Soul: it is characterised by staccato chords, a riff that would later echo through their song ‘Faster’ (on The Holy Bible), a bleak guitar tone, a militaristically marching drum sound, and ‘freeze dried vocals’ (Price 1999: 119). In a fitting description of the album’s sound, Matthew Boswell therefore summarises The Holy Bible as ‘post-post-punk’ (2012: 124).38

Personas, Covers and Sleeves The popular modernist notion of control returns as well in two other aspects of The Holy Bible. First, it returns in the band’s embrace of a military aesthetic: on the pictures printed in the album’s booklet and during

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performances in this era, the band members wear medals and military uniforms (most distinctively, Bradfield is dressed in the naval uniform worn on the battleship Potemkin—see Price 1999: 127), and have adorned their faces with camouflage paint.39 Adopting these military personas, the band emphasised the idea that the album is permeated with a militaristic form of discipline, and foregrounded the aggressive nature of its message. Second, the notion of control is presented on the album as a disciplinary means of reaching purity. We will see below that this term returns in several ways in the album’s lyrics, but for now I want to focus on the manner in which it is reflected by the album’s sleeve booklet. This booklet is dominated by one colour—white—and contains several religious references that symbolise strivings for purity: depictions of Christ, a Sacred Heart, and photographs of Christian tombstones. On the photo printed on the album’s back sleeve, furthermore, blue halos have been drawn above the heads of the band members. A religious reference to purity also returns in a quote printed in the album’s booklet, taken from a book by the Amitābha, a celestial Buddha who plays an important role in the scriptures of the Mahāyāna school of Buddhism. This quote describes the corroding nature of the ‘poisoned darts’ of ‘greed, anger, foolishness and the infatuations of egoism’ that originate within the self (see Kyōkai 2004: 57). Focusing on purity, this quote forces us to shine a critical light on purity’s ‘other’: forms of impurity and corruption as they permeate human beings. The notion of corruption, in turn, gains a social and political dimension in the quote printed on The Holy Bible’s back sleeve, taken from French novelist and playwright Octave Mirbeau’s controversial 1899 novel The Torture Garden. The quote describes ‘the poisoned and mortal wound of civilised world’ that is caused by living ‘attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation’ (see Mirbeau 2019: 93).40 Together, these quotes illustrate the idea that The Holy Bible combines the critical approaches of the two above-discussed albums: the outwardly directed political and social critique of Generation Terrorists, and the inwardly oriented and subjective concern with despair of Gold Against the Soul. As Matthew Boswell observes in his analysis of the album’s references to National Socialism as well: ‘Throughout the album, anger is

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directed at the internal world that contains violence, degradation and genocide as much as the outer world that gave rise to these things’ (Boswell 2012: 126). On The Holy Bible’s back sleeve, we furthermore find an emblem that includes a hammer and sickle, and shows the name ‘Manic Street Preachers’ as well as the Cyrillic letters ‘CCCP’.41 This reference to the symbol of Soviet oppression, it could be argued, again represents both a longing for purity and forms of corruption. It does this by presenting this longing as resulting, on the one hand, in the Soviet attempt to constitute the perfect society and shape the perfect human being, and on the other hand in the darker tendencies of this same human being, making this aim eventually slide down into dictatorships and totalitarianism. Edwards indeed reflected on the emblem as referring to ‘the beautiful dream’ of communism, disproven, in his view, by human nature and the way in which people put it into practice (see Jones et al. 2017: 46). In this way, he turned the purity of this ‘dream’ into a dark and misanthopric worldview that highlights corruption and impurity, embodied, for example, by the Khmer Rouge slogan that ‘only the newborn baby is spotless’ (qtd. in Courtois et  al. 1999: 620). In several interviews, furthermore, he also used this worldview to criticise Blair’s attempt to adopt Anthony Giddens’ ‘Third Way’ by disconnecting the Labour Party from its socialist past, and transforming it into the liberalism and ‘new capitalism’ of ‘New Labour’. In Edwards’ words: ‘they’re selling everybody out, including themselves’ (qtd. in Evans 2019: 42). Besides constituting references to purity and corruption, the booklet of The Holy Bible also does something else: in different ways, it emphasises the dominant role played on the album by the lyrics of its 13 songs. In this booklet, these lyrics are printed in black letters on a white background, forming two long pillars of words on each page. Furthermore, they are not printed in the order in which they appear on the album, giving them an almost autonomous status.42 In the following insightful passage, Matthew Boswell reflects on the specific form in which these lyrics are printed, as well as on the album’s advertising campaign: Rather than being set out in stanzas, each line was separated from the next by a dot that distinguished between units of meaning while urging readers

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not to look for rhythmic or syntactic continuity between them. A kind of anti-poetry, then, the importance of the lyrics to The Holy Bible was reflected in the fact that the advert for the album in the popular music press consisted of the entire lyric sheet reprinted across a two-page centre-spread. (2012: 125)

The dots that Boswell mentions, reminding of Roman interdots, make the album’s lyrics appear like blocks of prose, not interrupted by blank spaces, emphasising the dominant role that these words play in the album’s meaning, and rejecting the digestible and structured ways in which lyrics are often printed in album sleeves. This dominant role is reflected as well by the album’s cover: underneath the painting by Jenny Saville, to which I return below, we see the titles of its 13 songs listed like the chapters of a book. The importance of these lyrics is also emphasised by the wide range of pictures that can be found in The Holy Bible’s booklet, each in some way related to the content of the lyrics next to which they are printed. The lyrics of ‘Archives of Pain’, for example, are accompanied by an etch depicting an execution by guillotine during the French Revolution. This illustrates the song’s concern, partly inspired by Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, with the nature of punishment. Below the lyrics of ‘Revol’, furthermore, we see a picture of Lenin’s embalmed body exposed in his mausoleum in Moscow, and next to the lyrics of ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’ we find a picture of the gate of the Dachau concentration camp, including the phrase ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’. Before turning to the way in which The Holy Bible constitutes a tension between these lyrics and the album’s music—a tension that again, I will argue, results in an emphasis on the dominant role of lyrics—I want to briefly discuss the three paintings used for the three singles released from the album, made by controversial German artist Martin Kippenberger. The double A-side ‘Faster/P.C.P.’ uses the fourth of a series of five Kippenberger paintings called Fliegender Tanga (1982–83), and seems to embody Jean-Luc Godard’s above-cited phrase about the children of Marx and Coca-Cola: it depicts a Chinese soldier dressed in a Maoist uniform, sipping from a Coca-Cola can through a straw. For ‘Revol’, the 1983 paining Sympathische Kommunistin was used, depicting a smiling

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woman wearing a budenovka. As on Fliegender Tanga, the painting presents a postmodern hybrid of Soviet social realism, abstract expressionism and popist explorations of kitsch, seemingly driven by the aim to scandalise proponents of each of these movements and styles. ‘She is Suffering’, in turn, presents the Kippenberger painting Titten, Türme, Tortellini, again forming a pastiche of Soviet social realism: the painting shows a smiling woman from the waist up, only wearing a bra, against what appears to be an industrial background of two large brick towers or ovens. As Wodtke observes, these paintings present rather ungraspable and ambivalent perspectives on communist and totalitarian societies (Jones et  al. 2017: 280), forcing the spectator to reflect on what is meant by these paintings and whether they have any (political) meaning at all.43

Verbal Space Now that I have discussed several aspects of the sleeve booklet of The Holy Bible, as well as the covers of the three singles taken from the album, I want to analyse the way in which its songs create a tension between music and words. Simon Price observes the following about the relationship between these two elements: ‘In The Holy Bible message and medium are inseparable: the music, discordant and irregular, is onomatopoeic for the content’ (Price 1999: 143). Even though I agree with Price’s observation that The Holy Bible’s cold and controlled sound contributes to the meaning of the songs, I want to argue that this meaning mainly comes about because the balance between music and lyrics eventually shifts towards the latter. Had the album’s music completely embodied the message of the lyrics they accompany, then, as Larissa Wodtke observes as well, it would have been much more extreme and unconventional, coming closer to the industrial sound of Throbbing Gristle, Laibach or Einstürzende Neubauten (Jones et al. 2017: 264; see also Evans 2019: 70–1), than the still melodic and digestible songs that the album contains. As I discussed earlier, after all, to a large extent the album mirrors the postpunk sound developed in Britain between 1978 and 1982 and combines this sound with elements of grunge. This means that the album, as discussed in Chap. 2, mines the past and still follows recognisable musical

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conventions. Even though this style distanced the album from the dominant sound of Britpop, in other words, it is far removed from the experimentations with musical form that can be found, for example, on bIG⋆fLAME’s avant-gardist releases, praised by Manic Street Preachers as well. Another important aspect of the relationship between lyrics and music on the album is that its lyrics were clearly not modified to fit the musical structures of which they form part, resulting in a much more extreme disconnect between music and words than, as discussed earlier, found on Generation Terrorists. Alissa Wodtke indeed observes that the album presents the listener with a ‘linguistic deluge’ (Jones et al. 2017: 272), and Price writes: ‘For the first time, no attempt whatsoever had been made to make the lyrics scan or to fit the tune; indeed, many sentences started in one line and end in another’ (1999: 143). To analyse what this does to the meaning of the album’s songs, I want to use Griffiths notion of ‘verbal space’, which he defines as follows in his aforementioned analysis of the ‘anti-lyric’: ‘the words agree to work within the spaces of tonal music’s phrases, and the potential expressive intensity of music’s melody is held back for the sake of the clarity of verbal communication’ (Griffiths 2003: 43). In most popular songs, he observes, a balance is created between music and words, with the music determining the shape and form of lyrics. I want to argue, however, that on The Holy Bible words eventually come to colonise the music and the verbal space it constitutes, turning into an embodiment of the anti-lyric. This does not mean that these lyrics ignore the songs’ verbal space completely: often, the lyrics do try to follow rhythms and structures, but, since they were not modified to fit in this space, they constantly ‘spill over’, breaking out only to be pulled back in when the refrain of a song begins or when Bradfield is given some time to breathe and ‘find’ the rhythm of the song again. Sometimes, Bradfield even spells out words (as he already did earlier on ‘Sorrow 16’, on the single of ‘Motown Junk’, with the word ‘Beautiful’), filling the musical space and, simultaneously, emphasising the importance of the word he is spelling out. In ‘Archives of Pain’, for example, we hear him singing ‘Give them the respect they D E - S - E - R - V - E’, the last letter following after an unexpected pause, enforced by the disconnect between words and music.

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These observations concern several semiotic elements of the album’s lyrics, and I want to argue that these elements, as I also did above in the context of Generation Terrorists, play a specific role in the album’s meaning: they eventually make the listener focus on the symbolic elements of these words as well. As an example, I want to look at the opening lines of the lyrics of The Holy Bible’s last song, ‘P.C.P.’. I will quote these lines in their entirety and in the same form as they are printed in the album’s booklet, discussed earlier: Teacher starve your child, P.C. approved · as long as the right words are used · systemised atrocity ignored · as long as bi-lingual signs on view · ten foot sign in Oxford Street · be pure – be vigilant – behave · grey not neon, grey not real · life bleeds, death is your birthright ·

During the song, Bradfield only barely manages to squeeze these lyrics into the verbal space created by its musical skeleton, and often has to speed up to be able to include this list of words in the song at all, breaking up sentences at unexpected moments (‘systemised atrocity … í-gnored … as long as …’). This tactic of bombarding the listener with words, and making the song sound like it is born in a conflict between lyrics and music, forces this listener to pay attention to the symbolic elements of these words. She then notices that these lyrics revolve around a critique of hollow defences of censorship: the passage above refers, for example, to the ways in which a systematic, critical analysis of the attempt to eradicate Welsh language and Welsh culture by the English, even of atrocities in general, is buried beneath a shallow focus on language that only checks whether the use of words is ‘correct’ (see Edwards 2007: 149).44 This, the song suggests with the phrase that teachers ‘starve their children’, leaves the underlying political and cultural tensions unexplored, mirrored by the double meaning of the letters ‘P.C.’—police constable and political correctness—and ‘P.C.P’.—the drug known as angel dust and the Partido Comunista del Peru (as well as the communist parties of Palestine or Portugal). The lyrics then embed this observation in more general analyses of the undermining influences of censorship: the remainder—the above lines make up about

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one fourth of the song’s lyrics—also reference the censorship institution of the American Parents Music Resource Center, as well as Orwell’s Big Brother and the Biblical book of Leviticus, often used to condemn homosexuality. The line ‘Be pure, be vigilant, behave’, furthermore, was taken from the comic book series Nemesis the Warlock, 2000 AD, in which it forms a manifestation of the political ideology of dictator Tomas de Torquemada (see Mills et al. 2006).45 Suggesting that this line should be projected on Oxford Street, and referring to a society that is ‘grey’ and ‘not real’ and in which ‘death is your birthright’, makes these lyrics into a description of a dark Orwellian or Bradburian social totality in which language is ‘purified’ and controlled to eradicate critical meaning. Since the song foregrounds the symbolic elements of these words, I want to argue, the meaning of these words is not reduced to the musical structure of the song nor can these words be understood as ordinary speech. Instead, these lyrics pull themselves out of this musical structure—like Baron Munchausen pulled himself out of his swamp—and struggle to gain an autonomous position in their conflict with this structure. This means that the song internally embodies a notion of control that, as I discussed in Chap. 2, is shaped as well within certain popular modernist releases. Whereas the latter releases, however, mainly reflect notions of control with the sound of their music, or express it through the content of their lyrics—elements that return, as discussed earlier, on The Holy Bible as well—Manic Street Preachers’ third album also refers to control in a different way: on the one hand, the album’s words struggle against the control held over them by the song’s musical structures; on the other hand, they show that they cannot completely escape this same control, adding a reflective and fatalistic layer of meaning.

Purity, Religion and the Abject To be able to zoom in on the details of the lyrics of other songs on the album, I now want to turn to an exploration of the general theme that characterises the content of these lyrics, expressed in both their semiotic and symbolic elements: the ‘abject’. In the following, I will describe this

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theme with help of Julia Kristeva, and then link it to the tendencies of modernism and popular modernism. I want to do this by beginning with the album’s title, which was explained by Edwards as follows: ‘The way religions choose to speak their truth to the public has always been to beat them down [...]. I think that if a Holy Bible is true, it should be about the way the world is and that’s what I think my lyrics are about’ (qtd. in ‘Richey Edwards’ last TV interview ‘part 1’ [video fragment]). These statements provide us with a stepping stone to analysing the album’s general meaning, especially when combined with the audio sample included in the song ‘Mausoleum’, in which we hear British author JG Ballard describe the idea behind his controversial 1973 novel Crash as follows: ‘I wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit, and force it to look in the mirror’ (see Price 1999: 143).46 Ballard’s reference to forcing ‘the human face’ to watch its own vomit-­ covered reflection in a mirror forms an illustration of the ‘abject’. In her influential 1980 work Powers of Horror, Kristeva characterises this notion as referring to those aspects or dimensions of our existence that are radically excluded—‘abjected’—during the early stages of our psychological development. In contrast with the symbolic order, which represents not only language and structure for Kristeva, but also law, order and morality, the abject refers to a semiotic ‘realm’ in which the difference between subject and object, self and others, and between self and body, is not (yet) constituted: it is ‘opposed to I’, as Kristeva puts this (1982: 1). Since this ‘abject’ is pushed away by the symbolic order and therefore by morality, she furthermore observes that it refers to those elements that make us shudder, to that which we experience with horror, and reminds us, for example, of the fact that we are subjects ‘in’ a body that can be sick and will eventually die. The abject therefore refers to the realm of the cadaver (1982: 3), of excrement, pus and vomit, as well as to the idea of evil. Kristeva writes: The traitor, the liar, the criminal with a good conscience, the shameless rapist, the killer who claims he is a savior.... Any crime, because it draws attention to the fragility of the law, is abject, but premeditated crime, cunning murder, hypocritical revenge are even more so because they heighten

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the display of such fragility. He who denies morality is not abject; there can be grandeur in amorality and even in crime that flaunts its disrespect for the law – rebellious, liberating, and suicidal crime. Abjection, on the other hand, is immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady: a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter instead of inflaming it, a debtor who sells you up, a friend who stabs you… (Kristeva 1982: 4)

The abject, in other words, refers not so much to rebellion, resistance or amorality, but to those who deliberately explore the realm of immorality. Kristeva therefore also links the abject to Auschwitz and to Nazi crimes, more specifically to what she describes as the experience of seeing children’s shoes in the museum of ‘what remains of Auschwitz’. Here, she writes, abjection ‘reaches its apex when death, which, in any case, kills me, interferes with what, in my living universe, is supposed to save me from death: childhood, science…’ (Kristeva 1982: 4). Most of the themes that Kristeva links to the abject return, we will see below, in the lyrics of The Holy Bible. The abject manifests itself perhaps most directly in the opening lines of the song ‘Mausoleum’, which explore the border between body and cadaver: ‘Wherever you go I will be carcass · whatever you see will be rotting flesh’. Indeed, the notion of the ‘abject’ is frequently used by Larissa Wodtke in her excellent analysis of The Holy Bible to argue that the album presents the listener with repressed aspects of Western civilisation (see Jones et al. 2017: 282). It also returns in her analysis of the painting used for the album’s cover: Strategy (South Face/ Front Face/North Face) by British artist Jenny Saville, depicting three perspectives on an obese woman in underwear. Wodtke characterises the painting as articulating an ‘abject reality’ (2017: 280), presenting an ‘aesthetics of disgust’ that—like many paintings by Saville—breaks through the ways in which Western consumption culture permeates the reception and representation of female bodies with standardised ideas about beauty (2017: 283–5). In his analysis of the album, Daniel Lukes observes furthermore that the three parts of the painting refer to the origins of the triptych in Christian art and argues that its presentation of embodiment and flesh therefore forms an example of what has been characterised as ‘gorgeous abjection’ (Jones et  al. 2017: 226). With the three ‘faces’ of the title

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referring to the ‘faces’ of mountains, the woman on the painting indeed powerfully stares down the spectator, forcing him to face the truth presented by The Holy Bible.

Abjection and Modernism Since Kristeva argues that the abject is that which is pushed out of the symbolic realm, she observes that it cannot completely be grasped with help of words: ‘the abject is “something” that I do not recognize as a thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes me. On the edge of nonexistence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safeguards. The primers of my culture’ (Kristeva 1982: 2). The abject, in other words, also refers to meaninglessness. Kristeva argues that literary texts can be understood as places in which this aspect of the abject is not only explored and approached, but also hollowed out and, to return to this notion again, purified. Certain literature, she claims, comes as close as possible to the abject without losing itself completely in its ungraspable meaninglessness: ‘Because it occupies its place, because it hence decks itself out in the sacred power of horror, literature may […] involve not an ultimate resistance to but an unveiling of the abject: an elaboration, a discharge, and a hollowing out of abjection through the Crisis of the Word’ (Kristeva 1982: 208). What I find important to emphasise is that Kristeva describes how literature puts the abject into words: by translating the abject in different ways into language, this literature manages to both explore and purify the realm of meaninglessness without itself becoming meaningless, she argues. In spite of Kristeva’s own poststructuralist leanings, I want to argue, this observation introduces a modernist emphasis on dense explorations of (linguistic or musical) form, which I have discussed as the first characteristic of popular modernist music in Chap. 2. To be able to link this tendency more specifically to the form of words instead of to the form of music, I want to briefly return to Adorno’s notion of the ‘windowless monad’. In the previous chapter, we have seen that the German

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philosopher focuses on artworks in which form mirrors the, in his view, reifying aspects of modern societies. This often implies, he argues, that these works explore the form of the work until the moment it almost stops meaning—the moment the symbolic order is about to collapse and the distinction between words and reality almost implodes. This enables these artworks to become so incomprehensible and dense that they become windowless monads and critically place themselves in opposition to the social totality. One of the clearest examples of this latter process is found, according to Adorno, in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. In this play, Adorno observes, the words uttered by the protagonists have almost completely lost their meaning, and language is turning into a reified structure of empty and hollowed out words. As he writes in Aesthetic Theory: Beckett’s oeuvre already presupposes [the] experience of the destruction of meaning as self-evident, yet also pushes it beyond meaning’s abstract negation in that his plays force the traditional categories of art to undergo this experience ... Beckett’s plays are absurd not because of the absence of any meaning, for then they would be simply irrelevant, but because they put meaning on trial; they unfold its history. (2002a: 153)

Jameson describes a similar aspect of modernism by referring to a form of representation that touches ‘its outer limits’ (2007: 119). Put within Kristeva’s terminology: a play like Endgame explores the meaning of words as they form a barrier to protect the subject against the ‘weight of meaninglessness’ that lies beyond it. By doing this to the outer limits of language, holes are punctured in this language, giving the subject glimpses of the abject without completely leaving the structure of language behind. It is this same modernist tendency, I want to argue in the following, that returns in the lyrics of The Holy Bible in a popular modernist manner. An example is formed by the line that follows the above-cited passage from ‘P.C.P’: ‘P.C. she speaks impotent, sterile, naive, blind, atheist, sadist, stiff-upper lip…’ This line explores the borders of symbolic meaning by fragmenting into a list of words that almost stop making sense, emphasising the idea that an Orwellian focus on language ignores political issues and reduce speech to meaninglessness and silence. However, at

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the same time these words also resist being pulled down completely into the semiotic realm, which means that they present a struggle for autonomy; a struggle to also constitute meaning on a symbolic level. Alison Stone argues, as we have partly seen in Chap. 1, that some popular music lyrics ‘achieve originality not through the opacity of their language but rather through the particularity of the contexts, situations, and feelings that they nonetheless describe in fairly plain-spoken language’ (2016: 243). The modernist tendency of the lyrics of The Holy Bible, I believe, makes them counter this observation, and—almost violently—resist everyday language and everyday life. It is important to emphasise that this, in my view, makes these lyrics, and the art praised by Adorno, different from the ‘abject art’ celebrated within several avant-gardist traditions, as well as within several of Kristeva’s own works. For example, Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, created in the 1930s, was driven by the attempt to translate experiences of suffering, pain, boredom and the abject into the realm of theatre (see Bermel 1997). This resulted in a language that is robbed of its meaning and that is reduced to sounds, screams and cries, created to break through the, in Artaud’s view, false nature of modern life. The literature that Adorno praises, in contrast, keeps clinging to the symbolic order and explores its limits without completely breaking through them, representing the idea that one cannot completely escape the control of this order. It is also important to emphasise that these modernist tendencies distinguish the album’s lyrics from several postmodern explorations of embodiment, even though the art praised by Kristeva seems to express the postmodern idea that corporeality is always shot through with discourse and ideology. After all, the ‘abject’ explores forms of representation that gain this meaning by being the ‘other’ of our ideological notions of, for example, beauty and ‘cleanliness’. As Auslander observes in an analysis of the often abject nature of the postmodern performance art of Vito Acconci: All these events involve uses and aspects of the body that are, in and of themselves, seemingly independent of social discourses, ideology, and the like. The body’s bruisability, its reflexes, its production of saliva and

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­ erspiration, go on regardless of these other issues. But it is precisely p because it does these things that the body is absorbed into a cultural economy of representation that emphasizes cleanliness and order – the body’s productions must be masked, suppressed, and eliminated… (1997: 93)

Again, this seems to affirm the postmodern idea that everything about the body is discursive and ‘cultured’. Since, in contrast with Acconci’s performance art, Kristeva focuses on words, however, and since The Holy Bible communicates its truth to the listener primarily in the form of lyrics that refer to bodies instead of showing them (in the next chapter, I will show how these words eventually usurp the body on other Manic Street Preachers releases), I want to argue that the album’s explorations of the abject, to some extent, preserve the modernist tendencies that Adorno emphasises in his observations on Beckett’s Endgame. They reject postmodern celebrations of hybridity and immanence, again almost making the album’s words, in their striving towards autonomy and purity, turn against the music of which they also form part, and shaping a specific form of popular modernism. Kristeva herself discusses modernist authors like Kafka, Proust and Dostoyevsky in this context. Her prime example of literary explorations of the abject is Louis-Ferdinand Céline. As she observes about the French author, emphasising aspects that return as well in Octave Mirbeau’s aforementioned The Torture Garden: [Céline’s] coarseness, issuing from the global catastrophe of the Second World War, does not, within the orb of abjection, spare a single sphere: neither that of morality, or politics, or religion, or esthetics, or, all the more so, subjectivity or language. If in that process he shows us the ultimate point that can be reached by what a moralist would call nihilism, he also testifies to the power of fascination exerted upon us, openly or secretly, by that field of horror. (Kristeva 1982: 207–8)

What is important about this passage, is not only that Kristeva, again, refers the exploration of the borders of language, but also that she links these to exploration of the borders of structures like culture, politics and religion. She writes: ‘abjection, when all is said and done, is the other

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facet of religious, moral, and ideological codes on which rest the sleep of individuals and the breathing spells of societies. Such codes are abjection’s purification and repression’ (1982: 209). It is this latter aspect that reintroduces the second characteristic of popular modernism, discussed in Chap. 2 with help of Mark Fisher and others. We will see in the following that The Holy Bible is characterised by a popular modernist sensitivity not only because of its exploration of words and its emphasis on control, but also because of its radical critique of processes of modernisation associated with capitalism, bureaucratisation and commercialism. Generation Terrorists, we have seen, seems to partly accept the fragmentation of autonomy that comes with a postmodern world shot through with the logic of consumer capitalism, only to then express a critical message within this world by employing Situationist forms of irony and détournement. The Holy Bible, in contrast, violently rejects the fragmented nature of this postmodern world and instead mourns the death of modernity and of modern values like autonomy and dignity.

The Holy Bible’s Lyrics Now that I have discussed aspects of The Holy Bible’s musical context, its sound, cover and sleeve art, quotes printed on this sleeve, the interplay between music and lyrics, as well as Kristeva’s notion of the abject and the way it may return in modernist and popular modernist art, I am finally in a position to analyse the album’s lyrics in more detail. Since this has been done extensively in several publications on the album (most extensively in 2017’s Triptych), I do not aim to cover all of these lyrics. Instead, I will explore those details that are important for my analysis of the third critical model, showing how these lyrics revolve around a violent rejection of the social order.47

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Exploitation The lyrics of the first song on the album, ‘Yes’, introduce the notion of the ‘abject’ to the listener, exploring that which Kristeva describes in the passage cited above as ‘a passion that uses the body for barter’. Adorno’s descriptions of the culture industry echo through this song as well, especially his analyses of the permeation of the spheres of love, sexuality, beauty and embodiment by the manipulative techniques of consumerism (see Adorno 1998a: 76). The band link this exploration to nihilistic descriptions of what it is like, as a modern rock band, to be part of a world defined by consumerism, with Wire stating: ‘We feel that we’ve prostituted ourselves over the last three or four years’ (qtd. in Heatley 1998: 90). In the booklets of the album’s two anniversary editions, the following phrase is printed on what might be the cover or promotion material for a (never-released) single of ‘Yes’: ‘100% artificial, insincere hypocritical guarantee’, introducing Manic Street Preachers as ‘the band that likes to say yes’. Starting and ending with soundbites taken from English film director Beeban Kidron’s 1993 documentary Hookers, Hustlers, Pimps and their Johns (Price 1999: 144), in which a procurer (a ‘pimp’) states that ‘everything’s for sale’ and lists the prices one has to pay to do what kinds of things with ‘his’ sex-workers, these lyrics refer to a sphere in which the body, its desires, sexuality and sensuality are instrumentalised, reified, commodified and made into exchangeable objects. The song describes the same reified universe as Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, in which everything—from worker’s unions to sexuality to love to happiness—is ‘for sale’ as well. I want to look at a specific passage in the lyrics of ‘Yes’, which I will cite here again in the form in which it is printed in the album’s booklet: · in these plagued streets of pity you can buy anything · for $200 anyone can conceive a God on video · he’s a boy, you want a girl so tear off his cock · tie his hair in bunches, fuck him, call him Rita if you want, if you want · I eat and I dress and I wash and I still can say thank you · puking – shaking – sinking I still stand for old ladies · can’t shout, can’t scream, I hurt myself to get pain out ·

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These lyrics are devoid of sentimentality and describe a Célinian universe—‘plagued streets’–in which forms of human contact, religious experience (‘a God on video’) and language are, as in Beckett’s Endgame, reduced to empty gestures (eating, dressing, thanking, standing up for elderly people).48 By describing these practices and experiences in this way, the symbolic order is revealed to be a merely empty code, an observation that is emphasised by confronting this code with that which it is supposed to protect the self from: the abject (puking, shaking, sinking). What furthermore strikes the reader of these lines is their semiotic form: they present a staccato list of statements, as well as descriptions of situations and perspectives: the perspective of the procurer who believes that ‘tearing off’ someone’s penis equals making that person into ‘a girl’,49 and the perspective of those who are reduced to empty shells within this consumerist discourse.

Corporeality The last line in the passage from ‘Yes’ cited above, reflects the ways in which the abject returns in The Holy Bible’s discussion of embodiment: more specifically, this happens in references to decay and putrefaction, as well as to self-harm. The latter theme is presented in these lyrics as, on the one hand, a way to feel anything at all—‘can’t scream, hurt myself to get pain out’—and on the other hand as the ultimate form of control over one’s body, one’s feelings and, more generally, one’s existence.50 The lyrics of ‘Die in the Summertime’,51 for example, explicitly express the theme of suicide as a response to the inability to preserve one’s own purity (embodied by romantic notions of childhood, illustrated by pictures of the band members as children printed next to the lyrics in the album’s sleeve booklet) and ideological solidity. They also present self-­ harm as a way of disciplining and punishing the body for the embodied self ’s aforementioned corruption and impurity. This idea is clearly expressed in the song’s following two lines: ‘Scratch my leg with a rusty nail, sadly it heals · […] · childhood pictures redeem, clean and so serene’.

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Furthermore, it is linked to Christian notions of purity by stating that if an addressed ‘you’ really cares, he should ‘wash the feet of a beggar’. This theme continues in a more disturbing way in the lyrics of ‘4st7lb’, the title of which refers to the weight ‘generally said to be the threshold of death’ (Price 1999: 146). The lyrical ‘I’—a girl (the lyrics refer to ‘my breasts’ that are ‘sinking’, see Price 1999: 145)—describes how a need for absolute control and purity drives the self in an anorexic quest to ‘shed’ her ‘cocoon’ and reduce herself to a skeleton. This quest is embodied in the statements ‘I want to walk in the snow · and not soil its purity’,52 and ‘I wanna be so skinny that I rot from view’.53 In the album’s booklet, a picture of an apple is printed next to the song’s lyrics. ‘4st7lb’ opens with a quote from a documentary called 40  Minutes: Caraline’s Story – A Young Anorexic’s Final Months (see ‘Caraline’s Story – A Young Anorexic’s Final Months’ [video fragment), in which we hear the documentary’s protagonist declaring: ‘I eat too much to die, and not enough to stay alive. I’m sitting in the middle waiting’. The notion of ‘discipline’ is mentioned as well in a passage that ends the song and that I want to quote in full to show the style in which anorexia is approached in the song: self-worth scatters, self-esteem’s a bore · I long since moved to a higher plateau · this discipline’s so rare so please applaud · just look at the fat scum who pamper me so · yeh 4st. 7, an epilogue of youth · such beautiful dignity in self-abuse · I’ve finally come to understand life · through staring blankly at my navel.

As we see in this passage, anorexia is defended as a way of resisting the outside world and of sculpting one’s body, disciplining and controlling it to its outer limits; to the moment it is almost dead and becomes the cadaver—the alive object that ‘falls’ (the Latin ‘cadere’) into death—that Kristeva links to the abject. What makes these descriptions particularly

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disturbing is that they are devoid of sentimentality and present anorexia as a form of empowerment and self-sculpting; as a way to transcend one’s longing for ‘self-esteem’, reach a higher level of existence, become an ‘epilogue of youth’ and eventually ‘understand life’ by becoming a body that weighs 4st7lb. This perspective borders on the immoral, especially if we have the abused and suffering protagonist of the above-mentioned documentary in mind. At the same time, it is this latter aspect that gives these lyrics a social and political element: anorexia is presented to the listener as a way of threatening the symbolic order and constituting one’s own form of purity. After all, anorexia and self-abuse are described as resulting in a ‘beautiful dignity’ that deserves applause, and the song states that ‘choice is skeletal in everybody’s life’. This theme continues in the lyrics of the song ‘Faster’ (referring to processes of social acceleration embodied by the song’s pace, but also to someone who fasts), in which the practice of self-harm is aggressively defended as a way of shaping one’s own self. This becomes clear in the song’s three opening lines, in which the notion of ‘purity’ returns again and is ironically linked to an empowering defence of that which the symbolic order represses as abject or ‘primitive’: ‘I am an architect, they call me a butcher · I am a pioneer, they call me primitive · I am purity, they call me perverted’.54 In several interviews, Edwards indeed defended the practice of self-harm as superior to aggression towards other people: ‘I’m not a person who can scream and shout, so this is my only outlet. It’s all done very logically’ (qtd. in Shutkever 1996: 34). I return to this topic in the next chapter. As in Jean Genet, Mirbeau or Céline’s literature, the lyrics of ‘Faster’ also explore the darker sides of our moral beliefs. Again, the notions of ‘purity’ and ‘corruption’ return several times. The song opens with a soundbite taken from the 1984 film version of Orwell’s 1984, in which we hear Winston Smith (played by English actor John Hurt) claim that he hates purity and goodness and wants ‘everyone corrupt’ (see Radford 1984).55 Simon Price writes: ‘According to Richey, the point of the song was that morality is merely obedience to the ruling caste. He said that the song was inspired by Yukio Mishima, [...] whose elitist, quasi-­Nietzschean notions of nobility are usually – if simplistically – interpreted as being right-wing’ (Price 1999: 125). Indeed, ‘Faster’ combines a Nietzschean

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emphasis on superhuman self-constitution—symbolised by the statement that the lyrical ‘I’ ‘spits out’ Plath and Pinter and is ‘stronger than Mensa, Miller and Mailer’—with a rejection of the social order, embodied by the line ‘If you stand up like a nail then you will be knocked down’, a reference to the Japanese proverb that ‘the nail that sticks out shall be hammered down’. The song even combines this Nietzschean emphasis with a rejection of existence in general, proclaiming that life is ‘for the cold made warm’. In this way, these lyrics transform lyrical defences of anorexia and self-harm—symbolising the discipline and purity of what Wodtke calls ‘an Übermenschian declaration of a strong mind over a weak body’ (Jones et al. 2017: 287–8)—into a critical perspective on society.

Misanthropy The abject returns as well in the song ‘Of Walking Abortion’, which takes its title from the 1968 S.C.U.M. Manifesto by the American radical feminist Valerie Solanas, who tried to kill Andy Warhol in the same year she published her manifesto.56 In this manifesto (the title of which stands for ‘Society for Cutting Up Men’), which was already quoted in the booklet of Generation Terrorists to accompany the above-discussed ‘Little Baby Nothing’ (see Price 1999: 145), Solanas argues that males are incomplete females, ‘walking abortions’, responsible for phenomena like war and corruption and, therefore, wrong and evil (Solanas 1971: 3). The song opens with an audio-sample in which we hear the aforementioned Hubert Selby Jr. talk about the moment he realised he was going to die and had to live his life over again; an experience of a Nietzschean eternal return that sparked his will to write and give his life meaning again. Since the sample only presents the part in which the author is talking about the idea that he would have to live his life over again, however, it mainly transmits a message of angst and of weariness with existence. The lyrics of ‘Of Walking Abortion’ indeed translate Solanas’ ideas into an attack on humanity and human existence in general. They focus on the rise of totalitarianism in the Europe of the twentieth century and are driven by an observation that Nicky Wire put into words as follows:

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‘there’s a worm in human nature that makes us want to be dominated’ (qtd. in Price 1999: 145). In another interview, he observed about The Holy Bible: ‘There’s an overriding philosophy behind the whole album: evil is an essential part of the human condition and the only way to get over it is recognizing all hypocrisies, all evils – recognizing it’s in us all – which I guess is not a liberal view’ (qtd. in Lynskey 2011: 1183).57 A characteristic passage in ‘Of Walking Abortion’, for example, reads as follows. Mussolini hangs from a butcher’s hook · Hitler reprised in the worm of your soul · Horthy’s corpse screened to a million · Tisu revived, the horror of a bullfight · fragments of uniforms, open black ruins · a moral conscience…

In this passage, we find specific references to European fascist leaders—Mussolini, Hitler, Horthy and Tisu—formulated in staccato sentences that emphasise the ways in which their ideas live on in modern culture. And again, the last two lines fragment into short phrases describing the destruction and moral devastation that these leaders caused. The song, furthermore, explicitly makes the listener into an accomplice of this culture with the repeatedly shouted exclamation: ‘who’s responsible – you fucking are’. What specifically makes these lyrics disturbing (and critical), I want to argue, is that they, again, are born in flirtations with the abject perspective. This is seen more clearly in the lyrics’ adoption of a phrase taken from the diary of David Smith, the brother-in-law of Myra Hindley, girlfriend and accomplice of the British serial killer Ian Brady: ‘People are like maggots. Small blind and worthless fish bait’ (see Brady 2015: 7— the lyrics leave out the last two words). In his analysis of the affective workings of art, Ernst van Alphen refers to Kaja Silverman’s notion of ‘heteropathic identification’ to analyse what happens in art that explores similar aspects of human existence. During moments of heteropathic identification, Van Alphen writes, ‘the self doing the identification takes the risk of – temporarily and partially – “becoming” (like) the other. This is both exciting and risky, enriching and dangerous, but at any rate, affectively powerful’ (Van Alphen 2008: 28). Applying this idea to the lyrics

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of ‘Of Walking Abortion’, we could argue that they force the listener to identify with ‘the other’ (in the case a serial killer) to constitute an affective shock and trigger critical reflection, not so much endorsing the serial killer’s perspective but exploring its abject nature. In the lyrics of the song ‘Revol’, we find a more bizarre and absurdist approach to political ideologies. Released as the album’s second single, the song’s lyrics link observations on the psychosexual development of the subject to stereotypical psychoanalytical readings of the psyches of people like Che Guevara, Pol Pot, Louis Farrakhan, Napoleon and Leon Trotsky. Its opening lines, furthermore, refer in chronological order to six leaders of the Soviet Union and Russia: ‘Mr. Lenin – awaken the boy · Mr. Stalin – bisexual epoch · Kruschev – self love in his mirrors · Brezhnev – married into group sex · Gorbachev – celibate self importance · Yeltsin – failure is his own impotence’. The lyrics then break open this absurdist approach to political icons with help of phrases taken from different totalitarian contexts: ‘Lebensraum’, ‘fila fila’ and ‘raus raus’. Trying to make sense of these words, the reader is forced to look these people and phrases up, struggling with the political perspective that they present. Observing that ‘revol’ refers to change and repetition, but that its mirror image is ‘lover’ (a mirroring that returns more explicitly in their song-title ‘Enola/Alone’ on Everything Must Go), for example, Evans eventually arrives at the conclusion that ‘Revol’ presents a ‘Freudian nightmare of fascist politics’ (2019: 47). It could also be argued that the song is driven by the attempt to de-mystify the leaders mentioned in its lyrics, embedding them in references to narcissism, group sex, impotence and bisexuality. These references reduce the often horrible role that these people played in history to a longing for power that, the lyrics suggest, is born in the pathology of their psychosexual self-formation. The aforementioned notion of heteropathic identification can be applied as well to the lyrics of ‘Archives of Pain’, named after a chapter in David Macey’s 1993 biography of the French philosopher Michel Foucault (Price 1999: 145). The song is built around a sinister but powerful bass line that propels the more and more radical nature of the arguments that follow each other up in its lyrics. It opens with a soundbite taken from the mother of one of the victims of the British serial killer Peter Sutcliffe, who states: ‘I wonder who you think you are. You damn well think you are God or something? God give life, God taketh it away,

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not you. I think you are the Devil itself ’. Jones argues in Triptych that the album prioritises ‘victims over martyrs’ by referring to its line ‘Pain not penance, forget martyrs, remember victims’ (Jones et al. 2017: 90–9) and claims that it is born in a rejection of cultural fascinations with serial killers.58 I want to argue, however, that the song actually comes closer to an identification with the perspective of the serial killer, inspired by Foucault’s attempt to de-naturalise and historicise the modern penal system. This implies that we, as listeners, are addressed as the ‘you’ in this audio-­ sample. Again, this forces us to identify with evil, with the abject, prioritising the element of evil without providing an explicit moral standpoint. The following lines exemplify the extreme nature of ‘Archives of Pain’s heteropathic identification: if man makes death then death makes man · tear the torso with horses and chains · killers view themselves like they view the world, they pick at the holes · not punish less, rise the pain · sterilise rapists, all I preach is extinction · kill Yeltsin, who’s saying? Zhirinovsky, Le Pen, Hindley and Brady, Ireland, Allit, Sutcliffe, Dahmer, Nielson, Yoshinori Ueda, Blanche and Pickles, Amin, Milosovic · give them respect they deserve ·

As in the above-discussed lyrics of ‘P.C.P.’, we see that this passage opens with longer phrases and statements (referring to Foucault’s descriptions of dismemberment in Discipline and Punish), but gradually loses its consistency and becomes a mere list of names of serial killers (Beverly Allit, Colin Ireland, Peter Sutcliff, Denis Nielson and others), political figures (Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Eugène Terre’Blanche, Idi Amin), a judge (James Pickles) and other figures who the band present as appealing, in some way or another, to the ‘worm’ in human nature. This reference to Foucault and heteropathic identification recalls what the French philosopher, in an analysis of texts by Jorge Luis Borges, defines as ‘heterotopias’: ‘Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy ‘syntax’ in advance, and not only the syntax with

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which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to ‘hold together” (Foucault 2002: xix). In contrast with ‘utopias’, which ‘run with the very grain of language and are part of the fundamental dimension of the fabula’, Foucault argues that heterotopias ‘desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source’ and ‘dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences’ (Foucault 2002: xix). I want to argue that the lyrics of ‘Archives of Pain’ constitute such a heterotopia, born in that which the above-cited lyrics of ‘Archives of Pain’ describe as ‘picking at the holes’ in the world. These lyrics force the listener to identify with the abject point of view through the aforementioned process of ‘heteropathic identification’. They confront the liberal justice system with its ‘other’: the evil nature of a wide range of individuals—from serial killers to rapists to politicians—for whom, the song tells us, the notions of justice, autonomy and freedom do not mean anything since they ‘view themselves’ like ‘they view the world’. Furthermore, as Foucault observes about heterotopias, these lyrics force the listener to reflect on the borders of the symbolic order, on the realm in which this order becomes meaningless and loses its power, not by stating that this system has its limits and that forms of evil linger outside of it, but by exploring them to their outer limits in a language that reaches its endpoint as well. This exploration goes so far that the fascist, abject point of view suddenly presents itself again in the song as a convincing way of punishing people for defending this same point of view: ‘if man makes death then death makes man’, ‘rise the pain’, ‘sterilise rapists’; even defending the practice of dismembering people with help of horses. After all, ‘Archives of Pain’ tells us: ‘If hospitals cure · then prisons must bring their pain · do not be ashamed to slaughter · the centre of humanity is cruelty · […] · You will be buried in the same box as a killer…’, and concludes in a response to the aforementioned Myra Hindley: ‘a drained white body hanging from the gallows · is more righteous than Hindley’s crotchet lectures’. The idea that everyone forms part of this wrong whole is illustrated by the observation that the second time the aforementioned list of names is sung, the name of ‘Milosevic’ is replaced with ‘Manic Street Preachers’.

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Hiroshima and the Holocaust I want to conclude this analysis of the abject, as it rears its head in The Holy Bible’s lyrics, by describing two songs that are rather unique in the history of popular music: ‘Mausoleum’ and ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’. Inspired by the band’s visits in 1993 to the concentration camps Bergen-Belsen and Dachau, as well as to the site of Hiroshima (Price 1999: 146), these songs are attempts to say something meaningful about two of the most horrific events in human history. The lyrics were partly inspired as well by Edwards’ fear ‘that the clock was winding back to the 1930’s’ (Evans 2019: 47), especially caused by historians denying the Holocaust and the growing popularity of the British National Front and Jean-Marie Le Pen in the 1990s (Evans 2019: 56).59 Following an analysis of these songs, Matthew Boswell observes that The Holy Bible offers ‘one of the most sustained and challenging treatments of the Holocaust in twentieth century popular music’ (2012: 124). In these songs, we see how Kristeva’s idea that the borders of language are the same borders that protect the realm of culture and meaning from the abject meaninglessness of evil, finds its expression in explorations of the impossibility of giving meaning to genocide and mass atrocities. ‘Mausoleum’ concerns the desolation caused by the atomic bomb and, more generally, again explores the abject realm of evil. The specific meaning of its lyrics is oblique; the song seems to describe a dictator lying in a mausoleum and the inability of humanity to learn from the past and eradicate evil—‘humanity recovered glittering etiquette · answers her crimes with Mausoleum rent’. The song goes on: ‘… but life is so silent · for the victims who have no speech · […] · obliterates your meaning’. These lyrics aim to give meaning to the victims it refers to, reflectively problematising the ability to do this by grasping for words in a context that ‘obliterates meaning’. The song also describes the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing with phrases like ‘no birds – no birds · the sky is swollen black’, and refers to a ‘holy mass of dead insects’. This mass is mentioned in Masuji Ibuse’s 1965 novel Black Rain, itself about the nuclear aftermath of Hiroshima (see Treat 1995: 369).

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In ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’, the impossibility of translating atrocities into language returns in an even more devastating manner, accompanied by music that comes the closest to the aforementioned industrial sound of Throbbing Gristle: it is dominated by a slow machine-­ like and repetitive pattern, which constantly returns in the background, like the humming, dehumanised and abject machinery of evil that its title refers to. The song opens with a sample from a 1947 Russian documentary called The Nuremberg Trials (Boswell 127) and discusses the Holocaust. This is not done in a sentimental or explicitly normative framework. Instead, the song itself represents the struggle to put the event into words, asking the question if there is any framework at all in which it can be given meaning. Exemplary are the following lyrics: · 6 million screaming souls · maybe misery – maybe nothing at all · lives that wouldn’t have changed a thing · never counted – never mattered – never be · arbeit macht frei · transport of invalids · Hartheim Castle breathes us in · in block 5 we worship malaria · lagerstrasse, poplar trees · beauty lost, dignity gone · Rascher surveys us butcher bacteria · welcome welcome soldier smiling ·

The first lines of this passage emphasise the impossibility of giving meaning to what happened in the death camps and, more generally, the approximately six million people who were murdered under National Socialism. Even though the song sometimes aims to do this (‘beauty lost, dignity gone’), most of its others lines reflect the idea that the Holocaust undermines the ability to give meaning to anything at all. This idea is illustrated, for example, by its reference to Primo Levi’s discussion of the meaninglessness of the word ‘hunger’ in the devastating context of the death camps, proclaiming that ‘hunger’s a word’. As Levi observes in If This Is A Man: ‘If the Lagers had lasted longer, a new, harsh language would have been born’ (1959: 144). Boswell therefore observes that the song contains a ‘self-abusive turn’, which ‘reflects a kind of battle emerging between events which destroyed lives and with them the possibility of meaning in life and a creative

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process that is inherently generative of meaning’ (2012: 129). The song’s staccato phrases indeed show how concepts and words are hollowed out and lose their meaning in a context as gruesome as the Holocaust, a process embodied by Adorno’s claim, discussed in Chap. 3, that ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today’ (Adorno 2003a: 162). Since, however, these words form part of a song, of something meaningful—‘poetry’—that is created, Boswell argues, this results in a form of self-reflective guilt about its own existence, expressed through the song’s lyrics and machine-like, fragmenting sound. Indeed, the lyrics of ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’ constantly return to the suggestion that meaning crumbles down under the weight of the Holocaust. This suggestion is shaped in different ways. For example, the song explores an abject point of view that questions the meaning of the lives that were lost, or moral perspectives that would enable us to judge what happened. They refer, as the passage quoted above shows, to ‘lives that wouldn’t have changed a thing’, that ‘never counted, never mattered’; and to a situation that is ‘maybe misery, maybe nothing at all’. The song even contains the controversial line ‘Churchill no different · wished the works bled to a machine’, presenting the structures of capitalism, in line of Adorno, as not fundamentally different from the dehumanising machine of National Socialism—as another instance of the dialectical relationship between the individual and the social totality. They force the listener to reflect on the ways in which the National Socialist past has been worked through in contemporary societies, and whether it is still present in its abject dimensions—I briefly return to this latter issue in Chap. 8. Another way in which the song problematises the idea of generating meaning in this context, is by turning away from judgements or normative observations, even from comprehensive descriptions. Instead, these lyrics coldly refer to facts or objects, in a style devoid of emotion. The passage above, for example, mentions Schloss Hartheim, where thousands of physically and mentally disabled people were killed, as well as the Invalidentransporte, the experiments of SS doctor Sigmund Rascher, and the Lagerstrasse in concentration camps.

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When hearing these lyrics, the listener furthermore notices that they describe the existence in the camps in the present tense (‘breathes’, ‘worship’, ‘surveys’). As Ernst van Alphen writes in an analysis of texts by French Holocaust survivor Charlotte Delbo: ‘The traumatic event, which happened in the past, does not belong to a distant past: it is still present in the present (2005: 169). Van Alphen observes that this aspect of trauma returns in texts by Holocaust survivors in the use of the imperfect tense. In ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’, this idea is radicalised: imperfect tense is replaced with present tense, making memories of the horrors of the concentration camps into a living reality in the now. The present tense returns as well in the phrase ‘soldier smiling’, which reminds of the following statement in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics: ‘What the sadists in the camps foretold their victims, “Tomorrow you’ll be wiggling skyward as smoke from this chimney,” bespeaks the indifference of each individual life that is the direction of history. Even in his formal freedom, the individual is as fungible and replaceable as he will be under the liquidator’s boots’. (Adorno 1973: 362).

A Dark Mirror This brings me to the end of my discussion of The Holy Bible. Even though I have not discussed all of the album’s lyrics and references (there are many more), I hope that this analysis shows that the album successfully presents us with a critical model. This is the case, first, because it gains an autonomous position by exploring the boundaries of meaning to its outer limits, placing itself in opposition to the social totality. Since the album also presents the possibility of saying anything meaningful about the abject at all, it furthermore gains a reflective dimension that turns against the same language in which these ideas are expressed. Combined, these aspects make the album into a dark mirror that reflects the falseness of the world without clinging to any values outside or inside this world. Implicitly, it can, therefore, also be understood as a rejection of the Britpop movement that was gaining momentum when The Holy Bible was released: both its music and its lyrics ignore the main characteristics of this movement, instead presenting a combination of postpunk and

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grunge that accompanies lyrics that depart from the optimistic character of Britpop and its embrace of Cool Britannia. In his analysis of ‘Of Walking Abortion’, which he characterises as the moment the protest song ‘eats itself ’ (2011: 1166), Lynskey observes: Any successful protest song requires that the songwriter stop asking questions at a certain point and either say, Here is something like a solution, or leave the ambiguities dangling like loose threads, for individual listeners to tug at and unravel in their own way. But on The Holy Bible, Edwards is relentless, plunging deep into the moral mulch in order to find some approximation of truth which exists beneath the usual platitudes and assumptions. The album is too confoundingly complex to yield anything as simple as a message. (2011: 1169)

This idea can be translated to the notion of the critical model: The Holy Bible presents a world in which there are no values to cling to; no solutions. It undermines the order that shapes our lives and gives our art meaning. In one of the last pages of Powers of Horror, Kristeva asks the reader: ‘In these times of dreary crisis, what is the point of emphasising the horror of being?’ (1982: 208). She answers this question in different ways, arguing that approaching the abject is like allowing ‘the most deeply buried logic of our anguish and hatred to burst out’ (1982: 210). To a certain extent, this is what The Holy Bible does. Like Francis Bacon’s 1946 Painting, the album uncovers the abject, animalistic brutality boiling under the surface of the symbolic order; like George Orwell’s 1984, it imagines the future as a ‘boot stamping on a human face – forever’ (1977: 256); and like the literature of Romanian pessimist Emil Cioran, the album is driven by the following abject aim: ‘Sometimes I wish I were a cannibal – less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him’ (Cioran 1973: 186). The album, in other words, is driven by the aim to force the social order to look in the mirror and acknowledge the rotten nature of its core. At places, this aim even takes the shape of an almost biblical form of revenge, foregrounded by its title. This aspect is emphasised as well by a quote from a different era and a different social and political context of oppression and exploitation. For promotional photographs shot in The

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Holy Bible-era, the band posed behind a glass window on which the following passage from Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave is written (see Ikeda 2002: 146): They are deceived who flatter themselves that the ignorant and debased slave has no conception of the magnitude of his wrongs. They are deceived who imagine that he arises from his knees, with back lacerated and bleeding, cherishing only a spirit of meekness and forgiveness. A day may come – it will come, if his prayer is heard – a terrible day of vengeance, when the master in his turn will cry in vain for mercy. (see Northup 1996: 191)

The same quote is printed on the vinyl double A-side of ‘Faster’/‘P.C.P.’. In line of this call for apocalyptic revenge, the answer that I want to formulate as a response to Kristeva’s question, is that emphasising the horror of being within the realm of popular music, enables the resulting artwork to radically criticise the ‘entire culture we take for granted’, almost to a point where this ‘entire culture’ is completely hollowed out. Indeed, Kristeva herself observes that, when exploring the abject, one is ‘preparing to go through the first great demystification of Power (religious, moral, political, and verbal) that mankind has ever witnessed’ (1982: 210). Beginning with its title, this means that The Holy Bible demystifies the hold that the social order has on the subject without sparing this same subject or the band Manic Street Preachers: this subject and this band, the album shows the listener after all, are shaped by, dependent on and complicit to this same order.60

Conclusion Above, I have argued that Manic Street Preachers develop—or aim to develop—three different critical models on their first three albums: Generation Terrorists, Gold Against the Soul and The Holy Bible. My discussion of these models was driven by that which I characterised in Chap. 3, with help of Adorno, as a critical paradox: how can one critically resist a

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social and cultural whole if one does this within the same whole that the critic characterises as completely false? Even though these releases respond to historical and cultural contexts to which Adorno does not respond, even though they therefore use different authors and ideas to set up their critical models, and even though Adorno would criticise my focus on the way in which musical sound and lyrics express ideas, it is still the Adornian notion of a complete resistance against the status quo, coupled to a continual realisation of the futility of voicing this resistance from an autonomous point of view, that enables me to highlight what happens on these albums. Only on The Holy Bible, I concluded furthermore, we find a critical model that successfully translates the standards of autonomy and reflection into a robust form of critique. Overall, the analyses developed in this chapter can be understood as an argument against the claim, discussed in Chaps. 1 and 3, that popular music preserves an autonomous status because of its semiotic elements. Instead, I have argued that the sound and music of the above-discussed albums, as well the semiotic elements of their lyrics, do play a role in the meaning of these releases, but that only focusing on these styles and their semiotic elements does not result in a complete understanding of what these releases try to do. The listener also has to understand their lyrics on a symbolic level, work through them, decipher them, and reflect on them to develop a sense of what these songs mean. It is true that some of these words shoot at the listener like a bullet, to use a phrase by Benjamin (1968: 237), affectively touching her because of their poetic form, or because of the ways they are sung or set to music. Often, they do this even by struggling against this music, embodying the quest for autonomy by resisting the hybrid nature of popular music, contrasting its often conventional form with a waterfall of words. They present the listener with an exploration of the borders of that which Kristeva calls our ‘ideological codes’—with a ‘crisis of the word’. But also—and that has been the crucial part of my analysis—they do this because of the message these words carry on a symbolic level; that which they communicate conceptually to us as listeners, who understand these concepts, interpret them and try to embed them in their worldview, often without success.

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Notes 1. In his foreword to Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, Jameson reflects on the difficulty of defining the notion of ‘postmodernity’, referring to authors as diverse as Debord, Lefebvre, Bell, Adorno and Deleuze, who all diagnose and criticise ‘the postmodern’ in different ways (1984: vii-x). In Fred Pfeils Another Tale to Tell, we find a helpful discussion of the different ways in which the term ‘postmodernism’ has been defined. Pfeil observes that whereas Marxists like Jameson approach the concept in a highly critical manner, others approach it mainly in a formalistic sense and, therefore, merely as the successor of modernism (1990: 132–134). In this Chapter, I adopt Jameson’s approach, since it comes the closest, I will argue, to Manic Street Preachers’ own struggles with postmodernity. In another critical analysis of ‘postmodernism’, Neil Nehring argues that the term goes hand in hand with poststructuralism’s inability to refer to any solid foundation (2007: 3–20). Whereas Mark Fisher, as we will see in Chap. 6, presents the ideas of Derrida as a critical reflection of and response to postmodernism, Nehring, in other words, approaches poststructuralism as a rather uncritical embodiment of the tendencies of postmodernism itself. He also argues that Jameson’s pessimism undermines the ability to formulate critique, playing a fatalistic role in analyses of otherwise critical forms of pop culture (2007: 21–25). I disagree, since I believe that a band like Manic Street Preachers absorbs ideas similar to those of authors like Jameson (and Adorno), to then develop specific forms of critique. Ignoring these pessimistic ideas would not enable us to understand what a band like Manic Street Preachers aim to. For another influential analysis of postmodernism, see Harvey 1990: 300. To illustrate my use of the concepts of ‘modernism’ and ‘postmodernism’ in the context of popular music, the following characterisation of Oasis and The Beatles by Derek B.  Scott is helpful: ‘In that they are not attempting to progress or create an individual language for themselves, Oasis are postmodernist (that is, they reject pop metanarratives, and play down the role of ‘originating genius’). The Beatles’ concern with innovation, technology, progress and individuality marked them out as modernists, despite their occasional forays into postmodernist parody’ (2010: 120). 2. On Adorno and postmodernism, see Bernstein 2005: 20–27.

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3. This is not an original observation. Since the band members themselves referred to Situationism frequently, many authors have written about the links between Situationism and Generation Terrorists (see, e.g., Price 1999: 78; Clarke 1997: 26). 4. Jameson refers to Debord’s notion of the spectacle to illustrate observations on the postmodern ‘simulacrum’, which he defines with help of Plato as a copy of which no original exists (1992: 18). 5. Greil Marcus observes the following about L’Internationale Lettriste, out of which the Situationist International was born: ‘The delinquent intellectuals of the LI saw the culture and commerce of the West as exiled Frankfurt School critics Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer had seen it at the end of the Second World War: a single system of suffocation and domination’ (1989: 168). 6. Watson describes how the complex compositions of Frank Zappa, combined with his humorous lyrics and explorations of taboo topics, were inspired by Situationist ideas as well (1993: xxi-xxvii). Watson is critical, however, of the ways in which the ideas of the Situationists were, in his view, later ‘streamlined’ and commercialised on the one hand, and used to simplistically reject ‘the spectacle’ on the other. 7. For a discussion of Situationist uses of totalitarian symbols by punk, see Boswell 2012: 111. For an analysis of Gang of Four and Situationism, see Dettmar 2014: 69–73. 8. For an analysis of the critical aspects of Laibach, see also Jones et  al. 2017: 164. 9. Examples are formed by the Manic Street Preachers cover of ‘Wrote for Luck’ by Happy Mondays (released as a B-side on the single of ‘Roses in the Hospital’) and Bradfield collaborating with 808 State, a band associated with Madchester, on their song ‘Lopez’ (on Don Solaris). Even though Manic Street Preachers frequently criticised Britpop for revolving around false images of the working class, furthermore, they later also praised the music of bands like Oasis (see Heatley 1998: 55) and even toured with Oasis in 1996. Manic Street Preachers also covered ‘The Drowners’ by Britpop band Suede (a live version of the cover featuring Suede’s Bernard Butler was released as a B-side on the single of ‘She is Suffering’). 10. The song’s iconoclastic meaning is strengthened by a William S. Burroughs passage on adolescents destroying everything that makes up the social order, discussed below in footnote 27.

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11. Flags play an important role in several Manic Street Preachers releases (see also Naish 2018: 15): the cover of their 1992 E.P. Theme from M.A.S.H. (Suicide Is Painless) depicts an American flag; the video-clip of the same song (on Forever Delayed [DVD]) shows the band playing in a hall filled with flags (perhaps inspired by early The Clash concerts, which, as seen in the 1980 film Rude Boy, often included an assemblage of flags as stage backgrounds); on the sleeve of the single of ‘The Masses Against the Classes’, we see a Cuban flag without a white star; and during most post-1995 concerts the band draped a Welsh flag over one of their speakers. The back sleeve of the 1992 album Generation Terrorists, furthermore, depicts a burning European flag (perhaps the results of the band’s New Art Riot). 12. Again, the band later rejected the radical nature of their ‘Pol Pot-phase’ by playing phrases of Motown songs (such as The Supremes’ ‘Baby Love’, as seen on the DVD Leaving the 20th Century) before ‘Motown Junk’ and by expressing admiration for the melodies of Motown songs. 13. Price describes Generation Terrorists as  ‘Rock-Music-as-Trojan-Horse (1999: 44). 14. Simon Reynolds criticises the band for eventually embracing the commercial realm and reneging ‘on their auto-destruct promise, as they must have always known they would, being indentured employees of a major label who required a return on their investment. Instead, [Manic Street Preachers] doggedly slogged their way to stardom by the bog-standard route: touring and releasing singles in numerous formats to ensure chart entry’ (2011a: 131). 15. This stylistic shift is exemplified by the differences between the two versions of the songs ‘You Love Us’ and ‘Spectators of Suicide’: both songs were released on the 1991 independent single of ‘You Love Us’ and re-­ recorded for Generation Terrorists. The re-recorded versions have been robbed of their initial rawness and present easily digestible and catchy glamrock. 16. The only song on the album that has a different musical style is Public Enemy’s The Bomb Squad’s re-mix of ‘Repeat (UK)’, entitled ‘Repeat (Stars and Stripes)’. 17. As mentioned in Chap. 2, the font used for the album’s cover refers to the font used on Guns N’ Roses debut album. Furthermore, the album’s booklet, in which all lyrics are printed, contains a collage of pictures of the band members, reminiscent of the collage of pictures printed in the sleeve of Appetite for Destruction.

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18. The Guns N’ Roses song ‘It’s So Easy’, of which Manic Street Preachers included a live cover as a B-side on the 1992 single of ‘You Love Us’, forms an example. The song’s lyrics describe the easy access to sexual encounters within celebrity life. However, Edwards also observed that some Guns N’ Roses lyrics express critical perspectives on American culture (see Price 1999: 49), an observation illustrated by the rather nihilistic and fatalistic descriptions of the emptiness of celebrity life that can also be found in the lyrics of ‘It’s So Easy’. 19. For a rather critical analysis of ‘entryism’ as the product of a ‘particularly virulent capitalist mind plague’, see Fisher 2019: 294. 20. This means that Edwards’ original tattoo, branding himself as a member of the ‘useless generation’ his band aimed to criticise, and the one created for the album cover combine McLaren’s aforementioned statement that one should terrorise and abuse one’s useless generation. Other artworks that the band contemplated using for the album’s cover were Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, one of Matthias Grünewald’s paintings depicting Christ’s crucifixion, Salvador Dalí’s Christ of Saint John of the Cross, Clarence John Laughlin’s photograph The Spectre of Coca-Cola, and a picture of Auguste Rodin’s sculpture I Am Beautiful (see Price 1999: 68). 21. For an analysis of the dominant role of masculinity in rock ‘n’ roll, as well as punk and metal, see Oakes 2009: 225. 22. The reference to Levi Jeans, which return in several Manic Street Preachers lyrics as a symbol of late capitalism, reminds of the following passage in Epstein’s study of noise and music: ‘For Adorno and Eliot, a Wagnerian TV ad that promises to restore the broken world with blue jeans invites salutary questions about the health and wholeness of music itself under the baton of Mr. Moneybags’ (Epstein 2014: 59). 23. In his Essay on Liberation, Marcuse refers in a similar way to the goods provided by the United States to Cuba and Vietnam: ‘guns and butter, napalm and color TV’ (1969: viii). 24. A similar attack on democracy was formulated in the lyrics of ‘Democracy Coma’ (on the single of ‘Love’s Sweet Exile’ and later on Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of Manic Street Preachers). This song compares the coronation of the queen to an auto-da-fe, and uses the phrase ‘Mother of the Free’, from the patriotic British song ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, to describe the United Kingdom. The song ends with a sample in which we hear Beat poet Allen Ginsberg read a line from his poem ‘Howl’ (Ginsberg 2014). Lines from the same poem were printed in the sleeve

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of the single of ‘Stay Beautiful’. The song ‘Methadone Pretty’ (on Generation Terrorists), furthermore might refer to Ginsberg’s use of the phrase ‘methadone kitty’, uttered in a poem read by Ginsberg himself on The Clash’s song ‘Ghetto Defendant’ (on their 1982 album Combat Rock). 25. A sample from Public Enemy’s song ‘She Watch Channel Zero?!’ (on It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back) was used in ‘Starlover’, a B-side on the 1991 single of ‘You Love Us’. Chuck D is also quoted in the sleeves of Generation Terrorists and the 1992 single of ‘You Love Us’. 26. Initially, the band wanted Kylie Minogue to sing the song. Later Bradfield and Moore co-wrote the songs ‘Some Kind of Bliss’ and ‘I don’t Need Anyone’, appearing on Minogue’s 1997 album Impossible Princess. 27. This line is also a reference to the following passage in William S.  Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, which the band printed on the sleeve of their 1991 single of ‘Motown Junk’: ‘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’ (see Burroughs 2001: 38). Another quote by Burroughs, taken from his novel Junky, is printed in the sleeve of Manic Street Preachers’ single of ‘Stay Beautiful’. 28. Huyssen also observes how one of the revolutionary techniques of the avant-garde—the visual montage—eventually became a ‘standard procedure in commercial advertising’ (1986: 161). 29. For an analysis of the notion of ‘avant-garde’, its many reincarnations and the question whether the avant-garde may still exist in the realm of performance art, see Sell 2005: 1–55. 30. Oakes analyses the binary representation of male/female in song lyrics and links it, with help of Judith Butler’s analyses of the performativity of gender, to the idea that this representation is dependent on a normative notion of heterosexuality (2009: 222). In the video-clip of ‘Little Baby Nothing’ (on Forever Delayed [DVD]), Manic Street Preachers use their above-discussed slogan-style approach to try to break through this form of representation and this normativity. This video includes phrases like ‘All rock ‘n’ roll is homosexual’ and shows a hammer and sickle, made of a ripped up Union Jack, in a pink triangle in the background of a female group (‘The Dead End Dolls’) playing the song (still, Bradfield is seen

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singing). The title of their independently released 1991 single ‘Feminine is Beautiful’ seems to reflect a similar idea. 31. We hear Jones reading a passage from his poem ‘The Eloquence in Screaming’ (on Commemoration and Amnesia) in the opening of ‘Love’s Sweet Exile’. 32. The theme of alienation is emphasised by the song’s video-clip (on Forever Delayed [DVD]), in which we see the band during their Japanese tour, surrounded by neon advertisements and anonymous masses of ­people. For an early text in which Marx rejects liberalism for presenting a form of ‘political emancipation’ that does not truly emancipate human beings, see ‘On the Jewish Question’ (1978b). 33. The band had already mentioned the film as an influence in a 1991 NME interview (see NME Originals: Manic Street Preachers 2002: 26). 34. We do find some political lyrics on B-sides released during this era. The lyrics of the aggressive punk song ‘Us Against You’ (a B-side on the single of ‘Roses In The Hospital’), for example, attack the hegemony of ‘London’, referring to John Major and Virginia Bottomley. On the Life Becoming a Landslide E.P., furthermore, we find an aggressive cover of McCarthy’s ‘Charles Windsor’, which addresses the Prince of Wales, telling him that he is going to be brought to the guillotine. 35. The song opens with ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ and ends with the American Pledge of Allegiance. The song’s lyrics describe Bateman’s obsessions (Genesis, Huey Lewis and the News, his filofax organiser), Ellis’ earlier novel Less Than Zero, and characterise Bateman as a combination of Luke Rhinehart (whose Nietzschean attempts to undermine morality with help of his ‘dice philosophy’ echo through the song’s blasphemous and deliberately controversial lines) and Travis Bickle (the troubled protagonist of Taxi Driver). Manic Street Preachers also referred to Ellis by printing a passage from his novel Less Than Zero in the sleeve of their single of ‘Stay Beautiful’. 36. In ‘Britpop and Blairism’, Jeremy Gilbert develops an even more critical analysis of the, in his view, racist and nationalist aspects of Britpop (2014). In the chapter, Gilbert also rejects Manic Street Preachers’ ‘Motown Junk’ as a racist dismissal of a Black musical tradition. Gilbert, however, overlooks more nuanced interpretations of the song, even using a line—‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’—that is used by Manic Street Preachers in their song ‘Ifwhiteamericatoldthetruthforonedayit’sw orldwouldfallapart’ [sic] (on The Holy Bible). The line refers to Jack

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Gilroy’s book There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (1992), which focuses on Blackness and the entwinement of institutionalised racism and the economic structures of the United Kingdom. 37. Manic Street Preachers covered Nirvana’s song ‘Been a Son’ (which appeared on Lipstick Traces) as well as ‘Pennyroyal Tea’ during a BBC Radio 1 session. 38. A US version of the album was released as well, containing a different mix and lacking the titles of songs printed on the cover. Instead, these titles are printed on the album’s back sleeve. 39. In the video-clip of ‘Faster’ (on Forever Delayed [DVD]), we see the band playing in uniforms against a white background as well, intermitted with phrases and words from the song’s lyrics. Before they came on stage at concerts in The Holy Bible era, the band used to play Carl Davis’s famous theme to the 1974 documentary history series The World at War, emphasising their focus on militancy and war. 40. In the sleeve booklet of 20th anniversary edition of The Holy Bible, we see that this quote was taken from an analysis of Mirbeau’s book by V. Vale and Andrea Juno. 41. I return to the role that communism plays within the band’s releases in Chap. 6. 42. In his book on The Holy Bible, David Evans analyses the album’s lyrics and music separately, emphasising the density and autonomy of these lyrics. 43. Nicky Wire printed a quote by Kippenberger on his 2006 solo album I Killed the Zeitgeist. The painting Balance by Joan Celnik was used for the sleeve of the special edition Z-case release of the single of ‘She Is Suffering’. The design of the covers of the singles of ‘She is Suffering’ and ‘Revol’ (the colours and font used for the band name and song titles printed on the cover, as well as the positioning of image and words), furthermore, also resembles the cover of the 1961 album Time Further Out by The Dave Brubeck Quartet, which shows a painting by Joan Miró. 44. According to Price, the song was influenced by an article in New Marxism in which Mick Hume attacked censorship. Price mentions Orwell’s 1984 and Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 as well (1999: 125). ‘P.C.P.’ ends with an audio sample from Ronald Harwood’s 1983 film The Dresser: we hear Albert Finney’s character stating that, after playing Shakespeare’s King Lear 227 times, he cannot remember the first line anymore. Perhaps, this sample illustrates the forgetfulness that goes hand in hand with, as

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Bradbury shows, destroying books, or, as Orwel shows, removing words from the dictionary and, eventually, from language and culture. Within The Holy Bible, the phrase also draws the listener’s attention to the first line of the album’s first song, ‘Yes’. 45. The line later returned as the title of Kieran Evans’ 2019 concert film of Manic Street Preachers’ anniversary concert tour of The Holy Bible. The reference to the 2000 AD comic books mirrors The Mekons’ taking their name from the main villain in the Dan Dare comic book series. 46. The song ‘Dead Trees and Traffic Islands’ (a B-side on the single of ‘A Design for Life’) might refer to JG Ballard’s 1974 book Concrete Island, about a person trapped on a traffic island in a dystopian urban wasteland. 47. This means that I will not discuss three songs on The Holy Bible in detail. The first is ‘Ifwhiteamericawouldtellthetruthforonedayit’sworldwouldfal lapart’ [sic], named after a quote by American comedian Lenny Bruce (see Price 1999: 144—the song’s title is spelled in a grammatically correct way on the Minidisk-release of the album). The song’s lyrics form a rather direct attack on American politics and US foreign policy, especially its postmodern entwinement of consumerism, entertainment and politics. It opens with a sample from the announcement of a 1983 ‘GOP TV’ show about Thatcher and Reagan and includes references to Tipper Gore of the Parents Music Resource Center, the Republican Party’s ‘Moral Majority’, Paul Gilroy’s study of British racism called There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (1992), as well as a list of countries in which the United States, in some way or another, have been involved politically. The lyrics also target institutionalised racism in the United States and reject the Brady Bill gun law for being a mere ploy to deny people of colour access to guns instead of structurally solving the issue of gun crime. The second song I will not discuss is ‘She Is Suffering’, released as the album’s third single. As briefly mentioned in Chap. 2, this song expresses that which Rio Otomo, in an article on Yukio Mishima, characterises as ‘the Dostoyevskian aesthetic that beauty (or truth) exists in the most unlikely location, that is, the ‘abject’ site of the brooder’s mind’ (Otomo 286), resulting in forms of pain and suffering. On the US version of The Holy Bible, the song opens with a sample of British scientist John G. Bennett stating: ‘It is impossible to achieve the aim without suffering’. This same sample was used in the song ‘Exposure’ (on Exposure) by American musician Robert Fripp. The third song I will not discuss is the rather tender and melancholic

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‘This Is Yesterday’, which embodies a personal expression of despair. The song describes how the life of the lyrical ‘I’ is corroding in a style that reminds of the poetry of Sylvia Plath. 48. The line ‘I hurt myself to get pain out’ reminds of a scene in Hannah Green’s I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, in which the novel’s troubled protagonist burns herself with cigarettes to try and feel pain, and pull herself out of her imagined and illusory universe filled with cruel gods (see Green 1964: 238–39). 49. I do not agree with Daniel Lukes’ claim in Triptych that the album presents a sexist perspective on femininity as ‘castrated masculinity’ (Jones et  al. 2017: 223). This interpretation overlooks the observation that these lyrics explore an abject point of view without necessarily endorsing this view. 50. In a fascinating analysis of these lyrics, Wodtke argues that skin forms the border between the inner and outer world and, therefore, the location where this border can be crossed/broken through to explore the abject (2017: 288). 51. As Daniel Lukes observes the title might have been inspired by Mishima’s short story ‘Death in Midsummer’ (Jones et al. 2017:217–20). 52. The song’s lyrics also refer to not leaving a footprint in the snow, which, as David Evans observes, might be a reference to a similar line in Tennessee Williams’ play The Eccentricities of a Nightingale (see Evans 2019: 62). 53. The lyrics mention models Kate Moss, Emma Balfour, ‘Twiggy’ and Kristen McMenamy, as well as Karen Krizanovich, who had a column in the magazine Sky that often reflected on ways to lose weight. They are addressed by their first names, constituting a feeling of familiarity with the anorexic ‘I’ of the lyrics. 54. Many authors have linked this line to the first line of the Sex Pistols’ ‘Anarchy in the UK’ (on Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols), in which Johnny Rotten declares himself to be an antichrist and an anarchist (see, e.g., Price 1999: 125). 55. In the sleeve of the single of ‘Faster/P.C.P’, we find a quote from Orwell’s Animal Farm. A B-side on this single, the aggressive punk song ‘Sculpture of Man’, presents an extremely direct attack on consumerism and the monarchy, in which Situationist sloganeering returns. 56. Mary Harron’s 1996 film I Shot Andy Warhol depicts these events. Harron also adapted Ellis’ American Psycho into a film in 2000.

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57. Larissa Wodtke argues that the album performs ‘memory work’ by consciously working through the past of Europe, especially the rise of totalitarian structures, and by exploring the ideas and mechanisms behind our adoration for dictatorial leaders. She links this observation to the theoretical notion of ‘difficult knowledge’, which ‘works in opposition to lovely knowledge, which confirms and affirms one’s beliefs’ (Jones et al. 2017: 267–8) 58. In interviews, Wire specifically targeted a line in the Therapy?-song ‘Trigger Inside’ (on Troublegum), in which the lyrical subject claims that he knows how Jeffrey Dahmer feels (see Price 1999: 145; Jones et  al. 2017: 91). 59. In 1994 the band played the Anti Nazi League Carnival Against The Nazis, on May 28th. 60. I therefore disagree with Wodtke’s claim that the ‘difficult knowledge’ presented by The Holy Bible may result in what she calls ‘Counter-­ Enlightenment’ philosophies, among which she groups poststructuralism (Jones et al. 2017: 278). Instead, I would argue, the album should be understood more in line of Adorno’s dialectical critique of Enlightenment, which both criticises Enlightenment thought but, at the same time, defends the importance of Enlightenment values like reflection, critique and autonomous self-constitution by mourning them and describing how they contain the seeds of their own destruction.

5 Embodiment and Self-Overcoming: Everything Must Go, ‘Judge Yr’self’ and Journal for Plague Lovers

Introduction In the previous chapter, I described three critical models as manifested on Manic Street Preachers’ first albums: Generation Terrorists, Gold Against the Soul and The Holy Bible. In my analysis of the third critical model, several aspects related to embodiment were foregrounded: I observed that self-harm, anorexia and references to the decay of the body return in an exploration of that which Kristeva characterises as the ‘abject’. I furthermore observed that even though these references to embodiment are strengthened and emphasised by, mainly, Richey Edwards’ own struggles with and representations of his body, the album’s focus on words eventually gives it a popular modernist dimension that distinguishes it from several avant-gardist and postmodernist explorations of corporeality. This approach also enabled me to focus as much as possible on these words themselves without reducing them to the intentions or psychological states of their writer(s). It is this same approach and this same theme— embodiment—that play major roles in the critical model that I want to discuss in this chapter, which focuses on lyrics that Edwards left behind before his disappearance. Since this model is more closely tied to body © The Author(s) 2020 M. Peters, Popular Music, Critique and Manic Street Preachers, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43100-6_5

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art, to expressions of mental states, to reflections on the notion of ‘madness’, to the entwinement of author and persona, and to the absence/ presence of Edwards’ embodied existence, this model will include more references to Edwards himself than the models discussed in the previous chapter. Still, however, I aim to focus as much as possible on the band’s art itself—on their music and words—but it will not be possible to completely exclude these biographical aspects from my analysis. In the following, I will use a similar approach when analysing the philosophy of Nietzsche, the poetry of Plath and the art of Mishima, in which artist, persona and artwork are, at places, also entwined, I will argue. The Holy Bible was the last album that the band created together with Edwards, and many of the aforementioned biographical aspects concern the context in which the album came about. Before and during its release, Edwards’ condition worsened, fuelled by a series of destabilising events: the death of the band’s manager, Philip Hall, from cancer in 1993, the death of his childhood dog, the suicide of a close friend, and Kurt Cobain and Guy Debord’s suicides in 1994 (see Price 1999: 119, 123, 175). Edwards was hospitalised several times for severe alcohol abuse and weight loss and, around the album’s release, was committed in The Priory Hospital, a mental health care facility in London (Price 1999: 132–3). In his last television interview, he described his condition as follows: ‘It gets to a point where you really can’t operate anymore as a human being. You can’t even get out of bed. You can’t make yourself a cup of coffee without having something go badly wrong. Your body is too weak to walk’ (‘Richey Edwards’ last TV interview part 2’ [video fragment]). After his release and a tour, which ended with the band smashing all their gear in the London Astoria in a violent display of anger, frustration and cathartic need for destruction, Edwards gave his last interview on January 23. The pictures made for the interview show a very thin man with a shaved head and hollow eyes, wearing striped pyjamas (Price 1999: 188, 197, 203; Middles 1999: 158). In February 1995, he vanished. His car was discovered later, parked close to the Severn Bridge, an infamous suicide spot. His body was never found, however, and the fact that he systematically withdrew specific amounts of money before his disappearance, as well as several unconfirmed sightings, fuelled ideas about a possible staging of his disappearance.

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But Edwards never returned, and the band decided to continue as Manic Street Preachers. In 1996, they released an album with the telling title Everything Must Go, spawning four highly successful singles that led to a commercial streak in the band’s career. Speaking about the possibility of Edwards returning and becoming part of the band again, Wire observed: ‘Unless he’s had a miracle cure and become a Nietzschean strongman, I can’t imagine him wanting to go through all that again’ (qtd. in Price 1999: 198). In 2008, he was officially declared ‘presumed dead’. In this chapter, I will explore Manic Street Preachers songs that were released after Edwards’ disappearance but that do contain his lyrics. I will argue that these songs constitute a fourth critical model, which revolves, as mentioned earlier, for a large part around embodiment. This model is based on an interpretation of several ideas of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, which I will link to understandings of modernism and modernity with help of observations made by Japanese author Yukio Mishima.

Being One’s Truth In Nietzsche’s works, I want to argue, we find an early version of the paradox that I discussed at the end of Chap. 3 and that, we have seen, forms the basis of my notion of the critical model.1 This paradox finds its most famous expression in the following paragraph in Nietzsche’s The Gay Science: Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace, and cried incessantly: “I seek God! I seek God!” […] Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? […] Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

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[…] “I have come too early,” he said then: “my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time… (1974: 181–2)

With the death of religious systems, Nietzsche argues here, it has become impossible to believe in any pre-existing values anymore: with the growing influence of enlightenment discourses, the natural sciences, and social and economic circumstances propelling forms of secularization, he observes, we have killed God, wiped away ‘the entire horizon’ and entered an age of nihilism. If we phrase this observation with help of the metaphor discussed in Chap. 3, then Nietzsche’s ideas about nihilism imply that there is nothing that Baron Munchausen can cling to in his attempt to pull himself out of his swamp. Furthermore, as we will see below, all values, ideas and truths that still seem to be present in our culture—that Munchausen might find in his swamp and use as foundations for a critical analysis—are meaningless, in Nietzsche view; mere remnants of a metaphysics that died with God as well. This means that the three conditions that constitute the paradox of Adorno’ critique return. Nietzsche, after all, (1) aims to criticise a context of which he himself forms part; (2) aims to show that there is no ‘outside’ to this context, which means that he cannot refer to external values of a religious, metaphysical or scientific nature; and (3) aims to develop critique that revolves around the claim that this context is false— ‘sick’—and does not provide values or foundations either. Like Adorno’s works, Nietzsche’s texts therefore revolve around the paradoxical attempt to find, defend or construct a form of critique in a context that, this same critique suggests, makes this impossible. Nietzsche, in other words, aims to present us with an answer to Adorno’s paradox and, therefore, with the contours of a critical model. Unlike Adorno, however, he aims to do this by constructing values of a highly individualistic nature, embodied by the ‘madman’ in the passage from The Gay Science discussed earlier. Whereas Adorno focuses on changing (or at least criticising) social, cultural and economic structures as they permeate the individual, Nietzsche is mainly concerned with changing the individual herself in spite of the social, cultural and economic contexts that surround her, disconnecting this individual from the social totality.2 In his analysis

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of modernity and city life, Georg Simmel therefore observes that Nietzsche’s emphasis on the ‘relentless struggle of the individual’ (1982: 324) forms a direct response to historical processes of modernisation, driven by the attempt to protect the individual against the influence of mass culture and an anonymous life in modernity.3 We will see that this individualist approach gradually takes over the fourth critical model discussed in this chapter as well. This means that, on the releases that I will analyse below, the band replace their political and social critique with a more existentialist and religious focus on the embodied, individual self.

Embodiment and Critique What makes the critical model found in Nietzsche’s works particularly fruitful for the realm of popular music is that Nietzsche links his struggle to constitute values and criticise the context in which he finds himself to his own embodied existence. He does this most explicitly in Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is. In this book, he provides an overview of his life and his works, presenting everything he did and everything that happened to him as necessary steps in the formation of his philosophy. The idea, manifested in the passage cited earlier, that the madman speaks his truth ‘too early’ echoes through Ecce Homo as well. Nietzsche presents himself as a mad prophet, a manic (street) preacher, whose radical and renewing ideas—his own ‘truth’—have yet to be fully understood: ‘My time has not yet come, some people are born posthumously’ (2004: 40). In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche presents this truth with help of references to the character of Zarathustra, the prophet he already gave shape in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In a world in which the voice of reason has resulted in the death of God, in a wiping out of our moral and religious horizons and in an ‘unchaining’ of the earth from the sun, the philosopher can only move forward, he argues with help of Zarathustra, by embracing his own fate—Amor Fati (Nietzsche 1974: 223)—and becoming his own sun. Only the weak need religious or moral systems, Nietzsche goes on, since this enables them to hide behind the (Christian) idea that they are, by definition, sinful and powerless and cannot change their condition anyway. However, he not only criticises Christianity for being hostile towards

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the intellect, but also rejects its negative understanding of the body. Instead of praising the strength and beauty of the corporeal dimension of existence, he observes, Christianity portrays the flesh as ‘weak’ and sinful, and life as revolving solely around matters of the ‘soul’. Besides Zarathustra, Nietzsche refers in Ecce Homo to Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, fertility and ritual madness, as symbolising that which Christianity tried to repress and overcome, concluding the book with the line: ‘Dionysus against the crucified’ (2004: 98). These ideas found their way into the lyrics of the Manic Street Preachers song ‘Crucifix Kiss’ on Generation Terrorists, which, as briefly mentioned in Chap. 4, present a violent attack on Christianity’s attempt to keep people weak and favour the eternal instead of the present. The song refers to Christ as ‘Führer Nazarene’ and its lyrics are accompanied in the album’s sleeve by the following quote from Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human: ‘It was Christianity which first painted the devil on the world’s wall; It was Christianity which first brought sin into the world. Belief in the cure which it offered has now been shaken to its deepest roots; but belief in the sickness which it taught and propagated continues to exist’ (1996: 329). Aiming to cure his cultural context of this ‘sickness’, Nietzsche also moves away from the, in his view, passionless, bodiless and powerless truths sought after by theoretical science and most of the philosophers that preceded him: ‘To speak truth and shoot well with bow and arrow, that is the Persian virtue. – Am I understood? … The self-overcoming of the moralist into his opposite – into me – that is precisely what the name of Zarathustra means in my mouth’ (Nietzsche 1996: 92). The arts play an important role in this self-overcoming, and Nietzsche frequently contrasts the passionate, creative and Dionysian nature of the artists he embraces with the, in this view, dry and disembodied realm of theory, religion and most philosophy.

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Corporeality and the Fourth Critical Model In Ecce Homo, the idea that one truly has to embrace one’s fate returns in Nietzsche’s claim that even that which happened to him and over which he had no control (his father’s early death, his worsening eyesight, his migraines) should be interpreted as necessary for the formulation of the truth that he, as a specific individual, came to manifest. He describes his 1881 work Daybreak, for example, as made possible by a heavy migraine attack: ‘In the midst of the torments of an uninterrupted three day brain-­ pain accompanied by troublesome vomiting of phlegm – I possessed a dialectical clarity par excellence and thought very cold-bloodedly through things for which in healthier circumstances I am not enough of a social climber, not cunning enough, not cold enough’ (Nietzsche 1996: 11–12). Even the body’s vulnerability to suffering and pain, in other words, can be transformed into signs of power and strength, in Nietzsche’s view, since this dimension of his existence provided the author with the ‘coldness’ required to distance himself from humanity as a whole and, to link this observation to Manic Street Preachers, question ‘the entire culture we take for granted’. It is this idea that forms the basis of the fourth critical model: if one wants to create art that is both autonomous and reflective, as Adorno observes, then one needs to constitute a critical distance between the artwork and that which it criticises. And in a world in which, as Nietzsche claims, this distance cannot be created anymore by finding an Archimedean point—by clinging to religious values or to rationally construed or objective truths—one should attempt to make oneself into a truth. It is with help of this truth, manifested in a specific embodied self, that a critical distance can be created, according to the German author. Again, this means that this fourth critical model is not primarily based on a critical analysis of economic or social structures. Instead, it revolves around the individual who aims to constitute himself as his own critical yardstick. In his study of Nietzsche, Weber and Foucault’s critique of modernity, David Owen puts this idea into words as follows: ‘In so far as the death of God represents the collapse of the grounds of any unconditional extra-human authority, nihilism breeds a culture of individualism; there

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is not, and cannot be, any universally valid authority or set of moral values…’ (1994: 75).4

Embodiment, Personas and Popular Music Before developing an analysis of the way in which these ideas return in several Manic Street Preachers releases, I want to briefly reflect on the role that this Nietzschean fourth model may play in popular music in general. Since this fourth model revolves for an important part around the body, I want to do this with help of ideas on corporeality, performativity and popular music as developed by Philip Auslander. Whereas Nietzsche could still present the body as, in some way or another, opposed to the culture he aimed to criticise, Auslander links his observations on popular music and embodiment to postmodernity, which makes the constitution of such a distance more difficult. As discussed in the previous chapter, after all, Auslander argues that in postmodernity the body is pulled into the realm of discourse, becoming a performative entity shaped in and by realms of representation. This implies, he observes, that in postmodernity our references to embodiment have to take the idea into account that the body is ‘produced by ideological encodings, which it cannot simply transcend’ (Auslander 1997: 92). This suggests, in turn, that forms of critique can only be developed by exploring alternative forms of bodily representation that take place within these same structures and discourses. We can think in this context of popular artists who play with ideas about gender, body positivity and corporeal representation, like Madonna, Lizzo, Shea Diamond, Prince, Arco, Jayne County, Mykki Blanco or Christine and the Queens. Still, however, Auslander observes the following in an analysis of body alteration and postmodern performance art, returning to the Gramscian notion of hegemony: ‘A body that is understood to be discursively produced and ideologically encoded can also be seen as a site of resistance where hegemonic discourses and codings can be exposed, deconstructed, and, perhaps, rewritten’ (1997: 140).5 On the fringes of the realm of popular music, we indeed find musical groups that experiment in more radical ways with embodiment, not just to change—‘rewrite’—ideas

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about representation and corporeality, but to shock or even traumatise the audience in performative ways. Often, these experimentations were influenced, directly or indirectly, by avant-garde movements.6 In Simon Reynold’s study of postpunk, for example, we find the following description of a performance by English art collective COUM Transmissions, which included artists—Genesis P-Orridge, Cosey Fanni Tutti—who would later form Throbbing Gristle7: Typical components of a COUM performance included P-Orridge placing severed chicken heads on top of his penis and masturbating, or P-Orridge and Tutti engaging in simultaneous anal and vaginal sex using a double-­ pronged dildo. Various combinations of soiled tampons, maggots, black eggs, feathers, and syringes full of milk, blood, or urine figured as props. For instance, P-Orridge might stick a hypodermic into his testicle and then inject the blood into a black egg. Or for a pièce de résistance, he might give himself a blood-and-milk enema and then fart out the liquid, splattering the gallery floor. (Reynolds 2006: 411–12)

In his study of avant-garde and punk, furthermore, Clemens Marschall analyses the ways in which the body was used by early punk musicians to explicitly attack cultural norms and the social status quo. They aim to create what Guy Debord characterised as ‘mini-revolutions from below’, Marschall argues, which would replace the failed revolutions of the twentieth century (Marschall 2016: 9). Marschall cites an insightful quote from American punk and shock rocker GG Allin, which echoes Benjamin’s famous statement that ‘the work of art of the Dadaists became an instrument of ballistics’ and ‘hit the spectator like a bullet’ (Benjamin 1968: 237). GG Allin states: ‘My mind is a machine gun, my body is the bullets and the audience is the target’ (qtd. in Marschall 2016: 210). Indeed, the musician played aggressive punk, covered his body with tattoos, often played shows during which he attacked the audience, mutilated himself, defecated and urinated on stage, and mixed his art with everyday life by taking his performances to the streets and shocking random bystanders. When he died of an accidental overdose, his corpse was made part of a last performance,

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with fans organising a party and adorning his body with cigarettes and photographs, breaking through the social order by exploring the abject. Another important role played by embodiment returns in Auslander’s analysis of the musical persona, briefly discussed in the previous chapter. Auslander distinguishes different ‘layers of performance’ (2004: 6) and reflects as follows on the process during which a popular music performer is shaped: The process begins with a real person who has some desire to perform as a popular musician; this may include the desire to participate in a certain musical genre or the desire to express certain aesthetic or socio-political ideas through popular music. In order to enter into the musical arena, the person must develop an appropriate performance persona. This persona […] becomes the basis for subsequent performances. (2004: 11)

In the previous chapter, I illustrated this emphasis on the inclusion of the body in popular culture with help of the observation that in the Generation Terrorists-era, Manic Street Preachers ironically adopted the persona of the glamrocker. They acted out a decadent image as a form of détournement, using this persona as a way to smuggle theoretical and political issues into the mainstream, mainly with help of their lyrics. The ironic use of this persona, furthermore, made it possible for the band members to continually slip in and out of these performances, performing them on stage but, during interviews and, more importantly, in their lyrics, developing political analyses that reflected on these same personas as manifestations of nihilistic decadence. The critical model that I have sketched above with help of Nietzsche’s observations on becoming one’s own truth, however, results in a persona that is more difficult to separate from what Auslander calls the ‘real person’ of the musician. As briefly mentioned in Chap.1, Auslander himself discusses the different personas that David Bowie developed during the many stages of his musical existence: Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Halloween Jack, the alien in The Man Who Fell to Earth and ★ or Blackstar (see Boswell 111, Stone 57).8 Bowie’s controversial persona of the Thin White Duke, revolving around a fascist aesthetics and ideas about the inherently totalitarian elements of the rock ‘n’ roll artist (and the

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performative and entertaining aspects of fascist totalitarianism), specifically stands out in the context of this chapter. Bowie observed that he was gradually losing his sanity in this period, describing his 1976 album Station to Station, on which the Thin White Duke plays a prominent role, as ‘a piece of work by an entirely different person’ (qtd. in Doggett 2011: 252). It could be argued that by performing these personas and exploring them to the point of his own insanity, Bowie developed a version of Nietzsche’s notion of becoming one’s own critical truth. In her analysis of popular music and representations of madness, Nicola Spelman discusses related observations and describes Bowie’s performances as follows: ‘through clever use of reversal techniques, humour and role play, [Bowie] offers a critique of psychiatry that actively encourages listeners to question their own definitions of madness and sanity at the same time as espousing the potential appeal of difference’ (2012: 38).9 Yet another, again very different example of the Nietzschean entwinement of person, body and persona is formed by Lady Jaye and the aforementioned Genesis P-Orridge. The two artists created the pandrogyne project, revolving around the attempt to modify their bodies so they would come to resemble each other more and more, gradually turning into one being with one gender, beyond the dichotomy between male and female. Reflecting on their transition, Genesis P-Orridge, who was born Neil Andrew Megson, observes: ‘Some people take their lives and turn them into the equivalent of a work of art. So we invented Genesis, but Gen forgot Neil, really. Does that person still exist somewhere, or did Genesis gobble him up? We don’t know the answer. But thank you, Neil’ (qtd. in Leland 2018). Again, the constitution of the pandrogyne forms a radical postmodern translation of Nietzsche’s references to embodiment as a crucial dimension of one’s critical perspective, in this case a perspective that destabilises the essentialist and dualistic ways in which we tend to represent and experience gender, according to Genesis P-Orridge. These examples, however, constitute rather general links with Nietzsche’s ideas. Furthermore, they are born, again, in the idea that in postmodernity the body, as well as ideas about gender or ‘madness’, are shot through with ideological structures and notions that shape their meaning. In the following, I want to show that Nietzsche’s theory returns in a more specific way in Manic Street Preachers releases and results in the

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attempt to completely reject the social totality that shapes the self. In contrast with the performative gestures of Bowie and the embodied critique of Genesis P-Orridge and Lady Jaye, the critique shaped by this fourth critical model revolves more around negativity and a modernist rejection of the status quo, than around a postmodernist play with discursive signifiers. I will argue furthermore that this is the case since this model, again, is primarily shaped in the realm of the band’s lyrics. This constitutes a relationship between body and language that mirrors Adorno’s observations on the body’s problematic position in modernity and, again, eventually gives this model a modernist dimension that, through dense explorations of linguistic form, strives towards a form of purity. This means that this model is inspired by Nietzsche’s attempts to entwine self and body and become one’s own truth, but that it at the same time aims to bear witness to the difficulty of this endeavour; a difficulty it comes to critically manifest by eventually pulling the body into the realm of words.

Three Sides of Truthfulness To develop this argument, I first want to construct a more detailed analysis of the ‘truth’ around which Nietzsche’s critical observations revolve. My argument is as follows: defending the nobility and purity of speaking and being a truth that would enlighten the world and at the same time destroy everything believed thus far—that which Nietzsche describes as becoming one’s own sun in a sunless world—is a three-sided endeavour. Each of these sides revolves around a different theme intrinsically tied to the critic himself: vulnerability, militancy, and a specific understanding of self-destruction and ‘madness’. Nietzsche’s works are permeated with the second theme—militancy. He claims over and over that he is a destroyer—‘I am not a man, I am dynamite’ (1996: 90)—and that his ‘truth is frightful: for thus far the lie has been called the truth’ (1996: 90). This militant superiority is embodied by his defence of the Übermensch or overman, who transcends and overcomes humanity by constituting himself independently, without the need for a religious or moral system: ‘Truly, mankind is a polluted stream. One has to be a sea to take in a polluted stream without becoming

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unclean. Behold, I teach you the overman: he is this sea, in him your great contempt can go under’ (Nietzsche 1978: 13). This militant stance is surrounded by two perspectives that expose its more vulnerable sides. Nietzsche embeds his defence of the idea that he is his own truth in a post-religious landscape: the demand to be truthful, to become like Zarathustra and Dionysus, comes about in a world in which all moral and religious values have been exposed as false and have crumbled down. His defence of the Übermensch, however, implies that human beings themselves are too weak, needy and dependent to truly become who they are. The observations made in Ecce Homo, in other words, suggest that human beings are destined to suffer from another truth: that they are alone in the universe. As Albert Camus, strongly influenced by Nietzsche, famously put this idea into words in a passage cited in the sleeve booklet of Manic Street Preachers’ Generation Terrorists: ‘In a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land’ (Camus 1991: 6). In the video-clip of the song ‘Love’s Sweet Exile’, as well as in the sleeve of its single, furthermore, the following quote by Camus appears as well, taken from his novel The Fall: ‘Then came human beings, they wanted to cling but there was nothing to cling to’ (Camus 1956: 18). Put differently: if one arrives at the truth that the world is meaningless, one longs for a religious truth embodied by a god or a beyond. But as soon as one realises that such a truth is empty as well—that God does not exist since he is a truth made up by human beings—one has to accept the nihilistic truth again that the universe is empty. The only way to escape this circle of empty and disempowering truths, Nietzsche argues, is by becoming one’s own truth. Whereas Jesus said: ‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me’ (The Holy Bible 2011: John 14:6), Nietzsche therefore proclaimed in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: ‘This is my way; where is yours?’ (1978: 195), emphasising the power of individual creativity.10 The third perspective on the notion of truth that Nietzsche develops is constantly present in the background of his works as well, especially in his later writings. To describe this perspective, I will use the notion of ‘madness’. Nietzsche wrote Ecce Homo in 1888, but it was published

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posthumously in 1908. It is the last original book he produced before slipping into a state of madness, beginning with a nervous breakdown during which he broke into tears and embraced a horse that was beaten on a square in Turin. Nietzsche’s descent into madness can be read through the lines of Ecce Homo. His hyperbolic outbursts, aimed to generate ‘the experience of affective exhaustion’ in his readers (Owen 1995: 128)11; his need to overpower his opponents; his declarations of superiority; his longing for truth; his rivalry with Jesus as a weak prophet; his almost manic attempt to burst through the pages and undermine and destroy the nature of humanity—all of these elements expose the vulnerability of a mind that is on the brink of collapse. Linking Nietzsche’s texts to Auslander’s observations above, it could even be argued that the German philosopher turned himself into the personas of the prophet Zarathustra, of Dionysus, and of Christ, going as far as losing himself in these personas. He wrote letters to friends and to royal figures, calling for the death of the pope and for military leaders to invade Germany, signing these letters either as ‘the crucified’ or as ‘Dionysus’ (see Young 2010: 529–30). Several medical theories have been developed about Nietzsche’s condition; a brain tumour, syphilis, manic depression, progressive paralysis, bipolar disorder or frontotemporal dementia. Predicting his own fate, Nietzsche himself developed a different perspective on the notion of ‘madness’ by linking it to the themes of his own philosophy. As he writes in Daybreak: ‘All superior men who were irresistibly drawn to throw off the yoke of any kind of morality and to frame new laws had, if they were not actually mad, no alternative but to make themselves or pretend to be mad’ (1991: 14). In Ecce Homo, furthermore, he prophetically observes: ‘How much truth can a spirit endure, how much can it dare?’ (Nietzsche 2004: 8). In ‘Nietzsche’s Madness’, the French philosopher Georges Bataille develops a similar approach, analysing the notion of ‘madness’ through a cultural and philosophical lens. In spite of the rather uncritical and problematic manner12 in which Bataille links ‘madness’ to ‘artistic genius’ and overlooks the suffering that Nietzsche underwent, his analysis is helpful since it embodies an approach to madness that is similar to the perspective developed in the lyrics that I will analyse in this chapter.13 Bataille,

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after all, shifts away from medical discourses that pathologise madness and instead argues that it is intrinsically linked to Nietzsche’s understanding of truth and his cultural critique. In this way, he develops a strong— albeit at places overly romanticised—argument for my above-discussed claim that the form of critique developed by Nietzsche requires an entwinement of theory and embodied person. He writes: He who has once understood that in madness alone lies man’s completion, is thus led to make a clear choice not between madness and reason, but between the lie of ‘a nightmare that justifies snores’, and the will to self-­ mastery and victory. Once he has discovered the brilliance and agonies of the summit, he finds no betrayal more hateful than the simulated delirium of art. For if he must truly become the victim of his own laws, if the accomplishment of his destiny truly requires his destruction, if, therefore, death of madness has for him the aura of celebration, then his very love of life and destiny requires him to commit within himself that crime of authority that he will expiate. This is the demand of the fate to which he is bound by a feeling of extreme chance. (Bataille 1986: 45)

If one seeks to embody a truth that transcends humanity, Bataille observes, one eventually undermines one’s actual psyche. In the case of Nietzsche’s critique, he suggests in other words, thought, body and existence become one. And if these ideas are radical, one’s embodied existence changes radically as well—Nietzsche claimed he was dynamite, and the only way to become his destiny was to explode. Bataille emphasizes the religious nature of this idea by referring to the notion of ‘incarnation’ and by comparing Nietzsche to Christ: Beyond endless, mutual verbal destruction, what else remains but a silence driving one to madness in laughter and in sweat? But if the generality of men – or if, more simply, their entire existence – were to be INCARNATED in a single being – as solitary and abandoned, of course, as the generality – the head of that INCARNATION would be the site of inappeasable conflict, a violence such that sooner or later it would shatter. […] He would look upon God only to kill him in that same instant, becoming God himself, but only to leap immediately into nothingness. […] This leads to the inevitable acknowledgement that “man incarnate” must also go mad. (Bataille 1986: 43)

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Nietzsche, Bataille observes in other words, eventually came to embody his own truth and turned into the prophetic madman he had described earlier in his life.14 The affective dimensions of this aspect of Nietzsche’s writings are so strong that Bataille even observes: ‘No one can read Nietzsche authentically without being Nietzsche…’ (qtd. in Waite and Waite 2010: 270). It is a similar attempt to construct a notion of madness that constitutes a critical distance between the self and the social order that, we will see below, shapes several Manic Street Preachers lyrics. Unlike Bataille’s account, however, the perspective developed in these lyrics puts more critical emphasis on suffering and self-doubt, and frequently refers as well, both in descriptive and critical ways, to mental health facilities and medical discourses.

The Vulnerability of a Longing for Truth I want to argue that each of the three above-discussed aspects of Nietzsche’s ‘critical truth’ returns in the three different stages in which Edwards’ lyrics were released after his disappearance. The first of these stages is represented by the 1996 album Everything Must Go. As I will describe in more detail in the next chapter, this album is characterised by a radical shift in musical style: its sound is anthemic, melancholic and warm, different from the cold and unsentimental sound of The Holy Bible. Ignoring its Marxist themes and political dimensions, it was therefore often lumped together with Britpop, representing a return to a full guitar sound that had more in common with Oasis than, for example, Gang of Four or Joy Division (I will return to these issues in the next chapter as well). Of the 12 songs on the album, 5 contain lyrics written by Edwards, who had heard some of these songs in various stages of their creation before he disappeared. The lyrics of two of these songs were composed together with Wire, one of which is ‘Elvis Impersonator: Blackpool Pier’. This song, which opens Everything Must Go, addresses the influence of American consumption culture on the UK, using the image of Elvis impersonators at the beach resort of Blackpool, Lancashire, as an allegory for this influence: the lyrics describe an ‘All American trilogy’ in ‘used up cars and bottled beer’. The song opens and closes with Bradfield singing

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fragments from Elvis’ song ‘American Trilogy’ and the sound of waves crashing on a beach. Apart from this critical song, most of Edwards’ lyrics, as released on Everything Must Go, have a more existentialist and religious character, introducing the aforementioned notions of vulnerability and suffering, but also of despair. One of these is ‘Kevin Carter’, which was released as the album’s fourth single and is characterised by an upbeat musical composition in which we hear drummer Sean Moore play the trumpet. The song’s lyrics concern the South African photographer of the same name, whose pictures of political violence and human catastrophes won him a Pulitzer Prize. Carter committed suicide in 1994, leaving behind a note that stated: ‘I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain ... of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners…’ (see Marinovich and Silva 2001: 247). In the song’s lyrics, Carter’s life is described in staccato references to his Pulitzer Prize; the photo of a young Sudanese girl stalked by a vulture that brought him fame, but also made him vulnerable to the critique that he would aestheticise human suffering instead of helping people in need; the ‘kaffir lover’ he was called by racist South Africans; the ‘white pipe’ he got addicted to; the ‘Bang-Bang Club’ he and three other photographers were called, and more.15 A third song on Everything Must Go for which Edwards wrote lyrics— ‘Small Black Flowers that Grow in the Sky’—forms an intimate exploration of the suffering of animals hold in captivity, resembling Rilke’s 1902 poem ‘The Panther’. The title refers to a phrase a character in the 1946 film The Best Years of Our Lives uses to describe bomb explosions seen on a picture: ‘Little black flowers that grow in the sky’ (see Wyler 1946). Accompanied by a tender sounding acoustic guitar and harp, the lyrics address zoo animals in the second person, expressing empathy with the often neurotic behaviour they display in captivity in a line in which the theme of self-harm returns: ‘Here chewing your tail is joy’. These explorations of a person who committed suicide after having been confronted with the horrors of the world, as well as of the similarities between a human life of despair and self-harm and the caged life of zoo animals, are accompanied by two other songs for which Edwards wrote lyrics and that were released on Everything Must Go. The lyrics of

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these songs introduce the above-described religious theme and reflect the first side of Nietzsche’s notion of truth most explicitly: vulnerability. The first is ‘The Girl Who Wanted to Be God’, written together with Nicky Wire. The song’s lyrics are partly about the American writer and poet Sylvia Plath, who was clinically depressed during most of her life and committed suicide at the age of 30.16 The song’s lyrics contain implicit references to many of her poems, consisting of words that Plath frequently used: ‘dawn’, ‘silence’, ‘heaven’, ‘truth’, ‘lies’, ‘blind’, ‘eyes’, and refer to a girl who ‘told the truth but then lied’. The song’s title is taken from the following passage, which the 17-year-old Plath wrote in her diary, drawing a close connection between art and artist: ‘I want, I think, to be omniscient… I think I would like to call myself “The girl who wanted to be God.” Yet if I were not in this body, where would I be? … But, oh, I cry out against it. I am I – I am powerful, but to what extent? I am I’ (qtd. in Stevenson 1989: 16). The passage in Plath’s diary embodies the idea, described above within the context of the first side of Nietzschean truthfulness, that one can get stuck between two equally dissatisfying truths: the truth of the meaninglessness of everyday life and of the flawed nature of one’s embodied self, and the truth of an idealised, divine and godlike image of oneself and the world that turns out to be meaningless as well. In the first chapter of the 1989 biography Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath, entitled ‘The Girl Who Wanted to Be God (1932–1949’), Stevenson argues that the above-­ cited passage from Plath’s diary presents ‘the hapless dualism of the Romantics’. Stevenson writes: ‘Was she wrong … to idealize herself even when the merciless mirror showed her the ordinary truth?’ (1989: 16). On the one hand, Plath was who she was (‘I am I’). On the other hand, she aspired to be an ideal version of herself, an omniscient, pure, godlike version that was not bound to a specific body. In the booklet of their first album, Manic Street Preachers cited a line taken from the following entry in Plath’s journals, in which she reflects on her suicidal feelings and illustrates the first aspect of Nietzsche’s truthfulness as well: ‘I need a father. I need a mother. I need some older, wiser being to cry to. I talk to God, but the sky is empty, and Orion walks by and doesn’t speak’ (Plath 2000: 199). As discussed above, Camus describes a similar experience of ‘a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lies’.

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This theme plays a guiding role as well in the eighth song on Everything Must Go, ‘Removables’, which uses lyrics written by Edwards as well. These lyrics are accompanied by an acoustic guitar that plays a set of chords in a rhythm that reminds of Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ (on Nevermind). The lyrics mention a ‘bronze moth’ that ‘dies easily’, referring to the poem ‘Lament for the Moths’ by the American poet and playwright Tennessee Williams. The band referred to this same poem in two songs on Generation Terrorists, as discussed in the previous chapter (see also Price 1999: 214). The poem opens with the following lines: A plague has stricken the moths, the moths are dying, their bodies are flakes of bronze on the carpet lying. Enemies of the delicate everywhere have breathed a pestilent mist into the air. (Williams 2002: 17)

In Williams’ poem, moths can be understood as referring to the quiet and sensitive people who are ‘crushed’ and threatened by the violent, outside world—by the ‘enemies of the delicate’. Williams’ poem ends with a stanza in which a higher, godlike being—a ‘Mother’—is asked to return the moths to a bleak world that is haunted by ‘mammoth figures’. The lyrics to ‘Removables’ cynically describe human beings, in line of Williams’ moths, as ‘removables’, emphasising the trivial and meaningless nature of human existence. The song also contains religious imagery, referring to a killed god and to guilt about ‘making holes’, expressing feelings of frustration caused by the inability to reach a pure, truthful existence and by being drawn into, even corrupted by, the world of ‘removables’. The lyrics written by Edwards and used for songs on Everything Must Go, to summarise this first stage, express a longing for an indestructible, eternal or divine truth that, the lyrical selves shaped within these lyrics realise, can never be found in the ‘removable’ world that forces one to lie, like the girl described in the lyrics of ‘The Girl Who Wanted to Be God’. This makes these selves identify with Sylvia Plath and Williams’ moths, as well as with the troubled photographer Kevin Carter and zoo animals in captivity. Indeed, ‘Small Black Flowers That Grow In The Sky’ contains two lines that remind of Plath’s references to religion and

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the exploitation of embodiment, embedded in the context of a zoo: ‘Harvest your ovaries dead mothers crawl / Here comes warden, Christ, temple, elders’. These lyrics can therefore be interpreted as illustrating that which I have described as the first aspect of the fourth critical model: human vulnerability and a concern with an empty universe in which one longs for a higher authority, for a sense of meaning that does not exist.

Truth as a Militant Ideal This exploration of the vulnerability of longing for truth in a false and meaningless world, I have argued above, results within Nietzsche’s thought in a violent defence of oneself as a god and in a turn against humanity; in the destructive attempt to declare oneself to be superior; to be a sun in a sunless world and destroy everything believed thus far. A similar transformation takes place between Everything Must Go and the second stage of truthfulness I want to describe within the context of Edwards’ lyrics released after his disappearance: the song ‘Judge Yr’self ’. This song was initially written for the soundtrack of Danny Cannon’s 1995 movie adaptation of the comic book Judge Dredd. Indeed, its lyrics resonate with the themes of the comic book series 2000 AD, in which the militant and ruthless character of Judge Dredd functions as police, judge, jury and executioner in a totalitarian and dystopian future.17 A demo was recorded in January 1995 with Edwards (Price 1999: 175), and the song resurfaced on the 2003 compilation album Lipstick Traces (A Secret History of Manic Street Preachers). The music of ‘Judge Yr’self ’ is aggressive and sounds nihilistic and militaristic, characterised by a form of control that shapes the use of staccato riffs, somewhere between metal, grunge and punk. The song’s lyrics introduce Nietzsche, whose philosophy—and specifically the militant aspects of his thought discussed above—form its main inspiration. In these lyrics, the phrase ‘Dionysus against the crucified’ returns twice; the last line of Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo. Furthermore, the opening of the song’s video-clip (on the 10th Anniversary Edition of The Holy Bible), which, directed by Wire’s brother Patrick Jones, shows us fragments of the band as a foursome, displays the following quote by Nietzsche, typed by

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Edwards on a typewriter: ‘The devotion of the greatest is to encounter risk and play dice for death’. The line is taken from a passage in Thus Spoke Zarathustra called ‘On Self-Overcoming’, which Nietzsche concludes with the violent observation that ‘all truths that are kept silent become poisonous. And may everything be broken that cannot brook our truths!’ (1978: 116). Nietzsche’s aggressive defence of truthfulness as an entwinement of creation and destruction returns in the lyrics of ‘Judge Yr’self ’, which open with the lines ‘Blessed be the blade / Blessed be the scythe / Dionysus against the crucified’. Like a violent sermon, the lyrics instruct the listener to ‘find’, ‘face’, ‘speak’ and ‘be’ ‘your truth’, and to ‘heal’, ‘hurt’ and ‘judge yourself ’.18 Reflecting on the militant nature of his lyrics, Edwards indeed stated: ‘Some of my beliefs could be construed as quite fundamentalist, Islamic almost. But it’s not. It’s quite alien to that. It’s much more individual’ (qtd. in Price 1999: 167). As with the side of vulnerability discussed earlier, Edwards put flesh on the bones of these ‘beliefs’ by referring to several cultural influences. An early way in which he and the band did this was by referring to Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver, in which Travis Bickle, a traumatised Vietnam veteran played by Robert DeNiro, fantasises about a purifying rain that comes down and washes ‘all the scum off the streets’ (see Scorsese 1976).19 Following the aforementioned emphasis on embodiment and the constitution of a persona, furthermore, several references were constituted in this particular era in the form of body art: not long before his disappearance, Edwards had the line ‘I’ll surf this beach’ tattooed on his arm. The line refers to a scene in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 epic war film Apocalypse Now. In this scene, the character of Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore (played by Robert Duvall) expresses his desire to surf at a beach in a war-zone in Vietnam (Coppola 1979).20 Based on Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now famously tells the story of Captain Benjamin L. Willard, who is sent on a secret mission to find and assassinate Colonel Walter E. Kurtz (Marlon Brando) during the Vietnam War. Before his disappearance, Edwards decorated the band’s dressing rooms as camouflaged war zones. He also wore a camera of the same model used by a photographer in Apocalypse Now, played by Dennis Hopper, who has become a mad disciple to Kurtz (Price 1999: 151, 161,

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177).21 Again, this illustrates the observation that Edwards aimed to embody the critical truth he wanted to express by employing the performative aspects of the aforementioned persona. By creating this persona, Edwards emphasised the militant side of becoming one’s own truth as it is described in Conrad’s novel. Marlow (on whom Apocalypse Now’s Willard is based) describes Kurtz as follows, referring to his famous whispering of the words ‘The horror! The horror!’ when he is assassinated: This is the reason why I affirm that Kurtz was a remarkable man. He had something to say. He said it. Since I had peeped over the edge myself, I understand better the meaning of his stare, that could not see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness. He had summed up – he had judged. ‘The horror!’ He was a remarkable man. After all, this was the expression of some sort of belief; it had candour, it had conviction, it had a vibrating note of revolt in its whisper, it had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth – the strange commingling of desire and hate. (Conrad 2003: 171)

As in the lyrics to ‘Judge Yr’self ’, the notions of ‘truth’—this time a glimpsed truth with an ‘appalling face’—and of ‘judging’ return. Like Nietzsche in Ecce Homo, Kurtz represents the psyche of a man who, according to himself, sees through the falseness of the world, who destroys the simplicity of a morality based on a duality of good and evil—a ‘timid, lying morality’ (Coppola 1979)—and constitutes his own truth by way of a vision that is both creation and destruction. Like Travis Bickle, he embodies the longing for an absolute truth that transcends existence and that, when translated into a political or moral ideology, gains a violent, misanthropic and (self-)destructive character.

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Modernism and Abjection This brings me to another cultural reference that I want to use to illustrate this second dimension of the fourth critical model: Yukio Mishima. The Japanese author was frequently mentioned by Edwards as an influence (see Price 1999: 125) and, in previous chapters, we have seen how his ideas and aesthetics return throughout the band’s existence. There are two reasons for focusing on Mishima in this chapter. The first one is that he again expresses the aggressive and violent dimension of the fourth critical model. Whereas Nietzsche explicitly expressed the idea that he needed to be alone and did not want to become part of a group—‘I have always suffered from the “multitude”…’ (Nietzsche 2004: 39)—Mishima translated his emphasis on the strength and purity of body and mind into a political ideology of a nationalist and fascist nature, celebrating traditional values of honour, strength and purity. He formed a militia called the Tatenokai (‘Shield Society’) and attempted to overthrow the government of Japan by invading the headquarters of the Japanese self-defence forces. After the coup failed, he committed seppuku: he ritually disembowelled himself, after which he was decapitated by an assistant. The second reason is that Mishima defended an entwinement of body and mind and strongly resisted the idea that the mind would be somehow higher or purer than the body (Mishima 2003: 22). He embedded this idea in a critique of modernism and, I want to show, constitutes a problematic relationship between body and mind that I will eventually use to analyse this fourth model’s relationship between lyrics and corporeality. In 1970, the year in which he committed suicide by seppuku, Mishima reflected as follows on the aim behind his writings: I have all along had in mind a wish to destroy from the root the modernist misconception of literature, by equalising body and spirit, and by embodying that equality. … [W]hen it [my wish] is fulfilled, a unison of the creator and his work  – ‘the executioner and the condemned’ as Baudelaire would put it  – will become possible. I wonder if the era of modernity begins when an artist and his work are separated, and he found his perverse pride in that solitude. (qtd. in Otomo 2003: 277)

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Mishima here translates a Nietzschean disdain for the Platonic and Christian separation of body and mind to a critique of the modernist tendency to separate both realms within the arts—––to create a Great Divide between them. This passage is cited in an article in which Rio Otomo analyses Mishima’s 1956 novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Otomo puts Mishima’s critique into words as follows: By ‘the modernist misconception of literature’ Mishima is referring to a philosophical issue, not a style of writing. […] In the paradigm of modernity, as Mishima points out, the self-conscious breaks away from the body, looks at it from outside and enables a narcissistic subject to judge itself ‘objectively’ before others judge it for them. As such, the modern narrative is selfreflective, always returning happily to the safe and familiar space of the Self without touching the body of the absolute  – irreconcilable and dangerous – Other. (2003: 278)

It is no surprise that besides the ideas of Nietzsche and Foucault, Kristeva’s observations on the abject return in Otomo’s analysis of Mishima’s writings: if the tendency of modernism pushes the body away in favour of a celebration of a narcissistic, pure self, then everything that has to do with this body—sexual desires, affection, bodily strength—is abjected. This results, Otomo observes, in a mechanism that turns the body into an object that is opposed to the subject; into a thing categorically different from an ‘I’ that is presented as ‘a clean, proper and autonomous self that rules over [her] body…’ (Otomo 2003: 288). During this process, in other words, the body becomes bound, like Odysseus bound himself to the mast of his ship as a manifestation of Adorno’s idea that the corporeal is repressed in modernity. Otomo argues that this mechanism leads to a form of suffering, the moment this sterile self realises that she still is or has a body. At this moment, an inner conflict arises between the ‘pure’ and ‘clean’ self on the one hand and an ‘abject’ body on the other; a conflict that she aims to solve by disciplining and controlling this body—‘cleansing’ it of its abject nature. Even though Mishima aimed to overcome what he understood as the modernist divide between mind and body, I want to argue, he

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eventually came to embody this same conflict and therefore came to manifest a similar inability to constitute a healthy relationship with his corporeality. In his autobiographical essay Sun and Steel, he indeed describes his body as a paradox—‘a terrible paradox of existence’—that, since it is vulnerable to decay and death, lives a life of its own that eventually results in the annihilation of that same existence (Mishima 2003: 11). Mishima therefore practiced the art of body-building, writing: ‘the body is doomed to decay.... I for one do not, will not, accept such a doom. This means that I do not accept the course of Nature’ (qtd. in Stokes 1975: 184).

Disciplining the Body I want to argue that this means that Mishima, eventually, was unable to truly escape the same modernist discourse he aimed to overcome, even though he came much closer to embodying the ‘equality’ between ‘body and spirit’ than the modernist authors he rejects in the passage cited above. Instead, by trying to embody this equality he erected a destructive relationship with his body, rejecting its vulnerability and turning it into an expression of the clarity and purity of a strong mind. By doing this, he objectified and reified his body: even though he did manage to foreground his body through the act of bodybuilding, still it did not form a natural part of his embodied self or become ‘equal’ to his spirit. Instead, it was presented by him as a material dimension that needs to be controlled, sculpted and, eventually, destroyed through seppuku in a violent attempt to embody the self ’s political values, entwine art and everyday life, and reach a form of absolute purity that, in Mishima’s case, was deeply entwined with experiences of a sublime and sexual nature.22 The Japanese author, in other words, aimed to reject both modernity and modernism’s, in his view, problematic relationship with the body, but ended up embodying this same relationship when he pulled himself into his own art. This affirms Adorno’s observations, discussed in Chap. 3, that the only way in which art can critically reflect on this problematic relationship is by mirroring it and working through it; by reflecting a schism between body and mind instead of arguing that it can be overcome.

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Many aspects of Mishima’s relationship with embodiment return in Edwards’ self-aesthetisation and his concern with purity. As mentioned in the previous chapter, he suffered from anorexia and frequently mutilated himself, made these mutilations into a part of his art and presented them, in line of Mishima’s ideas, as illustrations of complete control over his body.23 In late 1994, for example, Edwards wore a boiler suit during a photo-shoot in the catacombs of Paris with the following lines from different parts of Arthur Rimbaud’s 1873 A Season in Hell written on the back: ‘Once, I remember well, my life was a feast where all hearts opened and all wines flowed. Alas the gospel has gone by! Suppose damnation were eternal! Then a man who would mutilate himself is well damned, isn’t he?’ (Rimbaud 1961: 3, 13, 27). In the lyrics of ‘Judge Yr’self ’, furthermore, these ideas are embedded in a Nietzschean critical model with help of the following two lines: ‘Clean your flesh and mock your fears’ and ‘Kiss your wounds and mock your fears’, both followed by the claim that ‘The brightest sun is the purest gun’. As Edwards observed in his last British interview: ‘There’s a certain kind of beauty in taking complete control of every aspect of your life. Purifying or hurting your body to achieve a balance in your mind is tremendously disciplined.’ In the same interview, he expressed admiration for the IRA martyr Bobby Sands, who died on hunger strike in prison in 1981: ‘I thought he was a better statement than anything else that was going on at the time, because it was against himself ’ (qtd. in Price 1999: 165, 167). Furthermore, Edwards referred to caged zoo animals— described in the aforementioned ‘Small Black Flowers that Grow in the Sky’—as expressing discipline as well: ‘Baboons chew their own tails, but then that’s an artificial environment. They also fix an imaginary point on the wall and constantly walk up to it, stop and then wander back. But they never cross that line. I do see an enormous amount of dignity in self-­ determination and self-discipline’ (qtd. in Price 1999: 167). Based on these analyses, the second stage in which Edwards’ lyrics were released after his disappearance—embodied by the song ‘Judge Yr’self ’— can be interpreted as revolving around the militant and destructive nature of Nietzsche’s defence of truthfulness. Following the expression of vulnerability and hopelessness that characterises the first stage, Edwards now writes about the desire to make himself into a god in a godless universe

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and to be the only judge of his own existence—to turn himself into an embodiment of purity. With help of intertextual references to Nietzsche, Kurtz and Mishima, furthermore, he emphasises the radical, destructive and personal character of this second side of critique, showing how it is tied to the bodily ability to undergo suffering—even suffering that is self-­ inflicted—and to the idea of making the body into a canvas to express one’s ideas. In line of Mishima, however, Edwards’ writings eventually still erect a schism between body and mind that, even though they aim to include the body, still mirror modern and modernist problematisations of embodiment. In the third stage, I now want to show, this trend radicalises and shifts the balance between body and mind more and more to the side of the mind; a movement that is reflected by a modernist exploration of the meaning of words within a religious discourse that shapes an even more radical understanding of purity.

Truthfulness as Self-Destruction Above, I have argued, with help of Bataille, that the form of critique Nietzsche develops almost necessarily results in a process to which Bataille refers with the term ‘madness’, which he links to ideas about self-­ overcoming and self-destruction. This idea is illustrated by two of the references that Edwards used to strengthen and aestheticise his ideas: Mishima eventually committed suicide in a way that forms a continuation of his reflections on self-control, purity and militancy. He even had theatrically ‘acted out’ the act of seppuku in his 1966 film Yūkoku (Patriotism), as well as on a series of photographs called Death of a Man, for which he also posed as St. Sebastian struck with arrows (see Flanagan 2014: 233–4). Furthermore, Mishima had, in the words of biographer Damian Flanagan, ‘toyed with the idea of having himself tattooed, yakuza-style, ahead of his final action’ (2014: 234). In this way, Mishima contributed to the performative persona he aimed to turn himself into as an embodiment of his ideas, providing his ideas with an aesthetic dimension. Kurtz, on the other hand, attempted to overcome himself and the social and moral structures that had shaped him, ending up in a state of

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madness and eventually longing for his assassin (Marlow, Willard) to kill him. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow describes this aspect of Kurtz as follows: [Kurtz] had made that last stride, he had stepped over the edge, while I had been permitted to draw back my hesitating foot. And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible. (Conrad 2003: 171–2)

Kurtz, Marlow observes here, stepped over the threshold and looked into the Nietzschean abyss. The idea that becoming one’s truth may result in self-destruction characterises the third aspect of truthfulness, embodied by the third stage in which Edwards’ lyrics were released: Manic Street Preachers’ ninth studio album Journal for Plague Lovers (2009). All lyrics on this album were composed of texts, poems, haikus and prose that Edwards left behind in a binder with the phrase ‘OPULENCE’ written on it.24 Perhaps these texts will one day be published as a book, but the original sheets on which those texts used as lyrics for the album were written are already reproduced in its sleeve booklet: we see lyrics typed on a typewriter or written down by hand, surrounded by pictures that are mainly of a religious nature (a crucified Christ by Giunta Pisano, Dante’s rings of hell with scribblings referring to Nick Cave and the Bad Seed’s song ‘A Box for Black Paul’ (on From Her to Eternity), Bernini’s sculpture Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, an illustration from Johannes von Tepl’s 1401 Der Ackermann aus Böhmen, and more).25 On a sheet purely filled with hand-written texts, we also find references to Spinoza, describing him as a ‘self styled philosopher’ and listing his ideas about freedom and embodiment. Furthermore, the booklet shows a piece of paper that seems to have formed part of a therapeutic self-help programme, listing ‘Basic needs of all individuals’ and ‘Elements in healthy relationships’. Before he disappeared, Edwards allegedly left a package behind in his hotel room, containing (among other objects), a copy of Peter Shaffer’s play Equus as well as a VHS of Mike Leigh’s Naked: two artworks revolving around troubled men who are unable to fit in society, become more and more extreme while simultaneously unravelling, and continually

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criticise and reject the contexts in which they find themselves. Equus, furthermore, also expresses religious themes and rituals that return, we will see below, in several ways in the lyrics of Journal for Plague Lovers, especially the theme of entwining religious devotion with bodily harm, purity and self-discipline. Illustrative is the following quote from Sidney Lumet’s film version of the play, in which a psychiatrist (played by Richard Burton) reflects on the troubled protagonist of the film, who slides down into a state that, with Bataille, could be characterised as ‘madness’, after horribly disfiguring several horses: The way you get your own spirit through your own suffering. Self-chosen. Self-made. This boy’s done that. He’s created his own desperate ceremony… Just to ignite one flame of original ecstasy in the spiritless waste around him… He’s destroyed for it, horribly. He’s virtually been destroyed by it…. Well, let me tell you something. I envy it. (Lumet 1977)

Just before his disappearance, Edwards furthermore gave a copy of the 1934 Novel With Cocaine to a friend (Clarke 1997: 132), written by a mysterious Russian émigré under the pseudonym of M. Ageyev. Not only did the author of the novel disappear, its protagonist—again a misanthropic young man who aims to break through the moral structures that constitute the social fabric as well as himself—slides down into addiction and instability, eventually to disappear as well.26

A Return to The Holy Bible In many ways, Journal for Plague Lovers forms, in Simon Price’s words, ‘a direct and conscious throwback to The Holy Bible’ (Price 2014).27 The fake Cyrillic font inspired by Simple Minds’ Empires and Dance returns on its cover and back sleeve, for example. Furthermore, the cover again displays a painting by Jenny Saville. Entitled Stare, the painting depicts a human face, frozen, it seems, in apathy and terror, the colour red adding a disturbing dimension. The painting was deemed inappropriate by several supermarket chains in the UK, who covered the album in a slipcase (see Rogers and O’Doherty 2009). Again, furthermore, these lyrics are filled with references to authors, cultural icons and phenomena from

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different realms: Stephen Hawking, Noam Chomsky’s 1993 Rethinking Camelot, riderless horses used in funeral processions, the Sistine Chapel, Heinrich Himmler, Giant Haystacks, O’Brien’s Newspeak dictionary in Orwell’s 1984, Hermann the Bull, Tracey the Sheep, and countless more. Like The Holy Bible, the album is also filled with audio-samples: the song ‘Peeled Apples’ opens with a fragment from Brad Anderson’s 2004 Dostoyevskian film The Machinist, for which Christian Bale lost so much weight that his insomnia-plagued and guilt-ridden character resembled the ideal described in The Holy Bible’s ‘4st7lb’. In ‘Doors Closing Slowly’, we hear a sample about the fragmented nature of memory, taken from Sofia Coppola’s 1999 film The Virgin Suicides. And ‘Virginia State Epileptic Colony’ contains a fragment from Alexander Sokurov’s 1998 documentary The Dialogues with Solzhenitsyn (see Jones et al. 2017: 326). The fact that the album was released 15 years after Edwards’ disappearance, however, constitutes a listening experience that is different from The Holy Bible. Before his disappearance, Edwards had expressed the aim to create music that was even more aggressive and metallic, mentioning the unlikely combination of Pantera, Nine Inch Nails and Primal Scream’s Screamadelica as examples (Price 1999: 175). Partly produced by Steve Albini, Journal for Plague Lovers’ music, however, is digestible and melodic, often even catchy, far removed from the militaristic metal of Pantera or the industrial emotional wastelands created by Nine Inch Nails.28 Again, it partly follows the style of postpunk, and again combines it with a focus on distorted guitars that reminds of the sound of Nirvana’s In Utero, produced by Steve Albini as well.29 When listening to the album, the listener can leave through the original sheets on which Edwards wrote down his lyrics with a typewriter. She then notices that many of these lyrics have been changed or adapted to fit into the songs. On the one hand, this emphasises the observation that lyrics, to some extent, have to follow the verbal space (discussed in the previous chapter) created by the semiotic elements of music and words. On the other hand, I want to argue, this makes the listener focus on these lyrics even more, noticing what has been left out, which references these lyrics contain, and in which order they were originally written down on the page.

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This is most clearly the case on the album’s 13th song: ‘William’s Last Words’. Sung tenderly by Nicky Wire, the song we hear on Journal for Plague Lovers sounds like a farewell letter, almost a suicide note, containing lines like: ‘I’m just gonna close my eyes, think about my family / And shed a little tear / Goodnight, sleep tight’. If we look at the original text printed in the album’s sleeve booklet, however, we find two pages filled with a prose-like monologue from which only a small part was used for the eventual song. Referring to these lyrics, Nicky Wire explained that Edwards was fascinated by the 1960 social realist film The Entertainer, which shows the demise of a music hall entertainer (played by Laurence Olivier) whose fate as a performer is entwined with his raison d'être (see Mackay 2009). Indeed, the lyrics of ‘William’s Last Words’ contain references to the film: the name of the father of Olivier’s character is mentioned (‘Old Bill’) and the lyrical style—addressing an audience—reflects the style of the bittersweet monologue that the film’s protagonist gives to his audience during his final performance. The lyrics also mention singer Gracie Fields and contain quotations from Field’s song ‘Wish Me Luck (As You Wave Me Goodbye’). Combined with this reference to Gracie Fields, reading the original lyrics makes them into a theatrical lament for music hall entertainment. Still, this meaning could be linked to feelings of depression and suicide—especially if we take the entertainer’s own statements about the emptiness behind his happy stage performances in mind—but the experience of listening to the song and reading the lyrics does constitute a schism between the two. Another example of such a listening experience is formed by the song ‘Doors Closing Slowly’. The song’s lyrics, to which I return below, express an ambivalent concern with Christian thought. The music to which these lyrics are set is very melodic, sounding like a slowed down version of the militaristic sound of The Holy Bible. When listening to the song, I want to argue, the listener therefore starts disconnecting the lyrics from the music. One starts to imagine the line ‘who throws the first stone if the stone is you’, for example, as shouted aggressively instead of sung, attacking Christian thought with a sound more akin to the militancy of ‘Judge Yr’self ’, the aforementioned metallic combination of Pantera and Nine Inch Nails, or even to the distorted and underproduced violent sound of Norwegian black metal.

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The ability to imagine alternative versions of the song is encouraged even more by the realisation that the lyrics of ‘Doors Closing Slowly’ and ‘All is Vanity’ (both on Journal for Plague Lovers) were used in the song ‘Picturesque’, released earlier on the E.P. God Save The Manics, of which only 3000 copies were given away during a concert at the Hammersmith Apollo on 19 April 2005. In the latter song, these lyrics are accompanied by rather melancholic and poppy music–this time inspired by the 1980s synth-pop sound of the band’s 2004 album Lifeblood—that, again, conflict with the robustness of a line like ‘Crucifixion is the easy life’.

The Lyrics of Journal for Plague Lovers I now want to turn to a more detailed analysis of the lyrics released in this third stage. These lyrics are fragmented, often difficult to understand, reflecting a mind that has difficulty clinging to one fixed notion of reality. As on The Holy Bible, they spill over the verbal spaces of the songs, forcing the listener to focus on both their semiotic and their symbolic elements. When he does this, the listener hears a symbolic order that is gradually breaking down, losing its consistency in songs that, to return to Kristeva’s ideas discussed in Chap. 4, provide glimpses of the meaninglessness that lies beyond language. Together with its many references to mental health facilities and hospitals, I want to argue, the album shapes a specific notion of what we can characterise, with Bataille, as ‘madness’. This notion is, in the case of Journal for Plague Lovers, intrinsically linked to language: by exploring the meaning of words to their utter limits, this album presents the idea that it is the structure of language that preserves and protects the solidity of the self, and that the notion of ‘madness’ refers to experiences of that which lies beyond this solidity. Again, I want to argue, this constitutes a critical distance between words and music, and between these lyrics and the social order, and makes them play a primary and almost autonomous role on the album as well.30

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Semiotic and Symbolic Even more than on The Holy Bible, these lyrics ‘put meaning on trial’, with Larissa Wodtke describing them as written in a ‘stuttering, slowly disintegrating language’ (Jones et al. 2017: 327) that reminds of Beckett’s prose (2017: 328). Indeed, Beckett’s dramatic monologue Not I comes to mind, which presents Mouth, who utters words and phrases that gradually unravel, the play’s text being filled with dots and empty spaces, the ‘I’ gradually losing its consistency (see Beckett 1973). In a famous letter, Beckett observed: ‘more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the nothingness) behind it. … To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it – be it something or nothing – begins to seep through…’ (qtd. in Calder 2001: 17). At places, the lyrics of Journal for Plague Lovers seem to do the same thing: boring holes in language, sliding down into lists of words that have lost their meaning and seem to want to get at the ‘weight of meaninglessness’ that lies beyond Kristeva’s symbolic order and that, within the album’s discourse, can be linked to experiences of madness. As Wodtke observes again, this happens, for example, in the lyrics of ‘Pretension/ Repulsion’, in which the semantic elements of words take over their symbolic meaning: ‘Sicken’d, howl’d, streak’d, spurn’d / Pluck’d, liv’d, compell’d, call’d / Clos’d, swallow’d, form’d, regain’d / Lock’d, curs’d, glow’d, discern’d’ (see Jones et al. 2017: 327).31 Another example can be found in the following lines in the song ‘Peeled Apples’: ‘The Levi jean will always be stronger than the Uzi / A dwarf takes his cockerel out of the cockfight / Falcons attack the pigeons in the West Wing at night’. Again, it is almost impossible to understand what these lines mean. Whereas the first line seems to describe the colonising character of capitalist commodities, the second line almost sounds like a tongue twister, but might also refer to the cockfights shown in Werner Herzog’s 1970 Even Dwarfs Started Small. The third line, in turn, might describe the influence of republican hardliners in the White House. Bradfield observed in an interview: ‘there are some verses [in ‘Peeled Apples’] where the intent or meaning behind the words were actually …

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I couldn’t unlock it. I couldn’t understand it at all. And that might be a bit shocking, because there might appear to be some lyrics on the record already which are quite hard to understand. But there were some stuff which actually seemed like the key had just been chucked away to the meaning of them’ (qtd. in Mackay 2009). Nicky Wire observed about the incomprehensibility of these lyrics, which alienates them from the voice that is singing them on the album: ‘For the first time ever, it’s just not worth a debate about a lot of these words…’ (qtd. in Mackay 2009). Still, however, I want to argue that the lyrics on Journal for Plague Lovers do keep clinging to the symbolic elements of language, which are presented as the same elements that preserve the self from disappearing into the mad, chaotic and meaningless nothingness that lies beyond language. The above-cited fragment from ‘Pretension/Repulsion’, for example, is followed by the line ‘Odalisque by Ingres, extra bones for sale’, referring to the observation that the woman depicted on Ingres’ 1814 painting Grande Odalique has a back that is anatomically unrealistic, seemingly having extra vertebrae; perhaps a reflection of the distorting nature of idealised notions of female beauty. ‘Jackie Collins Existential Question Time’, in turn, paints an absurdist picture of the romance novelist Jackie Collins hosting a talk show in which moral questions about adultery are debated. They contain the question ‘Oh mummy, what’s a Sex Pistol?’, a phrase that appeared on badges sold by the punk band in the 1970s. ‘Peeled Apples’, furthermore, opens with five powerful statements in which the lyrical ‘I’ seems to express a weariness with the ways of the world and a rejection of the methods this world uses to beat the self down, perhaps embodied by mental health facilities (the last two lines might refer to lobotomy): ‘The more I see, the less I scream / The figure eight inside out is infinity / The naked light bulb32 is always wrong / They make your brain complete / Then they blow it to kingdom come’.33 Hearing lines like these, the song suddenly finds a fragment of meaning to cling to again and, even though the line about the figure eight and infinity seems to point to a meaning that cannot be ‘unlocked’, the listener is constantly pulled back again into a realm in which words not only carry a semiotic but also a symbolic meaning.

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Mental Health Clinics Processes like these take place throughout the lyrics of Journal for Plague Lovers. The moment we think that the many holes in the album’s lyrics reduce them to meaninglessness or only to their semiotic elements, they suddenly recall phrases, images, ideas or references, and introduce symbolic elements of meaning as well. In several songs, for example, atmospheres and practices of mental health clinics are described. ‘Facing Page: Top Left’ opens with a description of the monotonous, sceptic and artificial nature of daily life in a mental health facility, but then transforms into a more general expression of existential weariness in lines that refer to ‘neophobia’ and reduce language to its bare minimum: ‘Private care, sugar pills, the flak of healing / Fragrance my escort of no meaning / This beauty here dipping neophobia’. ‘She Bathed Herself in a Bath of Bleach’, in turn, may have been inspired by a story Edwards heard in a clinic, and describes a vulnerable person who harms herself to please someone she loves: ‘She’d walk on broken glass for love / She thought burnt skin would please her lover’. The lyrics not only remind of the protagonists of Tennessee Williams’ plays, but also of Joy Division’s ‘She’s Lost Control’, which Ian Curtis wrote about a person with epilepsy who he assisted when working as Assistant Disablement Resettlement Officer (see Connolly 1998). The lyrics of ‘Virginia State Epileptic Colony’, furthermore, refer to the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, which was opened in 1910 by a group of infamous eugenicists. The lyrics question the notion of ‘health’ as it is shaped within ‘mental health’ clinics, describe the illusion of freedom, lobotomy (‘Today the doctors allow the illusion of choice / Tomorrow the necks split, there is no voice’) and mention the attempt to draw a perfect circle as a symbol of purity.34

Christianity What makes many of the lyrics published on Journal for Plague Lovers specifically important in the context of this chapter is the ambivalent attitude they express towards religion and Christianity in particular—an

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ambivalence that echoes Nietzsche’s last writings, described above. The song ‘Journal for Plague Lovers’, for example, ends with the expression of a religious longing for absolute norms, claiming that only a god can bruise, sooth and forgive—a sharp contrast with Edwards’ claim in ‘Judge Yr’self ’ that one has to find, face and speak one’s own truth. The lyrics also seem to entwine devotion and self-harm again, containing lines like ‘Stitches and wounds, doctor, divinity / so much love this blind affinity’. ‘All Is Vanity’, furthermore, takes both its title and its inspiration from the book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament. The song’s lyrics again describe a monotonous existence and state that the lyrical ‘I’ only wants one truth and does not mind if he is being lied to,35 seemingly longing for a religion that, in Nietzsche’s words, was based on ‘the art of holy lying’ (Nietzsche 1968: 169). In November 1994, Edwards claimed in a similar line that he was fascinated by humanity’s longing for a god, quoting Camus that everyone wants to die a ‘happy death’ (see Camus 1995) and citing William Blake’s claim that ‘The cut worm forgives the plough and dies in peace’ (qtd. in Price 1999: 166; see Blake 2000: 131).36 Desperately, it seems, the lyrical subject of ‘All Is Vanity’ seeks to want to cling to an entity that enables him to strip himself of all vanity and reach a form of purity and discipline within a context that is simultaneously rejected as sinful, impure and wrong. Again and again, furthermore, these explorations of the realm of meaninglessness beyond the symbolic order circle back to religion: only this realm and the language associated with it seem to be able to express that which the self may find beyond the symbolic order; the terrifying sublime experience of that which ‘exists’ beyond words. Again, Edwards also emphasised this idea with help of body art: he had two maps based on Dante’s Divina Comedia tattooed on his arms, one depicting its universe—Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, and Jerusalem at its centre—the other showing the ninth circle in Dante’s Hell. This circle holds sinners guilty of treachery, and emphasises Edwards’ idea that human beings will eventually not be able to live up to the ideal nature of (loving) relationships.

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Suffering These ambivalent religious references in the lyrics used for Journal for Plague Lovers and on Edwards’ own body, however, are frequently contrasted by a more aggressive and negative attitude towards Christianity, often combined—again—with references to pain. The lyrics to the song ‘Peeled Apples’, for example, express an obsession with the cleansing nature of self-harm and suffering as illustrated by the title’s reference to apples ‘without skin’: they refer to digging one’s nails out and to the Nietzschean idea that one should trespass one’s torments if one is ‘what one wants to be’. Furthermore, the original lyrics sheet reproduced in the sleeve booklet of Journal for Plague Lovers contains the phrase ‘Virescit Vulnere Virtus’, a quotation taken from the Roman poet Aulus Furius of Antium meaning ‘courage becomes stronger through a wound’. The phrase is not used in the eventual song. Even though the discourse of Christianity is used to phrase a longing for purity, this suggests, it is this same longing for purity and self-stylisation that results in a critical attitude towards Christianity. This religion, in other words, is presented as not pure enough. A similar theme is expressed, again, with help of an intertextual reference: the lyrics of ‘Marlon JD’37 mainly concern John Huston’s 1967 film Reflections in a Golden Eye, in which Marlon Brando plays a major who lives with his wife on an army base. After having flogged his wife’s horse (again, as in Nietzsche’s biography and in Equus, the torture of horses returns), she hits him in the face with a whip (see Huston 1967). This scene is described in the song with help of lines of which some were directly taken from the film: ‘He stood like a statue / As he was beaten across the face / With a horse whip’. These lines are followed by a reflection on the bruised nature of the character’s psyche: ‘Where the wounds already exist’. In the same film, Brando’s character expresses admiration for the Spartan life of the soldier on an army base, describing its discipline and simplicity with the phrase ‘as clean as a rifle’. Reminding of Mishima’s fascination with discipline and with homoerotic aspects of army-life, the line returns in the song’s lyrics (as well as ‘Judge Yr’self ”s aforementioned statement that ‘the brightest sun is the purest gun’). An

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audio-sample from the same scene can be heard in the song as well.38 Referring to this film, the song expresses the idea that, in a world experienced as meaningless, meaning might only be found in an embrace of discipline, militancy and a sober existence. ‘This Joke Sport, Severed’, in turn, ends with the claim that the procession of the flagellants is all that the Lamb of God achieved. The flagellants were a movement of religious zealots in the Middle Ages, who tried to find redemption and atonement by whipping themselves. Claiming that the ‘Lamb of God’ (a title for Jesus used by John the Baptist) has only achieved the procession of flagellants, could therefore be read as a Nietzschean critique of Christianity’s emphasis on sin, suffering and self-­ harm, as well as its inability to turn suffering into a sign of strength and power. As Nietzsche cynically observed in The Antichrist: ‘The fear of pain, even of the infinitely small in pain, – cannot end otherwise than in a religion of love…’ (1968: 154). It may also form an explanation for the title Journal for Plague Lovers: expressing a love for the plague emphasizes the strength of self-harm and the power expressed by being able to endure pain. The use of the word ‘journal’, furthermore, reminds of Jean Genet’s The Thief ’s Journal, which also explores the abject side of the social order.

Self-Overcoming The aforementioned ‘Doors Closing Slowly’ concerns Christianity as well. Its lyrics state that the cross is the shadow and that, as mentioned above, crucifixion is ‘the easy life’, urging the listener to remove ‘the lamb’ from her thought. Furthermore, the lyrics refer to the falseness of the religious community and to the violence of the Bible, describing Lazarus burning Jerusalem and referring to the prophet Isaiah’s violent speech to Hezekiah about his blasphemy against ‘the Holy One of Israel’ (The Holy Bible 2011: Isaiah 37:21–23). The song turns the language of the Bible against itself by claiming that the merciful cast the last stone, and, as mentioned above as well, asking who throws the first stone if the stone ‘is you’. This last statement, I want to argue, summarises the third and last dimension of the critical model that I have discussed in this chapter: self-­ destruction. By stating that one can be the stone that is cast, the self

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shaped in these lyrics expresses the desire to overcome human morality by transcending his own human nature and turning himself into a non-­ human object; an object that causes pain and may shock others into thinking, into a critique of their own humanity. This observation can be illustrated with a passage in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in which we find another reference to becoming an object: Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman – a rope over an abyss. A dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and stopping. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under. I love those who do not know how to live, except by going under, for they are those who cross over. (Nietzsche 1978: 14–15)

The lyrics of Journal for Plague Lovers mirror this idea: they express the need to become a bridge or rope; to become a stone; to become that which Kurtz in Apocalypse Now describes as the dream and nightmare of ‘crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor and surviving’ (Coppola 1979—italics added by me). But, as Nietzsche observes in this same passage, the only way in which this can be done–in which one can survive—is by ‘going under’, which, as Bataille argues in turn, eventually results in self-destruction and madness.

‘Bag Lady’ It is this fatal entwinement of art, religion and representations of and references to self-destruction and madness, I want to conclude, that distances this critical model from the social order. This enables this model to ‘question the entire culture we take for granted’ and successfully provides it with an autonomous position. Since this is done, to a large extent, by exploring the symbolic elements of language to the point at which they almost stop meaning and are pulled completely into the semiotic, this model furthermore gains a reflective aspect that questions the structures that shape our lives and the words that we use to give our lives meaning. Again, I have argued, the critical model that these lyrics

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constitute cannot be understood if we approach the semiotic elements of song lyrics as primary. Several of these aspects are manifested by the lyrics of the ghost track on Journal for Plague Lovers, called ‘Bag Lady’. The song contains the following nine lines: ‘Walk in half view of all mirrors / It makes sense to me / Never let yourself out / I did it ruined me / […] / To be morally good / Only rather to love / A devil pretending to be a god / Laws [love’s?] written on paper and paper burns / Eternity is not a sunrise’.39 These lines, I want to argue, present culture and human existence as shaped by a duality of opposites, as in Plath’s poetry discussed above: reality and a mirror’s reflection (returning in the voyeuristic elements of Reflections in a Golden Eye), inside and outside, devil and god, love and morality, transience and law, and temporariness and eternity. The lyrical ‘I’ expresses the experience of a world that is split between these dimensions, resulting in an attempt to strive towards a form of purity that the mortal, changeable and corruptible ‘I’ can never reach–pulling her into Dante’s ninth circle of Hell. The only form of meaning left therefore seems to be present, on the album, in the embrace of violent forms of discipline and militancy that eventually transform into an embrace of the cleansing and purifying nature of words. These words, in turn, are pushed to their outer limits— putting ‘meaning on trial’—in an attempt to mirror the split nature of this ‘I’ and of a world that this ‘I’ can only perceive ‘in half view’. This means, I want to argue, that this fourth critical model shares certain popular modernist tendencies with the third critical model as found on The Holy Bible. What distinguishes this model from the third one, however, is its more explicit exploration of religion and of specific understandings and representations of that which I have discussed, following Bataille, with help of the notion of ‘madness’. This latter notion is shaped with help of references to Nietzsche, Plath, Mishima, Kurtz and others, and robbed of the slightly romantic meaning it has in Bataille’s text with help of references to suffering and pain. More than in the controlled and dense lyrics of The Holy Bible, furthermore, the lyrics on Journal for Plague Lovers unravel, fragment and corrode, and pull the individual away from critical analyses of the political and economic structures in

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which she is embedded. Instead, these lyrics explore the realm of individual existence: they revolve around references to militancy and discipline, as well as to the Bible, Christ, sin, treachery, Dante’s hell, punishment and self-harm, and keep returning to a Christian discourse, as did Nietzsche before he slipped into madness, struggling with the inability to truly overcome himself and the cultural spheres in which he was embedded. Only the language of Christianity, both Nietzsche and Edwards imply, is able to approach that which lies beyond words and to describe a sublime form of purity; even though these same words frequently reject Christian points of view as themselves not strong and not pure enough.

Conclusion I want to conclude that the fourth critical model discussed above shares an emphasis on lyrics and words with The Holy Bible. Even though the body, as in Nietzsche’s works, is included in an attempt to overcome a modern schism between corporeality and consciousness, between the physical and the conceptual, this model eventually still mirrors the problematic position that corporeality holds in modernity, discussed with help of Adorno in Chap. 3. Whereas Alison Stone, as we have seen in Chaps. 1 and 3, therefore argues that embodiment is addressed by popular music to avoid the ‘tyranny of the intellect’ (2016: xxv), the fourth critical model represents the opposite idea: the above-discussed lyrics make the body into a canvas of the intellect. This body is eventually subsumed by this tyranny and becomes a ‘substratum’ at the bottom of the artwork, illustrating Adorno’s idea that the only way in which one can criticise the social totality is by mirroring its nature, not by trying to escape it. As we have seen, this results within this model in a change in the balance between the meaning of music and of words, the latter eventually colonising the former. This gives these lyrics a modernist sensitivity that, released within the contemporary realms of mass culture and popular music, can be characterised as a form of popular modernism. We have indeed seen that the body is shaped, sculpted, disciplined and wounded in the lyrics that shape this critical model, taking over

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tendencies of the social and religious totality it aims to reject. This turns the body into a manifestation of a critical truth, pushed to its outer limits in formulations that represent it as a stone, bridge or rope, showing, to use Mishima’s words, ‘the existence of values greater than respect for life’ (qtd. in Flanagan 2014: 85). Paradoxically, however, these formulations emphasise the power of lyrics and of words, and push the music of which they form part to the background: the tyranny of an intellect that uses the body as its canvas to reach towards a form of absolute purity is represented by the observation that this body is, eventually, subsumed by the language used to formulate this critical model. After being turned into a stone, this body now becomes a word in the self ’s quest for purity; its material dimension is reduced to a ‘substratum’ that, instead of being included in postmodern representations of corporeality, is rejected in a popular modernist exploration of language. This idea is emphasised even more by the above-discussed observation that the lyrics discussed in this chapter were written by someone who disappeared and whose body was never found, haunting the words left behind without being physically present. This makes the listener reflect on the idea that these lyrics are composed of words that, only later, were accompanied by music; an observation most clearly embodied by the different incarnations of the lyrics of ‘Doors Closing Slowly’. Therefore, the purity that these words long for again makes them push away the music that accompanies them, striving for an autonomous position within the song, and eventually projecting its meaning on the song as a whole. Since this meaning is constituted within this tension between music and words, this does not imply that the former can be ignored, only that it is precisely with help of this tension that the words push themselves to the forefront of the song’s meaning and eventually manage to colonise it. This brings me to the end of my discussion of this fourth critical model. Of course, it does not present the only way in which Nietzsche’s ideas can be translated to the realm of popular music. I already mentioned Bowie’s flirtations with a Nietzschean overcoming of humanity through his persona of Ziggy Stardust. Others have argued–not unproblematically—that heavy metal’s aggressive construction of a form of ‘masculinity’ embodies Nietzsche’s Dionysian focus on passion and affective

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violence (Weinstein 2009: 28). Another exploration can be found in Laibach’s 2017 Also Sprach Zarathustra, which presents fragments of Nietzsche’s work accompanied by music, like Journal for Plague Lovers accompanies Edwards’ lyrics by music. Lastly, Stanley Spector argues that Nietzsche’s attempt to overcome the rational Western subject returns in both the music and the words of Grateful Dead songs (2014). Nevertheless, I hope to have shown that Edwards provides us with a very specific example of a Nietzschean form of critique in the modern age, presenting us with a fourth way of struggling with Adorno’s paradox within the realm of popular music.

Notes 1. For an analysis of the influence of Nietzsche on Adorno, see Gillian Rose’s The Melancholy Science (1978). 2. As Huyssen observes, a Marxist emphasis on economics is absent from Nietzsche’s works, which made Adorno criticise him for uncritically focusing on individualist notions of self-expression (Huyssen 1986: 35). In this critique, Adorno’s rejection of ‘subjective art’, discussed in the previous chapter, returns as well (see also Jameson 2007: 124). 3. David Owen develops a compelling analysis of Nietzsche and modernity, presenting Nietzsche’s descriptions of nihilism and self-overcoming as antidotes to ‘the platitudes of liberal triumphalism’ (1995: ix). 4. Owen argues that Nietzsche reconciles his emphasis on individual autonomy with a form of collectivity with help of the thought experiment of the eternal recurrence of the same (Owen 1994: 78). I believe, however, that the notion of eternal recurrence is primarily used by Nietzsche as an individual thought experiment 5. For a defence of a ‘carnal aesthetics’ that would undermine accepted ideas about gender and sexuality, see Papenburg and Zarzycka 2013. 6. Performances within the Fluxus movement, for example, ‘included the destruction of musical instruments, shaving exercises, and a leap into a bathtub filled with water’ (Home 1991: 52). For the links between EXIT, Fluxus, Situationism and avant-garde composers like Varèse and John Cage, see Berger 27–40.

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7. Genesis P-Orridge’s experiments with embodiment were inspired by Max Ernst’s surrealist collage The Hundred Headless Woman (see Leland 2018). 8. In his book on David Bowie, Simon Critchley describes Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust as Nietzschean in nature, referring to his ideas about overcoming humanity and about sacrificing himself to become the overman (2014: 60–1). 9. For an analysis of ‘madness’ as caused, triggered or substantiated by conditions inherent to the popular music industry, see also McKay 2013: 154–173. McKay discusses Richey Edwards, as well as Amy Winehouse, Daniel Johnston, Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix and many other popular music artists to explore the idea that pop stardom might be understood as an illness itself. 10. This phrase echoes through the title of Manic Street Preachers’ fifth album This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours. However, this title was inspired, as we will see in Chap. 6, by speeches from Welsh politician Aneurin Bevan. 11. Owen argues that the hyperbolic aspects of Nietzsche’s writing style in Ecce Homo introduces an ironic layer to these writings, undermining the quest for an icon through self-parody (2013: 128–9). 12. Bataille’s observations also implicitly reiterate a gendered perspective on the notion of ‘madness’. For a detailed overview of how, throughout history, ‘madness’ has been gendered by representing ‘masculine madness’ as revolving around anger, control and genius, and ‘feminine madness’ as revolving around ‘hysteria’ and ‘loss of control’, see Wood Anderson 2012: 58–63. 13. Richey Edwards himself was very critical of romantic understandings of madness as supposedly forming part of the (male) artistic genius. He observed, for example, that the clinic he spent time in ‘was not full of artistic geniuses’ but ‘full of postal workers’ (qtd. in Evans 2019: 87). I agree that we have to be careful, especially in analyses as developed in this chapter, not to romanticise ‘madness’; the suffering that Edwards went through emphasises the problematic aspects of doing this. But I also think it is important not to overlook the specific ways in which an artist like Edwards (member of a band called Manic Street Preachers, who, from the beginning of their existence, referred to artworks and authors like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Birdy, I Never Promised You A Rose Garden, Equus, Naked, Mishima, Plath, Nietzsche and more) makes different dimensions and representations of ‘madness’ into crucial

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components of his art. I hope to avoid romanticised understandings of madness in this chapter by mainly exploring songs and albums themselves, showing how the notion of ‘madness’ is represented by and shaped within these artworks mainly with help of references to Nietzsche, Mishima and Christianity. Since Edwards made himself part of the meaning of his art—mainly with help of interviews, body art and personas—I will not be able to completely ignore the more personal aspects of his existence, however. 14. In his biography of Nietzsche, Young notes that both Jesus and Dionysus overcame death (Dionysus was killed by the Titans and then resurrected). He furthermore observes, in line of Bataille: ‘The ecstatic side of Nietzsche’s madness can […] be described as an entry into the Dionysian state that is the foundation of his philosophy’ (Young 2010: 530). 15. The video-clip of ‘Kevin Carter’ (on Forever Delayed [DVD]) opens with the following Wordsworth-quote, taken from his 1789 poem ‘Expostulation and Reply’: ‘The eye, it cannot choose but see’ (see Wordworth and Coleridge 2005: 103). In the clip, the button of a photo-­camera is presented as the trigger of a gun. 16. The B-side ‘Lady Lazarus’ (on the 2007 single of ‘Autumnsong’) refers to a poem of the same name by Sylvia Plath (see Plath 2004: 14–18). In the opening of the song, which is sung by Nicky Wire, we hear Scottish poet Carol Ann Duffy reading from her poem ‘Words, Wide Night’ (Duffy 2015: 169). The title of the B-side ‘Litany’ (on the 2005 single ‘Empty Souls’) might refer to Duffy’s poem ‘Litany’ as well (Duffy 2015: 183). 17. In Chap. 5, we have seen that the phrase ‘be pure, be vigilant, behave’ in the lyrics of The Holy Bible’s ‘P.C.P.’ was taken from this comic as well. 18. It could be argued that replacing ‘your’ with ‘yr’ introduces a reference to the Welsh word ‘yr’, meaning ‘the’. This would suggest that the song simultaneously targets ‘your’ and ‘the’ self. 19. Bickle is mentioned in the lyrics of ‘Patrick Bateman’ (a B-side on the single ‘La Tristesse Durera (Scream to a Sigh)’). His picture is also part of the collage on the cover of their 1991 single ‘You Love Us’. 20. The Clash refer to the scene as well with the song ‘Charlie Don’t Surf ’ on their 1980 album Sandinista!. In the song ‘Break My Heart Slowly’ on Nicky Wire’s 2006 solo-album I Killed the Zeitgeist, furthermore, we find an audio-sample taken from the 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (directed by Bahr, Hickenlooper and Coppola), about the making of Apocalypse Now. The fragment emphasises themes

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similar to the critical model discussed in this chapter; we hear Eleanor Coppola observe the following about her husband: ‘It’s scary to watch someone you love go into the centre of himself and confront his fears. Fear of failure, fear of death, fear of going insane. You have to fail a little, die a little, go insane a little, to come out the other side (see Bahr et al. 1991). 21. In a scene in Apocalypse Now, we also see that Kurtz has a copy of The Holy Bible in his lair (see Coppola 1979). 22. Edwards mentioned as well that cutting himself had a sexual component (see Price 1999: 160). 23. In his autobiography, Roland Barthes refers the ‘intellectual’s mythology’ that ‘to become thin is the naive act of the will-to-intelligence’ (2010: 30). 24. The binder included the lyrics of previously released songs like ‘Kevin Carter’ and ‘Removables’ (on Everything Must Go) as well (see Mackay 2009). 25. The booklet of Journal for Plague Lovers contains the following quote by Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, reflecting on the way in which the album re-presents lyrics written in the past: ‘A life spent making mistakes is not only more honourable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing’ (see Shaw 2013). Above the lyrics of ‘Me and Stephen Hawking’, furthermore, Edwards wrote down a quote by the British physicist: ‘I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image’ (see Holloway 2018). 26. Price also notes Edwards’ obsession with other artists who either committed suicide or disappeared, like Van Gogh, Rimbaud, JD Salinger, Marilyn Monroe, Kurt Cobain and Ian Curtis (1999: 165, 188). 27. Larissa Wodtke therefore argues that Journal for Plague Lovers forms a repetition and return—a palimpsest—of many aspects of The Holy Bible (see Jones et al. 2017: 314–334). 28. As emphasised by Bradfield in an interview on the 20th Anniversary edition of Everything Must Go, Edwards did hear some of the demos of songs that were eventually released on Everything Must Go. 29. Albini produced the raw-sounding In Utero, which is partly why the band asked him to produce the album (see Mackay 2009). Like The Holy Bible, Journal for Plague Lovers has 13 songs. Like In Utero, it has a ghost track (again, see Mackay 2009).

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30. This same concern with language distinguishes this album from the popular music songs that Nicola Spelman analyses in the aforementioned Popular Music and the Myths of Madness. Spelman argues that songs performed by Lou Reed, David Bowie and Pink Floyd (among others) question the social and political structures that shape our ideas about ‘madness’ and our ideas about ‘curing’ people who are presented as ‘mad’, influenced by the anti-psychiatry movement. Journal for Plague Lovers, however, presents ‘madness’ in a more ambivalent way, exploring it as lying beyond the border of that which shapes our lives and existence. The album not only protests and resists the symbolic order, but also shows the disturbing nature of what happens when this same border disappears, presenting the suffering it causes without necessarily linking this suffering to psychiatric discourses. 31. In light of the album’s concern with representations of ‘madness’, these lines recall a passage in Hannah Green’s I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, in which a girl in a mental health facility tells the novel’s protagonist the following: ‘I’ve been in six hospitals. I’ve been analyzed, paralyzed, shocked, jolted, revolted, given metrazol, amatyl, and whatever else they make. All I need now is a brain operation and I’ll have had the whole works’ (Green 1964: 47). The theme of self-harm returns in Green’s novel as well: its protagonist frequently burns herself with cigarettes. 32. The ‘naked light bulb’ might refer to the character of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, who refers several times to her fear of naked light bulbs, stating, for example: ‘I can’t stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action’ (Williams 1947: 60). The line also reminds of the light bulb on Picasso’s Guernica, illuminating its depiction of human and animal suffering. 33. If we read these lyrics in the sleeve booklet, we again notice that several lines have been removed to fit ‘in’ the verbal space of the song. 34. In an interview in 1992, Edwards referred to Vincent Van Gogh’s obsession with drawing a perfect circle as well, and observed: ‘The only perfect circle on the human body is the eye. When a baby is born it’s so perfect, but when it opens its eyes it’s just blinded by corruption and everything else is a downward spiral’ (qtd. in Jones et al. 2017: 102). 35. This is one of the phrases returning in the lyrics of ‘Picturesque’ (on God Save the Manics).

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36. A B-side on the single of ‘Your Love Alone is Not Enough’, called ‘Little Girl Lost’, might be a reference to Blake’s poem ‘A Little Girl Lost’ (see Blake 1971: 45). 37. It is unclear to whom the letters ‘JD’ refer, perhaps James Dean or JD Salinger, other artists who, respectively, died young or disappeared for a long time. 38. The film constitutes intertextual references to two other films frequently mentioned by Manic Street Preachers: pictures of Brando in Reflections in a Golden Eye were used in Apocalypse Now to show a young Kurtz. A scene in which Brando talks to himself in a mirror, furthermore, influenced a similar scene in Taxi Driver. Self-harm and madness return in the film as well: a character in Reflections in a Golden Eye has cut off her nipples after a miscarriage. She is eventually sent, by her dominant husband, to a sanatorium in Virginia (perhaps Journal for Plague Lover’s ‘Virginia State Epileptic Colony’) where she dies under suspicious circumstances. A quote by Brando, in which the actor reflects on how sensitive persons are always ‘brutalised’ by the outside world, was printed in the booklet of the single of ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’. 39. The phrase ‘Eternity is not sunrise’ might refer to the line ‘eternity’s sunrise’ in William Blake’s poem ‘Eternity’ (see Blake 2019: 73).

6 Marxist Specters and Alternative Futures: Everything Must Go, This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours, Know Your Enemy and Lifeblood

Introduction In the previous two chapters, I focused on four models of critique that, I argued, are manifested on the Manic Street Preachers releases on which Edwards plays a creative role. I discussed Adorno, Jameson, Huyssen, Benjamin, Debord, Mishima, Genesis P-Orridge, Nietzsche, Bowie, Bataille and other philosophers, artists and artworks to reflect on these models of critique and show how and where they find their place in the different discourses in which Manic Street Preachers position themselves as a popular band who aim to ‘question the entire culture we take for granted’. One of the main theoretical inspirations behind radical forms of political resistance, however, has not yet been comprehensively discussed: Karl Marx. Marxism and different political manifestations of communism do play a role in the background of the Manic Street Preachers releases analysed in the previous chapters, albeit not a very substantial one: as discussed, a picture of Marx is printed on the cover of the independently released single of ‘You Love Us’; photos of Mao and Lenin are seen in the 1992 video-clip of ‘You Love Us’ (on Forever Delayed [DVD]); Wire wears a © The Author(s) 2020 M. Peters, Popular Music, Critique and Manic Street Preachers, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43100-6_6

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shirt with a large hammer and sickle on a picture in the booklet of Gold Against the Soul; and, as discussed, a hammer and sickle are also printed on the sleeve of The Holy Bible, together with the phrases ‘CCCP’ and ‘Manic Street Preachers’. Embossed on military dog tags, the same symbol was released as promotion material for The Holy Bible. Furthermore, a quote from the introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in which Marx characterises the ‘revolutionary audacity’ required to resist oppression, is printed in the sleeve of the New Art Riot E.P. and included in the lyrics of ‘Methadone Pretty’ (on Generation Terrorists): ‘I am nothing and should be everything’ (Marx 1978a: 63). Nevertheless, on the releases discussed in the previous chapters, the political ideologies of Marxism and communism are overshadowed by other theoretical frameworks, even though several of these frameworks—mainly Debord’s Situationism, but, of course, Adorno’s ideas and Jameson’s analysis of postmodernity as well—are strongly influenced by Marx’s critique of consumer capitalism. If communism is mentioned on the hitherto discussed Manic Street Preachers releases, furthermore, this is often done in a critical and misanthropic manner. On the picture on the back of The Holy Bible, for example, the band members wear USSR-medals (among others) and Nicky Wire has a picture of Mao pinned to his chest. In his book on songs of rebellion, Dorian Lynskey argues that these medals are worn by Manic Street Preachers as a ‘symbol of corrupted idealism’ (2011: 1191). Whereas a leftist intellectual like Chomsky, in other words, argued that the demise of the USSR freed leftist movements from the need to defend themselves against the charge that they were embracing a form of totalitarianism (2017: 177), Manic Street Preachers adopted the symbols of totalitarian regimes to emphasise the rotten core of humanity. Again, this means that Marxism as an ideology is not really embraced on this album, but that communism is used to criticise humanity’s inability to constitute a society in which the wellbeing of all of its members plays a primary role. Marx and the ideology of communism, I want to show in this chapter, only start playing a substantial role on the four albums that the band released during the ten years after Edwards’ disappearance: Everything Must Go (1996), This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours (1998), Know Your Enemy (2001) and Lifeblood (2004). I will argue that these four albums

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provide us with examples of another critical model, again primarily formulated in the band’s lyrics. This model is based on French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s attempt to reinterpret Marx’s ideas in an era defined by Francis Fukuyama’s notion of ‘the end to history’. The theory of Marxism, I will show, is employed by Manic Street Preachers on these four albums to resist the corrosion of temporal linearity that is, from different perspectives, linked by authors like Fukuyama, Fredric Jameson and Mark Fisher to the era of postmodernity. This is done by employing Marx’s ideas about historical progress and his utopian notion of a better future in a specific manner. I will conclude, however, that this fifth critical model is not constituted successfully on these albums; a failure that mirrors the, in my view, unconvincing aspects of Derrida’s approach to Marxism.

The End of History and Adorno’s Paradox One of the defining characteristics of postmodernity, Fredric Jameson famously observes in several of his works, is a growing difficulty to understand oneself as part of a historical narrative that has a past, a present and a future. The postmodern fragmentation of grand narratives and of solid structures, he argues, positions the self in a ‘perpetual present’ (2007: 231) in which this self is continually bombarded with new stimuli and changes that, paradoxically, only revolve around a repetition of the ever-­ same.1 In The Seeds of Time, Jameson writes for example: ‘What we now begin to feel … – and what begins to emerge as some deeper and more fundamental constitution of postmodernity itself, at least in its temporal dimension  – is that henceforth, where everything now submits to the perpetual change of fashion and media image, nothing can change any longer’ (Jameson 1994: 17–18). This temporal aspect of postmodernity, he goes on, corrodes the belief that the future will be better than, or even different from, the present; that historical progress is possible. Many authors have made similar observations about the postmodern. David Harvey, for example, describes what he calls a postmodern ‘time-­ space compression’ (1990: 350–2), and Mark Fisher characterises time in postmodernity as ‘pastiche-time’ (2013: 47).2 In his sociological analysis

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of modernity and acceleration, furthermore, the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa observes the following: ‘the current epoch is characterized precisely by the way all motion seems to come to an end: utopian energies are exhausted because all the intellectual and spiritual possibilities appear to have been tried, and this threatens to expand into an uneventful boredom’ (2013: 15).3 The lyrics of the Manic Street Preachers song ‘Groundhog Days’, released as a B-side on the 2001 single of ‘Ocean Spray’, use Harold Ramis’ 1993 film Groundhog Day to illustrate this experience. In this film, a character played by Bill Murray is forced to live the same day over and over again. The postmodern notion of a perpetual present echoes as well through Francis Fukuyama’s ideas about the end of history, to which I want to turn as a stepping stone to Fisher and Derrida’s interpretations of Marxism. First developed in his 1989 essay ‘The End of History?’, then in his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man, the American political scientist famously argues that history reached its end with the demise of the ideology of communism, embodied by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the survival of capitalist liberalism as the only vital ideology left. Since this ideology is free from internal contradictions, Fukuyama claims by employing Kojève’s Hegelian understanding of history, its victory resulted in the end of history; a situation defined, in his view, by a ‘universal homogenous state’ that forms a ‘liberal democracy in the political sphere combined with easy access to VCRs and stereos in the economic’ (1989: 8). Fukuyama’s conclusions have important consequences for the ability to criticise liberal capitalism, which brings me to the topic of this book again. If this ideology has indeed ‘won’ and all other ideological frameworks, theories and ideas have collapsed because of their internal contradictions, it will eventually become impossible to think outside of this framework and criticise it with help of values that are not, in some way or another, formulated within the ideology of capitalist liberalism. Furthermore, it might then also be impossible to struggle against the ideology that Fukuyama celebrates, since this ideology is all there is. Again, we find Baron Munchausen stuck in his swamp, this time because the corrosion of historical progress has made it impossible to defend or find any values outside of this swamp—values pointing towards a better

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future that is created by changing the society in which we live in the now. This situation turns into a version of the paradox I discussed at the end of Chap. 3, if the critic also argues that the framework that shapes this ‘now’—the swamp—is wrong and should be rejected.

Critique and Spectrality This is precisely what Mark Fisher, with help of Derrida, aims to do in his books Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009) and Ghosts of My Life (2014). To work towards my understanding of the fifth critical model, I want to briefly discuss Fisher and Derrida’s critique and the way in which this critique, in general, returns in several aspects of popular music. After this overview, I will turn again to a more specific analysis of Manic Street Preachers releases. Adopting an Althusserian approach to Marxism, the title of Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? refers to Fisher’s claim that capitalism and consumption culture have, with help of the ideological functions of social institutions like, in his view, the Kafkaesque British health care and education systems, become so pervasive that we have entered an era in which Jameson’s postmodern ‘logic of consumer capitalism’ has become completely naturalised. This makes it, Fisher claims, even more difficult to imagine an alternative political system in the future—to imagine an ‘outside’ to the swamp—than in the time of Jameson’s own analysis of postmodernity. One of the main reasons for this observation, Fisher argues, is that all forms of resistance and protest are immediately usurped by the capitalist system. He refers as follows to Kurt Cobain and Nirvana to illustrate this condition as manifested, in his view, within the realm of popular music: No-one embodied (and struggled with) this deadlock more than Kurt Cobain and Nirvana. In his dreadful lassitude and objectless rage, Cobain seemed to give wearied voice to the despondency of the generation that had come after history, whose every move was anticipated, tracked, bought and sold before it had even happened. Cobain knew that he was just another piece of spectacle, that nothing runs better on MTV than a protest against

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MTV; knew that his every move was a cliché scripted in advance, knew that even realizing it is a cliché. The impasse that paralyzed Cobain is precisely the one that Jameson described. (Fisher 2009: 14)

Jameson, however, could still focus on the attempt of postmodern artists to introduce forms of difference and diversity while rejecting the elitism of modernism, and Cobain could still express his rage in an embodiment of teenage angst and noise as protest, Fisher observes. Even these problematisations of the cultural realm, however, have become obsolete in the second half of the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s, he argues. This means that the entwinement of art and consumption culture has, in his view, become completely accepted in the era that he characterises with help of the phrase ‘capitalist realism’. He concludes: ‘capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable’ (Fisher 2009: 12). Fukuyama’s statements regarding the end of history, Fisher therefore claims, should be understood as a cynical affirmation of Jameson’s analysis of a postmodern perpetual now, reemphasised by Slavoj Žižek’s famous statement that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism (qtd. in Fisher 2009: 2). Still, however, Fisher aims to reject this system and show why it is wrong. To be able to do this, he turns to Derrida’s 1993 book Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, in which the French philosopher resists Fukuyama’s ideas. Derrida writes: [I]t must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-­ evangelize in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realized itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and humanity. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the “end of ideologies” and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, never have so many men, women, and children been subjugated, starved, or exterminated on the earth. (1994: 106)

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Derrida lists ten ‘plagues’ that, in his view, cause these ‘sites of suffering’ and are the result of neoliberal capitalism: underemployment, deportation of immigrants, foreign debt, the arms trade and more (1994: 100–104). In Specters of Marx, Derrida therefore aims to counterbalance Fukuyama’s capitalist ‘evangelism’ by developing his own understanding of history and time, meant not only to undermine the hegemony of neoliberal and capitalist discourses, but also to disconnect Marxism from Stalinism, Maoism and other totalitarian systems. Following Marx and Engels’ famous opening of The Manifesto of the Communist Party that ‘a spectre is haunting Europe  – the spectre of Communism’ (Engels and Marx 1978: 473), Derrida approaches Marxism as a specter, a ghost. The moment communism manifested itself in The Manifesto of the Communist Party, he therefore observes, it already did this as a specter. And this means, his argument goes, that it is impossible to declare the ideology of Marxism dead (Derrida 1994: 2). Derrida develops this interpretation further by returning to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, especially the observation that ‘time is out of joint’. Hamlet utters this phrase in an attempt to voice his confusion after he has heard, from the specter of his dead father, that this same father was murdered by Claudius. This information shocks Hamlet in such a profound manner—causing a wound, a trauma—that he comes to experience the world as not being ‘right’. Derrida links this idea to the notion of the specter: experiencing a specter, he observes, is experiencing something or someone that or who is not here but also not not here. A specter arrives but at the same time it returns (as Hamlet’s father), forming an embodiment of the confusing experience that time is out of joint (Derrida 1994: 166). It is this destabilising and ungraspable character of the specter that enables Derrida to argue that Marxism has a critical potential in a postmodern age determined by Fukuyama’s end of history. Observing that Marxism has broken up in different ideas, perspectives and notions in the postmodern era, he describes how different specters of Marx still haunt the political, social and cultural discourses that determine the ways in which we think, feel, perceive and experience. They are able to do this because, as specters that pull time out of joint, they both arrive and

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return, lacking a clear foundation or origin and, inspired by Benjamin’s ideas, becoming messianic in nature (Derrida 1994: 114). The opening lines of The Manifesto of the Communist Party, Derrida observes, proclaim that a new future is going to arrive—communism—and when the specters of Marxism return, they again and again confront us with this messianic possibility of imagining the arrival of an alternative future: ‘This future is not described, it is not foreseen in the constative mode; it is announced, promised, called for in a performative mode’ (Derrida 1994: 128). Even though Fukuyama might proclaim the end of history and the victory of neoliberal capitalism, the specters of Marx, Derrida therefore concludes, make it possible to imagine the future as it was conceptualised in the past—‘a revolutionary present haunted by … antique models’ (1994: 144). This creates cracks in the seemingly unchangeable and seamless whole of the neoliberal worldview, he argues, and enables us to see what is wrong with the capitalist system and reject the ten above-­ mentioned ‘plagues’.

Mourning An important role is played in these analyses by the notion of mourning, which, in Derrida’s Freudian approach to the concept, ‘consists always in attempting to ontologize remains, to make them present, in the first place by identifying the bodily remains and by localizing the dead’ (1994: 9). He argues that this attempt to localise the dead is driven by the aim to work through or process the traumatic experience of a profound sense of loss, and to eventually make this experience part of one’s past. The concept of the specter, however, embodies the impossibility of doing this. A specter keeps returning/arriving, pulling time out of joint, manifesting the impossibility of working through a trauma that keeps haunting the traumatised self. As many authors observe about the nature of trauma, after all, this experience is so radical and disturbing that it cannot be understood or worked through, as we do with other experiences; in Chap. 4, I have linked this observation on representations of trauma to the use of the present tense in the lyrics of Manic Street Preachers’ song ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’ (on The Holy Bible).4 This means that we cannot put traumatic experiences into words, make them part of who we are

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and embed them in our narrative identity, even though we aim to do this through the process of mourning: ‘As in the work of mourning, after a trauma, the conjuration has to make sure that the dead will not come back: quick, do whatever is needed to keep the cadaver localized, in a safe place, decomposing right where it was inhumed, or even embalmed as they liked to do in Moscow’ (Derrida 1994: 120). This idea forms the basis of Derrida’s critical analysis of Fukuyama: whereas those who celebrate the end of history and the victory of neoliberal capitalism aim to mourn the death of Marx and thereby overcome Marxism—to ‘localise the body’ of Marx and reduce it safely to a stage in the past—Derrida argues that the process of mourning Marx is disrupted by the specters of Marx, who make it impossible to accept the ideologies of capitalism and neoliberalism as constituting the end of history. The specters of Marx, in other words, form the trauma of capitalism and keep haunting it, referring to the experience of a wound that does not heal and keeps destabilising this ideology by confronting it with the suffering and injustice it causes: ‘At a time when a new world disorder is attempting to install its neo-capitalism and neo-liberalism, no disavowal has managed to rid itself of all of Marx’s ghosts’ (Derrida 1994: 45–6). It is for this reason that Mark Fisher argues that Derrida’s interpretation of Marxism as a ‘failed mourning’ (Fisher 2014: 22) can be understood as an attempt to develop a notion of critique within the era of postmodernity. He puts this idea in Ghosts of My Life as follows: ‘The power of Derrida’s concept lay in its idea of being haunted by events that had not actually happened, futures that failed to materialise and remained spectral’ (2014: 107). This form of retrofuturism, Fisher goes on, breaks open the postmodern perpetual now and distances the position of the critic from the context she aims to criticise. It is therefore this hauntological understanding of Marxism that results in the fifth critical model discussed in this book: this model is built around the standard of autonomy by aiming to constitute a distance between itself and the whole that is criticised by clinging to the radical otherness of the alternative future that is announced by the spectral presence of Marx. As Jameson writes: ‘Derrida’s ghosts are these moments in which the present – and above all our current present, the wealthy, sunny, gleaming world of the postmodern and the end of history, of the new

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world system of late capitalism  – unexpectedly betrays us’ (2008: 39). The standard of reflection, furthermore, returns in this model’s emphasis on the difficulty of constituting this distance: the spectral presence of Marx is fleeting, difficult to conceptualise, remaining the only interpretation left of the once solid theory of Marxism. I will return to this vulnerability below.

Spectrality and Popular Music Derrida’s notion of hauntology has been used to develop different ideas about voicing critique within the realm of popular culture and, more specifically, popular music. Even though she does not mention Derrida, for example, his ideas return in DeNora’s fascinating study of memory and music, which foregrounds the embodied, affective and sensuous aspects of the ways in which the music to which we used to listen in the past may recall memories and past ideas about the future (DeNora 2003: 81–2). Whereas DeNora mainly focuses on reception, however, those who explicitly use Derrida’s hauntological ideas focus more on the meaning of the artworks and art movement themselves. Abstracting from Derrida’s focus on Marx, for example, Fisher argues that the musical and political movement of Afrofuturism can be understood as driven by retro-­ futuristic and hauntological concerns of a political nature (2013). Fisher also argues that recorded music in general has a hauntological or spectral quality: we hear someone playing an instrument and/or singing who is not really present but also not really absent, emphasised by the specific sound of vinyl: ‘Crackle makes us aware that we are listening to a time that is out of joint; it won’t allow us to fall into the illusion of presence’ (Fisher 2014: 21).5 In many cases, furthermore, the person we hear is not alive anymore: playing a record is like summoning the specters of musicians, with the music both arriving and returning during our repeated listening experiences.6 Derrida’s hauntology has also been used to interpret acousmatic forms of listening, during which the specific source of a sound is not seen, perceived or part of the listening experience, illustrating Derrida’s idea that the specter is a being without a clear origin (Fisher 2013: 53).

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Even though he does not mention Derrida or Fisher, Stan Erraught develops similar observations in On Music, Value and Utopia: Nostalgia for an Age Yet to Come?. Erraught argues that the ‘sonic signature’ of a record is so specific that it immediately recalls a past time and space in the listener’s mind (2018: 118). Records that aim to emulate the style of previously released music, he observes furthermore, therefore never completely succeed in doing this and ‘suggest an alternative world, where the type of music that it is attempting to replicate retained its currency’ (Erraught 2018: 118). In this way, this music gains a utopian aura, Erraught goes on, encouraging listeners to imagine alternative worlds and, in turn, alternative versions of the future.7 Erraught also observes that recording techniques have made it possible that ‘music that could never have actually happened can be retrospectively invented’ (2018: 118), describing the creation of duets between people who do not live anymore and who never actually sung together. In a similar line, the use of samples and ghost-like sounds in electronic music has been understood—both by authors and by musicians themselves—as affirming Derrida’s ideas about the specter, with samples forming specters of past musicians that haunt the music of today. Fisher mentions the aptly titled dark ambient album Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was by Leyland Kirby (2014: 21) as illustrating this idea. Another example is formed by Kirby’s project The Caretaker, named after the role of the protagonist of Stephen King’s haunted-hotel story The Shining.8 The music on The Caretaker’s 2011 album An Empty Bliss Beyond This World consists entirely of samples from ballroom jazz records and was inspired by the influence of music on people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Using these samples in such a way that they are pulled out of their historical time, Fisher argues, blurs the origins of these samples and makes them into nostalgic soundscapes that recall memories and summon alternative futures that were imagined during the time of the original recordings, possibly forcing the listener to criticise the ideology that dominates and shapes the reality of the present (Fisher 2014: 112–19).

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Between Hauntological and Left Melancholy In line of Derrida’s analysis of Marxism, Fisher argues that it is this spectral aspect that makes this type of music critical: it revives notions of an alternative future as they were conceptualised in the past. It does this, he observes furthermore, in a world in which, as discussed above, the ideology of liberal capitalism has, in his view, completely taken over and permeated us with the feeling that history has reached its end and has resulted in the postmodern perpetual present that Jameson describes. Fisher writes: At a time of political reaction and restoration, when cultural innovation has stalled and even gone backwards, […], one function of hauntology is to keep insisting that there are futures beyond postmodernity’s terminal time. When the present has given up on the future, we must listen for the relics of the future in the unactivated potentials of the past. (2013: 53) [italics added by me]

This means that these releases are characterised by a form of melancholy. The futures conceptualised in the past, after all, are memories of these conceptualisations, permeated with melancholic feelings about a past (and an alternative present/future) that is gone. A form of melancholy also returns in Fukuyama’s article, which ends as follows on an unexpected critical note: The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed. Such nostalgia, in fact, will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post-historical world for some time to come. (1989: 18)

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Fisher argues, however, that it is important not to confuse the melancholy that characterises Derrida’s hauntology—a ‘hauntological melancholy’—with a different, uncritical form—manifested in Fukuyama’s nostalgia. This uncritical form, which he characterises with help of Wendy Brown’s article ‘Resisting Left Melancholy’ (1999), paralyses the critic by pulling her into the past and making her reject the idea of working towards a better future (Fisher 2014: 23). Fisher writes: ‘Brown’s left melancholic is a depressive who believes he is realistic; someone who no longer has any expectation that his desire for radical transformation could be achieved, but who doesn’t recognise that he has given up’ (Fisher 2014: 23). I want to argue that it is this second form of melancholy that forms part of the reflective aspect of the fifth critical model, since it constantly looms in its background. This makes this model vulnerable; prone to tipping over to a longing for a past in which everything seemed to be better. In the following, I will show that this vulnerability is also present on the four albums Manic Street Preachers released between 1996 and 2004, to which I will now turn, beginning with an analysis of Everything Must Go (1996). On the one hand, we will see, these releases aim to revive specters of Marx by exploring political movements and ideals as they were formed in the past. On the other hand, these attempts are constantly pulled towards left melancholy, fragmenting in emotional explorations of hopelessness in a postmodern present that is experienced as unchangeable.9 Whereas Fisher and the other authors and artists I mentioned above focus on semiotic aspects of music—crackle, older musical styles, samples, the presence of musical fragments in our memory—I will, after a brief overview of Everything Must Go’s musical context and its sound, again primarily focus on the band’s lyrics and argue that it is mainly in these lyrics that we find hauntological echoes. The conceptual nature of these echoes, I will argue furthermore, makes them more explicitly Marxist than the musical traces described, for example, by Fisher or shaped by The Caretaker.

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Britpop and the End of History As briefly mentioned in the previous chapter, what strikes the listener to Everything Must Go is its radical departure from the musical direction developed on The Holy Bible. Instead of the latter’s bleak, dry and controlled sound, Everything Must Go’s songs sound warm and contain orchestral passages and sweeping refrains that are catchy but melancholic, not afraid of grand musical gestures. They express the cathartic feeling of relief the band felt when they found out they were still able to write meaningful music after Edwards’ disappearance. The album’s style was indeed characterised by Nicky Wire as driven by ‘faded optimism’ (qtd. in Price 1999: 211) and was influenced, to a large extent, by producer Mike Hedges. As briefly mentioned in the previous chapter as well, Everything Must Go’s anthemic accessibility, which made the band break through to the mainstream, as well as its thick guitar sound and the way in which James Dean Bradfield sings on the album (see Hawkins 2010), even made it ride the waves of Britpop (Naish 2018: 30–32). The catchiness of the refrains of some of the album’s hit singles, like ‘A Design for Life’, ‘Everything Must Go’ or ‘Australia’, for example, made it possible to collectively chant these refrains in stadiums, not unlike the refrains of Oasis hits, which massively broadened the band’s appeal. In a 2016 interview, Bradfield observed that this made them able to fill venues with 10,000 instead of 2000 people, resulting in situations in which their new audience (often overlapping with the audiences of Britpop bands) was not familiar with their earlier, more radical output: ‘we played ‘Faster’ and a very visible minority went mental while the guys in Sheffield United tops were going: “What is this?”’ (qtd. in Beaumont-Thomas 2016). Whereas the album’s music sounds accessible, warm and anthemic, however, its lyrical content again radically distances it from Britpop and Cool Britannia. The album’s lyrics explore Marxism, forms of memory and working-class values, with Nicky Wire explaining that ‘A Design for Life’ aimed to express ‘an idea about what the miners had given back to society when they built municipal halls and centres across the country – beautiful looking institutes that they proudly left for future generations.

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The lyric was me railing against what I saw as a flippancy pervading the country with the rise of Britpop, a wholesale adoption – and bastardisation – of working-class culture’ (Wire 2011). Bradfield, in turn, observed that the song revolves around the following sentiment: ‘We’ve built the working classes in south Wales, we built our own society and we’ve had to watch you fuckers try and destroy it and now we’re coming back again’ (qtd. in Cummins 2014: 177). These political observations imply that the ideas and sentiments crystallising on Everything Must Go target not only the ideological aspects of Britpop and Cool Britannia, but also those of the Labour party. As briefly discussed in Chap. 4, Britpop and Cool Britannia were embraced by Tony Blair in his attempt to transform Labour into New Labour, presenting a renewed understanding of the party that distanced it from its socialist bedrock. As Rupa Huq, in an article on Britpop and politics, observes about the elections during which Tony Blair was voted into office, one year after the release of Everything Must Go: ‘The choices on offer at the 1997 election amounted to some extent to ‘whoever wins, Thatcher has won’. Labour had, after years of battling the internal market, accepted the central tenets of Thatcher in according a role to market forces in delivering solutions. In their General Election manifesto of 1997 Labour promised no increase in the basic or top rates of tax and pledged to stick to the Tories’ spending commitments’ (2010: 98). Following this observation, Huq arrives at a conclusion that I want to quote in full, since it emphasises the idea that Fukuyama’s above-­discussed thesis about the end of history echoes through the political aspects of Britpop as well: Perhaps, then, Britpop can be characterized as a post-ideological soundtrack to post-political times. New Labour abandoned many tenets of accepted Labour ideology, beginning with its brazen junking of the party’s constitutional commitment to public ownership, clause 4. Its main defining feature was arguably pragmatism. Britpop’s vacuity too can be seen as tame and anodyne compared with earlier youth-musical subcultural sloganeering such as punk’s nihilistic prescription to shake society to its very foundations (‘anarchy in the UK’, ‘no future’) or hippie idealism (‘be reasonable, demand the impossible’, borrowed from the Situationists). In the early

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1980s, indie, with its kitchen-sink songs, offered a social-realist solution to the austerity of the era. The mainstream pop of the time offered glamour and excitement (Culture Club, Wham!, Duran Duran) in an escapist vision of hedonism in hard times. The technologically savvy ‘New Pop’, as it became known, was a precursor to the cultures of electronic dance music that became acid house. Political pop as a mainstream force has arguably been in decline since. (2010: 100)

Britpop, in other words, may be understood as the soundtrack to Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’, presenting a worldview in which political reflection and social critique were replaced with the construction of a mythical English identity. Since this identity revolves around a form of hedonistic ‘laddism’ that is presented as ‘ordinary working class’, this furthermore suggests that the emancipating and critical aspects of working-­ class consciousness disappeared with it. Not only had systematic ideological and political critique come to a halt in the UK of the mid-­1990s, with Blair implicitly accepting the end of history, this furthermore implies, the drive to resist political structures and create new forms of protest music had largely disappeared from the realm of rock as well. It is in the lyrical content of Everything Must Go, however, that we do find a form of protest, mainly rooted in a defence of a form of socialism that Manic Street Preachers linked to political figures and union activists like Arthur Scargill and Aneurin Bevan. They dedicated one of their awards to the former (see Hawkins 2010: 146n), and Bradfield characterised the latter as ‘the greatest figure in British history’, adding: ‘It just fucking sickens me that people have been conned into believing that you can’t think in terms of class anymore. As soon as working-class people lose their sense of belonging, they lose all their humility, and you get a classless society in the worst possible sense’ (qtd. in Heatley 1998: 77). In his introduction printed in the sleeve booklet of the 10th Anniversary edition of Everything Must Go, John Harris observes that the album rejected a cultural and social epoch in which ‘the odd academic talked about The End of History’, writing furthermore: ‘Things that were once elemental were now rearranged and trivialized. Class was now less the spark of political anger than something from which bourgeois metropolitans could make irony-tinged art; nationalism had mutated from a

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taboo into a kitsch political prop (put them together, and you have the basis of Britpop)’. In 2016, Nicky Wire indeed reflected, referring to Blur’s 1994 album Parklife: ‘There was undoubtedly some anger at how the working classes were being portrayed in Britpop. Post-Parklife, it had become a cockney jamboree of greyhound racing. I couldn’t relate to it’ (qtd. in Beaumont-Thomas 2016). To develop this argument, I will now turn to the album’s lyrics.

History and Melancholy Like Everything Must Go’s musical form, the album’s lyrics also present a break with the band’s past: these lyrics are more direct, affective and descriptive than those on The Holy Bible. They explicitly make political and emotional points, coming closer to what has been described as The Clash’s ‘practical agit-prop political engagement’ (see Dee 2009: 61), than to the dense popular modernist style that, as I have argued in previous chapters, characterises especially The Holy Bible and Journal for Plague Lovers. Wire observed about the album’s lyrical content: ‘The language is simpler, but the content is probably more complex. Each song has two or three themes’ (qtd. in Price 1999: 254). And somewhere else: ‘Richey [Edwards] was so intelligent that he ended up trying to condense so much that it was unintelligible’ (qtd. in Heatley 1998: 42). In Kieran Evans’ 2019 documentary about This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours, furthermore, Wire links this focus on more direct forms of expression to the influence of Welsh poet R.S. Thomas. One of the main themes running through the lyrics on Everything Must Go is a concern with past, history, progress and time, which introduces the above-discussed themes.10 In the beginning of the band’s existence, the band had often explicitly rejected the past, with Richey Edwards stating for example: ‘We don’t want to return to some supposed golden day… We’re now. All you can do with the past is to never want to be like it, because the past has created what we’re living in now, and we’re not happy, so it must’ve failed’ (qtd. in Shutkever 11). On Everything Must Go, the band had grown older and built up a past of their own, with especially Edwards’ disappearance shifting their focus on youthfulness,

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revolution and the future, to musings on ageing, memory and past. Indeed, as I want to argue in the following, the album’s lyrics are driven by the need to go forward, but continually contrast this need with the experience of being pulled back to a traumatic moment that has pulled time out of joint, to use Shakespeare’s phrase again. On a psychological and biographical level, this traumatic moment is formed by the disappearance of Edwards: the fact that his body was never found made him into a Derridean specter; both present and absent; haunting the lyrics and music written by Manic Street Preachers after his disappearance. Never getting older than 27, furthermore, Edwards left behind a body of lyrics, a body of thought, a body of (moving) images and photographs, but not a body of flesh. His disappearance carved a hole in the band’s history, pulling its narrative out of joint and causing a wound—a trauma—that could not heal or be mourned, undermining the ability of those left behind to move forward. This latter theme is expressed by the album’s title, Everything Must Go,11 which refers both to the descriptive claim that everything always moves on—a possible explanation for the band’s decision to continue after Edwards’ disappearance, not changing their name as New Order did after Ian Curtis’ death, for example—and to the normative claim that history should go forward (again) after a traumatic experience. Of course, Everything Must Go introduces the audience to this hauntological dimension by the five songs on which lyrics written by Edwards were used, discussed in the previous chapter. When listening to these lyrics, Edwards’ specter both arrives and returns, disconnected from a specific origin. On the album’s cover, furthermore, we see portraits of the three remaining band members standing on a shelf, and in its sleeve booklet we find the album’s lyrics printed in black capital letters on a monochromic background. Different phrases from these lyrics are also printed separately in the album’s booklet, emphasising the importance of their content. On the cover, furthermore, the album’s title is followed by two brackets with a large empty space in-between. Together with its minimalist design, mainly dominated by the colour blue, the inclusion of photographs of details of the band member’s bodies, as well as the wearing of bland, white and khaki-coloured clothes that form a radical contrast with their glam and military earlier personas,12 these aspects

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emphasise the themes of vulnerability, loss and emptiness. The notion of time is foregrounded as well by the Jackson Pollock quote printed in the album’s sleeve booklet: ‘The pictures I contemplate painting would constitute a halfway state and an attempt to point out the direction of the future – without arriving there completely’ (see Craft 2012: 129).13

Stuck in a Sepia Film A concern with past, history, progress and time is explicitly expressed in the lyrics of those songs on Everything Must Go that were not written by Edwards, even though ‘Elvis Impersonator: Blackpool Pier’ links the corroding influence of American consumption culture to the statement that ‘The future’s dead, fundamentally’. An example is formed by the title song, released as its second single in July 1996. The song’s first verse contains the following lines: ‘Freed from the memory / Escape from our history’. These lines are contrasted in the second verse with descriptions of the inability to go forward in a present that is dominated by its past: ‘I look to the future it makes me cry / But it seems too real to tell you why / Freed from the century / With nothing but memory’. In the song’s video-clip (on Forever Delayed [DVD]), this problematic relationship with time returns: we see the band play in front of an enormous clock through which a guitar is eventually smashed.14 The clip also features a cherry blossom tree, which refers in Japanese culture to both the beauty and briefness of life;15 at the end of the clip, the tree’s blossoms are blown away. A focus on the inability to escape from a past that paralyses the self, undermining her ability to move on, dominates the lyrics of several other songs on the album as well. ‘No Surface All Feeling’, for example, contains lines that express reflections on a crippling form of nostalgic self-­ doubt: ‘What’s the point in always looking back / When all you see is more and more junk?’. The lyrics of ‘Further Away’, furthermore, revolve around a longing for childhood happiness and mourn a lost ‘you’ by using metaphors referring to circularity and repetition: ‘Further away, feel it fade into your childhood // […] // The circular landscape comes back only with regret’. The song ‘Enola/Alone’, in turn, was inspired by

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Roland Barthes’ writings on memory and the nature of photography in Camera Lucida (Price 1999: 213), briefly mentioned in Chap. 1.16 Again, the lyrics express nostalgia and commemoration, most explicitly in the following lines: ‘I’ll take a picture of you / To remember how good you looked / Like memory it has disappeared’. In the lyrics to ‘Enola/Alone’, the theme of being overcome by Barthes’ punctum and of being sucked into the past (reflected by the mirrored repetition in the song’s title) returns, this time coupled to an expression of wanting to move forward: ‘But all I want to do is live / No matter how miserable it is’. Since these lyrics are accompanied by emotional, melancholic and anthemic music, they transmit this punctum through their music as well, touching the listener by bringing her into a reflective and melancholic mood, the song’s sweeping refrains providing moments of emotional catharsis. Again embracing the technique of intertextuality, the theme of wanting to escape from a past that keeps pulling the subject back, is illustrated with help of several references to the 1969 film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The song ‘Sepia’, a B-side on ‘Kevin Carter’ (released as the third single from Everything Must Go), for example, does this by describing the film’s ending: the two titular heroes are trapped in a building and burst out into a firefight in which, they know, they will be killed. Instead of showing their deaths, the film ends in a sepia-coloured freeze-frame (see Hill 1969), making the protagonists into spectral beings who neither die nor live; who cannot be mourned but remain trapped within the film’s narrative, arriving/returning the moment we watch the film (again). The lyrical subject of ‘Sepia’ claims that he is ‘perpetually stuck in sepia film’, the colour of sepia referring more generally to the nostalgic connotation of sepia-coloured photographs from the past. Fragments from the ending of the film were also projected on stage during the 1997 Everything Must Go-tour (see Ikeda 2002: 99). The important role that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid plays in the meaning constituted in the Everything Must Go-era, is emphasised as well by a B-side on the single of ‘Everything Must Go’: a cover of ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head’, which was written by Hal David and Burt Bacharach for the film.17 ‘Australia’, the ninth song on Everything Must Go, released as its fourth and last single, was inspired by the film as well: its lyrics echo the wish of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,

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expressed just before they are reduced to sepia specters, to flee from their lives as bank robbers and escape to Australia (see Hill 1969). In the song’s lyrics, the name of the continent represents the utopian wish to escape from the past and move forward: ‘I’ve been here for much too long / This is the past that’s mine / I want to fly and run till it hurts / Sleep for a while and speak no words in Australia’.

A Revival of Modernism Before discussing how this theme—explorations of nostalgia, memory and the inability to move forward—is combined with the attempt to summon specters of Marx, I want to briefly discuss how several releases in the Everything Must Go-era embed these ideas about past and future in references to the artistic tendency of modernism. On most sleeves of the singles taken from the album, quotes by modernist painters, sculptors and architects are printed. These quotes explicitly emphasise the modernist focus on form and the process of creation, providing art with an almost holy aura that conflicts with the postmodern destabilisation of Huyssen’s Great Divide between high and low art, between mass culture and the aesthetic realm. Furthermore, they express the idea that a form of hope might be found in progress constituted in the realm of art, which, they suggest, provides the ability to experiment with form and to create something new; something of beauty. On the sleeve of CD1 of ‘A Design for Life’, for example, the following quote by Spanish modernist architect Antoni Gaudí is printed: ‘The creation continues incessantly through the media of man. But man does not create … he discovers. Those who look to the laws of nature for support for their new works collaborate with the creator. Copiers do not collaborate. Because of this, originality consists in returning to the origin’ (see Ramírez 1998: 37). Part of this quote returns in the song’s video-clip (on Forever Delayed [DVD]), as well as Swiss-French radical modernist architect Le Corbusier’s maxim ‘A house is a machine for living in’ (see Le Corbusier 1986: 107). Another Le Corbusier quote, again reflecting on artistic creation and again taken from his 1923 text Towards a New Architecture, is printed on CD2 of ‘A Design for Life’: ‘The architect, by

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the relationships which he creates he wakes in us profound echoes, he gives us the measure of an order which we feel to be in accordance with that of our world, he determines the various movements of our heart and of our understanding; it is then that we experience the sense of beauty’ (see Le Corbusier 1986: 1). The two singles of ‘Everything Must Go’, furthermore, contain quotes by painters Edward Hopper and Mark Rothko—I mentioned above that the sleeve of Everything Must Go cites Edward Hopper as well—and the two singles from ‘Australia’ are accompanied by quotes from British poet Hal Summers and John Steinbeck. Lastly, the two singles of ‘Kevin Carter’ contain citations from Eugene O’Neill and Dennis Potter, the latter referring to a modernist problematisation of the inability to find a unified and stable form of meaning: ‘Words themselves – the very material of our discourse increasingly take on masks or disguises’ (see Gilbert 1998: 30). This embrace of modernist art returns in ‘Interiors (Song for Willem de Kooning)’, the tenth song on Everything Must Go, which discusses the abstract expressionist painter Willem De Kooning. Its lyrics link observations on his ability to approach the ‘interiors’ of people from an expressionist point of view, with reflections on the dementia that eventually took over his life: ‘Who sees the interiors like young Willem once did / […] / Now you seem to forget it so much’. The decision to approach Willem de Kooning’s art through the lens of his dementia again illustrates Everything Must Go’s struggle with history and memory, haunted by specters that emphasise and encourage feelings of melancholy, in this song pulling time out of joint in such an extreme way that the self gets lost in forgetfulness.18

Labour and Liberation I now want to argue that this concern with the themes of time, memory and nostalgia—expressed in lyrics that revolve around the inability to escape from a past that keeps pulling the self back—results on Everything Must Go in the attempt to summon specters of Marx—especially the notion of a better future—to kickstart this same self into a hopeful

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embrace of historical progress. The attempt to summon these specters is manifested in the following line, printed in the album’s booklet: ‘Inspiration – Tower Colliery, Cyon Valley, South Wales’. Tower Colliery was a deep-coal mine that played an important role in the miners’ strikes of 1984 and 1985. When the mine was about to be closed by the Thatcher government, the miners protested, drawing parallels between their plight and that of the miners’ protests during the famous 1831 Merthyr Rising, which allegedly was the first time a red flag was raised to symbolise organised working-class protest (see Dicken 2013). The mine stayed open and, when it was in danger of being closed in 2004, the miners unified again and bought the mine themselves, keeping it open until 2008. By expressing the idea that Everything Must Go is inspired by a place that symbolises a long tradition of working-class protests against exploitation and, in particular, of resistance against the neoliberal political system of Thatcher, the album presents itself as haunted by the specters of Marx. These specters also haunt the lyrics of the album’s first single: ‘A Design for Life’, which was released in April 1996 and was the band’s first taste of mainstream success; it reached number 2  in the UK Top 40. Characterised by anthemic music and a waltz rhythm, the song’s lyrics discuss the theme of class identity (as briefly discussed in Chap. 1). Inspired by the title of Joy Division’s 1978 E.P. An Ideal for Living,19 the song plays with different ways of interpreting the idea that one’s life is shaped by the class to which one belongs. In the song’s video-clip (on Forever Delayed [DVD]), this idea of class identity is visualised with help of images that refer to the British upper classes, but also to stereotypical notions of working-class life: we see the band play while in the background video fragments are projected of what appear to be drunk soccer fans, of the Royal Ascet, of fox hunting parties, of large groups of police constables, and of stereotypical scenes of middle-class family life that remind of Douglas Sirk’s films. These images are intertwined with phrases in capital letters, like ‘VIOLENCE FOR EQUALITY’ (inspired by Ted Honderich’s 1998 bundle of essays with the same name) and the William Morris-inspired statement ‘USEFUL IS BEAUTIFUL’. Furthermore, the clip shows citations from George Orwell—‘HOPE LIES IN THE PROLES’ (Orwell 1977: 66)—and Lenin—‘WHEN FREEDOM EXISTS THERE WILL BE NO STATE’ (see Lenin 2014: 134).

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I want to argue that these lyrics introduce the theory of Marxism as an attempt to move history forward: to escape from the crippling experience described in the lyrics discussed above, and to anchor the self in a linear understanding of past, present and a hopeful future as predicted by Marx’s historical materialism. The emancipating aspects of the working class are clearly emphasised in its lyrics—‘Libraries gave us power / Then work came and made us free’—but the difficulty of recalling the specter of Marx is expressed as well. This is mainly done, as discussed in Chap. 1, with help of stereotypical descriptions of the working classes in ways that both empower and give up—‘We don’t talk about love / We only want to get drunk’20—followed by the statements ‘And we are not allowed to spend / As we are told that this is the end’. The last two lines undermine the progress emphasised by Marx’s historical materialism, embodied by Fukuyama’s rejection of Marx and his proclamation of ‘the end of history’. Still, however, Marxist specters are continually recalled to counter this proclamation, haunting the VHS release of their 1997 concert in the Manchester NYNEX with help of a quote by Lenin printed on the video’s back: ‘When we are victorious on a world scale I think we shall use gold for the purpose of building public lavatories’ (see Lenin 1965: 113). Even though the song’s embrace of a guitaroriented and anthemic sound made it, to a certain extent, part of Britpop, its lyrics alienate the song from the hedonistic laddism of Britpop, emphasising labour and self-education as empowering working class values.

‘If I Can Shoot Rabbits, I Can Shoot Fascists’ On the album following Everything Must Go, 1998’s This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours, we again find a combination of a concern with memory, history and nostalgia on the one hand, and the attempt to summon specters of Marx on the other. The album’s cover shows the three band members standing on a beach close to the north Welsh town of Portmeirion, again replacing the more abstract covers of their first three albums with a focus on the band members themselves.21 Implicitly, the cover also emphasises the absence of a fourth person, as well as the growing presence of Wales

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on the album. In the background of the album cover, we see the mountains of Snowdonia, and inside the sleeve a poem by Welsh poet R.S. Thomas is printed (in the next chapter, I will return to this observation). In its sleeve booklet, we furthermore find the album’s lyrics printed in black capital letters, as well as a collection of polaroid pictures of the band members, Welsh landscapes, trees, and more. Even more than on Everything Must Go, I want to argue in the following, the album moves towards a crippling form of Brown and Fisher’s above-mentioned ‘left melancholy’ that is haunted by specters that pull the lyrical subject back to a lost past instead of reviving an alternative image of the future. This theme is emphasised by the album’s music. In 1997, the movement of Britpop had died out, and Cool Britannia and its embrace of the British flag had been taken over by the immense popularity of the Spice Girls. After 1997, furthermore, post-Britpop bands like Keane, Travis and Snow Patrol gained momentum, rejecting Britpop’s hedonism and replacing its thick guitar sound with a focus on melodic songs with clean guitars and introspective lyrics. In 1997, furthermore, Radiohead released OK Computer, propelling the band into the mainstream with experimental music and abstract lyrics that, in their focus on atmosphere, broke away from their earlier thick and distorted guitar sound as well. Similarly, This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours moves away from the rock-­ oriented style of Everything Must Go, as well as from the latter’s powerful singing style. Apart from a rock song like ‘You Stole the Sun from My Heart’, the album instead presents a tender sound accompanied by clean and more vulnerable singing. More than Everything Must Go, furthermore, the album is characterised by a nostalgic sound, revolving around slow songs that combine acoustic guitars with different instruments, from strings (‘The Everlasting’, ‘Black Dog on My Shoulder’) and cello (‘The Everlasting’, ‘My Little Empire’), to sitar (‘Tsunami’), a melodica (‘Be Natural’) and programmed percussion (‘The Everlasting’, ‘You Stole the Sun from My Heart’). Musically, the pace of the band seems to slow down on this album as well, being pulled towards a present dominated by a longing for a past that will not return. Indeed, all of the political references on the album refer to the past. Its title was taken from a phrase that the above-mentioned Welsh Labour

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politician Aneurin Bevan used to conclude his speeches, heard by Wire in 1997 when a recording of one of these speeches was played during a celebration at Bevan’s monument near Ebbw Vale (see Edwards 2007: 150). Bevan played an important role in constituting the British National Health Service and, for many, embodied the ideology of socialism from a perspective closely tied to the plight of the miners. Referring to Bevan and contrasting him with the New Labour of Tony Blair, Manic Street Preachers seem to imply that it is only in the past that we may find political ideas that provide hope. A similar approach is found on the album’s first single, ‘If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next’, which was released in August 1998. The song’s accessible sound gave it a commercially viable quality that made it reach number 1 in the UK singles chart. The song’s lyrics describe Welsh volunteers who fought fascism in the Spanish Civil War. Its title was taken from a poster displaying a dead child, killed by Franco’s Nationalist Army, urging people to join the resistance. The song’s lyrics contain a quote from Tom Thomas, a volunteer from the Welsh mining town of Bedlinog, who explained his motivation for going to Spain by stating: ‘If I can shoot rabbits, I can shoot fascists’ (qtd. in Francis 2012: 215). The video-clip of the song (on Forever Delayed [DVD]), furthermore, opens and ends with a music box playing the left-wing anthem ‘The Internationale’. Even though the song aims to revive the specter of Marx—its title addresses the listener and translates the urgency that this message had in the past to the present—the melancholy of having to look to the past in order to imagine a different future undermines the trust that the lyrical ‘I’ has in the possibility of really constituting this future. The line ‘I’ve walked Las Ramblas / But not with real intent’, for example, might refer to Homage to Catalonia, in which George Orwell describes his disillusion with the Popular Front, which fragmented because of internal conflicts and international politics. Furthermore, like in the lyrics of The Clash’s ‘Spanish Bombs’ (on London Calling), which contrasts the Spanish Civil War with British tourists visiting areas in Spain where people used to die fighting fascism, the song’s lyrics shift to the present day. By doing this, they describe the ideological nature of the Welsh volunteers from a nostalgic perspective, recalling a future that has been lost in today’s world:

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‘Gravity keeps my head down / Or is it maybe shame / At being so young and being so vain’. This pessimistic interpretation is strengthened by the cover of the song’s single, which shows a picture of Welsh volunteers of the XV International Brigade before the 1938 Ebro offensive. Instead of reproducing this picture itself, which is done on the cover of Hywel Francis’ study Miners Against Fascism: Wales and the Spanish Civil War, however, the single shows a blurry polaroid made of this picture as it seems to hang in a museum. The polaroid displays the writing underneath, and the reflection of the camera’s flashlight makes the photo even more unclear.22 This means that the single again places the Marxist ideology it refers to in a historical perspective, making the volunteers into specters, into ghosts from the past. In the song’s above-mentioned video-clip (on Forever Delayed [DVD]), we furthermore see the band playing in a sanitised and artificial environment, performing mechanical and passionless gestures, their eyes slowly disappearing. Again, this could be interpreted as an illustration of the impossibility of escaping Jameson’s postmodern era and of truly reviving Marxist specters. This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours contains one more political song: ‘S.Y.M.M.’. Standing for ‘South Yorkshire Mass Murderer’, the lyrics refer to the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, when 96 people were killed and 766 injured during an overcrowded soccer match. Even though the police—assisted by tabloid journals—originally blamed the disaster on soccer fans, frequently with help of references to negative stereotypes of the working classes, in 2017 several police officers were charged, with investigations concluding that the fans were killed because of the careless way the police handled the crowd. Instead of embodying an attack on a system that let the tragedy happen, however, S.Y.M.M. mainly expresses confusion, emphasised by its slow and minimalistic sound. Even though the lyrics mention Jimmy McGovern, who made the 1996 television film Hillsborough about the disaster, and even though the lyrics resist the way the disaster was originally blamed on soccer fans, they circle around a political standpoint without really arriving there: ‘The context of this song / Well I could go on and on / But it’s still unfashionable / To believe in principles’. Marx’s critical specter is summoned here, but it does not arrive, driven away by a postmodern rejection of political standpoints

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firmly rooted in theoretical foundations. Simon Price indeed characterises the lyrics as ‘flimsy post-modern tail-chasing’ (1999: 258), and it could be argued that Fukuyama’s declaration of the end of history stalls the song’s ability to crystallise in a solid political standpoint. That the melancholy of these songs pulls the subject back to a past that is experienced as forever lost, undermining the ability to defend social progress and truly imagine a better future, is illustrated by four B-sides released in the This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours-era. The first is ‘Black Holes for the Young’ (a duet with singer Sophie Ellis-Bextor) on ‘The Everlasting’. The song contains the line ‘Subside the opera, forget coal’, expresses the idea that there is nothing left for young people to believe in anymore, and concludes that the upper classes have overpowered the working classes. Another B-side is the song ‘Socialist Serenade’, released on the single ‘You Stole the Sun from My Heart’. Explicitly criticising the way in which Tony Blair’s New Labour hollowed itself out by focusing on a ‘politics of celebrity’, the song mentions the introduction of student loans (see Naish 2018: 74) and contains the following, in the context of this chapter, important line: ‘I can’t see past anywhere’. The song therefore concludes with the statement: ‘Change your name to New / Forget the fucking Labour’. In the song ‘Prologue to History’ (a B-side on the single of ‘If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next’23), this theme is explicitly linked to observations about time and progress as well. Referring to musicians (Happy Monday’s Shaun Ryder), athletes (Steve Ovett, Phil Bennett), the ‘Kinnock factor’ (named after Welsh Labour politician Neil Kinnock who, against all expectations, lost the 1992 elections), pension plans and modern-day brands, the lyrics reflect the fragmented nature of living in a postmodern world, of ‘talking rubbish to cover up the cracks’ and being ‘an empty vessel who can’t make contact’, pushing political ideas back to a forgotten past. Its line ‘remember ethnic cleaning in the highlands’, which refers to the depopulations of the highlands of Scotland between 1785 and the 1850s, is followed by the observation that ‘no one says a thing in the middle of En-ger-land’. The phrase ‘Eng-er-land’ refers to the way in which ‘England’ is often chanted by soccer fans, recalling the laddism and mythical Englishness of Britpop.

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Memory Becoming Pain I want to argue that these expressions of a growing inability to take in a political stance and express it with certainty, as well as the commemorative musings of ‘If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next’, make the critical model that the band aim to construct on these albums vulnerable to the above-described ‘left melancholy’. As in the Everything Must Go-era, the singles taken from the album are mainly accompanied by quotes from modernist artists, or artists reflecting on the process of artistic creation: Pablo Picasso and Alfred de Musset on ‘If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next’, Samuel Beckett and Francis Bacon on ‘The Everlasting’, and again Picasso on ‘You Stole the Sun from My Heart’. On ‘Tsunami’, furthermore, we find two quotes that revolve around time and change: ‘Before us stands yesterday’ from Ted Hughes’s poem ‘Climbing into Heptonstall’ (see O’Connor 2018: 54), and ‘I have to change to stay the same’ by Willem de Kooning (see Marshall 1986: 34). A quote by Welsh actor Anthony Hopkins on ‘You Stole the Sun from My Heart’, furthermore, again expresses an inability to go forward: ‘Acting is bad for the mental health. I can’t take it any more. This has got to stop’ (see Hopkins: ‘I want to quit acting’, 1998). In line of the fatalistic aura of Hopkins’ statement, the lyrics on almost all other songs on This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours revolve around feelings of depression that petrify the lyrical subject and undermine the ability to go on. In three of the album’s songs, these feelings are expressed with help of cultural and political references. ‘Black Dog on My Shoulder’, for example, was inspired by the idea that Winston Churchill would describe his depressions as a black dog sitting on his shoulder (for a critical discussion of this idea, see Attenborough 2014).24 The lyrics express the inescapability of depression—‘My dilemma but not my choice’—by referring to the realm of film: ‘Like Carlito’s Way / There are no exit signs’. Famously, the protagonist of Brian DePalma’s film Carlito’s Way tries to escape a life of crime after being released from prison, eventually to be pulled back in again (see DePalma 1993). ‘Ready for Drowning’, in turn, is inspired by the drowning of the Welsh town of Tryweryn, in 1965, to supply water to the cities of Liverpool and Birmingham. It expresses a similar struggle with history and time, containing the lines ‘Drown that poor thing / Put it out of its misery / Condemn it to its future / Deny its

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history’ and ends with the open question: ‘What is there to believe in?’. The song also contains the line ‘I’d go to Patagonia but it’s harder there’, referring to the Welsh who emigrated to Patagonia in the nineteenth century to preserve their culture against the, in their view, threatening presence of the English in Wales. The song’s titular ‘drowning’ also refers to Welsh artists like Rachel Roberts, Dylan Thomas and Richard Burton who, in Wire’s words, ‘drank themselves to death’ (qtd. in ‘Manic Street Preachers – Truth & Memory’ [video fragment]).25 ‘Tsunami’, released as the fourth single of This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours, contains another reference. The song revolves around the story of poets June and Jennifer Gibbons, the ‘silent twins’ who grew up in Wales and decided to stop speaking to no one but each other when they were young.26 They spiralled into a life of crime and were eventually hospitalised in a psychiatric clinic, becoming trapped ‘by their inability to communicate with anyone but each other’ (Wallace 1987: 122). The lyrics to ‘Tsunami’ adopt the story of the twins as a way to express feelings of isolation, misrecognition and alienation, the phrase ‘tsunami’ referring to the wave of fear and liberation felt by June Gibbons when her sister died. The song’s video-clip (on Forever Delayed [DVD]) contains fragments from their poem ‘We Two Made One’. This theme of isolation returns as well on most of the other tracks on the album, which are completely personal and emotional, revolving around self-critique, self-doubt and the loss of political values. Expressing doubt about Marxism—about any political engagement—they fatalistically affirm Fukuyama’s claim that we have reached the end of history. This already happened in the lyrics of ‘Dead/Passive’, a B-side on the single of ‘A Design for Life’, in which the public’s obsession with celebrity couples (the lyrics mention eight celebrities) is linked to a critique of the band’s own status, mainly targeting their contributions to charity albums from a Marxist perspective. The lyrics state: ‘I’m so passive hopeless fucking mess / We’re so passive do our bit for charity / From Bosnia to London we do it all for free…’ On This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours, however, similar forms of self-doubt and self-critique start permeating the self more completely. ‘My Little Empire’, for example, expresses the desire to turn away from the attempt to constitute political change, withdrawing into the self instead. ‘I’m Not

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Working’, furthermore, revolves around feelings of being stuck in history as well, with the line ‘Petrified for the millionth time’ describing the emptiness of a life devoid of labour. This idea is most clearly expressed by the song ‘The Everlasting’, which was released as the album’s second single. Containing the lines ‘I don’t believe in it anymore / Pathetic acts for a worthless cause’, the lyrical subject of the song longs for a past in which he could still fully embrace an ideology and look towards a bright future, instead of being stuck in a ‘now’ in which he can only look back: ‘In the beginning when we were winning / When our smiles were genuine’. Time and history return in the song ‘You’re Tender and You’re Tired’ as well: ‘No time to be strong enough / Just time to leave it all behind / Memory has become pain’. This focus on personal expressions of suffering finds its most vulnerable manifestation in the lyrics to the song ‘Born a Girl’, which revolve around the idea that the lyrical subject does not feel good in his own body, and expresses this feeling by referring to the desire to be ‘born a girl’. Criticising notions of masculinity, which embed the song in the context of Nicky Wire’s gender-bending stage personas, the lyrics again connect this expression to a rejection of the present and the inability to change the future with the following line: ‘Need a new start and a different time’.

Masses Against Classes The specters of Marx did not wither away completely after Manic Street Preachers had delivered their ‘Socialist Serenade’, however. I want to argue that they attempted to revive these specters one last time in 2000 with the release of ‘The Masses Against the Classes’, a stand-alone single that, paradoxically, reached number 1 in the UK singles chart. The cover of the single depicts the Cuban flag—albeit without its white star—and presents an attempt to escape from the melancholic swamp in which they had found themselves. Illustrating the Marxist aim of overcoming a class society, the title of the song is taken from William Ewart Gladstone, a nineteenth-century British politician of the Liberal Party, who stated that ‘All the world over’, he would ‘back the masses against the classes’ (qtd. in Marquand 2013). The song itself opens with a soundbite in which we

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hear Noam Chomsky observe: ‘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’. Chomsky refers here to James Madison’s notes on the constitutional convention of 1787, illustrating the idea that, in Chomsky’s view, the political structure of the United States is permeated with capitalist values. To make their antagonistic point abundantly clear, the sleeve of the vinyl version of the single contains the following quote from Mao’s little red book: ‘We should support whatever the enemy opposes and oppose whatever the enemy supports’ (see Tse-Tung 1966: 15). On the CD-version of the single, we furthermore find a quote that links a focus on the past to the necessity of turning towards the future: Søren Kierkegaard’s observation that ‘Life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forwards’ (see Kierkegaard 1996: 161). The lyrics of the song itself open with the statement ‘Hello it’s us again’, addressing an antagonistic relationship with a ‘you’ that can both be understood as referring to the band’s audience as well as to the upper classes that aim to control ‘the masses’. The frequent use of the words ‘we’ and ‘us’, furthermore, emphasises a new-born trust in the power of collectivity that contrasts with the individual explorations of suffering of the band’s previous two albums. Furthermore, the song contains several lines that explicitly embrace the future: ‘I’m tired of giving a reason / When the future is what we believe in’. This change in approach to time and political ideology is emphasised by its sound: the song is loud and guitar-­ driven, with Bradfield singing and shouting the lyrics in a powerful manner, expressing a new-found trust in the power of rock ‘n’ roll. The latter observation is strengthened by one of the single’s B-sides: an aggressive cover of Chuck Berry’s ‘Rock ‘N’ Roll Music’, completely breaking away from the melancholic, folky and tender musical style of This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours.27 This optimistic and hopeful attempt to constitute a critical model by summoning the specters of Marx continues on the album Know Your Enemy, released in March 2001. The title of the album recalls Rage Against the Machine’s critical anti-American song of the same name (on their debut album Rage Against the Machine), continuing Mao’s above-­ cited idea of radically resisting an enemy. The title was also inspired by a passage in Sun Tzu’s military treatise The Art of War:

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If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained your will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. (Sun Tzu 2002: 51)

In line of this quote, the enemy in the album’s title should therefore be understood as, to a large extent, formed by the band themselves (Naish 2018: 41), symbolising the attempt to resist the inner need for ‘left melancholy’ and to withdraw from the attempt to change social structures. With 17 songs (including a ghost track at the end) in a multitude of musical styles, Know Your Enemy is impossible to categorise and, in contrast with the accessibility of Everything Must Go and This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours, resists commercial validation. The album presents surf pop on ‘So Why So Sad’, which was released as a single together with the fast and punky ‘Found That Soul’;28 a pastiche of disco on ‘Miss Europa Disco Dancer’; and melancholic and accessible rock on ‘Ocean Spray’, which mourns the death of Bradfield’s mother and was released as the album’s second single.29 Other songs on the album embrace rock ‘n’ roll, layered guitars and feedback that make the album sound noisy and ‘raw’ (Naish 2018: 8). It is no surprise that the lyrics of ‘So Why So Sad’ refer to the Sonic Youth song ‘Expressway to Yr. Skull’ (on Evol), with the album as a whole being long, fragmented and guitar-oriented, building up towards climactic moments in a style that mirrors the music of the American noise rock band. The album’s sleeve presents a Susan Sontag-quote: ‘The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions’ (qtd. in Toback 1968—Sontag actually cites Hippolyte), expressing a desire to finally express knowledge that makes the past obsolete and forces the self to create new insights and ideas. The album’s artwork, which I discussed at the end of Chap. 2, expresses a similar chaotic and passionate aggressiveness. In its sleeve booklet, all lyrics are presented in the form of the original sheets on which they were written by Nicky Wire. This means that Know Your Enemy presents the listener with a universe of fragments and, as Stephen Lee Naish observes in his book on the album, aims to ‘summarize all the working class rage, the evils of war, imperialism, capitalism and the futility of modern western society over an entire album that clocks in at over seventy-five minutes’ (Naish

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2018: 61). The album opens with the rather aggressive song ‘Found That Soul’, which, echoing the sentiment of covering Chuck Berry’s ‘Rock ‘N’ Roll Music’, again embraces the rawness of guitar-oriented music and, against the background of a crumbling subject, emphasises a rediscovered vitality: ‘Not a subject am I / Sick and pale but / Strangely alive’. A large part of this vitality finds its way on the album through lyrics of a critical nature that revive the specters of Marx in several ways. Echoing Max Weber’s observations that the ethos of Calvinism—revolving around hard work and rationalisation—resulted in the spirit of capitalism, for example, ‘Intravenous Agnostic’ combines the phrase ‘Life becomes Calvinist’ with the lines ‘Brutality is needed in capitalist society’ and ‘Television abandoned my very entity’. In a similar fashion, ‘The Year of Purification’ expresses a need to escape from the iron cage of a bureaucratised life: ‘Run away – run away as fast as you can / From anything that needs discipline’, resulting in the aggressive condemnation ‘Moral little shit-­kickers / Liberal asinine pricks’. The above-mentioned ‘Miss Europa Disco Dancer’, furthermore, satirises the emptiness of popular music, both in form and in lyrics, ending with a mantra-like repetition of the phrase ‘Braindead motherfuckers’ that seems to reject the standardised character of European pop and simultaneously emphasise the power of rock. ‘Royal Correspondent’, in turn, satirises devotion to the British monarchy, entwining this critique with references to British tabloid journalism. Three songs on Know Your Enemy specifically voice the band’s resistance against capitalism. The first is ‘Freedom of Speech Won’t Feed My Children’, which presents an explicit attack on Fukuyama’s idea that history is over and that neoliberal capitalism has won. The song mainly does this by criticising the, in the band’s view, hypocritical nature of the Western and liberal belief in freedom and its trust in consumption values: ‘J.S. Pemberton saved our lives’. Mentioning tourists on the Berlin wall, provocatively ridiculing Western and celebrity love for the Dalai Lama, and referring to the NATO bombing the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999, the song’s lyrics reject Fukuyama’s idea that neoliberalism would have overcome all other ideologies and would be free of internal

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contradictions: ‘Bomb the Chinese Embassy / The West is free, oh the West is free / Laugh at the hammer and sickle / It is antique, oh it is antique’. Two other songs make a similar point: following the Mao-quote cited above, they do this by embracing everything that ‘the enemy’ opposes, aiming to battle the neoliberal framework and ‘kickstart’ historical progress again by presenting the listener with a network of historical and cultural references that often explicitly target American politics. ‘Baby Elian’, for example, refers to the treatment of Cuba by the United States, mentioning the Bay of Pigs, Operation Peter Pan, economic blockades, the ideological nature of Hollywood films, and the titular Elián González, the then six-year-old boy who was involved in a custody battle between the United States and Cuba. The song expresses a belief in the Marxist ideology in an almost stereotypical manner in which The Clash’s above-­ mentioned ‘agit-pop’ style returns, referring to the Maoist Communist Party of Peru, Sendero Luminoso: ‘We follow a shining path / that you will never destroy’.30 The other explicitly political song on the album relates to Cuba as well: ‘Let Robeson Sing’, released as the fourth single of the album. The song tells the story of American singer and activist Paul Robeson, whose image is shown on the single’s cover. Robeson was involved in different ways with the plight of Welsh miners, himself drawing analogies between the position of African Americans in the United States and the Welsh working class in the UK (Sparrow 2017: 134). In 1938, for example, he attended the Welsh National Memorial Meeting to honour Welsh miners who had fought in the Spanish Civil War, emphasising the international nature of working class movements (Francis 2012: 249). In 1940, furthermore, he acted in the film The Proud Valley, about the struggles of Welsh coal miners (see Naish 2018: 51).31 In the song’s lyrics, the band use a language that reminds of social realist depictions of heroes of the revolution, describing Robeson as having ‘a voice so pure’ and ‘a vision so clear’. These lyrics are accompanied by a catchy and memorable melody, mainly played on an acoustic guitar. The lyrics furthermore describe the manner in which Robeson, as a fighter for Black emancipation movements, was treated by ‘the lie of the USA’, referring to McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunt and the CIA mind

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control program MK Ultra. The song contains two audio-fragments: a recording in which Robeson reads Langston Hughes’ poem ‘The Freedom Train’, which refers to the ‘freedom rides’ that activists took through the southern United States to protest the racism of the Jim Crow laws. A second sample presents the sound of Welsh miners clapping for Robeson in 1957 after he had sung several songs, including the Welsh national anthem ‘Land of My Fathers’, over the telephone. Since McCarthy had taken away his passport, Robeson was unable to sing to the miners in person (Sparrow 2017 ix, 145; Naish 2018: 51). As a B-side on the single, the band included a cover of the Biblical hymn ‘Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel’ as well, which was frequently sung by Robeson. On the single’s sleeve, the following statement by Robeson is printed, made during his famous speech at the Albert Hall to support volunteers who went to Spain and fight Franco’s fascist forces: ‘The artist must elect to fight for freedom or slavery – I have made my choice – I had no alternative’ (see Robeson 2001: 293). This emphasis on Cuba and on a defence of everything ‘the enemy’ opposes materialised concretely when the band performed in Havana in 2001, a big Cuban flag behind them. On stage, they were joined by Cuban trumpet player Yasek Manzano, and during their visit the band also met with Cuban boxer Félix Savón and athlete Alberto Juantorena. Bradfield observed: ‘Cuba is an example that everything doesn’t have to be Americanised’ (qtd. in Naish 2018: 64). Their concert, which took place in the Karl Marx Theatre, was attended by Fidel Castro, who the band met before the concert. During this meeting, they warned Castro that the concert would be rather loud, to which Castro replied that it would not be louder than war, a statement he retracted after the concert. Together with a recording of the concert, the meeting with Castro was released on a DVD in 2001 with the title Louder than War,32 accompanied by the following Serge Gainsbourg quote ‘Provocation is my oxygen’ (see Husband 2018). Manic Street Preachers had now gone as far as they could to revive the specters of Marx: playing music that was deemed to be louder than war by Fidel Castro.

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Postmodern Inertia Even though these songs and the decision to perform at Cuba and meet Castro express an optimistic—and, as the band later admitted, rather naive (Naish 2018: 69, I return to this below) —outlook on the future, ‘left melancholy’ keeps creeping into Know Your Enemy as well. It does this in the form of expressions of crippling self-doubt, as well as confusion caused by the plethora of options, perspectives and references that Jameson links to the era of the postmodern. The lyrics of ‘Let Robeson Sing’, for example, ask Robeson the following questions: ‘Will we see the likes of you again? / Can anyone make a difference anymore? / Can anyone write a protest song?’ The political nature of this left melancholy is illustrated by the ending of ‘The Masses Against the Classes’ as well, in which we hear Bradfield shouting the following observation by Albert Camus: ‘A slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown’. The line, which conflicts with the Mao-quote mentioned above, is taken from The Rebel, in which Camus criticises Sartre and other leftist intellectuals for defending the totalitarianism of communism (see Camus 1984: 25). Camus specifically rejects Marxist, teleological understandings of history that, he argues, revolve around a ‘the end justifies the means’ ideology that eventually always results in terror and death, in his view. These doubts about communist understandings of history creep into the critical model erected on ‘The Masses Against the Classes’ and Know Your Enemy and are continually coupled to reflections on the need to disappear into the past and the inability to conceptualise a better future— even a future at all—or to find and defend a truth. The song ‘Dead Martyrs’, for example, contains the line ‘Got no future’, perhaps referring to the recurring phrase ‘No future’ in the Sex Pistols’ ‘Anarchy in the UK’ (on Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols). ‘His Last Painting’, furthermore, tells us: ‘Don’t speak the truth anymore / All of the hope and the dreams / Ripped right open at the seams’. And on ‘Epicentre’, Bradfield sings: ‘Feels like there’s no escape / Except through my hate’ and: ‘I’m sleeping myself away / Into the blurred life of yesterday’. Furthermore, in the lyrics of a B-side on the single of ‘The Masses Against

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the Classes’—‘Close My Eyes’—the lyrical ‘I’ again expresses the feeling that he is losing touch with time and ideology: ‘I’m in control but I am out of time / I’ve lost the need for any desire / … / I had a vision but it slipped away’. Postmodern inertia almost completely takes over the lyrics of songs like ‘My Guernica’, which entwines references to Picasso’s Guernica (or the 1937 bombing of the town of Guernica) with subjective descriptions of a fragmenting self, and ‘The Convalescent’, both on Know Your Enemy. The latter song describes a fragmented and unstructured view on the world—‘internal thoughts and obsessions in an ever-cascading collage’ (Naish 2018: 57)—that mirrors Jameson’s descriptions of postmodernity as a kaleidoscopic whole of perspectives and ideas.33 The lyrics reference athletes—Payne Stewart, Haile Gebrselassie, the above-mentioned Alberto Juantorena—cultural figures—Klaus Kinski, Werner Herzog, Brian Warner (Marilyn Manson), Picasso, Goya34—and historical persons and places—Jack Kevorkian, Bonnie and Clyde, Treblinka and Srebrenica. Still, there seems to be a last straw of resistance—‘DNA means Does Not Accept’—but this straw completely disappears on the ending of Know Your Enemy. The album’s last song—‘Freedom of Speech Won’t Feed My Children’—is followed by a ghost track, a cover of McCarthy’s ironic ‘We Are All Bourgeois Now’. Originally released as a B-side on the 1988 single ‘Should the Bible Be Banned’, the song’s lyrics ironically accept Fukuyama’s claim that we have reached the end of history.

Repelling Ghosts It is after Know Your Enemy, I want to argue, that the specters of Marx lose their power in the intertextual whole shaped by Manic Street Preachers, succumbing to a perpetual ‘left melancholy’ that is fuelled by the feeling that everything is lost. For the 2002 charity album NME in Association with War Child Presents 1 Love, the band covered the Rolling Stones song ‘Out of Time’, expressing the feeling of being excluded from time with help of a repetition of a song from the past. Giving in to a nostalgic need to look back, they furthermore released two compilation

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albums in 2002 and 2003: a collection of greatest hits called Forever Delayed, the title of which again refers to the idea that the band is pulled back by a past that thwarts the ability to go forward, and a collection of B-sides called Lipstick Traces (A Secret History of Manic Street Preachers), named after Greil Marcus’ famous study of avant-garde movements and punk music. In 2002, they also published a collection of photographs made throughout the band’s history by Mitch Ikeda, entitled Forever Delayed as well. To promote Forever Delayed, the band also re-released a remixed version of ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’ as a single, containing a new B-side: ‘4 Ever Delayed’. The latter song explicitly expresses a feeling of being left behind, of being out of time, of being unable to make oneself part of history anymore. Its music is characterised by a gentle and rather poppy sound that is melancholic in nature. This musical trend continued on the two new songs released on Forever Delayed: ‘There by the Grace of God’ and ‘Door to the River’. The first one, which came out as a single, reflects on religious longing in a Kierkegaardian and Camusian manner, accompanied by an electronic pop sound that reminds of Depeche Mode.35 The second song is named after a 1960 painting by Willem De Kooning and its lyrics contain fatalistic lines like ‘All my best wishes are just lies’ and ‘Fearful of the future now / The future is now’, again expressing the idea that history has ended. A B-side on ‘There By the Grace of God’ illustrates the band’s acceptance of the sense of an ending even more. Called ‘Happy ending’, the song tells us: ‘We’ve reached the stars and glitter / Fell from grace and asked for more’36 and proclaims: ‘This could be a happy ending’. This lyrical trend continues on the album Lifeblood, released in 2004. The album contains 12 songs and, produced by Tony Visconti, sounds accessible, poppy and dreamlike, replacing the aggressive, guitar-driven rock of Know Your Enemy with a sound dominated by keyboards and inspired by synth-pop. The album’s sound is oblivious to the neopostpunk, indie rock and garage rock revival that was gaining popularity when the album was released and that, to some extent, was mirrored on Know Your Enemy. Bands shaping this movement, like The Strokes, The Libertines, Interpol, Arctic Monkey and Kaiser Chiefs, presented distorted and flamboyant guitar rock in a rejection of the perceived

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mellowness of post-Britpop bands like Coldplay, Snow Patrol, Keane or Travis. Lifeblood, however, ignores this movement, and instead presents a turn inwards, away from politics, guitars and contemporary musical contexts. This difference is embodied by the contrast between the wild and expressionist nature of Know Your Enemy’s paint-splattered cover and Lifeblood’s white and minimalist design, showing the contours of a naked female body covered in red blood. In its sleeve booklet, the song lyrics are printed in bold grey capital letters on a white background. The album’s shift from the political to the personal is furthermore reflected by a quote from René Descartes in its sleeve: ‘Conquer yourself rather than the world’ (Descartes 1998: 14). Indeed, the album contains melancholic songs with titles like ‘A Song for Departure’ (inspired by Elisabeth Jennings’ poem of the same name— see Jennings 1985: 46), ‘I Live to Fall Asleep’ and ‘Solitude Sometimes Is’. In ‘Glasnost’, furthermore, Gorbachev’s political term is given a personal dimension as well: ‘Make your own Glasnost’. In the lyrics of ‘Empty Souls’, we find a reference to the attacks of 11 September, which took place between the releases of Know Your Enemy and Lifeblood. The reference is shaped like a metaphor, however, and does not suggest that the event, in the band’s view, changed conceptualisations of the supposed end of history: ‘Collapsing like the twin towers / Falling down like April showers’. It is also on Lifeblood that the figure of the specter is explicitly present and mentioned. Even though, as discussed above, many songs on Everything Must Go and This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours express a nostalgic longing for something, someone, somewhere or sometime lost in the past, it is on Lifeblood that this longing is shaped with help of explicit references to ghosts. Wire observed about the album and its references to Richey Edwards: ‘The main themes are death and solitude and ghosts. Being haunted by history and being haunted by your own past. … Lifeblood doesn’t seek to exorcise Edwards’ ghost, though, just admits that there are no answers’ (qtd. in The Scotsman 2004). As described above, Derrida links the idea of the specter to the practice of mourning: ghosts keep returning to us, visiting us, because they require mourning. And as long as this mourning is not successful—as long as an experience of loss

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is not worked through, overcome and given a place in the past—ghosts keep haunting the present. In an excellent analysis of Lifeblood, Edwards is indeed approached in Triptych as a spectral being, haunting the band after the trauma of his disappearance, manifested by the many references to ghosts on the album (Jones et al. 2017: 298–301, 310–12). The first verse of Lifeblood’s song ‘To Repel Ghosts’, for example, named after a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat, describes this process as follows: ‘When the disappearing begins / The ghosts we kept within / Can break free from inside’. In the second verse, the mourning that the specter encourages is set in motion, symbolised by the idea that eventually this ghost wants to be set free, released from its fate as a haunting presence that has to return: ‘For all will be revealed / When ghosts become set free’. The song ‘Empty Souls’, which was released as the second single of the album,37 refers to ‘empty souls’ as memories or ghosts as well: ‘Empty souls will leave their homes / To find a place where they’re alone / Rattling memories and hollow bones’. The three versions of the single and the slipcase in which these versions could be collected, furthermore, all contain quotes referring to death and the return of the dead. Examples are: ‘The ceaseless labour of your life is to build the house of death’ by Michel de Montaigne (see Montaigne 2003: 374); ‘Death came and he looked like a rat with claws – I made him go into the wall’, a phrase part of a 1989 art installation called Laments: Death came and he looked like… by American conceptual artist Jenny Holzer; and ‘After the first death there is no other’, the last line of Dylan Thomas’ poem ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London’ (see Thomas 2014: 367). The album ends with the song ‘Cardiff Afterlife’, which embeds the specter-­ like existence of Edwards in the cityscape of Cardiff. Again expressing a time that is pulled out of joint, the song refers to a ‘paralysed future’ and a past crawling ‘sideways’. To a certain extent, this concern with ghosts and melancholy gains a political dimension on the album as well: the song ‘1985’—in which the band reflect on the titular year as the follow-up to Orwell’s 1984, perhaps inspired by Anthony Burgess’ 1978 novel 1985—refers both to the end of history, the crushing of the miners’ strikes—‘In 1985 Orwell was proved right’—and to personal history and the experience of listening to The Smiths: ‘Morrissey and Marr gave me choice’. Petrified by

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melancholy, the lyrical subject realises that her ideologies have lost their power—‘I realise there’s no going back’, ‘God is dead like Nietzsche said / Superstition all we have left’. The video-clip of the song, made by Nicky Wire’s brother Patrick Jones,38 consists of blurry fragments from the same period, showing the miners’ strikes, The Smiths, the band themselves and sporting events from the mid-1980s, most primarily the ice-skating pair Torvill and Dean, who are mentioned in the song’s lyrics as well. The video ends with a quote by Welsh trade unionist Emlyn Williams, describing the strikes as follows: ‘I wouldn’t call it a strike – it was a demonstration for existence’ (see Day 2002: 123). Again, the band almost completely give in to Fisher’s ‘left melancholy’ by including descriptions of political figures that, as in their rather descriptive approach to religion in ‘There By the Grace of God’, lack a critical perspective. An example is formed by ‘The Love of Richard Nixon’, which was released as the first single of the album in October 2004. Instead of criticising Nixonian political thought, the band approach the American president in a manner similar to Oliver Stone’s 1995 film Nixon: as a tragic figure, a character in a play, referring to his ‘War on cancer’ and his diplomatic visits to China. The different versions of the song’s single contain Nixon’s campaign slogans, and the lyrics describe him as ‘Richard III in the White House’. The song’s video-clip (included on the song’s single) shows the band members wearing Nixon masks, intermitted by fragments from Nixon’s political career. Another example is formed by the song ‘Emily’, which refers to the women’s rights activist and suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst. Praising Pankhurst, the lyrics expresses melancholy for the kind of activism that she represents, again using the concept of the ghost to make this point, in the case of this song as a last attempt to summon a Marxist specter: ‘The relics, the ghosts / All down so many roads’, and: ‘Emily, so pity poor Emily / You’ve been replaced by charity’. By explicitly referring the notion of the ‘ghost’, the band reached the end of their hauntological explorations of past and memory, as well as the end of their attempts to summon the specters of Marx.

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Conclusion This brings me to the conclusion of this chapter. Above, I have argued that we find the contours of a fifth critical model on the four albums released during the ten years after Edwards’ disappearance. This model is based on Derrida’s approach to Marxism, which disconnects this theory from its historical manifestations. Instead, the theory is reduced to a specter that haunts the neoliberal age. I have used this image to show that the four above-discussed albums revolve not only around a trauma that pulls time out of joint, but also around the attempt to revive specters of Marx with help of references to Marxist figures of resistance, using these references to imagine a different—and better—future. This latter aspect means that this model, more than the models discussed in the previous two chapters, revolves around brief glimpses of hope, constituted by affirmations of the social change promised by Marx’s specters. Still, however, these glimmers of hope are presented as coming from past and not from present contexts, glimmering only in a pitch-black social totality that Fisher characterises as constituted by the inescapable ‘realism’ of capitalism. I believe, however, that the discussion above illustrates the observation that if we reduce Marxism to specters that refuse to be mourned, we corrode the solidity of this theory to such an extent that hardly anything is left. Basing a critical model on the summoning of rather ungraspable, fleeting experiences in an otherwise sealed-off postmodern discourse, that which could make Marxism into a viable theory—its understanding of history as driven by conflict, its focus on material suffering and exploitation—is reduced to vague conceptual traces of melancholy that disappear the moment we try to grasp them. Formulated with help of the Adornian notions discussed in the previous chapters, I therefore want to conclude that this fifth critical model aims to constitute its own autonomy by relying on the return/arrival of specters that confront the self with a radical otherness created in the past, but that these specters are so fleeting and vulnerable that they succumb to the reflective observation that, in the postmodern age, this is the only way to constitute critical distance.39 The aim to strive towards the

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standard of reflection, in other words, undermines and corrodes the ability to constitute a form of autonomy. As Jameson puts his critique of poststructuralism into words, this concern with the specter provides an uncritical immediacy to ‘a variety of punctual ‘experiences’’ (2007: 160) without embedding these experiences in a solid critical framework.40 The fragility of these references to Marxism goes hand in hand with the band’s growing doubts about the political feasibility of communism. Soon after their visit to Cuba, for example, they realised that they had, in Wire’s words, ‘overstepped the mark of politics and music’. As Wire goes on in the same interview: ‘The press conference was 100 hardcore journalists telling me I was wrong for being there. The idea was about the underdog, it was about romance, but that was all blown away’ (qtd. in Lynskey 2014). And as Bradfield observes in the 2015 documentary No Manifesto: ‘As soon as you shake a politician’s hand, you endorse everything they do. Without actually saying: ‘I agree with everything you do, Mr. Castro’. The picture says that’ (qtd. in Marcus 2015). In the lyrics of ‘The Next Jet to Leave Moscow’ (on 2014’s Futurology), Wire therefore describes himself as a ‘hypocrite’ who did not truly understand the oppressive reality of communist regimes: ‘So you played in Cuba, did you like it brother? / I bet you felt proud, you silly little fucker’. With the release of 2007’s Send Away the Tigers, furthermore, Wire observed on the Bolshevik revolution: ‘I’ve spent half my life believing that was a good thing. As you get older you wonder if it’s just one evil replacing another’ (qtd. on repeatfanzine.co.uk n.d.). After their controversial visit to Castro had resulted, in Sean Moore’s words, in committing ‘commercial suicide’ (Marcus 2015), Lifeblood was a commercial disappointment as well and was later characterised by the band themselves as one of the weakest moments of their musical existence. Bradfield stated, for example, about the album’s lead single: ‘I just don’t understand why we fucking did it. Why would you try and humanise Richard Nixon?’ (Marcus 2015). After Lifeblood, Manic Street Preachers summoned ghosts from the past yet another time by releasing a 10th Anniversary Edition of The Holy Bible in 2004, the God Save the Manics E.P. (containing the before-mentioned song ‘Picturesque’ with lyrics left behind by Edwards) in 2005, a cover of The June Bride’s ‘The Instrumental’ in 2006 (on Still Unravished – A Tribute To The June Brides),

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and a 10th Anniversary Edition of Everything Must Go in 2006. In 2009, furthermore, they released Journal for Plague Lovers, which, as discussed in Chap. 5, partly presents a drawback to The Holy Bible and is haunted by the arrival/return and absence/presence of Edwards as well. With Send Away the Tigers (2007), the first studio album released after Lifeblood, the band returned to the anthemic stadium rock of Everything Must Go. On the album, the specters of Marx have withered away completely and, as I will briefly discuss in the next chapter, are replaced by fragmented observations on a post-postmodern world that fail to solidify into a critical model. In the album’s sleeve, the following quote by controversial English painter and writer Wyndham Lewis is printed: ‘When a man is young, he is usually a revolutionary of some kind. So here I am, speaking of my revolution.’ Taken from reflections on his engagements in the militant avant-garde movement of Vorticism, Lewis here reflects on his ‘pre-war avant-gardism’ (Hanna 2015: 20), embedding the spirit of resistance in a melancholic framework.41 On 2002’s Postcards from a Young Man, which continues their focus on anthemic stadium rock, Manic Street Preachers affirmed a similar idea, accepting the impossibility of resisting the postmodern perpetual present with a song entitled ‘The Future Has Been Here 4Ever’. The song mentions the 1990 film The Godfather Part III as showing, again, that there is no escape, mirroring the above-mentioned reference to Carlito’s Way, which also stars Al Pacino. The same album contains the song ‘All We Make Is Entertainment’, in which the following statement seems to completely embrace Fukuyama’s thesis: ‘We’re so post-modern, we’re post-everything’.

Notes 1. Jameson refers to the genre of the ‘nostalgia film’ to illustrate this idea, a genre that trains’ us to ‘consume the past in the form of glossy images’, in actuality—in his view—robbing the past of its particularity and reproducing it with help of empty formulae (1992: 287). In the realm of popular music studies, Simon Reynolds developed the term ‘retromania’ to refer to the ways in which popular music is ‘addicted’ to its own past,

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in his view fetishising this past into canonised images that continually repeat the same movements (2011b). 2. For a comprehensive analysis of temporality, postmodernism and Jameson’s ideas about time, see Hammer 2011: 188–99. 3. In modernity, this experience is combined, Hartmut Rosa observes, with that which Paul Virilio characterises as a ‘frenetic standstill’: the experience that our lives are speeding up but that, eventually, nothing changes fundamentally (2013: 15). Observations on these issues can already be found in early sociological and critical works focused on modernity, an example being Georg Simmel’s ‘The Pace of Life and the Money Economy’ (2009). 4. For a comprehensive defence of the idea that a trauma is a wound that does not heal and keeps destabilising and haunting the traumatised self, see Caruth 1996. 5. Adorno makes similar observations on the historical dimension that the eventual deterioration of the gramophone record provides to the music (see Epstein 2014: 91). 6. This provides a hauntological dimension to questions regarding the ontology of songs and the differences between performances and recordings. For a defence of the idea that music only ‘exists’ as a recording, see Gracyk 1996; for a convincing critique of Gracyk, see Auslander 2004: 3. 7. Middleton points at similar ideas in an analysis of memory and popular music. He observes, for example, that if we listen to The Boswell Sisters’ re-interpreted versions of traditional blues songs, ‘what we hear, flickering around particular constellations of historical time-space, at once exploding and imploding, is the continuous production of difference— of mutating subject potential—out of apparent repetition’ (2006: 159). 8. Jameson mentions The Shining in the context of Derrida’s hauntology as well (2017: 39). 9. In her essay in Triptych, Larissa Wodtke also applies Derrida’s ideas about memory work and spectrality to analyse Manic Street Preachers albums, observing that the band’s preoccupation with time and repetition implies that they had always ‘haunted their own future’ and that ‘their past continues to bleed into their present’ (Jones et al. 2017: 259). Whereas she mainly focuses on the band and the disappearance of Edwards, I will link a hauntological analysis more to political and critical frameworks and ideas about specters of Marx. Still, my approach is indebted to her analysis.

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10. For an analysis of Everything Must Go and temporality, see Jones et al. 2017: 294–8. 11. The title ‘Everything Must Go’ was inspired as well by a play of the same name, written by Nicky Wire’s brother Patrick Jones. The play contains an entirely Welsh soundtrack (see Edwards 2007: 153). 12. Wire created a persona during this time that formed the complete opposite of the extravagant rock personas the band had shaped before. On ‘Mr. Carbohydrate’, a B-side on the single of ‘Everything Must Go’, the lyrical subject describes himself as a hypochondriac who only wants to sit at home, watch sports (the lyrics mention cricketer Matthew Maynard), digest chips and forget everything. In the lyrics released after 1995, references to athletes regularly turn up in the lyrics of the band, expressing Wire’s love for sports. When the band won ‘Best Band’ and ‘Best Album’ for Everything Must Go at the 1997 Brit Awards, Wire again emphasised his anti-rock ‘n’ roll persona by wearing a T-shirt saying ‘I ♥ Hoovering’. 13. The album was originally titled ‘Sounds in the Grass’, after the title of a group of paintings Jackson Pollock made in 1946. A reference to grass returns in the lyrics of ‘Enola/Alone’ (on Everything Must Go). 14. In the documentary No Manifesto, the image of this clock is preceded by the image of a large clock with no handles as it is shown in Rumble Fish (which inspired ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’, as discussed in Chap. 4), right after the character of Motorcycle Boy (Mickey Rourke) tells his brother that he has nowhere to go—that he has no future (see Marcus 2015). 15. Cherry blossoms are also mentioned in the song ‘Nobody Loved You’ on This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours, where they have a similar connotation. This song was exclusively released as a single in Japan. 16. The phrase ‘enola’ might refer to the name of the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima: Enola Gay. 17. The cover was also released on the 1995 The Help Album, A Charity Album for War Child, the band’s first sign of life after the disappearance of Edwards. It also appeared as a B-side on the single of Everything Must Go’s ‘Further Away’, which was only released in Japan. 18. Even though the band might aim to revive the modernist era by quoting modernist painters, architects and authors on their album and single sleeves, this attempt itself could, of course, be characterised as postmodern itself: by quoting artists from a past era, printing these quotes on singles, meshing them with mass culture and disconnecting them from

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their original sources, the unique nature of the modernist emphasis on form might here already fall prey to the fragmentation of the postmodern world. 19. In his text in the sleeve of the 20th Anniversary Edition of Everything Must Go, Stuart Maconie also claims that the phrase was inspired by Noël Coward’s 1932 play ‘A Design for Living’. In an interview on the same release, Bradfield observes that the lyrics of ‘A Design for Life’ were composed of two sets of lyrics, one called ‘A Design for Life’, the other ‘Pure Motive’ (a phrase that returns in the video-clip of ‘A Design for Life’). The latter text was inspired by a 1994 episode of Jimmy McGovern’s police drama series Cracker called ‘To Be a Somebody’ (directed by Tim Fywell), about the Hillsborough disaster, tabloid journalism and representations of the working classes. 20. In his analysis of the laddism of Britpop, Stan Hawkins claims that these two lines place the song in a discourse revolving around a constructed notion of masculine British working-class honesty, which, he argues, they share with Oasis and Blur (2010: 147). Hawkins, however, overlooks the Marxist context of the song’s lyrics as a whole, the semi-­ironic meaning of these lines, as well as the way in which the song embodies the reflective idea that ‘the working class’ cannot be reduced to a stereotypical image. Hawkins argues furthermore that this image is strengthened by the way in which Bradfield sings on ‘Everything Must Go’: a hoarse vocal delivery that presents his voice as ‘untrained’ and ‘ordinary’ in contrast with the bombast of the music, mirroring what he calls the ‘bloke histrionics’ of the Britpop era (2010: 148). 21. The cover might refer to the cover of Echo And The Bunnymen’s 1981 album Heaven Up Here, on which the latter band’s four members stand on beach near the south Welsh town of Porthcawl. On ‘Some Kind of Nothingness’ (on Postcards form a Young Man), Bradfield sings together with Echo And The Bunnymen’s Ian McCulloch. 22. Polaroid pictures return several times throughout Manic Street Preachers post-Everything Must Go releases, not only in the sleeve booklet of This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours and on the covers of the four singles taken from the album, but also in Nicky Wire’s 2011 collection of polaroids called Death of a Polaroid: A Manics Family Album. Furthermore, the cover of Postcards from a Young Man shows actor Tim Roth making a polaroid picture, and the same album’s sleeve booklet is filled with polaroids (and other photographs) of the band. These pictures, showing us snap shots of

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past moments, again provide these releases with a hauntological and melancholic dimension. 23. The song replaces ‘Nobody Loved You’ on the 20th Anniversary Edition of This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours. The single of ‘If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next’ also contains ‘Montana/Autumn/78’, about Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. The title refers to the place and time where and when Kaczynski withdrew into a cabin in the woods and started his terror campaign. Its lyrics express sympathy for his ‘luddite’ ideas but reject his methods. 24. The lyrics refer to kitchen sink melodrama, which might be a reference to the British art tradition of ‘kitchen sink realism’. 25. ‘Ready for Drowning’ contains an audio sample from Jack Gold’s film The Medusa Touch, in which we hear Richard Burton’s telekinetic character express his plans to destroy a cathedral (Gold 1978). Within the context of the song, the quote functions as an expression of a powerless rejection of the political forces that drowned the town of Tryweryn. Furthermore, as mentioned, the song’s ‘drowning’ also refers to Burton’s alcoholism. The last line of the song also refers to Stevie Smith’s 1957 poem ‘Not Waving But Drowning’ (see Smith 1988: 67). 26. In the sleeve booklet of This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours, we find a picture of the silent twins. 27. Stone analyses how Berry’s song emphasises embodiment, spontaneity and movement (2016: 43). 28. The video-clip of ‘Found That Soul’ (on Forever Delayed [DVD]), made by Jeremy Deller, is shot with a night camera and shows night animals and people reading books in the dark. Deller explained: ‘the subtext was supposed to be a secret reading club for women in the future. People weren’t allowed to read in public so they would meet in private in darkened rooms’ (Wire et al. 2011: 9). 29. ‘Ocean Spray’ opens with Manic Street Preachers’ photographer Mitch Ikea stating in Japanese: ‘You have beautiful eyes’. On the sleeve of the song’s single, a quote by Yukio Mishima is printed. 30. The phrase ‘shining path’ returns as well in the song ‘The Shining Path’, on Nicky Wire’s 2006 solo album I Killed the Zeitgeist. 31. Stuart Hall analyses the ways in which Paul Robeson aimed to break through racist representations of Black masculinity, mainly in his films (2013: 243–6). Hall observes, however, that Robeson continually

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remained stuck in the stereotypical ways in which Black males were represented by Hollywood. 32. The DVD’s title not only refers to Castro’s observation, but—as mentioned in Chap. 2—also reminds of the best-of compilation album Louder than Bombs by The Smiths. This album, in turn, took its title from a line in Elizabeth Smart’s epic poem ‘By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept’ (see Smart 2015). 33. A similar view drives the video-clip of ‘So Why So Sad’ (on Forever Delayed [DVD]), which shows a peaceful beach scene that is, suddenly, overrun by an army and tanks, the people on the beach remaining oblivious to what is happening. The clip could be interpreted as a comment on a passive and uncritical postmodern world in which wars are waged by Western countries without meeting real resistance in the West (see also Naish 2018: 48–9). 34. The tile of Goya’s etch ‘The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters’ was printed in the sleeve of the ‘Little Baby Nothing’ single. 35. The lyrics contain a reference to drugs not being able to save us in two lines that might refer to similar lines in Marilyn Manson’s ‘Coma White’ (on his 1998 album Mechanical Animals). 36. This line might refer to the line ‘We have all reached the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars’, in Oscar Wilde’s play Lady Windermere’s Fan (see Wilde 1985: 176). 37. A B-side on the song’s single, called ‘Failure Bound’, is sung by Nicky Wire and contains references to Nabokov’s Lolita and a citation from Philip Larkin’s 1980 poem ‘Money’ (see Booth 2005: 45). The same passage from Larkin’s poem was already printed in the sleeve booklet of Generation Terrorists to accompany the song ‘Nat West – Barclays – Midlands – Lloyds’. 38. Patrick Jones made video-clips for six songs on Lifeblood, several of which are included on the singles of ‘The Love of Richard Nixon’ and ‘Empty Souls’. 39. Andres Huyssen makes a similar point, observing that poststructuralists like Derrida and Foucault eventually ‘are more concerned with the archaeology of modernity than with breakthrough and innovation’ (1986: 171). In his study of postmodernism, in turn, Harvey argues that ‘deconstructionism ended up, in spite of the best intentions of its more radical practitioners, by reducing knowledge and meaning to a rubble of signifiers’ (1990: 350).

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40. A similar critique of poststructuralist theorists is developed by Neil Nehring (1997: 4–5). 41. An instrumental B-side to the 7” version of the 2007 Manic Street Preachers single of ‘Autumnsong’, called ‘The Vorticists’ is named after the British movement of Vorticism.

7 Locality and Internationality: Rewind the Film and Futurology

Introduction With the statements ‘All We Make Is Entertainment’ (a song-title) and ‘We’re so post-modern, we’re post-everything’ (a line in the same song, on 2010’s Postcards from a Young Man), the releases following Lifeblood seem to spiral more and more towards the idea that it is, or has become, impossible to formulate political and social critique within the realm of popular music; the idea that, as the title of Manic Street Preachers’ 2018 album eventually tells us, Resistance Is Futile. This does not necessarily mean that these releases state that all forms of resistance or critique are futile, but that the kind of critique these releases aim to formulate in Manic Street Preachers’ ‘exclusive language’ becomes more and more difficult to express under the historical circumstances that they aim to reject from within the realm of popular culture: a kind of critique formulated in lyrics crystallising around the standards of autonomy and reflection. The moment these releases come about in a context that corrodes these standards, these same releases suggest, resisting this context becomes (almost) impossible and the only thing one can do is ironically embrace it—‘All We Make Is Entertainment’—or withdraw completely. © The Author(s) 2020 M. Peters, Popular Music, Critique and Manic Street Preachers, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43100-6_7

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Descriptions of this latter option return more and more in the lyrics of later albums by Manic Street Preachers, with a clear example being the song ‘A Soundtrack to Complete Withdrawal’. Released on the deluxe version of Resistance Is Futile, the song’s lyrics contain the following telling passage: ‘Total withdrawal, silence for all / The last generation by polarisation’. Instead of resisting their political or social context, these lines describe the desire to accept the end of history and completely let go of the wish to change the world for the better. Furthermore, as the second line of this fragment illustrates, this desire is coupled to and, as we will see below, even fuelled by descriptions of the polarising and corroding nature of the rise of populist parties and post-truth-politics in the second decade of the 2000s. In this chapter, I want to argue, however, that we do find a last critical model on the two albums that Manic Street Preachers released between Postcards from a Young Man and Resistance Is Futile: Rewind the Film (2013) and Futurology (2014). Both albums were recorded simultaneously and stand out because of their inclusion of a large number of duets with other singers: Cate Le Bon, Richard Hawley, Green Gartside, Cian Ciaran and more. Futurology was hailed by Simon Price as a ‘masterpiece’ (2014) and, I will argue in the following, together with its sister album Rewind the Film, constitutes a sixth critical model. Before discussing this model, however, I want to briefly reflect on the three above-mentioned albums that define the context in which Rewind the Film and Futurology were released: Send Away the Tigers, Postcards from a Young Man and Resistance Is Futile. I will do this to show that, even though these three albums do not present us with a solid critical model, they still contain critical observations that give us an idea of those aspects of the historical era in which they were released that, these same releases tell us, undermine the possibility of formulating critique in the band’s ‘exclusive language’. These observations, I will briefly argue, mainly concern the era of post-postmodernity and revolve around the above-mentioned populism, post-truth politics and processes of social and political polarisation.

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Sincerity The observation that, on 2007’s Send Away the Tigers, 2010’s Postcards from a Young Man and 2018’s Resistance Is Futile, Manic Street Preachers struggle with the attempt to carve out a critical position within the popular musical landscape, is reflected in a specific way by the difference between the rather carefree sound of these albums and the more melancholic and introspective sound of the last album discussed in the previous chapter: Lifeblood. They are characterised by the return to a style that the band seemed to have left behind and that, on a musical level, expresses a more confident attitude: commercial stadium rock.1 This means that the three albums sound optimistic and careless, revolving mainly around guitar riffs, anthemic refrains and cathartic solos that, to a large extent, draw back to the sound—‘faded optimism’—first heard on Everything Must Go. Send Away the Tigers, Postcards from a Young Man and Resistance Is Futile again embrace the genre of rock, defined, as Simon Frith observes, by notions of individuality, self-expression and, most of all, fun. As Frith writes in an often-quoted passage, arguing that even this aspect contains a critical dimension: ‘Rock for all the power of its individual dreams, is still confined by its mass cultural form. Its history … is the history of class struggle – the struggle for fun’ (Frith 1983: 272). Indeed, the sound of these three albums expresses the idea, which the band had seemingly lost with Lifeblood and that they perhaps rediscovered after Wire and Bradfield took time apart from the band and each released a solo album in 2006, that they are able to make catchy stadium rock, wholeheartedly embracing this type of music again as a fun, cathartic and empowering form of expression. An example of this style is the song ‘Your Love Alone Is Not Enough’, which was released as the second single of Send Away the Tigers in April 2007.2 The song presents a poppy duet with The Cardigans’ Nina Persson, and is built around repetitions of memorable lines and hooks that make it easy to sing along to. Wire explained that several of the song’s lyrics refer to Richey Edwards, and that its title was taken from the last statement in a suicide note by a friend (repeatfanzine.co.uk, n.d). Its lyrics, furthermore, embed the song in the history of rock—characterised by the

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above-mentioned ‘struggle for fun’—by including several references to lines from canonical English bands,3 one Welsh band and, perhaps most tellingly, Manic Street Preachers themselves: lines from The Beatles’ ‘Nowhere Man’ (on Rubber Soul), the Rolling Stone’s ‘Exile on Main St’ (on Exile on Main St.),4 The Who’s ‘I Can See for Miles’ (on The Who Sell Out), Pink Floyd’s ‘Wish You Were Here’ (on Wish You Were Here),5 Badfinger’s ‘Baby Blue’ (on Straight Up), and Manic Street Preachers’ own ‘You Stole the Sun from My Heart’ (on This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours) are cited in the song’s lyrics. I want to argue that the different layers of meaning that these three albums constitute embody certain aspects of what has been defined as post-postmodernity.6 A positive characterisation of this era, I first want to show, returns in the albums’ music and can be linked to Frith’s abovecited description of rock’s struggle for fun. This characterisation is rooted in the idea that, in post-postmodern art, the cynicism and irony of the postmodern pastiche is replaced with a return to what are presented as the modernist notions of ‘sincerity’ and ‘authenticity’. An example is formed by the ‘remodernism’ of the international art movement of Stuckism, founded at the end of the twentieth century. The movement’s goals are presented as follows in their founding manifesto, which mainly refers to the realm of painting: ‘We aim to replace Post-­modernism with Remodernism using paint to express experience, intellect and emotion. Stuckism is the future of art. It stands for integrity and creativity, and is against the tins of shit in art galleries all over the world’ (Johnstone et al. 2011: 454). In another manifesto, the notion of ‘remodernism’ is defined as a rebirth of spiritual art, based on a rejection of postmodernism for failing ‘to answer or address any important issues of being a human being’ (Childish and Thomson 2011: 433). Although they concern a different art form, the sincere pleasure and, again, fun that the three above-mentioned Manic Street Preachers albums express by embracing melody, a thick guitar sound and anthemic rock, could be linked to the Stuckist defence of creativity. Indeed, these albums present us with songs that are characterised by ‘experience, intellect and emotion’, and positively embrace the creative core of the band as revolving around stadium rock and, more generally, re-affirm the fun, glamour and grandeur of the rock ‘n’ roll tradition.

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References These observations mainly concern the music of these three albums, however. In the following, I therefore want to briefly turn to their lyrics, first zooming in on Send Away the Tigers. In a rather critical analysis, which couples the above-described carefree sound to the withering away of political critique, Stephen Naish observes that this album ‘marks a phase in the band’s career where they opted to actively please the audience, make stadium-friendly rock that subtly let political commentary slip through the backdoor’ (Naish 2018: 96). Even though the band, indeed, seemed to have left behind the notion of formulating radical critique in the realm of lyrics, it could be argued, however, that the combination of commercial rock and less critical lyrics results in a form of entryism similar to Scritti Politti’s later phase. From this perspective, the phrase ‘Your Love Alone Is Not Enough’, for example, could be understood as an attempt to de-naturalise idealised images of love from within the realm of mainstream rock, not unlike Scritti Politti’s ‘The “Sweetest Girl”’, discussed in Chap. 2. Furthermore, many lyrics on Send Away the Tigers actually do contain critical and cultural references, still encouraging the listener to think and reflect, and to research that which these songs are about. Most of these lyrics couple these references to a self-reflective perspective, with the band looking back on their history—as well as their own youth—from a position of maturity: the above-mentioned Stuckist reference to ‘experience’. Rediscovering and re-affirming themselves as a melodic rock band, these lyrics imply, enabled them to leave behind the experience of a time that, as discussed in Chap. 6, is ‘out of joint’ and to enter a new phase. The phrase ‘Send Away the Tigers’, for example, refers to the way in which English comedian Tony Hancock used to describe the drowning of his troubles in alcohol (repeatfanzine.co.uk, n.d.). Embedded in the band’s history, the song’s lyrics also gain another meaning, describing the attempt to get rid of the ghosts of the past, to rediscover their strengths and move forward.7 The lyrics also quote a more fatalistic line from Hancock’s suicide note: ‘Things seemed to go wrong too many times’ (see Fisher 2008: 1278).

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‘I’m Just a Patsy’, in turn, refers to the phrase Lee Harvey Oswald exclaimed when he was accused of murdering John Kennedy and uses this phrase to describe a perspective in which the lyrical ‘I’ is ‘just a Patsy for your love’. The ‘you’ could be interpreted as the band’s audience, with the lyrics presenting a self-reflective and, again, more mature and even self-deprecating perspective on the role of the rock ‘n’ roll musician; a reversal of the message of Generation Terrorists’ ‘You Love Us’. The lyrics of ‘Underdogs’ address the band’s fans as well, thanking them for, together with the band, forming ‘underdogs’ who kept each other alive throughout the history of Manic Street Preachers. As an embodiment of this idea, the lyrics cite Tracy Emin’s neon artwork entitled ‘People like you need to fuck people like me’. The title of ‘Love Letter to the Future’, in turn, translates this theme to a hopeful notion of progress, again emphasising the positive idea that the band have rediscovered themselves. Its lyrics couple this rediscovery to the ability to look back upon the past by mentioning ‘the winter of my discontent’, referring to the famous first two lines of Shakespeare’s Richard III (Shakespeare 1995: 1), and by describing measuring one’s life in coffee spoons; a nod to a similar line in T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock (see Eliot 1998: 2). Send Away the Tigers also contains references to more political phenomena: the then ongoing Iraq War is criticised on ‘Imperial Bodybags’, entwined with references to the killing of the imperial family after the Soviet revolution of 1917. The so-called special rendition flights, carried out by the CIA to torture people during the ‘War on Terror’, are criticised, in turn, on ‘Rendition’. The latter song references Jack Lemmon and draws parallels between the American involvement in international wars and Costa-Gravas’ 1982 film Missing, which tells the story of the journalist Charles Horman (played by Lemmon), who was murdered by the Chilean junta after the American-backed coup against socialist leader Salvador Allende (see Costa-Gavras 1982). Even though the album does contain a hopeful ‘Love Letter to the Future’ and does express a rediscovery of rock’s above-mentioned struggle for fun, the ‘left melancholy’ described in the previous chapter returns in this era as well, mainly on two B-sides on the single of ‘Autumnsong’8 (from Send Away the Tigers). ‘1404’ refers to the year in which Owain Glyndŵ r declared Wales to be independent, and its lyrics approach Welsh

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political and cultural resistance against English rule through a nostalgic lens: ‘But 1404 got left behind / And we were trapped and stuck in time’. The lyrics mention Welsh poets R.S. Thomas, Saunders Lewis and Dylan Thomas as empowering manifestations of Welsh culture. The other B-side, ‘Morning Comrades’, again mourns the death of hope, ideology and a firm grasp on past and future, with an acoustic guitar accompanying lines that present a more negative perspective on the band’s newly discovered maturity: ‘The past is gone for everyone / We’ve lost the art of being young’. As a ghost track, furthermore, Send Away the Tigers includes a cover of John Lennon’s ‘Working Class Hero’, which provides the line ‘A working class hero is something to be’ with an aura of Fisher’s ‘left melancholy’ that adds a fatalistic layer to the already cynical meaning the line has in Lennon’s version.

Digimodernism Send Away the Tigers was followed in 2009 by Journal for Plague Lovers, discussed in Chap. 4. After the latter album’s combination of post punk and grunge, the band picked up their more commercial and anthemic musical style again for 2011’s Postcards from a Young Man. They indeed presented the album as a ‘last shot at mass-communication’ (qtd. in Naish 2018: 110), with Wire embracing a form of entryism that again reminds of Scritti Politti: ‘We’ve always been about infiltrating the mainstream. It was a conscious decision this time to want to hear ourselves on the radio’ (qtd. in Naish 2018: 110). The album’s cover depicts English actor and director Tim Roth making a picture with a polaroid camera. Its sleeve booklet contains the original lyric sheets—written by hand—surrounded by collages of drawings, quotes, the symbol of The Who, as well as pictures of the young band members that mirror the album’s hauntological title. The booklet also refers to the album’s title by containing collages of stamps and postcards, reminding of Ray Johnson’s mail art (celebrated on ‘Locust valley’, a B-side on the 2001 single of ‘Found That Soul’). The cover of the single of ‘(It’s Not War) Just the End of Love’ presents a collage of postage stamps as well.9

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The album contains less political songs than Send Away the Tigers,10 and even though its music again presents a hopeful embrace of the glamour and fun of stadium rock, the album’s lyrics construct a more fatalistic perspective. It contains the above-mentioned ‘All We Make Is Entertainment’, for example, as well as ‘The Future Has Been Here 4Ever’. The song ‘Golden Platitudes’, furthermore, explicitly expresses the withering away of political values in lines like: ‘Where did it all go wrong? / Born to be a communist / But then the marriage failed’. The songs that do express a political message in their lyrics, furthermore, are dominated by a concern with more negative interpretations of ‘post-postmodernity’, especially with that which has been dubbed ‘pseudo-modernism’ or ‘digimodernism’. Famously, Alan Kirby uses these terms to retroactively develop a positive understanding of postmodernism. He writes: ‘Whereas postmodernism favoured the ironic, the knowing and the playful, with their allusions to knowledge, history and ambivalence, pseudo-modernism’s typical intellectual states are ignorance, fanaticism and anxiety’ (2006). The Stuckists, in other words, reject the, in their view, cynicism and irony of postmodernism, and Mark Fisher, as we have seen in Chap. 6, argues that certain tendencies of postmodernism radicalised into what he calls ‘capitalist realism’. Kirby, in contrast, embraces postmodernism as, in his view, at least sparking forms of reflection and creativity, embodied, for example, by Andy Warhol’s popism. Especially helpful for my analysis of Postcards from a Young Man is Kirby’s analysis of processes of digitalisation, of which he argues that they increasingly permeate and shape our lives in the post-postmodern era, and have constituted a shallow and empty world that revolves around the illusions of individual participation and instantaneous satisfaction. Several of Kirby’s ideas echo through the lyrics of these late Manic Street Preachers releases, and we might understand Postcards from a Young Man’s references to polaroid pictures and mail art as attempts to highlight forms of communication and technology that were developed in the pre-­ digital age. The album’s lyrics furthermore express the confusion caused by living in a digitised world in which ‘fake news’ is playing a bigger and bigger role, undermining the ability to formulate sound political and social critique that embeds ideas and traditions in their intellectual history.

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The lyrics of ‘A Billion Balconies Facing the Sun’ (on which Guns N’ Roses’ Duff McKagan plays bass), for example, express this idea by stating that we have found a way to ‘consume boredom everyday’, describing our online existence as resulting in a world in which ‘a billion lies become the truth’. The title of ‘Don’t Be Evil’, furthermore, refers to a line that used to be part of Google’s code of conduct (see Conger 2018) and its lyrics attack the American corporation with observations like ‘The lines have all been blurred / To the point of no return’ and ‘Don’t be evil, just be corporate’. In the lyrics of ‘Engage with Your Shadow’ (on the 2011 single of ‘Postcards from a Young Man’), furthermore, the prominence of digital media is rejected from an existentialist standpoint, referring to ‘Media streams / Bluetooth zones / Pixelisation’, stating that ‘I’m so out of date / I’ve been disconnected’, and ‘I feel as useless / as a VHS’. These critical aspects are constantly linked to forms of self-critique, partly embodied by the title of the song ‘Auto-intoxication’, on which John Cale provides keyboards and, as the album’s sleeve booklet tells us, ‘noise’.11 In 2011, the band released another Greatest Hits album, National Treasures, which contains one new song: a cover of The The’s ‘This is the Day’. Around the release of National Treasures, furthermore, Nicky Wire commented in several interviews on the diminishing presence and influence of rock ‘n’ roll. In a 2011 interview with The Guardian, for example, he observed that pop is ‘better than ever’ but that ‘rock, as I know and love it, does seem dormant at the moment’, referring to The Smiths and the Sex Pistols, as well as ‘parts of the Stones and The Who’, as examples of rock bands who made him pick up a guitar when he was young (‘Nicky Wire of Manic Street Preachers on the death of rock‘n’roll’ [video fragment]). Wire mentions English rock bands The Libertines and The Horrors, as well as S.C.U.M (named after Solanas’ manifesto, discussed in Chap. 4) as inspiring groups, but claims that the pretentious, flamboyant and revolutionary ‘I want to conquer the world’ dimension of earlier punk and rock bands seems to have disappeared. Partly, Wire links this observation to the influence of New Labour, observing that the party has resulted in a ‘whole generation of passive consumerism’ that he contrasts with the violent resistance that was formulated in the 1980s against the Thatcher government (‘Nicky Wire of Manic Street Preachers on the death of rock‘n’roll’ [video fragment]). These observations on the

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dormant status of rock music are reflected by the musical style adopted on the two albums on which I will focus below. In spite of these observations, however, after these two albums Manic Street Preachers released Resistance Is Futile in 2018, an album on which they returned, again, to the anthemic and melodic stadium rock of Everything Must Go, Send Away the Tigers and Postcards from a Young Man, including sweeping and slightly melancholic refrains boosted by a thick guitar sound and, sometimes, string sections. Wire stated about the album: ‘There’s a hunger for some kind of rock ‘n’ roll lineage that you may not think exists any more, but is definitely out there’ (qtd. in Trendell 2018). The album, again, contains many references to the realm of art. The lyrics of ‘International Blue’, for example, refer to several techniques developed by French artist Yves Klein: his focus on the colour blue, his artworks exhibiting empty space, his attempts to ‘record’ the rain by driving around with a canvas on his car, as well as his use of gas burners on canvases. In the song’s video-clip, directed by Kieran Evans, we see several of Klein’s artworks in the Musee d’Art Moderne Et d’Art Contemporain in Nice, as well as monuments and buildings in the French city itself. Furthermore, we see the band posing in front of these buildings, and actress Sarah Sayuri quoting several of Klein’s observations on the colour blue in Japanese, walking through Nice as she is trying to make a polaroid picture of the perfect kind of blue (see ‘Manic Street Preachers  – International Blue (Official Video)’ [video fragment]). The album also contains a ballad about Dylan and Caitlin Thomas (‘Dylan & Caitlin’), which features Welsh musician The Anchoress, as well as a tribute to the life and art of street photographer Vivian Maier (‘Vivian’). Furthermore, the band critically reflect on the Hillsborough disaster in ‘Liverpool Revisited’, as they did earlier on This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours, entwining this reflection with a tribute to the city of Liverpool. Most of the album’s other songs refer, again, to a critique captured by Kirby’s notion of ‘digimodernism’. And again, this is mainly done by expressing the confusion and doubt caused by living in an age of populism, post-truth politics and digital media, which, these songs suggest, fracture experience, memory, the solidity of theories and notions of selfhood. As Bradfield observes in a 2018 interview: ‘That’s why Nick called our album ‘This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours’. It says ‘This Is MY Truth,

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now TELL ME YOURS’. Not ‘This Is My Truth now let the algorithm send me a truth that’s the same as mine’. There’s an algorithmic pressure to make you read things that will keep you warm at night because they agree with you, and that’s just very, very unhealthy’ (qtd. in Trendell 2018). Indeed the lyrics of ‘A Song for the Sadness’ (on Resistance Is Futile) tell us that the tendencies of digimodernism drive us towards the following condition: ‘Memories are all we leave / Fragments of lost melancholy / Traces of a generation gone’. On the album’s cover, we find a photo of one of the last Samurai warriors who lived in Japan before they were removed from power during the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Wire explained the cover as follows: ‘I just can’t navigate myself through the digital hysteria and political insanity of the current times. I’d be lying if I said I felt that absolutism of my youth now, because everything overlaps. That’s the idea of the Samurai warrior being an analogy for us – everyone else has their iPhones and we’ve still got our guitars’ (qtd in Garlan 2018).12 Instead of embracing the empowering aspects and the critical possibilities that some aspects of modern technology might also provide, in other words, he almost categorically rejects digitalisation processes here. In a 2016 interview, furthermore, Wire linked his rejection of these processes as follows to the musical conditions of the time: I’ve never felt less inclined to participate in what people see as culture. The three great loves of my live, apart from my family, have been music, politics and sport. Sport is the only one left. Music has just become a giant brand of blandness, of digitised fakery. People are willing to join causes, but no one puts those feelings into their actual art. A song like our If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next, about the Spanish civil war, got to number one in six countries. It’s impossible that that – or A Design for Life – could be a hit now. (qtd. in Beaumont-Thomas 2016)

The confusion caused by processes of digitalisation—‘digital fakery’— seep into many of the lyrics of Resistance Is Futile. An example is formed by ‘Distant Colours’, which refers to a ‘Cold war for the mind’ and state that ‘I no longer know my left from my right’. Bradfield, who wrote the

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lyrics, explained them as follows, again contrasting the current age with the 1980s: I was just trying to kind of trying to figure out how you could define yourself by knowing what your enemy was like you did when you were 16 years old. Which, for me, was 1986, ‘85, ‘84. All those years. And I just decided that you couldn’t any more because, obviously, the left has fractured, the centre left has fractured. (qtd. in Murray 2018)

To a large extent, these feelings of disillusionment in an era of digimodernism are also driven on the album by a concern with the American elections of 2016—characterised by the band as a ‘tribal gathering of complete madness’ (qtd. in Murrau 2018)—as well as the corrosion of Labour, mentioned in Chaps. 4 and 6. Already in the lyrics of ‘Socialist Serenade’, the band had criticised Blair’s ‘New Labour’ for selling the party out, replacing its socialist solidity (embodied, for Manic Street Preachers, by the democratic socialism of Welsh politician Aneurin Bevan) with a neoliberal ideology that, in their view, eventually betrayed workers’ and students’ rights, and hollowed out the British healthcare system. In the video-clip of ‘Distant Colours’, again directed by Kieran Evans, this longing for the political worldview embodied by Bevan is illustrated with help of melancholic shots of different Welsh landmarks, visited by the above-mentioned actress Sarah Sayuri (who also acts in the video-clip of ‘Hold Me Like a Heaven’): Cofiwch Dreweryn, the monument to the drowned town described in ‘Ready for Drowning’ (on This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours), the miners memorial Guardian of the Valleys, the statue of Welsh warrior Llewelyn ap Gruffydd, the Aneurin Bevan Stones, the Chartist Monument and more. The video also contains a Welsh spoken word performance about Wales by actress Elan Evans and shows the band playing in the Blackwood Little Theatre, where one of their first gigs in 1986 resulted in a fight with the audience (see ‘Manic Street Preachers – Distant Colours (Official Video)’ [video fragment]). That they had not regained trust in Labour was expressed by Bradfield in a 2014 interview: ‘I’ll always hate Ukip. I’ll always hate the Tory party. The only problem now is that I hate Labour, too. The sea’s washed over the sand. There’s not one thing you can hang your hat on any more’ (qtd.

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in Lynskey 2014). Again, this rejection is coupled to the idea that Labour fails to present a solid political theory and has alienated itself from the concerns of the working classes, and again this corrosion of political ideologies is coupled to that which Kirby calls ‘digimodernism’. The song ‘Broken Algorithms’, for example, refers to caressing ‘the beauty of your screens’ and describes ‘The fractured versions of our days / The break our wisdom somehow made’. The lyrics observe furthermore that ‘History gets to write its own lies’, referring again to post-truth politics. The lyrics conclude with the observation that ‘We now know society’s truly dead’, echoing Thatcher’s famous 1987 claim that ‘there’s no such thing as society’ (see O’Sullivan 2006: 223). In the above-mentioned 2018 interview, Nicky Wire indeed observes: ‘Tech companies frighten me more than politicians. They drive this dystopian ideal. It’s great for them because they know that everyone runs for the comfort of their virtual life. They’re more than happy to push the ideal of a world in chaos and political strife. It just makes everyone run for their mobile phone’ (qtd. in Trendell 2018). Even though this brief overview shows that these three albums contain several cultural and political references (of which I have only mentioned a few), these observations also emphasise that these references mainly express doubt and confusion. Wire stated about Resistance Is Futile in 2018: ‘It’s definitely not nostalgic, it’s not hankering back to some golden age. It’s just a cold look to things that are gone that are never going to be filled again’ (qtd. in Trendell 2018). I want to argue, however, that at many places the album does come close to a form of nostalgia. Being unable to cope with that which, in the band’s view, defines the post-­ postmodern era—digitalisation, fake news and post-truth politics—the album suggests that the only thing they are able to do as a band is either embrace the fun, glamour and seemingly sincere nature of rock ‘n’ roll music, or show what has been lost by referring to artists like Yves Klein, Dylan Thomas or Vivian Maier; to artists who lived in a pre-digital age and for whom, these lyrics imply, the world of art still formed a meaningful realm that could be explored in ongoing celebrations of creativity. The idea that even the realm of rock ‘n’ roll has lost its vitality, however, is defended in the song ‘Sequels of Forgotten Wars’ (on Resistance is Futile), which not only claims that ‘The wars we fight are doomed to be lost’, but also observes that there is ‘Nowhere to go for rock and roll’. The last line

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constitutes a tension with the rather uplifting and irresistible rock of the song’s music, which seems to want to resist the fate described in its lyrics, adding a different layer of meaning to the phrase Resistance Is Futile. A quote by filmmaker Derek Jarman, printed in the booklet of Postcards from a Young Man, emphasises this interpretation. In this quote, Jarman reflects as follows on his life after he was diagnosed with HIV: ‘My world is in fragments smashed to pieces so fine I doubt I will ever reassemble them’ (see ‘Derek Jarman at Wilkinson’ 2013). These albums, the use of this quote suggests in my view, do not manage to distance themselves far enough from the context in which they were created to critically reflect on this same context, and to present us with a solid critical model.

Complex Seeing At the end of this chapter, I will briefly return to these three albums by linking them to Adorno’s notion of ‘late style’. In the following, however, I want to argue that several songs on the albums Rewind the Film (2013) and Futurology (2014), released between Postcards from a Young Man (2010) and Resistance Is Futile (2019), do constitute a critical model. These albums present a cluster of artworks that form an exception to the three above-discussed releases. At first glance, the critical model that the albums constitute seems to follow the themes discussed in the previous chapter, revolving around time, spectrality, history and the projection of alternative futures as conceptualised in the past. These themes echo through the albums’ titles, after all: Rewind the Film refers to the inability to move forward, to circularity and to repetition; Futurology refers to the social science of predicting changes that will happen in societies; predictions that are based on analyses of the past and the present (see Wilcox 1983). Present and future are linked as well by the Albert Camus quote from The Rebel, printed in the sleeve booklet of Rewind the Film: ‘Real generosity towards the future lies in giving it all to the present’ (Camus 1984: 304). In interviews, furthermore, the band members themselves described Futurology as inspired by the movement of retrofuturism (see Jones et al. 2017: 336) and stated that it expressed, in Nicky Wire’s words, the idea

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that ‘the future does seem to rely on the past for inspiration’ (qtd. in Barry 2014). German artist Catrine Va’s design of the album’s cover—on which The Holy Bible’s reversed ‘R’s’ return again—has a retrofuturistic aura as well, depicting a model holding an architectural design, reflecting the style of avant-garde movements like cubofuturism, constructivism and Bauhaus. In his review of the album, Robert Barry therefore links Futurology to Derrida’s claim that the future ‘can only be for ghosts’ (see Barry 2014), and in Larissa Wodtke’s essay in Triptych, the album is analysed with help of references to Derrida’s ideas about hauntology and time as well. I want to argue, however, that even though these two albums do address memory, past and future, continuing the musings on these themes that began with Everything Must Go, what distinguishes the critical model that they shape from the band’s previous releases are references to what I want to define as locality and internationality; more specifically, references to the ways in which historical developments have shaped and continue to shape the places where people live, as well as their existence. My understanding of this sixth critical model is partly inspired by observations made by Paul Willemen in ‘An Avant-garde for the 90’s’. In this article, Willemen describes several avant-garde films in which landscapes play a critical and prominent role. Especially helpful for this chapter is Willemen’s discussion of the 1981 documentary film So That You Can Live, made by the leftist directors collective Cinema Action, which was formed at the end of the 1960s and produces films that often present a hybrid of fiction and documentary. So That You Can Live depicts five years in the life of a family in South Wales. The film mainly revolves around strikes organised by a group of women miners to protest unequal pay, making a more general argument for the crucial importance of unification to fight for the plight of the working classes. The film is driven by a deep sense of compassion with and respect for the South Welsh family and especially the role of their mother. At the same time, the film affects the spectator by showing the impossibility of living a life of happiness and dignity in a political climate shaped by Thatcherism. This critical observation is emphasised by the citations—from Marx and Raymond Williams—shown throughout the

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film, not unlike Manic Street Preachers would later embed similar quotes in their video-clips. What makes Willemen’s analysis helpful for this chapter is that he foregrounds the role that landscapes play in the film. In an important passage, he observes the following about a scene taking place in a garden: In the background of the gardening scene is a hillside partially covered in thick forest, the results of a reforestation policy. In South Wales, reforestation uses up a large proportion of the available arable land and constitutes one of the most lucrative investments for London-based stock-market gamblers. In addition, people who only a few generations ago were transformed into an industrial working class are now caught up in a process of deindustrialisation which leaves them stranded in the countryside, forced to move elsewhere or to relearn farming skills. Neither of these options offers a solution for the immediate problems people in that situation have to face, especially when the prima farming land has been reserved for gamblers betting on the future price of wood. (Willemen 1994: 141)

In an online analysis of the British Film Institute, Kieron Webb characterises the film’s focus on landscapes as ‘reflective’ as well, observing that we frequently see people looking at their surroundings, ‘remembering changes or wondering what has led to it looking the way it does’ (Web n.d.). Indeed, the camera often shows people talking, but then gradually moves away to show the surrounding landscape while human voices fade into the background. Willemen refers to Marxist playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht’s notion of ‘complex seeing’ to develop a more specific understanding of the role that these landscapes play in So That You Can Live. He writes: ‘Landscape is not subordinated to character or to plot-development. Instead, it is offered as a discursive terrain with the same weight, and requiring the same attention, as the other discourses that structure and move the text’ (1994: 141). The process that Brecht calls ‘complex seeing’ makes the spectator aware of the political and ideological layers that are ‘present’ in the landscapes that surround us and encourage her to reflect on the economic history of these seemingly neutral horizons of our lives. This approach reflects Brecht’s more general emphasis—influencing

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bands like Gang of Four and Scritti Politti, as discussed in Chap. 2—on triggering the critical Marxist realisation that what we experience as natural and neutral contexts are in fact socio-historical constructs that permeate and shape our existence (Willemen 1994: 155).13 Following this idea, Willemen observes that landscapes add a critical dimension to So That You Can Live: instead of being merely used as atmospheric backgrounds, they play an active and autonomous role. They form ‘palimpsests’, Willemen argues (1994: 154), that encourage the spectator to adopt a form of ‘complex seeing’ and address the following question, reflected in the film’s title: ‘How to understand social existence?’ (1994: 143). Willemen focuses on the realm of film, but I want to argue that the landscape, as a layered and political palimpsest that encourages critical reflection, can play a role in music as well. Even though we do not ‘see’ music like we ‘see’ films, of course, the releases on which I want to focus do encourage us to reflect on the landscapes that surround us and that shape us, presenting a different version of that which Brecht called ‘complex seeing’. It is this idea that I want to present as the sixth and last critical model that can be found on the albums that Manic Street Preachers have released thus far. This model is shaped on these two albums by combining two types of landscapes, with the notion of ‘landscape’ interpreted in a rather wide sense. Rewind the Film revolves around a locality shaped with references to the landscape of South Wales and to reflections on Welsh culture and history. Futurology combines these references to locality with an emphasis on internationality that finds its expression in experiences of what I will call ‘European landscapes’. I want to argue that this model’s focus on what I will loosely characterise as ‘landscapes’ gains a form of autonomy, because of the way in which it lets experiences and descriptions related to these two ‘landscapes’ solidify into songs. These songs do not present ‘Welshness’ or ‘Europeanness’ in essentialist manners, but, like an Adornian constellation, explore different aspects of locality and internationality that, when connected, express empowering and critical ideas about what these landscapes mean, why they matter, and how they influence our existence. In this way, I want to argue, these two ‘landscapes’ critically reflect on that which is presented on these albums as their ‘other’: forms of nationalism as well as, again, experiences of post-postmodern ennui.

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This means that, on the one hand, these albums suggest that nationalistic discourses overlook the specific aspects and dimensions of local landscapes. In the case of South Wales, these aspects and dimensions are subsumed by mythical ideas about one British identity that would find its embodiment in the hegemony of England or even London, justifying the instrumentalisation of these landscapes by Willemen’s above-mentioned ‘London-based stock-market gamblers’. On the other hand, the albums suggest that nationalistic ideologies ignore the strength of embracing forms of interconnectedness that transcend boundaries between nations. Together, these references to locality and internationality therefore result in a rejection of the anti-European and nationalistic sentiments voiced by populist parties—on a British, European and global scale—in the era in which the albums were released. This sixth critical model gains a reflective layer, furthermore, because of its critical reflections on the ways in which, as Kieron Webb notes about So That You Can Live, the individual is shaped by seemingly natural overarching structures, represented by the landscapes that are constantly present on these two albums. Because these albums affirm ideas about locality and internationality, they partly drift away from the negativity that characterised the band’s earlier albums and therefore from the paradox born in criticising a context that is rejected as completely false. This process was already set in motion on the albums discussed in the previous chapter, which are driven, after all, by an affirmation of the specters of Marx. More than these ungraspable and vague specters, however, which are summoned to criticise a postmodern whole shaped by an ideology that is still rejected completely, Rewind the Film and Futurology express hope in a more explicit manner by embracing experiences of locality and internationality.

Manic Street Preachers and Wales The Welsh locality that Rewind the Film refers to, I want to argue, is shaped on the album with help of references in songs and video-clips, the latter showing the landscapes that the lyrics on the album describe and refer to. Again, it is important to emphasise that I do not want to claim that the album presents an essence of something that could be

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characterised as ‘Welshness’. As Raymond Williams already observed in a 1975 article on ‘Welsh Culture’, after all, it is impossible to pin this notion down, which means, he argues, that we should focus instead on the ‘living complexity’ of the area (1989: 104). To be able to discuss the references to locality that can be found on Rewind the Film in a nuanced manner, I therefore first want to reflect on this complexity by discussing the relationship between Manic Street Preachers and Wales. I will thereby rely to a large extent on Rebecca Edwards’ 2007 article “Everyday, When I Wake Up, I Thank the Lord I’m Welsh’: Reading the Markers of Welsh Identity in 1990s Pop Music’. Hailing from South Wales, the band are embedded in a different cultural context than popular music groups from other parts of this country, resulting in different experiences, expectations and representations of the experience of being Welsh (see Roberts 2010: 79–80). Indeed, J. Mark Percival observes the following about the linguistic differences between the areas: ‘There is a linguistic North-South divide in Wales  – first-­ language Welsh or bilingual Welsh/English speakers in the North and English speakers in the South’. Percival links this observation as follows to the different discourses that shape expectations of Welsh popular music: ‘Stereophonics and the Manic Street Preachers are both from South Wales, so there has never been an expectation, domestically or elsewhere, that they would record in Welsh. Super Furry Animals were formed in Cardiff, South Wales, and led by a Welsh speaker, Gruff Rhys from North Wales, so there is also some geographical mixing’ (Percival 2010: 137). Furthermore, Manic Street Preachers’ first three albums, we have seen in Chap. 4, develop critical models with help of, mainly, cultural sources from a general European and North-American context that makes it difficult to link them to Wales at all. Of course, ideas about working-class consciousness and experiences related to the closing of the mines do play a role on these releases. In an early interview, for example, Richey Edwards stated the following about the area in which they grew up: Blackwood is scarred – industrially, economically and politically. Everything about Blackwood stands as a reminder of 15 years of decay. … All the big buildings in Blackwood used to be Miner’s Institutes. Now they’ve been

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turned into pleasure centers and cinemas… The whole landscape, too; they try to put grass over the slagheaps, and every time it rains they turn into muddy slides – the landscape is swelled by a huge slap of blackness. (qtd. in Shutkever 1996: 8)

The post-industrial scars that Edwards refers to, however, can be found as well in former mining areas in England or Scotland (see also Edwards 2007: 149). Even more generally, they are the result of post-industrial social and economic conditions to which English bands like Joy Division and Throbbing Gristle responded as well in an urban context. The band’s early releases therefore mainly reflect critically on the exploitative results of industrialisation processes, and do not specifically link these results to Wales. In the beginning of their existence, furthermore, the band explicitly resisted attempts to frame them as a Welsh band, even though, as Simon Price notes, early Manic Street Preachers reviews were ‘littered with anti-­ Welsh racism’ (Price 1999: 23; see also Edwards 2007: 146–7). Bradfield stated, for example: ‘You get the Welsh ones who think you’re trying to do something good and important for Wales. Why do they bother? We’ve never said good things about where we come from. All we’ve said is, ‘we’re from Wales, from a town where there’s nothing to do’. We’ve never felt any sense of pride in where we come from’ (qtd. in Percival 2010: 139–40). In those interviews in which they did foreground their background, furthermore, the band mainly emphasised, in a more general manner, progress and self-education as working-class values. In 1991, for example, Nicky Wire stated the following: ‘Where we come from in Wales, it’s very working class, but there is a tradition of bettering yourself. Our parents never wanted us to go down the pit. Self-education is a really big thing. The work ethic is just massive’ (qtd. in Reynolds 2011a: 126). Mark J.  Percival therefore observes: ‘Manic Street Preachers rejected expectations that they would represent Welshness to the world and advocated a traditional socialist argument that working-class aspirations could be achieved through education and intellectual development’ (2010: 142). After The Holy Bible, however, Manic Street Preachers started to refer more explicitly to Wales, exemplified by the Welsh flag draped over their speakers at concerts, and the above-discussed video-clip of

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‘Distant Colours’.14 Nicky Wire stated the following about this change in attitude: ‘With your first album, you just want to escape. When you’re young you want to run away from where you were born, and when you’re older you want to understand what made you feel like that’ (qtd. in Price 1999: 27). It is this latter desire that returns in different ways on the songs released after Edwards’ disappearance. Bradfield observed, for example, about the context in which Everything Must Go came about: ‘We were a Welsh rock band, and in the eyes of some people then that was the very worst thing in the whole world. We were totally a product of our environment’ (qtd. in the sleeve of the 10th Anniversary Edition of Everything Must Go). On Everything Must Go (inspired by Tower Colliery, as discussed in Chap. 5) and This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours (which has a photo of the band on a Welsh beach on the cover), furthermore, more and more references to Wales and different aspects of Welsh culture can be found. In the previous chapter, I discussed examples like the Silent Twins who grew up in Wales (‘Tsunami’), the drowning of the Welsh town of Tryweryn (‘Ready for Drowning’), and the Welsh who joined the Spanish fight against fascism (‘If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next’).15 As noted, the latter album also includes a fragment from R.S. Thomas’s poem ‘Reflections’ in its sleeve booklet; ‘a poet more usually associated with rural, religious, Welshspeaking Wales’ (Edwards 2007: 150).16 Furthermore, the album’s promotional material was bilingual (see Edwards 2007: 150). Nicky Wire even defined This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours as ‘the first true Welsh folk album’ (qtd. in Price 1999: 252),17 and several B-sides released in its era refer to Welsh culture and Welsh politicians well. ‘Valley Boy’ (a B-side on the single of ‘The Everlasting’), for example, describes processes of globalisation from the perspective of a boy from the valleys of South Wales; and ‘Prologue to History’ (on ‘If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next’, and on the 2018 20th Anniversary Edition of This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours) mentions Labour politician Neil Kinnock and took its title from the first chapter—‘Prologue to a History’—of Gwyn A.  Williams’ book on Welsh independence (see Williams 1985). In 1999, Manic Street Preachers played the Welsh national anthem ‘Hen Wlad fy Nhadau’ during a Christmas concert in Cardiff (Edwards 2007: 150), and in the book accompanying their

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‘Manic Millennium’ gig in the Cardiff Millennium Stadium at New Year’s Eve of 1999 (at which video-clips of triumphant events in Welsh sporting history were shown, see Edwards 2007: 154–5), we find pictures made by David Hurn, which were part of an exhibition about Welsh history and culture in the National Museum Cardiff called ‘Land of My Father’. References to Wales are present on later releases as well. Sung by Nicky Wire, the song ‘Wattsville Blues’ (on Know Your Enemy), for example, refers to Wire’s love for the former mining town of Wattsville, where he lived when they created the album. And a B-side called ‘Little Trolls’ (on the ‘Ocean Spray’ single) presents a vicious attack on critic A.A.  Gill’s racist description, in a 1998 article in The Sunday Times, of Welsh people as ‘little trolls’ (see Naish 2018: 78). In 2016, furthermore, the band released a stand-alone single called ‘Together Stronger (C’mon Wales)’, which celebrates the Welsh soccer team’s participation in the UEFA Euro championship. Its lyrics refer to the team’s players and in its video-clip, filled with Welsh flags and the colours green, white and red, we see the band playing the song for the Welsh team themselves. Earlier, the band had covered ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’ (during live concerts and released as a B-side on the single of ‘Australia’), which had become the unofficial anthem of Welsh football in the mid-1990s (see Edwards 2007: 149–50).18 Phrases from ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’ return in ‘Together Stronger (C’mon Wales)’ as well. The cover of their 2011 compilation National Treasures – The Complete Singles, furthermore, shows a photograph, made by Eleanor Hardwick, of a girl holding a French horn and wearing a marching band uniform, standing in front of the winding tower of the Big Pit National Coal Museum which has a Welsh flag waving on its top. The growing impact of Welsh bands during the second half of the 1990s (Manic Street Preachers, Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, Super Furry Animals, Stereophonics, Catatonia) in the post-Britpop era, as well as, in Rebecca Edwards’ words, ‘the release of three films set in south Wales (House of America, Twin Town and Human Traffic), the 1997 referendum vote for devolution and the holding of the 1999 Rugby World Cup in Wales’ (2007: 145), had even resulted in the construction of the concepts of ‘Cool Cymru’, ‘Cymrock’ and ‘Taff Rock’. These concepts were

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presented, together with a Scottish ‘Cool Caledonia’, as responses to Britpop’s ‘Cool Britannia’ (see Ellis 2010; Edwards 2007: 145), discussed in Chaps. 4 and 6. Forming part of this growing momentum of Welsh culture as well, Manic Street Preachers’ ‘Motown Junk’ featured on the soundtrack of Kevin Allen’s above-mentioned Twin Town (1997), and their early song ‘Strip It Down’ was included on a 1997 compilation album of songs by Welsh musicians, called Dial M For Merthyr. An instrumental version of ‘A Design for Life’, furthermore, was used in a campaign of the Welsh Tourist Board (see Edwards 2007: 152). Lastly, in 1999 Tom Jones released his highly successful album Reload, on which the Welsh singer is accompanied by James Dean Bradfield on the track ‘I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone’. The problematic notion of ‘Cool Cymru’, however, leads me to one of the reasons why I want to refrain from trying to define an essentialist notion of ‘Welshness’ in the following (see also Edwards 2007: 148). Understanding Manic Street Preachers, as well as the above-mentioned bands, as embracing their Welsh background in a response to Britpop, only defines the notions of ‘Wales’ and ‘Welshness’ as ‘the other’ of ‘Britpop’ and ‘Englishness’. Not only does this still characterise the latter two movements as hegemonic and as crucial for understanding what ‘Welshness’ would mean, it again overlooks the many different ways in which these bands refer to the different parts of Wales they are from, as well as the widely different cultural signifiers and musical styles they included and adopted (see Percival 2010: 143). Percival indeed concludes the following in an analysis of the supposed ‘Welshness’ of Manic Street Preachers and the supposed ‘Scottishness’ of bands like Travis and The Pastels (who were represented as part of ‘Cool Caledonia’): The codified Englishness of Britpop … was not accompanied by equivalent emphasis on essentialist expressions of Scottish or Welsh national identity in indie and alternative scenes. There was instead an explicit rejection of the perceived inward-looking parochialism of Britpop and an understanding of alternative music in Scotland and Wales as internationalist, free from the constrictions of narrow nationalism. (2010: 143)

I want to use the latter observation as a stepping stone to my analysis of the sixth critical model found on Rewind the Film and Futurology, to

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which I will now turn. Whereas the first album, as mentioned above, represents a form of locality that revolves around landscapes of South Wales and references to a fragmented understanding of Welshness, the second album represents the internationality that Percival mentions. Both albums should therefore be understood as two sides of the same coin: the locality of the band’s background as a rather ungraspable yet autonomous entity that does not require a hegemonic and nationalist notion of ‘Englishness’ or ‘Britishness’ to define itself is linked to an understanding of internationality that, again, distances itself from an inward-looking focus on national identity.

Rewind the Film The locality of South Wales that is expressed by Rewind the Film is introduced by the album’s cover: a blurry polaroid of the side barriers of the Severn Bridge (Price 2014), spanning the River Severn and the river Wye between south west England and south east Wales.19 It is also emphasised by the album’s sound, which is vastly different from the three albums mentioned above, reflecting Wire’ above-cited idea that rock had become ‘dormant’. Rewind the Film’s songs are shaped by acoustic guitars and are devoid of guitar solos, giving the album a gentle sound that roots it in folk traditions that entwine music with references to locality, place and tradition (see Wiseman-Trowse 2008: 73). Many of the album’s songs also give a prominent place to horns, trumpets and glockenspiel, instruments used in Welsh marching bands.20 In a 2013 interview for BBC Breakfast, Bradfield explained how he let the songs’ lyrics guide his music-­ writing for the album: ‘When [Wire] was giving me his lyrics I realised my electric guitar couldn’t fit over the top of them because it would have been just preposterous for me to just be riffing over the top of these lyrics that are more gentle in nature’ (‘Manic Street Preachers Interview BBC Breakfast 2013’ [video fragment]). I want to argue that the lyrics on Rewind the Film express experiences related to ‘locality’ in two ways, mainly foregrounded by three video-­ clips. On the one hand, they revolve around a disappointment in the death of the area’s socialist past, as well as the hopelessness caused by the

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area’s exploitation. On the other hand, they express feelings of empowerment that are also linked to aspects of Wales and are oriented towards a notion of progress.21 Raymond Williams points at a similar duality in his above-mentioned article on the difficulty of defining ‘Welsh Culture’. He observes that the area is both characterised by a melancholic but empowering concern with the past, and a more hopeful embrace of a better future, coupled to notions of autonomy and independence: Real independence is a time of new and active creation: people sure enough of themselves to discard their baggage; knowing the past as past, as a shaping history, but with a new confident sense of the present and the future, where the decisive meanings and values will be made. But at an earlier stage, wanting that but not yet able to get it, there is another spirit: a fixation on the past, part real, part mythicised, because the past, in either form, is one thing they can’t take away from us, that might even interest them, get a nod of recognition. (Williams 1989: 103)

These two aspects, I now want to argue, are both present in the lyrics of songs on Rewind the Film. They are described, for example, in the lyrics of the album’s first song: ‘This Sullen Welsh Heart’, a duet with English singer-songwriter Lucy Rose. The song’s sound is melancholic, built around an acoustic guitar and the two singers’ tender voices. The lyrical subject claims that she does not want her children to grow up ‘like me’, describing how she wants to give up, has lost a will to change, echoing the corrosion of feelings of resistance described in the previous chapter. Nevertheless, this same ‘I’ then expresses the idea that her ‘Welsh heart’ keeps resisting: ‘This sullen Welsh heart / It won’t leave, it won’t give up’. It is this idea that, I want to argue, runs like a critical undercurrent through the album, an undercurrent emphasised by three video-clips. This does not mean that all of the album’s lyrics refer to experiences of a Welsh locality; many of its songs address other issues and contain references to different phenomena. Like the landscapes in So That You Can Live, furthermore, this locality is not presented in a nationalistic or chauvinistic manner, nor is it reduced to slogans or political ideologies. Instead, it is present in the fibres of the album’s lyrical subject, often by working against this same subject: in many of the songs’ lyrics, the

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post-postmodern ennui that characterises the three albums described above seeps into the self and threatens to undermine her. ‘Rewind the Film’, for example, a duet with English singer Richard Hawley, revolves around descriptions of nostalgia and even regression, expressing the wish to lay in one’s mother’s arms again, to listen to old records, to turn back pages and rewind films because ‘There is too much heartbreak / In the nothing of the now’. ‘Builder of Routines’, in turn, links the experience of political ambivalence to personal reflections on the withering away of the younger self ’s radical political ideals: ‘How I hate middle age / In between acceptance and rage’. The lyrics link this experience to the band’s history as well, referring as follows to Edwards’ self-mutilation and their exclamation in ‘You Love Us’, more than 20 years earlier, that ‘Our voices are for real’: ‘So sick and so tired of being 4 real / Only the fiction still has the appeal’. ‘3 Ways to See Despair’ expresses a similar idea by referring to The Beatles’ ‘I’m So Tired’ (on The Beatles): ‘I am as tired as John Lennon sang / I am no longer the centre of the universe’. In fragmented and different ways, however, references to locality turn up on the album, resisting this desire to give up by hinting at the manner in which the self is rooted in the landscapes that have shaped her. A subtle example is formed by the song ‘Running Out of Fantasy’, the title of which refers to a fatalistic statement made by Werner Herzog in the documentary Burden of Dreams (see Blank 1982), reflecting his feelings of exhaustion and desperation caused by the brutal circumstances of the making of his 1982 film Fitzcarraldo. The lyrics of the song were partly inspired as well by Welsh author Jan Morris’ 1974 novel Conundrum, one of the first autobiographical novels about gender reassignment (see Burrows 2013). The song’s lyrics describe a self who is fragmenting and hollowing herself out; who is at the end of her rope and ‘bled dry’ by an ‘obsession with change’ (Burrows 2013). Still, however, this self observes: ‘I’m revealing myself in layers / Exposing a core to the inner eye’. The context of the album suggests that we may interpret this core as partly formed by experiences of a Welsh locality that keeps resisting and rebelling, providing an ‘ecosystem’ that, these lyrics tell us, is ‘based on hatred’. Similarly, the lyrics of ‘4 Lonely Roads’, which were influenced by the poetry of A.E. Houston (see Burrows 2013), contrast observations on despair—‘I’m trapped inside the skin / Can’t let love back in’—with

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expressions of hope—‘And if we can / Then we must / Hold our heads up’. ‘Show me a Wonder’, which was released as the first single of the album, links this hopefulness to Wales again by contrasting the Talking Heads line ‘Is heaven a place where nothing ever happens’ (from their song ‘Heaven’, on Fear of Music) with the lines ‘We may write in English / But our truth remains in Wales’. As mentioned above, the critical role that locality plays on the album is mainly emphasised and foregrounded by the three video-clips that accompanied its release and that show the localities and landscapes that Rewind the Film’s lyrics describe in fragments. More than in earlier eras, this means, the band make their video-clips play a constitutive role in the critical meaning that they aim to shape. In the video-clip of ‘Rewind the Film’ (‘Manic Street Preachers  – Rewind the Film ft. Richard Hawley’ [video fragment]), for example, we see green South Welsh landscapes, mines and bars, and an elderly man walking through a South Welsh town that seems almost abandoned. The melancholic sphere of these images changes when we see the same man playing bingo in a pub. Images of empty South Welsh mines and towns are intercut with documentarystyle close-ups of people’s faces looking directly into the camera, often laughing and talking. The sense of emptiness and melancholy that some of the album’s songs express, and that is linked to the hopelessness caused by the death of the area’s mining industry, is contrasted in the video-­clip with the critical landscape of South Wales, showing how deeply people are embedded in this landscape, how this same landscape and the mines created these towns, providing them with a sense of belonging and identity. Together with the lyrics of Rewind the Film, these landscapes encourage complex seeing: they play an active and autonomous role in the video-clip, not just creating an atmosphere but forming political dimensions, social palimpsests, in which the cultural and social history of South Wales is sedimented. Similar observation apply to the video-clip released for ‘Show Me the Wonder’, made by above-mentioned Welsh director Kieran Evans (‘Manic Street Preachers – Show Me the Wonder’ [video fragment]). The clip was shot in the Pioneer Workingmen’s Club in Porth, Rhondda Valleys in South Wales and shows Welsh actors Tori Lyons and Craig Roberts. We see people of different ages dressing up before going out,

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drinking, dancing and having a good time in a Welsh pub while Manic Street Preachers—introduced as ‘the sound of the valleys’—are playing on a small stage, all set in the 1980s. Yet another dimension of Welsh locality is shown in the video-clip of ‘Anthem for a Lost Cause’, again directed by Evans and again starring Craig Roberts and Tori Lyons (‘Manic Street Preachers – Anthem for a Lost Cause’ [video fragment]). The latter plays a woman living in the Wales of the 1980s, struggling to make ends meet and eventually having to sell her possessions. Intertwined with historical clips from the miners’ strikes and especially from the women worker’s movements, it emphasises the socialist dimension of the area, its landscapes and towns, mirroring the above-mentioned So That You Can Live by foregrounding the role that women played in protecting their communities and fighting injustice during the strikes. Again, these landscapes do not play a secondary role, but form the heart of the video-clip and show that the lives of the protagonists are determined by the socio-historical situation in which they find themselves, battling for a cause that the song describes as ‘lost’ but still celebrates. On another level, the lyrics of ‘Anthem for a Lost Cause’ seem to refer to the diminishing importance of critical song lyrics, to which I briefly return in Chap. 8. Before ending with the song ‘30-Year War’, to which I return in the next chapter as well, Rewind the Film contains the instrumental ‘Manorbier’, which I want to discuss as a conclusion to my analysis of the album. The name of the song refers to the South Welsh village of the same name, where, Wire observed in an interview, Virginia Woolf visited George Bernard Shaw (Burrows 2013). It opens with a nostalgic sound, an acoustic guitar riff determining a pensive but steady rhythm. The song then slowly builds up towards an optimistic and triumphant melody, embodying the dual experience—described in the above-cited passage by Williams—of being rooted in South Welsh landscapes: on the one hand, a sense of pride and belonging linked to the ability to make the area’s past part of an optimistic narrative resulting in resistance and a better future. On the other hand, feelings of political hopelessness caused by the area’s exploitation, coupled to a crippling form of left melancholy.

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Futurology The band’s 12th album, Futurology, was released a year after Rewind the Film. As mentioned above, it presents a critical landscape in several of its songs as well. Bradfield stated: ‘Lyrically, the album’s got a European fascination. The landscape of Europe, the malaise of Europe, the malaise of us Brits not feeling part of it’ (qtd. in Stevens 2013). Nicky Wire observed in turn that the album is driven by the aim to connect ‘Europe through art movements, like an antidote to politics’ (qtd. in Petridis 2018), and stated somewhere else that he wanted to present the continent as a ‘unified art movement’ (qtd. in Lynskey 2014). These aims result, I will argue in the following, in an embrace of experiences of liminality and internationality, embodied by representations of what I want to characterise as a form of internationality that is mainly shaped with help of references to international European and west-Russian avant-garde movements. The nature of this network is illustrated by the citation printed in the album’s booklet—‘The lines are joined by finding one another’—by Russian constructivist Aleksandr Rodchenko, who wrote a manifesto on the nature of ‘the line’ in art (see Margolin 1997: 81–122). Futurology, this suggests, sketches lines between different aspects, elements and places in Europe, but also—mainly through references to constructivism and suprematism—to the Russian avant-gardes. Like Rewind the Film, Futurology was partly recorded in the Berlin Hansa Tonstudio, in which David Bowie’s albums Low and “Heroes”, as well as Iggy Pop’s The Idiot and Lust for Life were created (see Boswell 2012: 111–12). It could be argued that the album finds its ideological predecessor in Bowie’s Berlin trilogy. Moving to Berlin, Bowie famously embraced west Berlin to escape the drug-infused claustrophobia he experienced in the Los Angeles music scene, drawing inspiration from European art traditions (see Critchley 2014: 181). One of these traditions was Die Brücke, an inspiration that resulted in the cover of “Heroes” (as well as Iggy Pop’s The Idiot) mirroring Die Brücke’s Erich Heckel’s painting Roquairol. But Bowie also drew inspiration from German experimental musicians like Edgar Froese and Kraftwerk.

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The sound of Futurology reflects a similar focus, using Berlin as a key to unlock the art history of Europe. In the album’s booklet, we find pictures of the band posing in front of the entrance to the Bahnhof Potsdamer Platz (close to the Hansa Tonstudio), as well as in front of Alexander Calder’s 1965 sculpture Têtes et Queue (in Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie). The booklet also contains more abstract photographs of walls and buildings (of the Neue Nationalgalerie itself, for example) that emphasise Rodchenko’s revolutionary concern with lines and with form. Furthermore, the album’s music, Wire noted, was inspired by the minimalist, experimental and electronic sound of German bands like Neu!, Ash Ra Tempel, Can, Kraftwerk and Max Richter (see Price 2014). Indeed, the folk and acoustic guitar-oriented songs of Rewind the Film are replaced on Futurology by music that embraces a more electronic and futuristic sound, in which keyboards, synthesisers and electronic percussion play important roles. Even though guitars still dominate the album, its music hints at the new wave ‘dance rock’ of early Simple Minds, especially their 1980 Empires and Dance. Another reference point is the synthand keyboard-infused pop of Depeche Mode, who recorded their albums Construction Time Again (1983), Some Great Reward (1984) and Black Celebration (1986) in the Hansa Tonstudio as well. I want to argue that, like on Rewind the Film, an understanding of internationality is partly shaped on the album in a defence against the post-postmodern ennui that threatens to fragment the lyrical ‘I’. Again, the album’s lyrics contain many references to boredom, emptiness and the desire to withdraw, most explicitly phrased in the title of the song ‘Antisocial Manifesto’. Instead of explicitly showing and recalling landscapes, as on Rewind the Film, the ungraspable ‘feeling’ of Europe is recalled on this album in a more abstract sense, expressing the hope embodied by experiences of internationality. It is important to embed these references in the historical context of the album. In interviews, Manic Street Preachers frequently reflected critically on the 2016 vote for Brexit, mourning the disappearance of intellectual reflection in and on a political debate that they characterised as ‘statement after statement of opposing vitriol’ (qtd. in Petridis 2018). After expressing his disappointment in the unnecessary bureaucratisation of the European Union, Wire observed in 2014, furthermore: ‘The

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concept of Europe is really strong, powerful, glorious, enriching, peaceful – the biggest thing of all is the peace-dividend… I’m just trying to get across … that there is an amazing amount of positivity from the European Union, which people have become totally distant from. And when that happens, it’s always the right that fills the void, when the left becomes blind… And that’s always deeply worrying’ (‘Manic Street Preachers Speak Out About UKIP And The EU’, 2014). This defence of Europeanism contrasts with the burning European flag on the back and in the sleeve booklet of Generation Terrorists.

Internationality In the following, I want to argue that Futurology translates the notion of ‘Europeanness’ in three ways into a critical model. The first is by referring to actual places and areas. ‘Walk Me to the Bridge’, released as a single in April 2014, for example, was inspired by the 8 km long Øresund Bridge that connects Sweden and Denmark (see Price 2014). Referring to this landmark, the band present it as a symbol of European connectedness. Another place referenced on the album is the above-mentioned city of Berlin. This is partly done, again, with help of a video-clip. The clip of ‘Walk Me to the Bridge’, directed by Kieran Evans and inspired by Tom Tykwer’s 1998 film Lola Rennt, was shot in the German capital: we see an actress running through the city, passing several of Berlin’s landmarks, and eventually arriving at a hangar at the Berlin-Tempelhof airport, where the band is playing (‘Manic Street Preachers  – Walk Me to the Bridge (Official Video)’ [video fragment]). ‘Black Square’, furthermore, includes sounds recorded on the streets of Berlin (an example of ‘found noise’22). Another European capital returns in the nostalgic bonus-track ‘The Last Time I Saw Paris’. The song is almost completely sung in French and forms a duet between Bradfield and a female singer.23 Its lyrics refer to Richard Brooks’ 1954 film of the same name, which was inspired, in turn, by the 1940 song ‘The Last Time I Saw Paris’, already featured in the 1941 film Lady Be Good. The song’s lyrics describe the intellectual

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climate of the French capital, referring to the film Last Tango in Paris, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus (‘le boxeur et le gardien de but’, a phrase inspired by Andy Martin’s 2013 The Boxer and the Goalkeeper: Sartre vs Camus), as well as the former author’s La Nausée. The album’s lyrics also constitute links between these places and Wales. This, I want to argue, results in the hybrid notion of a Welsh internationality that Percival hints at in the passage cited above. ‘The View from Stow Hill’, for example, describes the Welsh town of Newport, mentioning the scars left by working class movement of Chartism: ‘You can still see the bullet holes / You can still sense a little hope’ (see also Price 2014). The name of the instrumental ‘Dreaming a City (Hughesovka)’, furthermore, refers to the city that Welsh businessman John Hughes aimed to create in Ukraine, shipping large groups of Welsh miners and ironworkers to the Russian Empire and constituting the town that is now Donetsk. The song takes its title from Colin Thomas’ 2009 book Dreaming a City: From Wales to Ukraine – The Story of Hughesovka Stalino Donetsk. Lastly, the title of a B-side on ‘Walk Me to the Bridge’ is called ‘Caldey’, referring to the island to the south east of Wales. This brings me to the second way in which the notion of ‘Europeanness’ is shaped in the lyrics of songs on Futurology: with help of descriptions of liminality. Taken from the field of anthropology, this concept came to play an influential role in migration studies, referring to a state of existence in-between two locations. The Indian English scholar Homi Bhabha, for example, uses the term to refer to the position of migrant culture, often existing in-between countries, languages and cultures, inhabiting what he calls a ‘third space’ that, he describes, may result in unique forms of art (Bhabha 2004). Several descriptions on Futurology refer to the liminal position of a self embedded in international networks and migrating between countries. The above-mentioned image of the bridge forms an example, as well as the references to Welsh miners and ironworkers who migrated to take part in the creation of a Welsh industrial experiment in Ukraine. The album most explicitly stresses the idea that ‘liminality’ and ‘internationality’ form part of the experience of ‘Europeanness’ in the lyrics of the song ‘Europa Geht Durch Mich’. The song opens with the line ‘Europe has a language problem’, a reference to a line in ‘I Travel’, Simple Minds’

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celebration of Europeanism on Empires and Dance. The song’s German chorus is sung by actress and singer Nina Hoss and describes the feeling of Europe ‘passing through’ the self, stressing the idea that Europe forms a network of areas, countries and cultures that are connected like constellations: we can travel through these countries and areas in different ways, constantly reshaping our idea of what ‘Europe’ is, each language and each landscape contributing to this constellation and, in turn, to our ideas about who we are and how we are shaped by the contexts through which we move. The song’s lyrics furthermore refer to European dreams, wishes, suns and skies, describing its interconnectedness in lyrics accompanied by music that gradually speeds up. The third way in which the album celebrates ‘Europeanness’ and, more generally, internationality is by embracing several international art movements. Firstly, this is done with help of the music that influenced the album, especially the above-mentioned German bands. The album also constitutes a more general link with those bands and musicians who adopted Berlin as a creative focal point as well, like Bowie, Depeche Mode and Nick Cave. Furthermore, its lyrics contain several references to the historical avant-gardes, who often explicitly emphasised their international nature, as illustrated by the three European cities—Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam—forming the name of the CoBrA movement. For example, the name of the above-mentioned German expressionist and avant-garde art movement Die Brücke echoes through the lyrics of ‘Walk Me to the Bridge’ (see Barry 2014; Price 2014). This collective, which was active in the beginning of the twentieth century in and around Dresden, responded to the international avant-garde art movements that were formed in Europe. Their name refers to the attempt to build a bridge to the future, as well as to Nietzsche’s passage on human beings forming a bridge, cited in Chap. 5 (see also Price 2014). Futurology also contains two songs named after paintings: ‘Between the Clock and the Bed’, on which we hear Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside sing together with Bradfield, is the title of a dark self-portrait by Edvard Munch, made not long before he died. ‘Black Square’, furthermore, refers to the most famous painting of avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich. Wire observes that the painting stands for ‘punk’, describing its avant-­ gardist tendencies as follows: ‘This is it. I am stripping the world of

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everything you have seen before and this is the reality of now’ (qtd. in Barry 2014). Simon Price observes, furthermore, that the song’s lyrics contain references to abstract expressionist painter Egon Schiele’s statement that ‘Art is never modern, art is primordially eternal’ (see Selsdon and Zweingerberger 2012: 7) as well as Paul Valéry’s observation (passed on by W.H. Auden) that ‘Poetry is never finished, only abandoned’ (Price 2014; see Valéry 1971: xvi). Lastly, the album contains the almost instrumental song ‘Mayakovsky’, on which we only hear the Russian artist’s name shouted several times, accompanied by futuristic and hopeful sounding music that opens with the exclamation ‘I’ve got blisters on my fingers’, a reference to The Beatles’ song ‘Helter Skelter’ (on The Beatles). By constituting this web of references to international avant-garde movements, Futurology shapes a feeling of connectedness and celebrates the creativity that is sparked by international art movements—European and Russian—that ignored the borders between countries and responded to each other, often with help of antagonistic manifestos. Taken together, I want to conclude my brief analysis of the sixth and last critical model shaped in and by Manic Street Preachers releases, Rewind the Film and Futurology entwine a valuing of one’s locality with a valuing of internationality and liminality. Willemen observes in his above-mentioned article that the avant-garde he describes, which revolves around films that invite spectators to develop ‘complex seeing’, ‘is in a better position than its historical precursors to achieve an art form that can teach us something about our own situation as well as providing a motivational connection to political action’ (1994: 157). Referring to landscapes of South Wales as a political palimpsest, as well as to the rich artistic culture of international avant-garde movements and the liminal feeling caused by European landscapes, I believe that Rewind the Film and Futurology affirm this observation in the realm of popular music. These albums encourage their listeners to think about and reflect on the ways in which we are shaped by the socio-historical landscapes that surround us, embracing both the local influence of landscapes and areas, and the internationality of the continent of which these landscapes and areas form part. This combination makes both albums reject chauvinistic or nationalist discourses, and even implicitly suggests that

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the landscapes of Wales, instead of forming part of the British nation, should be understood as embedded in an international network. This provides both albums with a form of autonomy, de-naturalising these landscapes as ‘neutral horizons’ and presenting them instead as mattering in different ways in the constitution of our selves. The model shaped by these songs gains a reflective dimension, furthermore, by showing how deeply embedded we are in these same landscapes, forcing us to realise how difficult it is to elevate ourselves, or the artworks we shape, above the structures that shape this self and ‘question the entire culture we take for granted’, a ‘culture’ shaped in, by and through these same landscapes. In contrast with the critical models discussed in previous chapters, as briefly mentioned above, these references, at places, gain a more positive and affirmative nature, contrasting that which they affirm—locality and internationality—with discourses of nationalism as well as post-postmodern ennui. Furthermore, we have seen that, more than on previous albums, video-clips play an important role in showing the landscapes that this critical model refers to as well.

Late Work It is with this brief discussion of critical landscapes that we have reached the end of my analysis of the critical models that, I have argued, are manifested on Manic Street Preachers releases. This means that we have also reached the end of Manic Street Preachers’ catalogue as it has been shaped so far. Before concluding this chapter, however, I want to briefly reflect on the status of Rewind the Film and Futurology within this catalogue. I will do this by exploring that which Adorno, in an analysis of Beethoven’s late work, characterises as ‘late style’. Focusing on the ‘formal law’ of musical compositions, Adorno observes that whereas the works of Beethoven’s middle period incorporate traditional and conventional figures—phrases, rhythms, movements—but ‘transform them according to [the composer’s] intention’ (2002b: 565), his late work is filled with conventional figures that remain untransformed and are shown ‘undisguised’. In this way, these conventions become what Adorno calls ‘splinters, fallen away and abandoned’, and

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‘finally revert to expression; no longer, at this point, an expression of the solitary I, but of the mythical nature of the created being and its fall’ (2002b: 566). By presenting these conventions as ‘objective’ skeletal structures, Adorno observes, the subjective intention that used to unite them in the composer’s middle period is now present as an absence, which makes these compositions turn ‘emptiness outward’ and reflect on the composer’s eventual death (2002b: 567). This subjectivity, he continues, expresses the powerlessness of an ‘I confronted with Being’ (2002b: 566) and shows something about death within the universe of the artwork. Adorno’s argument that in the late works of certain composers we find a style that distinguishes them from their earlier works encourages us to ask if similar claims can be made within the realm of popular music, more specifically about the catalogue of Manic Street Preachers. It has been argued, for example, that relatively recent releases by Bob Dylan can be characterised as ‘late work’ in Adorno’s sense, with albums like 1997’s Time Out of Mind or 2001’s Love and Theft incorporating earlier movements and phrases, taken from blues and folk traditions, in an undisguised and ‘objective’ manner that distances them from earlier Dylan releases (see Nicolay 2009). Even though we might be able to understand the skeletal and fragmented nature of the lyrics left behind by Edwards as an example of ‘late style’ in his lyric-writing, however, I am reluctant to make similar claims about the releases of Manic Street Preachers as a band. After all, the group still exist and the artists have decades of musical creation ahead of them.24 Furthermore, even though the band do present different musical influences on Rewind the Film and Futurology—aspects taken from folk and from German experimental music of the late 1960s and early 1970s, for example—both albums are still, as Simon Price observes (2014), very recognisably Manic Street Preachers albums. This means that they are still characterised by the ‘unifying intention’—to use Adorno’s phrase— shaped by the interplay of Bradfield’s voice and guitar, Wire’s bass, Moore’s drums and Wire’s critical lyrics, in which intertextuality and a very particular focus on art movements, history and local and international politics play dominant roles. It would therefore be difficult to argue

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that the Welsh band present these influences in an ‘undisguised’ manner, as Adorno argues about Beethoven’s late work. It might also, more generally, be argued that Adorno’s observations force us to conclude that the notion of ‘late style’ is difficult to apply to the realm of popular music in general, and in particular to the realm of rock. Apart from diverse exceptions like, perhaps, Nick Cave, Joni Mitchell, The Beatles, Patti Smith, Johnny Cash, Frank Zappa, Aretha Franklin, Bowie or Tom Waits,25 many artists working within this realm peak in the beginning of their careers. This often results, later in their careers, in reunions or anniversary tours, in re-releases, or in music that, to some extent, repeats the styles of earlier albums. Partly, we see some of these aspects return in the anniversary tours and special editions celebrating Manic Street Preachers releases, as well as on later Manic Street Preachers albums, for example 2007’s Send Away the Tigers, 2010’s Postcards from a Young Man, and 2018’s Resistance Is Futile. As observed above, on these albums the band partly turn inwards and repeat styles that they developed earlier, mainly on Everything Must Go. As discussed above as well, this goes hand in hand, on these albums, with references to a crumbling down of youthful optimism and reflections on aging. Furthermore, it is coupled to expressions of crippling forms of doubt about their own ability to formulate critique in an era defined by digimodernism and post-truth politics. Paradoxially, as I have mentioned above as well, these same expressions are still accompanied by an embrace of the fun of anthemic and cathartic rock music, which seems to want to resist the dark fate of rock ‘n’ roll as it is described in the band’s lyrics.

Conclusion This brings me to the conclusion of this chapter. Above, I have argued that this increasing concern with the digital aspects of post-­postmodernity results in their more recent releases in a standpoint that undermines the ability to formulate the kind of critique that they aim to express; a standpoint, again, mainly expressed in their lyrics. As Bradfield observes in the interview cited above: ‘there’s not one thing you can hang your hat on any more’ (qtd. in Lynskey 2014). In the 2015 documentary No Manifesto, he

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links a similar idea to his memories of the miners’ strikes; an era in which, on the one hand, he observes that ‘it felt as if everything we had grown up with was being systematically destroyed’, but, on the other hand, in which it was clear what to resist (see Marcus 2015). Processes of digitalisation, populism, fake news and post-truth politics, the band’s later releases suggest, have made Baron Munchausen drown in his swamp. Any problematisation of his position, after all, can now be countered with the claim that it is fake and fabricated; a construct created by the ‘other side’ of the polarised social and political divide. This also suggests that it is in the era following postmodernity and Fisher’s ‘capitalist realism’ that the characteristics for which these two eras were already criticised decades earlier have come to completion: the spectacle, this suggestion goes, has now become a perfect and inescapable simulacrum. At least, that is, from the band’s point of view. With help of Willemen, however, I have argued in this chapter that, by focusing on locality and internationality, the band still aim to constitute a sixth critical model, revolving, in several songs on the albums Rewind the Film and Futurology, around a musical interpretation of Brecht’s notion of ‘complex seeing’. Again, we have seen, this model is constructed for a large part with help of lyrics, with several video-clips showing the landscapes referred to as well. But, again, even in the lyrics of these albums, crippling forms of doubt and self-critique arise. This results, for example, in the critical reflections on communism that are found, as mentioned in the previous chapter, on Futurology’s ‘The Next Jet to Leave Moscow’, to which I briefly return in the next chapter. Furthermore, the lyrics of ‘Let’s Go to War’ (also on Futurology) contain references to ‘working class skeletons’ that ‘lie scattered in museums’, and to ‘false economies’ that ‘speak falsely of your dreams’. Simon Price argues that the song forms a nihilistic kamikaze call-to-arms against the English upper classes (Price 2014). I would argue, however, that the European horizon of the album makes a line like ‘the knives will now sharpen’ into a more pessimistic reference to the 1934 Night of the Long Knives, as well as to contemporary resurgences of populism and right radicalism. In spite of their reflections on these resurgences, which go hand in hand with the negative aspects of the digitalisation processes that Kirby

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labels ‘digimodernism’, however, both Rewind the Film and Futurology do present us with a critical model, resisting forms of nationalism by emphasising the empowering aspects of locality and internationality. Whereas punk and postpunk bands, as well as The Holy Bible, aimed to resist the different incarnations and resurgences of the British National Front, racism and right wing-extremism in the second half of the twentieth century, this means that these later Manic Street Preachers releases express a growing concern with forms of populism and nationalism in the beginning of the twenty-first century, infused with the ‘digital fakery’ constituted, in their view, by technological processes and tech companies.

Notes 1. The three albums spawned a large number of singles: ‘Underdogs’, ‘Your Love Alone Is Not Enough’, ‘Autumnsong’ and ‘Indian Summer’ (from Send Away the Tigers); ‘It’s Not War (Just the End Of Love)’, ‘Some Kind of Nothingness’ and ‘Postcards from a Young Man’ (from Postcards from a Young Man); ‘International Blue’, ‘Distant Colours’, ‘Dylan & Caitlyn’, ‘Liverpool Revisited’, ‘Hold Me Like a Heaven’ (inspired by a line in Philip Larkin’s ‘Lines On A Young Lady’s Photograph Album’) and ‘People Give In’ (from Resistance Is Futile). The latter five singles, however, were only released as digital downloads. 2. In an even fuller embrace of pop, Manic Street Preachers released a cover of Rihanna’s song ‘Umbrella’ for the 2008 album NME Awards. In December 2007, they also independently released the poppy Christmas song ‘The Ghosts of Christmas’ as a free digital download, containing hauntological pop culture references to celebrating Christmas in the 1970s. 3. The line ‘Baby what have you done to your hair?’ in ‘Autumnsong’ (also on Send Away the Tigers) refers in a similar way to a line in the Aerosmith song ‘You See Me Crying’ (on their 1975 album Toys in the Attic). 4. In ‘Another Invented Disease’ (on Generation Terrorists), the band had already referred to a line about daylight and sunshine in the song ‘Rocks Off’ (on the Rolling Stones album Exile on Main St.). 5. The Pink Floyd line refers to ghosts, which gives the album a hauntological aspect. This aspect returned as well in receptions of the cover of Send Away the Tigers. On this cover, we see two girls dressed in a glamorous style that reflects the way in which Manic Street Preachers fans use(d) to

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dress for the band’s concerts, with an American bridge in the background. This resulted in baseless speculations about whether the bridge referred to the Severn Bridge, where Edwards’ car was found (see Sullivan 2007). The photograph was taken from Valerie Philip’s 2005 book Monika Monster Future First Woman on Mars. Other photos from the book were used for the album’s sleeve booklet, as well as for the covers of the four singles released from the album. The two girls from the album’s cover can also be seen in the one shot video-clip of ‘Autumnsong’, which the band released after they were not satisfied with its official clip (on National Treasures – The Complete Singles). 6. On the difficulty of determining whether the era of ‘postmodernity’ has ended, see Eisentraut 2013: 302–3. 7. The lyrics might refer to a similar feeling of cathartic escapism with the line ‘Zoo’s been overrun on Baghdad’: during the American invasion of 2003, animals in the Baghdad zoo were killed or escaped, with several tigers running free in the city. Some of the tigers were caught, others were killed by the American military. 8. Together with ‘Indian Summer’ and ‘Winterlovers’, ‘Autumnsong’ is one of three songtitles on Send Away the Tigers that refer—in chronological order—to seasons. 9. In the video-clip, we see two chess masters, one representing Wales and the other the Soviet Union (played by actors Michael Sheen and Anna Friel) who suddenly end their chess game and start kissing passionately. Martin Sheen also wrote the foreword to Kevin Cummins’ 2014 collection of Manic Street Preachers photographs Assassinated Beauty. 10. In a B-side on the 2010 single of ‘Some Kind of Nothingness’, called ‘Red Rubber’, we do find a critical political exploration of the history of colonialism. The lyrics refer to phrases taken from the 2003 documentary on the exploitation of Congo by Belgian king Leopold II, called White King, Red Rubber, Black Death (see Bate 2003). 11. Bradfield and John Cale had both appeared previously in Marc Evans’ 2000 music documentary Camgymeriad Gwych (Beautiful Mistake). 12. An intertextual link can be drawn between this reference to Samurai and Jim Jarmusch’s film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. In this film, the ‘way of the Samurai’ is approached as an ancient tradition that visits the present from the past, enabling the protagonist to haunt the present as a ghost-like figure who has already accepted his archaic nature and his eventual death (see Jarmusch 1999).

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13. On Marxism, Brecht and popular culture, see also Jameson 2007: 84; Huyssen 1986: 14. Willemen connects this idea to Benjamin’s influential notion of the ‘dialectic image’, which refers to an image that ‘shows’ its own past by making use of fragments, montage and destabilising forms of representation. This makes such an image into a sedimentation of historical developments that, again, enables the spectators to critically reflect on this past and de-naturalise that which she sees (Willemen 1994: 142). Wodtke refers to the dialectic image to discuss the archival aspects of The Holy Bible (Jones et al. 2017: 275). 14. Nicky Wire also draped the Welsh flag around his shoulders when collecting the Brit Award that the band won in 1997 (see Edwards 2007: 150). 15. For an analysis of Manic Street Preachers and Wales, see also Price 1999: 21–27. 16. A reference to Thomas’ poem returns as well in the song ‘You Stole The Sun from My Heart’ (on This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours), which contains a line that mentions ‘furies’ (see Thomas 1996). 17. Wire seems to refer to the idea that the discourse of folk music revolves around the value of ‘place’ as providing a form of authenticity (see Wiseman-Trowse 2008: 73). 18. On sports and the construction of Welsh identity, see Johnes 2013. 19. Inside the album’s sleeve booklet, we find its lyrics printed in black capital letters. Furthermore, the booklet contains several atmospheric works of art: what appear to be photos of Welsh landscapes and nature, adorned with paint. 20. This constitutes a link between the album and National Treasures – The Complete Singles. The covers of the different releases of this collection feature photographs made by Eleanor Hardwick of girls dressed in marching band uniforms and holding an instrument. 21. In his entry on The Holy Bible in Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series, David Evans argues that the band’s third album can be analysed with help of the two Welsh notions of ‘hiraeth’ (referring to a specific form of nostalgia, melancholy, grief and longing, not unlike the specific meanings of the Portuguese ‘saudade’, the German ‘Sehnsucht’ or the Turkish ‘huzun’), and ‘hwyl’ (referring to a form of passion, vitality or energy). These two notions, Evans claims, shape the album’s sometimes bleak and sometimes hopeful lyrics (Evans 2019: 7–9). I disagree, since I think The Holy Bible is too deeply embedded in more general reflections on

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European culture and history to refer to these specifically Welsh notions. Furthermore, using these notions in this way might, again, too uncritically embrace a rather stereotypical representation of ‘Welshness’. 22. On the idea of ‘found noise’, see Stone 2016: xxxi. 23. The identity of the French singer remains unclear. 24. On the difficulty of determining ‘late style’ within an artist’s life and work, see McMullan and Smiles 2016: 3–4. 25. We also have to be careful not to uncritically reintroduce the romantic and modernist notion of the artistic Genius, as Adorno does in his writings on Beethoven’s late work (see also Spencer 2016: 232).

8 Conclusion

Libraries and Power On 18 June 2009, the new Cardiff Central Library (Llyfrgell Ganolog Caerdydd) was opened in the presence of Manic Street Preachers (see Colothan 2019). During the opening, the band unveiled a plaque with the phrase ‘Libraries Gave Us Power’, referring to the opening line of their song ‘A Design for Life’ (on Everything Must Go). That line was based, in turn, on the engraving of Francis Bacon’s dictum that ‘Knowledge Is Power’ above the entrance to Newport’s Pillgwenlly Library, and foregrounds the song’s focus on self-education as a working-class value. In a 2011 article in The Guardian, Nicky Wire emphasised the importance of this value by criticising the closing of British libraries. In the article, he furthermore rejected the, in his view, destructive influence of the British government, at that time led by David Cameron of the Conservative Party: One of the most amazing things about public libraries remains their utter classlessness. You don’t have to have gone to Eton to make the most out of a library. They aren’t inhabited by the kind of people currently damning them. The closure of libraries in conjunction with tuition fees, the sell-off © The Author(s) 2020 M. Peters, Popular Music, Critique and Manic Street Preachers, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43100-6_8

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of our forests and radical reorganisation of the NHS are symbolic of the blatant power grab of this fiasco of a government. (Wire 2011)

I believe that the claims made in this article, as well as the band opening the Cardiff Central Library, summarise the guiding thread of Manic Street Preachers releases: a continual emphasis on self-education, knowledge and critical reflection, mainly formulated in and through their lyrics. As Nicky Wire stated in 1991: ‘If literature or music can make you think or become aware, then it’s done something. That’s what we’ve always wanted to do; just ignite sparks in people’s minds’ (qtd. in Marcus 2015). In this book, I have indeed argued that the Welsh group have released songs and albums on which we find several ‘models of critique’. Referring to countless art movements, artists and artworks, as well as to politicians and philosophical ideas, these models mirror the historical and cultural contexts and discourses in which they come about, without—at least that is what I have tried to argue—allowing us to reduce them to these contexts and discourses. This latter characteristic makes the band’s releases critical in nature. By constituting these models, Manic Street Preachers encourage listeners to educate themselves, to explore the countless references included in their lyrics, and to think about the critical ideas that these lyrics express. We have seen that the band started by creating rather unfocused bricolages of authors, movements and artworks, all presented as examples of radical resistance and subversion. Gradually, however, these bricolages transformed into more focused critical perspectives that I have characterised as ‘critical models’. I have shown that their releases present Situationist forms of détournement, a subjective turn inwards that I have characterised with Adorno’s phrase that ‘the splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass’ (Adorno 1974: 50), and popular modernist explorations of the meaning of language, morality and the social order. Later releases, we have seen, revive Nietzsche’s notion of overcoming humanity and becoming a truth oneself, or summon Marxist specters (embodied, e.g., by the ideas and actions of Aneurin Bevan and Arthur Scargill) in attempts to imagine a different future in a postmodern era defined by Fisher and Jameson’s ‘pastiche-time’.

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All of these models, I have shown with help of Adorno, are driven by a paradox that arises when the following three aims are combined: (1) the aim to criticise a context of which the critic herself forms part; (2) the aim to show that there is no ‘outside’ to this context, which means that the critic cannot refer to external values; and (3) the aim to develop critique that revolves around the claim that this context is completely false and does not provide values or foundations for the critic to cling to either. The falseness of these contexts returns in different ways in the models of critique that I have discussed: from Debord’s categorical rejection of the spectacle of consumerism, to a worldview in which depression, addiction and insomnia rob the world of its meaning; from a popular modernist exploration of the corroding aspects of the social order, to Nietzsche’s diagnosis of an age of nihilism; and from Jameson and Fisher’s analyses of postmodernity and ‘capitalist realism’, to a rejection of discourses of nationalism. Only the last critical model that I have discussed departs to some extent from a complete resistance to the critic’s own context. This is the case, since it affirms specific notions of ‘locality’ and ‘internationality’ as still, in some way, playing a positive role within the critic’s context. Again, however, these notions are contrasted with observations on post-­ postmodern ennui, as well as with the ideologies of nationalism and populism. These ideologies, this last model also suggests, make it almost impossible to adopt a solid critical standpoint. Furthermore, the constitution of this model is embedded in a fatalistic context shaped by the lyrics of three other Manic Street Preachers albums. These lyrics, we have seen, reject the idea that it is possible to construct a critical model in a post-postmodern age that they characterise as permeated with the all-­ fragmenting dimensions of ‘digimodernism’ and post-truth politics.

Semiotic and Symbolic I have argued furthermore that even though Manic Street Preachers releases constitute critical models that are each of a very different nature, they are united by the aim to constitute an autonomous position by distancing themselves—in different ways—from the context in which they

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are embedded and which, on these same releases, is rejected as false. What unites their releases as well is an emphasis on reflection: in different ways, these releases aim to express the reflective realisation that constituting this distance is impossible or, at least, extremely difficult. By embodying these two aims, I have argued, the band’s releases implicitly set themselves the standards of autonomy and reflection, presenting these standards as necessary to formulate a particular kind of critique, and shaping them differently within each critical model. The second standard, we have furthermore seen, is often shaped as well with help of the observation that what Manic Street Preachers aim to do has been tried many times before, by bands ranging from the Sex Pistols to Public Enemy, and from bIG⋆fLAME to Scritti Politti. These standards paradoxically function, within their releases, also as a way to reclaim critical authenticity and originality, creating the band’s ‘exclusive language’. One of the other main points that I have tried to make in this book is that the standards of autonomy and reflection mainly characterise the lyrics of the band’s releases, with their music, album covers, video-clips, interviews, clothes and body art—the other ‘building blocks’ of their ‘exclusive language’—strengthening and emphasising the critical message that these lyrics communicate to the listener. This gives their releases meaning on different levels. Some of these levels mainly concern that which Alison Stone describes, with Kristeva, as the realm of the semiotic: rhythm, structure, sound, bass, the affective and embodied aspects of popular music, and more. This realm also concerns the semiotic aspects of Bradfield’s and sometimes Wire’s voices, as well as the ways in which the singers make the lyrics work with (or against) the music of which they form part. Furthermore, this level concerns form, rhythm and (the absence of ) rhyme in the band’s lyrics, which distinguishes them from everyday speech. On yet another level of meaning, we find the symbolic elements of these lyrics, which transmit a critical message to the listener. Often, we have seen, these levels work together and are entwined: as I have tried to show, the lyrics of many Manic Street Preachers songs— mainly those written by Richey Edwards for The Holy Bible and Journal for Plague Lovers—‘put meaning on trial’ and explore the borders of language almost to the point of meaninglessness, using different forms that experiment, in different ways, with the semiotic elements of language. This is done, for example, with help of staccato phrases or words that

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seem to unravel and undermine the symbolic meaning of language, accompanied by a cold and controlled musical sound. Often, this is also done by creating a tension between music and voice, filling up the verbal space of songs to the point that words start ‘spilling over’. This, I have argued, gives these lyrics a popular modernist sensitivity that, written within a realm—popular music—that has overcome Huyssen’s Great Divide between art and everyday life, aims to erect a Great Divide within this same realm, and sometimes even within songs themselves. Many other Manic Street Preachers songs contain lyrics that are more straightforward and communicate ideas to the listener in a less abstract manner. Most of these lyrics are written by Nicky Wire, who attributed their semiotic form and their often melancholic aura to the influence of Welsh poet R.S. Thomas. These songs rely less on modernist explorations of form and meaning, and more on accessible poetic styles in which melancholy and direct formulations of political critique play important roles. Often, these lyrics also fit more ‘fluently’ in the verbal space created by the music of which they form part. Again, this means that both types of lyrics are characterised by specific semiotic aspects. However, and this has been the main point of this book, both types of lyrics are also driven by the aim to express a critical message to the listener that is symbolic in nature: their conceptual meaning continually encourages the listener to think and reflect, as well as to research the phenomena that they refer to with help of different employments of the method of intertextuality. Both types of lyrics, in other words, make it impossible to reduce their meaning to different dimensions of the semiotic, but stress the importance of paying equal—and sometimes even more—attention to the crucial role played by the symbolic. It is this role that I have tried to emphasise in this book with help of the notion of the critical model, which foregrounds the ways in which the band formulate political, social and cultural critique in their lyrics and communicate it to the listener. Another point that I have tried to defend is that this makes Manic Street Preachers lyrics into an unexpected presence within the realm of popular music, especially since these lyrics are accompanied by rather traditional and conventional music that mines past styles or responds (sometimes positively, sometimes critically) to contemporary music: 1950’s rock ‘n’

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roll, 1960’s and 1970’s forms of rock, folk, German experimental music, glamrock, punk, postpunk, New Pop, synthpop, Dream Pop, Madchester, 1980’s indie rock, 1980’s L.A. hard rock, American grunge, Britpop, postBritpop, garage rock and neopostpunk. Partly, the band represent and embrace the spectacle and glamour of rock and express a genuine love and admiration for the democratic, affective, empowering, creative, decadent and entertaining aspects of the realm of popular music. Partly, they add a reflective layer to this spectacle and this realm, infusing them with critical ideas. This sometimes constitutes another tension within the band’s songs: a tension between the radical critique formulated in their lyrics, and the often accessible or commercial music of which these lyrics form part. In their later career, we have furthermore seen, Manic Street Preachers stated several times that rock ‘n’ roll had lost its revolutionary nature and had grown ‘dormant’, and partly linked this diagnosis to the flattening influence of Britpop and New Labour’s embrace of ‘new capitalism’. Perhaps, these latter observations suggest that the realm of rock ‘n’ roll has hollowed itself out and is not able anymore to make grand (political) gestures or statements. This suggestion implies that other musical styles and genres are more capable of responding to the complexities of the contemporary world. We can think of experimental electronic music, forms of hiphop, or underground punk movements, for example. Furthermore, since the band’s focus (as well as the approach of this book) mainly concerns Western musical traditions, this suggestion might also imply that the future of critical art lies in music created in the Global South. Yet another suggestion could be that it is now up to a new (music) generation to voice critique, and to do this with the energy and vigour that, the band suggest on several of their releases, is so characteristic of the ‘all or nothing’ mentality of youth. Indeed, we see the band grow older on their releases, reflecting more and more on the withering away of youthful radicalism, and on what it means to build up a past of one’s own. But perhaps these observations suggest something more specific: that it has only become more difficult to voice critique and do something new within the ‘exclusive language’ of Manic Street Preachers. This suggestion is illustrated by the band presenting themselves as a Samurai warrior on their 2018 album Resistance Is Futile, lost in an era of digimodernism. It can also be found in the lyrics of ‘Anthem for a Lost Cause’ (on Rewind the Film), which seem to describe the diminishing importance of critical

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lyrics, referring to a ‘cold and lonely message at the end of a song’, and to the idea that ‘it seems that every song / now is just one last chance’.

Unwelcome Guerrillas and Crackpot Messiahs In the remainder of this last chapter, I want to develop several concluding observations on the general characteristics of this ‘exclusive language’ and the critique that it shapes. I will first do this by exploring George Orwell’s 1948 essay ‘Writers and Leviathan’. Then, I will discuss several observations on critique made by Adorno. These observations concern Flaschenpost, a tension between hope and despair, as well as the notion of ‘working through the past’. In ‘Writers and Leviathan’, Orwell reflects on the relationship between art and politics in ‘an age of State control’ (Orwell 1968: 407). He observes that it is impossible for the artist not to make art that, in some way or another, reflects the political context in which she lives: ‘War, Fascism, concentration camps, rubber truncheons, atomic bombs, etc are what we daily think about, and therefore to a great extent what we write about, even when we do not name them openly. We cannot help this. When you are on a sinking ship, your thoughts will be about sinking ships’ (1968: 408). Nevertheless, Orwell argues, it is important not to let one’s politics or party affiliations dogmatically determine one’s art or one’s appreciation of the art of others. The artist, he claims instead, should always ‘stand aside’ (1968: 414)—a suggestion that Manic Street Preachers ignored when they met Fidel Castro—and, instead of adopting the line of a political party or dogma, should reflect on politics ‘as an individual, an outsider, at the most an unwelcome guerrilla on the flank of a regular army’ (1968: 413). Furthermore, the critical artist should reserve the right to contradict herself; a right that returns in the different perspectives and ideas presented on Manic Street Preachers releases as well. These releases, we have seen after all, never solidify into one solid political standpoint. As unwelcome guerrillas or manic street preachers, the band has always favoured critique, resistance, rebellion and contradiction over systematicity or dogma. This means, I want to argue, that the band’s position can also be characterised in contrast with an observation made by Francis Fukuyama, in ‘The End of History?’: ‘Our task is not to answer exhaustively the

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challenges to liberalism promoted by every crackpot messiah around the world, but only those that are embodied in important social or political forces and movements’ (1989: 9). By continually constructing critical models within a context defined by Fukuyama’s proclamations that history has ended and that neoliberal capitalism is the only surviving economic and political system left, and by continually emphasising the reflective idea that this same resistance might be futile, Manic Street Preachers still manage to challenge Fukuyama’s conclusions. This makes them into ‘crackpot messiahs’ who, within the realm of popular music, radically question our ideas by infusing the debate with the perspectives and reflections about which they are manically preaching. This last observation can, again, be phrased differently: Manic Street Preachers present us with ‘messages in a bottle’—‘postcards’—that might, during brief moments, encourage us to reflect on who and what we are, on the kind of society in which we live, and on the question whether history has actually ended. This brings me to Adorno again, who famously stated the following about the historical age in which he lived: ‘In view of everything that is engulfing Europe and perhaps the whole world, our present work is of course essentially destined to be passed on through the night that is approaching: a kind of message in a bottle’ [Flaschenpost] (qtd. in Clausen 2008: 161). In line of this idea, Daniel K.L.  Chua describes the modernist music defended by Adorno as ‘the surviving cry of despair from the shipwrecked … tossed meaninglessly on the currents of history’ (2006: 1; see also Jameson 2007: 120); a phrase that resonates with Orwell’s above-cited observations on writing on board of a sinking ship. Like Manic Street Preachers, Adorno emphasises the importance of thought, knowledge and critique; of being encouraged to think about one’s socio-political position and situation; to reflect on the structures— political, economic, cultural, religious or social—that permeate one’s body and mind and shape one’s perception of the world; and on the historical conditions that made modernity, in his view, undermine itself and result in the horrors of the twentieth century. Only if we do this, Adorno paradoxically argues, we might be able to move forward, to shape a society that is primarily concerned with the well-being of all of its members.

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We have seen that Adorno does not believe that this specific kind of critique and these specific ideas can or should be directly presented or expressed by art, as I have argued Manic Street Preachers releases do. Adorno focuses instead on the ways in which artworks internally organise their material, writing that the refuge of art ‘remains exclusively the unflinching power of resistance in the act of forming’ (2002a: 240). This means that, in his view, artworks should not express ideas or thoughts, but instead position themselves in opposition to the social totality by internally constituting a truth content and, in this way, gaining a form of autonomy. As I have therefore argued, it is here that the similarities between Adorno and Manic Street Preachers end, since he would reject the manner in which the band constitute different forms of autonomy and reflexivity within the different critical models that I have discussed. Still, however, it has been with help of Adorno’s ideas about radical critique and negativity that I have been able to foreground the three above-­mentioned aims that together constitute the paradox around which Manic Street Preachers releases organise themselves.

Despair and Hope We have seen that the combination of these three aims often results, in the band’s lyrics, in the presentation of a dark and extremely negative worldview, revolving around the inability of human beings to organise themselves in societies that eradicate human suffering. Furthermore, it often also results in expressions of hopelessness, despair and fatalism. In this way, Manic Street Preachers again echo the negativity of Adorno, who defended his own approach as follows: ‘I have exaggerated the somber side, following the maxim that only exaggeration per se today can be the medium of truth’ (1998b: 99). In the same text, however, Adorno warns the reader not to understand his negativity as a form of apocalyptic Spenglerism, and emphasises the more hopeful dimension of his ideas as well. Observing about his concern with the totalitarian tendencies of modern societies, he concludes for example: ‘My intention was to delineate a tendency concealed behind the smooth façade of everyday life before it overflows the institutional dams that, for the time being, are erected against it’ (1998b: 99). Continuing my general reflection on the kind of critique that Manic Street Preachers develop, I want to show that a similar tension returns in

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the Welsh band’s releases. On the one hand, these releases embrace forms of fatalism, sometimes to the point of expressing radically misanthropic perspectives. On the other hand, these releases continually emphasise the need to change the world for the better; an emphasis in which glimmers of hope are still present. As representations of the two sides of this tension, I want to briefly explore the meaning of two of their songs: ‘Leviathan’ and ‘30-Year War’. Released on the 2005 War Child charity album Help!: A Day in the Life, ‘Leviathan’ opens with an audio sample in which we hear The Skids’ Richard Jobson state that ‘We do also speak politics to you today’. It is composed around a metallic riff, a distorted and full electric guitar sound, percussion that involves clapping hands, an anthemic refrain, and a cathartic guitar solo. These elements make the song express a form of aggression and affirm the power of rock ‘n’ roll, breaking away from the rather soft and introspective synthpop-sound of the album released before ‘Leviathan’: Lifeblood. Resonating with the title of Orwell’s ‘Writers and Leviathan’, the song contains lyrics that reflect on the human need to bow down to a dictatorial and absolutist ruler: Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. Referring to Hobbes’ characterisation of life in a pre-social and pre-­political state of nature as ‘brutal, nasty and short’ (Hobbes 2002: 96), and as defined by a constant threat of a ‘war of all against all’ (2002: 95), the lyrics mention Baader-Meinhof, the religious doctrine of Reprobation, Patty Hearst, the Angolan MPLA (mentioned as well in the Sex Pistols song ‘Anarchy in the UK’), and the film The Medusa Touch, as examples of both abuse of power and the human tendency to submit to it: ‘Dictators or democracy, all pay the price to make us free / […] Leviathan, I am your son’. By adopting Hobbes’ rather dark approach to human beings and his defence of the necessity of an absolute sovereign, the song represents the fatalistic and misanthropic side of many Manic Street Preachers releases: the idea that there are no alternatives, and that human beings are driven by the Hitlerian ‘worm in human nature’ explored extensively in the lyrics of The Holy Bible. The idea, in other words, that resistance is futile. However, throughout the band’s existence this fatalistic side is continually confronted with an emphasis on the importance—and possibility—of resistance, an emphasis in which, as mentioned above, glimmers of hope are still present. This latter aspect is represented by the song

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‘30-Year War’, which closes the album Rewind the Film and reflects the idea that the history of the band—then spanning 30 years—has been and still is characterised by a war against political, social, economic and religious structures that they, as Orwell’s ‘unwelcome guerrillas’, reject as wrong. ‘30-Year War’ therefore addresses the listener multiple times—‘I ask you again, what is to be done?’—translating the title of Lenin’s 1901 pamphlet What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement to the present day. Again, however, the song’s lyrics emphasise the idea that glimmers of hope can only be discerned in a pitch-black context—the influence of the band’s darker and more negative side. These lyrics do this by embedding Lenin’s question in fatalistic observations on British politics, criticising ‘Etonian scum’ and the ‘old boy network’ that ‘won the war again’. The lyrics refer, furthermore, to the 1984 Battle of Orgreave as well as to the Hillsborough disaster as forms of class conflict, characterised by media cover-ups and legalised state violence. More generally, they describe the attempt to ‘kill the working class in the name of liberty’, driven by a system that, they suggest, presents ‘mistruths’ that are meant to justify the Thatcherite aim of reducing society to market mechanisms. As we have seen in previous chapters, the band argue that this attempt and this aim are omnipresent in British politics. After all, they not only criticise the Conservative Party and Ukip, but also the Labour Party that was shaped by Tony Blair’s attempt to adopt Anthony Giddens’ ‘Third Way’, which, in the band’s view, resulted in Jeremy Corbyn’s disconnect from the working classes in post-industrial Britain. In the above-mentioned pamphlet What is to be Done? Lenin states that critical intellectuals play and should play an important role in spreading ideas and strengthening the ideological unity of the working classes (1969). The dogmatic nature of the political system that Lenin defended, however, resulted in the context of the Soviet Union in gulags, repression and totalitarianism.1 I have discussed that Wire himself expressed regret about his embrace of communism and about the band’s visit to Fidel Castro, most explicitly in the lyrics of ‘The Next Jet to Leave Moscow’ (on Futurology). In these lyrics, he characterises himself as ‘the biggest flaming hypocrite you’ll ever see’, but couples this statement to the cynical observation that ‘the market never lies and your conscience is so clean’.

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Again and again, this latter line illustrates, Manic Street Preachers releases couple self-doubt, despair and fatalism, to defences of the possibility and necessity of resistance and change. This observation can again be illustrated with the lyrics of ‘30-Year War’, which refer to English artist L.S. Lowry, famous for painting the everyday lives of the working classes, as an empowering example of this resistance in the realm of art. The song mentions Lowry turning down the knighthood offered to him in 1968, and describes him as a figure marginalised for his ideas. Combined with the countless other references and political ideas found in their lyrics, this illustrates the observation that Manic Street Preachers continually contrast their own fatalism, self-doubt, despair and negativity, with references to hope, resistance and the importance of critique, embodied by reflection and knowledge; by the idea that libraries ‘give power’.

Working Through the Past This latter observation highlights the last aspect of Manic Street Preachers on which I want to focus before concluding this book: an emphasis on the importance of historical reflection and, again, knowledge. As Adorno writes in ‘The Meaning of Working through the Past’, published in the collection Critical Models: ‘The past will have been worked through only when the causes of what happened then have been eliminated. Only because the causes continue to exist does the captivating spell of the past remain to this day unbroken’ (1998b: 103). Adorno is specifically concerned with the era of Nazi Germany in this passage, resisting what he characterises as a ‘loss of history’ (1998b: 91) and a ‘weakened memory’ (1998b: 95) that result in an ‘empty and cold forgetting’ (1998b: 98) that will eventually make it possible for the horrors of the twentieth century to repeat themselves. Manic Street Preachers aim to work through past events that, they suggest on their releases, to a large extent still permeate the political, economic and cultural frameworks that shape our societies and ourselves as well. We have seen that especially The Holy Bible is driven by a concern with the dark pages of European history, sparked by a fear of revisionist historians in the mid 1990’s who denied the Holocaust, as well as by the

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rise of fascist movements in the UK and abroad. As Adorno observes: ‘National Socialism lives on, and even today we still do not know whether it is merely the ghost of what was so monstrous that it lingers on after its own death, or whether it has not yet died at all, whether the willingness to commit the unspeakable survives in people as well as in the conditions that enclose them’ (1998b: 90). Similar ideas, I have argued against Adorno, can be expressed within the realm of popular music. By constituting different critical models, mainly with help of their lyrics, a band like Manic Street Preachers show that it is possible to shape different forms of resistance within this same realm. These forms of resistance can be summarised with help of the two lines with which I want to end this book. They are heard in the Manic Street Preachers song ‘Postcards from a Young Man’ (on Postcards from a Young Man), and go as follows: ‘The world will not impose its will / I will not give up and I will not give in’.

Note 1. Huyssen observes that Marx and Engels did not specifically focus on the role of culture in working class struggles, and that this aspect is coupled for the first time to the idea of a Marxist revolution in Lenin’s writings. Huyssen argues that it is this same link between art and politics that eventually made it possible to turn art into an instrument of political propaganda, resulting in the eradication of avant-garde art and the prosecution of artists as contra-revolutionary in the Soviet Union (Huyssen 1986: 5–6).

Discography

Releases by Manic Street Preachers Manic Street Preachers. 1988. Suicide Alley. [Self-released] ———. 1990. New Art Riot E.P. [EP] Damaged Goods. ———. 1990. UK Channel Boredom. [Self-released] ———. 1991. Motown Junk. Heavenly. ———. 1991. You Love Us. Heavenly. ———. 1991. Feminine is Beautiful. CAFF15. ———. 1991. Love’s Sweet Exile. Columbia. ———. 1991. Stay Beautiful. Columbia. ———. 1992. Generation Terrorists. Columbia. ———. 1992. Little Baby Nothing. Columbia. ———. 1992. Motorcycle Emptiness. Columbia. ———. 1992. Slash ‘N’ Burn. Columbia. ———. 1992. Theme from M.A.S.H. (Suicide is Painless) [EP] Columbia. ———. 1992. You Love Us. Columbia. ———. 1993. From Despair to Where. Columbia. ———. 1993. Gold Against the Soul. Columbia. ———. 1993. La Tristesse Durera (Scream to a Sigh). Columbia.

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Peters, Popular Music, Critique and Manic Street Preachers, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43100-6

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390 Discography

———. 1993. Roses in the Hospital. Epic. ———. 1994. Faster. Epic. ———. 1994. Life Becoming a Landslide E.P. [EP] Epic. ———. 1994. Revol. Epic. ———. 1994. She Is Suffering. Epic. ———. 1994. The Holy Bible. Epic. ———. 1995. ‘Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head’. On The Help Album. Go! ———. 1996. A Design for Life. Epic. ———. 1996. Australia. Epic. ———. 1996. Everything Must Go. Epic. ———. 1996. Everything Must Go. Epic. ———. 1996. Further Away. Epic Japan. ———. 1996. Kevin Carter. Epic. ———. 1997. Everything Live [VHS]. Sony. ———. 1998. The Everlasting. Epic. ———. 1998. If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next. Epic. ———. 1998. This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours. Epic/Virgin. ———. 1999. Tsunami. 1999. ———. 1999. You Stole the Sun from My Heart. Epic. ———. 2000. Leaving the 20th Century [DVD]. Sony. ———. 2000. The Masses Against the Classes. Epic. ———. 2001. Found That Soul. Epic. ———. 2001. Know Your Enemy. Epic. ———. 2001. Let Robeson Sing. Epic. ———. 2001. Louder Than War: Manic Street Preachers Live at Cuba [DVD]. Epic. ———. 2002. Forever Delayed – The Greatest Hits. Epic. ———. 2002. Forever Delayed – The Greatest Hits [DVD]. Epic. ———. 2001. Ocean Spray. Epic. ———. 2001. So Why So Sad. Epic. ———. 2002. ‘Out of Time’. On NME in Association with War Child Presents 1 Love. B-Unique. ———. 2002. There by the Grace of God. Epic. ———. 2004. Lifeblood. Epic. ———. 2004. The Love of Richard Nixon. Epic. ———. 2004. The Holy Bible [10th Anniversary Edition]. Epic. ———. 2005. Empty Souls. Epic. ———. 2005. God Save the Manics [EP]. Sony.

 Discography 

391

———. 2005. ‘Leviathan’. On Help!: A Day in the Life. Independiente. ———. 2006. Everything Must Go [10th Anniversary Edition]. Sony. ———. 2006. ‘The Instrumental’. On Still Unravished – A Tribute To The June Brides. Yesboyicecream. ———. 2007. Autumnsong. Columbia. ———. 2007. Indian Summer. Columbia. ———. 2007. Send Away the Tigers. Columbia. ———. 2007. Underdogs. Columbia. ———. 2007. Your Love Alone Is Not Enough. Columbia. ———. 2008. ‘Umbrella’. On NME Awards 2008. UK: Warner Bros. ———. 2009. Journal for Plague Lovers. Columbia. ———. 2010. (It’s Not War) Just the End of Love. Columbia. ———. 2010. Postcards from a Young Man. Columbia. ———. 2010. Some Kind of Nothingness. Columbia. ———. 2011. National Treasures – The Complete Singles. Columbia. ———. 2011. Postcards from a Young Man. Columbia. ———. 2011. This Is The Day. Columbia. ———. 2012. Generation Terrorists [20th Anniversary Edition]. Columbia. ———. 2013. Anthem for a Lost Cause. Columbia. ———. 2013. Rewind the Film. Columbia. ———. 2013. Show Me the Wonder. Columbia. ———. 2014. Futurology. Columbia. ———. 2014. Futurology. Columbia. ———. 2004. The Holy Bible [20th Anniversary Edition]. Epic. ———. 2014. Walk Me to the Bridge. Columbia. ———. 2006. Everything Must Go [20th Anniversary Edition]. Sony. ———. 2016. Together Stronger (C’mon Wales). Sony. ———. 2017. International Blue. Columbia. ———. 2017. Send Away the Tigers [10th Anniversary Edition]. Sony. ———. 2018. Distant Colours. Sony. ———. 2018. Dylan & Caitlin. Sony. ———. 2018. Hold Me Like a Heaven. Sony. ———. 2018. Liverpool Revisited. Sony. ———. 2018. People Give In. Sony. ———. 2018. Resistance is Futile. Columbia. ———. 2018. This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours [20th Anniversary Edition]. Sony. ———. 2020. Gold Against the Soul [Deluxe re-issue]. Columbia.

392 Discography

Releases by Other Artists 808 State. 2008. Don Solaris. ZTT. Aerosmith. 1975. Toys in the Attic. Columbia. Badfinger. 1971. Straight Up. Apple. Beatles, The. 1965. Rubber Soul. Parlophone. ———. 1967a. Magical Mystery Tour. Parlophone. ———. 1967b. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. EMI. ———. 1968. The Beatles. Apple. Blur. 1994. Parklife. Food. Bowie, David. 1972. The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. RCA Records. ———. 1976. Station to Station. RCA Records. ———. 1977. Low. RCA Records. ———. 1977. “Heroes”. RCA Records. ———. 1986. Absolute Beginners. Virgin. Bradfield, James Dean. 2006. The Great Western. Columbia. ———. 2017. The Chamber Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. Music on Vinyl. Burroughs, William S. and Cobain, K. 1993. The “Priest” They Called Him. Tim/Kerr. Buzzcocks. 1979. Singles Going Steady. Liberty-United Records. Caretaker, The. 2011. An Empty Bliss Beyond This World. History Always Favours the Winner. Clash, The. 1977. The Clash. CBS. ———. 1977. White Riot. CBS. ———. 1979. London Calling. CBS. ———. 1980. Sandinista! CBS. ———. 1982. Combat Rock. CBS. Dave Brubeck Quartet, The. 1961. Time Further Out. Columbia. Durutti Column. 1980. The Return of the Durutti Column. Factory. Dylan, Bob. 1997. Time Out of Mind. Columbia. ———. 2001. “Love and Theft”. Columbia. Echo and the Bunnymen. 1981. Heaven Up Here. Korova. Fripp. Robert. 1979. Exposure. Polydor. Gang of Four. 1979. Entertainment! EMI. Garfunkel, Art. 1979. Bright Eyes. Columbia. Guns N’ Roses. 1987. Appetite for Destruction. Geffen.

 Discography 

393

Jones, Patrick. 1999. Commemoration and Amnesia. Big Noise Recordings. Jones, Tom. 1999. Reload. Gut. Joy Division. 1979. Unknown Pleasures. Factory. ———. 1979. Transmission. Factory. ———. 1980. Closer. Factory. Kirby, Leyland. 2009. Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was. History Always Favours the Winners. Laibach. 2018. Also Sprach Zarathustra. Mute Records. Manson, Marilyn. 1998. Mechanical Animals. Nothing. Massive Attack. 1998. Inertia Creeps. Virgin. McCarthy. 1988. Should the Bible Be Banned. September Records. ———. 1989. The Enraged Will Inherit the Earth. Midnight Music. Minogue, Kylie. 1997. Impossible Princess. Deconstruction. Negativland. 1991. U2. SST Records. New York Dolls. 1973. New York Dolls. Mercury. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. 1984. From Her to Eternity. Mute. Nirvana. 1991. Nevermind. DGC. ———. 1994. In Utero. DGC. Pink Floyd. 1975. Wish You Were Here. Harvest. Pop, Iggy. 1977. The Idiot. RCA. ———. 1977. Lust for Life. RCA. ———. 1979. New Values. Arista. Public Enemy. 1988. It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. Def Jam. Public Service Broadcasting. 2017. Every Valley. PIAS Recordings. Radiohead. 1997. OK Computer. Parlophone. Rage Against the Machine. 1992. Rage Against the Machine. Epic. Rolling Stones, The. 1972. Exile on Main St. Rolling Stones. Scritti Politti. 1981. The “Sweetest Girl”. Rough Trade. ———. 1985. Perfect Way. Virgin. Arista. ———. 2005. Early. Rough Trade. Sex Pistols. 1977. Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. Virgin. Shellac. 2000. 1000 Hurts. Touch & Go. Simple Minds. 1980. Empires and Dance. Skids, The. 1978. Scared to Dance. Virgin. Smiths, The. 1987. Louder Than Bombs. Sire. Suicide. 1977. Suicide. Red Star. Talking Heads. 1979. Fear of Music. Sire. Therapy?. 1994. Troublegum. A&M.

394 Discography

Various artists. 1986. C86. Rough Trade/NME. Various artists. 1997. Dial M for Merthyr. Fierce Panda. Who, The. 1967. The Who Sell Out. Track. ———. 1979. The Kids Are Alright [soundtrack]. Polydor. Wire, Nicky. 2006. I Killed the Zeitgeist. Red Ink.

Filmography

Allen, K. dir. 1997. Twin Town. UK: Polygram Filmed Entertainment. Anderson, B. dir. 2004. The Machinist. USA: Paramount Classics. Bahr, F., Hickenlooper, G. and Coppola, E. dirs. 1991. Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse. USA: Triton Pictures. Bate, P. dir. 2003. White King, Red Rubber, Black Death. USA: ArtMattan Productions. Beinix, J.J. dir. 1986. Betty Blue. France: Gaumont. Benson, M. dir. 1996. Predictions of Fire. US: Kinetikon Pictures. Blank, L. 1982. Burden of Dreams. USA: Flower Films. Brooks, R.  Dir. 1954. The Last Time I Saw Paris. USA: MetroGoldwyn-Mayer. Cannon, D. dir. 1995. Judge Dredd. USA: Buena Vista Pictures. ‘Caraline’s Story – A Young Anorexic’s Final Months’ [video fragment]. Uploaded to YouTube by zararity on 5 May 2013. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=7vMcW7YBUII [last accessed 30 August 2019]. Cinema Action, dir. 1982. So That You Can Live. UK: Cinema Action. Connolly, M. dir. 1998. Close-Up: From There to Here. BBC, August 1998. Coppola, F.F. dir. 1979, Apocalypse Now. USA: Universal Pictures. ———. dir. 1983, Rumble Fish Now. USA: United Artists. Coppola, S. dir. 1999. The Virgin Suicides. USA: Paramount Pictures. Corbijn, A. dir. 2007. Control. UK: Momentum Pictures. © The Author(s) 2020 M. Peters, Popular Music, Critique and Manic Street Preachers, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43100-6

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396 Filmography

Costa-Gavras. dir. 1982, Missing. USA: Universal Pictures. Dean, M.W. dir. 2007. Hubert Selby Jr: It/ll Be Better Tomorrow. USA: Eclectic DVD Dist. DePalma, B. dir. 1993. Carlito’s Way. USA: Universal Pictures. Evans, M. dir. 2000. Camgymeriad Gwych (Beautiful Mistake). UK: Merlin Films. ‘Frank Zappa interview (6/19/89) Arsenio Hall Show’ [Video fragment]. Uploaded to YouTube by siresounds on 8 April 2018. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=deqGD7nrPcc [last accessed 30 August 2019]. Fywell, T. dir. 1994. ‘To Be a Somebody: Part 1’, in Cracker [TV-series]. UK: Granada Television. Gee, G. dir. 2007. Joy Division. UK: The Works. Godard, J.L. dir. 2011. Masculin Féminin. UK: Optimum Home Entertainment. Gold, J. dir. 1978, The Medusa Touch. USA: Warner Bros. Harron, M. dir. 1995. I Shot Andy Warhol. USA: The Samuel Goldwyn Company. ———. dir. 2000. American Psycho. USA: Lions Gate Films. Harwood, R. dir. 1983. The Dresser. USA: Columbia Pictures. Hazan, J. and Mingay, D. dirs. 1980. Rude Boy. UK: Tigon Film Distributors. Herzog, W. dir. 1970. Even Dwarfs Started Small. Germany: Werner Herzog Film Produktion. Hill, G.R. dir. 1969. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. USA: 20th Century Fox. Huston, J. dir. 1948. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. USA: Warner Bros. ———. dir. 1967. Reflections in a Golden Eye. USA: Warner Bros. Jarman, D. dir. 1990. The Garden. UK: Basilisk Communications. Jarman, D. and Humrfess, P. dirs. 1976. Sebastiane. UK: Cinegate. Jarmusch, K. dir. 1999, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. USA: Artisan Entertainment. Kazan, E. dir. 1951. A Streetcar Named Desire. USA: Warner Bros. Kidron, B. dir. 1993. Hookers Hustlers Pimps and Their Johns. UK: Channel 4. Kubrick, S. dir. 1962. Lolita. USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. ———. dir. 1980. The Shining. USA: Warner Bros. Lumet, S. dir. 1977. Equus. UK: United Artists. ‘Manic Street Preachers – Anthem for a Lost Cause’ [video fragment]. Uploaded to YouTube by Manic Street Preachers on 8 July 2012. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=PwwtOd3pMlk [last accessed 30 August 2019]. ‘Manic Street Preachers  – Faster (Top Of The Pops 1994)’ [video fragment]. Uploaded to youtube by Manic Street Preachers on 21 October 2015. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5PI7k_ZiQ0 [last accessed 30 August 2019].

 Filmography 

397

‘Manic Street Preachers  – Rewind the Film ft. Richard Hawley’ [video fragment]. Uploaded to YouTube by Manic Street Preachers on 8 July 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwwtOd3pMlk [last accessed 30 August 2019]. ‘Manic Street Preachers – Show Me the Wonder’ [video fragment]. Uploaded to YouTube by Manic Street Preachers on 10 October 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQiGseawtSg [last accessed 30 August 2019]. ‘Manic Street Preachers  – Truth & Memory’ [video fragment]. Uploaded to YouTube by Manic Street Preachers on 17 January 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sop2YE-WYc [last accessed 30 August 2019]. ‘Manic Street Preachers – Walk Me to the Bridge (Official Video)’ [video fragment]. Uploaded to YouTube by Manic Street Preachers on 28 April 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nusymqINrSc [last accessed 30 August 2019]. ‘Manic Street Preachers Interview BBC Breakfast 2013’ [video fragment]. Uploaded to YouTube by mjp221972 on 17 September 2013. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=ahyUTWdRtEc [last accessed August 30 2019]. ‘Manic Street Preachers Speak Out About UKIP And The EU’ [video fragment]. Uploaded to YouTube by NME on 18 July 2014. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=UanrsQTuTjQ [last accessed 30 August 2019]. ‘Manic Street Preachers – Distant Colours (Official Video)’ [video fragment]. Uploaded to YouTube by Manic Street Preachers on 16 February 2018. https://youtu.be/7RZzxbZ6WWY [last accessed 30 August 2019]. ‘Manic Street Preachers – International Blue (Official Video)’ [video fragment]. Uploaded to YouTube by Manic Street Preachers on 9 January 2018. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcJ8BTAGqE0 [last accessed 30 August 2019]. Marcus, E. dir. 2015. No Manifesto: A Film About Manic Street Preachers. UK: November Films. McGovern, J. dir. 1996. Hillsborough. UK: Granada Television. McLeod, N.Z. Dir. 1941. Lady Be Good. USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Mishima, M. and Masaki, D. dirs. 1986. Patriotism. Japan: Japan Art Theater Guild. Moyle, A, dir. 1980, Times Square. UK: Associated Film Distribution. ‘Nicky Wire of Manic Street Preachers on the death of rock‘n’roll’ [video fragment]. Uploaded to YouTube by The Guardian on 12 October 2011. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnrIC3H4m0Q [last accessed 30 August 2019]. Radford, M. dir. 1984, 1984. USA: 20th Century Fox. Ramis, H. 1993. dir. Groundhog Day. USA: Columbia Pictures.

398 Filmography

‘Richey Edwards’ last TV interview part 1’ [video fragment]. Uploaded to YouTube by SiouxsieCerealKillah on 8 December 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnJ5nkju0gQ [last accessed 30 Augustus 2019]. ‘Richey Edwards’ last TV interview part 2’ [video fragment]. Uploaded to YouTube by SiouxsieCerealKillah on 8 December 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qtv2EDYYkCo [last accessed 30 Augustus 2019]. Romero, G.A. Dir. 1978. Dawn of the Dead. USA: United Film Distribution Company. Scorsese, M. dir. 1976. Taxi Driver. USA: Columbia Pictures. Sokurov, A. dir. 1987. The Dialogues with Solzhenitsyn. Russia: Russia-K. Spheeris, P. dir. 1988. The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years. USA: New Line Cinema. Temple, J. dir. 1986. Absolute Beginners. UK: Palace Pictures. ———. dir. 1980. The Filth and the Fury: A Sex Pistols Film. UK: Film Four. ———. dir. 2000. The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle. UK: Virgin Films. ‘Theodor Adorno – Music and Protest’ [video fragment]. Uploaded to YouTube by Sonia Ramírez on 27 Augustus 2010. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=-njxKF8CkoU& [last accessed 30 Augustus 2019]. Tykwer, T. Dir. 1998. Lola Rennt. Germany: Prokino Filmverleih. Wyler, W. dir. 1946. The Best Years of Our Lives. USA: Samuel Goldwyn Productions.

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Index1

A

Abject, 51, 121, 190, 198–220, 229n47, 230n49, 230n50, 233, 242, 256, 270 Abject art, 203 Abjection, 200–205, 255–257 Addendum, 99 Addiction, x, 24, 37n20, 180, 182, 261, 377 Adorno, Theodor W., viii, 2, 46, 83, 130–132, 148, 236, 281, 283–285, 346, 376 on art, 86, 100 Dialectic of Enlightenment, 87, 102, 148 on embodiment, 100, 140n14

on jazz, 104, 105, 120, 128, 141n28, 142–143n43 Minima Moralia, x, 133, 149, 182 on popular music, 122, 123, 142n31 responses to, 87, 111, 113, 117, 125, 130, 131, 135, 139n5 on society, 217 Affect, 26, 28, 35n9, 102, 124, 128, 129, 347 Affectivity, 5–9, 123, 142n40, 145n64 ‘Aftermath,’ 44, 215 Albini, Steve, 21, 111, 112, 142n34, 262, 278n29 Alice in Chains, 187

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Peters, Popular Music, Critique and Manic Street Preachers, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43100-6_8

421

422 Index

Alighieri, Dante, 260, 268, 272, 273 Allin, GG, 52, 241 ‘All Is Vanity,’ 264, 268 ‘All We Make Is Entertainment,’ 20, 81n19, 325, 333, 340 Alphen, Ernst van, 211, 218 Althusser, Louis, 285 American Psycho, 183, 230n56 Amin, Idi, 213 Andersen, Mark, 151 Anorexia, 24, 48, 186, 208–210, 233, 258 ‘Another Invented Disease,’ 371n4 ‘Anthem for a Lost Cause,’ 360, 380 Anti-lyric, 177, 178, 196 ‘AntiSocial Manifesto,’ 362 Apocalypse Now, 23, 24, 28, 51, 253, 254, 271, 277n20, 278n21, 280n38 Appetite for Destruction, 51, 165–167, 224n17 Arbeit Macht Frei, 37n22, 194 ‘Archives of Pain,’ 194, 196, 212–214 Artaud, Antonin, 203 Art-entertainment distinction, 9–12, 106–109, 130–132 Artivism, 142n42 Asante, M.K., 142n42 ‘A Song for Departure,’ 320 Assemblage, 73, 75, 159, 224n11 Astor, Pete, 5, 6, 35n2, 165 Attali, Jacques, 118, 120, 142n30, 144n58 Auschwitz, 37n22, 133, 145n68, 186, 200, 217 Auslander, Philip, 8, 116, 153, 167, 169, 203, 240, 242, 246

‘Australia,’ 82n29, 82n30, 294, 300–302, 354 Auteur theory, 20–22, 30 Authenticity, 10, 13, 36n14, 54, 69, 75, 81n16, 126, 127, 144n60, 173, 336, 373n17, 378 ‘Auto-intoxication,’ 341 Auto-mutilation, 48, 52 Autonomy Adorno on, 46, 91, 92, 97, 123, 127, 133, 140n10, 323 within Manic Street Preachers releases, 136 ‘Autumnsong,’ 74, 277n16, 331n41, 338, 371n1, 371n3, 372n5, 372n8 Avant-garde, vii, 5, 11, 34, 35n3, 49–51, 56, 64, 73, 76, 79n3, 81n16, 84, 107, 111, 119, 121, 139n4, 140n10, 141n26, 143n50, 144n54, 144n60, 154, 159–161, 165, 166, 173, 175, 226n28, 226n29, 241, 275n6, 319, 325, 347, 361, 365, 366, 387n1 Avgikos, Jan, 43, 150, 151, 154 ‘A Vision of Dead Desire,’ 79n2 B

‘Baby Elián,’ 315 Bacon, Francis (painter), 219 Bacon, Francis (philosopher), 309, 375 Badfinger, 336 Baggy, 68, 69, 169 ‘Bag Lady,’ 271–273

 Index 

Ballard, J.G., 59, 66, 190, 199, 229n46 Bardot, Brigitte, 55 Barthes, Roland, 6, 25–27, 62, 278n23, 300 Basquiat, Jean-Michel, 321 Bataille, Georges, 33, 246–248, 259, 261, 264, 271, 272, 276n12, 277n14, 281 Bateman, Patrick, 183, 184, 227n35, 277n19 Bauhaus, 59, 347 Beat, 3, 17, 104, 124, 130, 159, 199, 254, 266 Beatles, The, 56, 59, 71, 81n21, 107, 123, 131, 141n23, 162, 187, 222n1, 336, 358, 366, 369 Beat poetry, 159 Beckett, Samuel, ix, 63, 64, 95, 100, 129, 202, 204, 207, 265, 309 ‘Been a Son,’ 228n37 Beethoven, Ludwig von, 11, 94, 95, 97, 120, 367, 369, 374n25 Benjamin, Walter, ix, 60, 101, 107, 108, 110, 112, 113, 145n63, 221, 241, 253, 281, 288, 373n13 Bergen-Belsen, 215 Berlin, vii, 29, 119, 190, 361–363, 365 Berman, Marshall, 64, 82n22 Bernstein, Jay, 102, 130 Berry, Chuck, 57, 72, 163, 312, 314, 329n27 ‘Between the Clock and the Bed,’ 71, 365 Bevan, Aneurin, 276n10, 296, 306, 344, 376

423

Bhabha, Homi K., 364 Bickle, Travis, 227n35, 253, 254, 277n19 bIG⋆fLAME, 11, 73, 74, 76, 82n30, 166, 196, 378 ‘A Billion Balconies Facing the Sun,’ 341 ‘Black Dog on My Shoulder,’ 305, 309 ‘Black Holes for the Young,’ 308 Blackness, 105, 140n19, 227n36, 352 ‘Black Square,’ 363, 365 Blackwood, 23, 351 Blair, Tony, 188, 189, 193, 295, 296, 306, 308, 344, 385 Blake, William, 268, 280n36, 280n39 Blue note, 120, 143n43 Blues, 53, 81n18, 108, 192, 225n22, 298, 326n7, 342, 368 Blur, 155, 175, 187, 189, 291, 297, 328n20 Bomb Squad, The, 55, 79n3, 224n16 Boredom, 163, 203, 284, 341, 362 Borges, Jorge Louis, 213 Born, Georgina, 10, 48 ‘Born a Girl,’ 311 ‘Born to End,’ 170 Boswell, Matthew, 67, 166, 190–194, 215–217, 242, 361 Bourdieu, Pierre, 121 Bowie, David, vii, 8, 35n4, 59, 116, 161, 169, 190, 242–244, 274, 276n8, 279n30, 281, 361, 365, 369

424 Index

Bradfield, James Dean, viii, 17, 19, 22–26, 38n30, 41, 44, 45, 48, 51–54, 71, 72, 75, 78, 151, 162, 164, 177, 185, 191, 192, 196, 197, 223n9, 226n26, 226n30, 248, 265, 278n28, 294–296, 312, 313, 316, 317, 324, 328n19, 328n20, 328n21, 335, 342–344, 352, 353, 355, 356, 361, 363, 365, 368, 369, 372n11, 378 Brady, Ian, 211, 213, 229n47 Brecht, Bertolt, 34, 59, 110, 113, 348, 349, 370, 373n13 Brexit, 362 Brezhnev, Leonid, 212 ‘Bright Eyes,’ 50 Britishness, 187–190, 356 Britpop, 37n21, 68, 154, 187–191, 196, 218, 219, 223n9, 227n36, 248, 294–297, 304, 305, 308, 320, 328n20, 355, 380 ‘Broken Algorithms,’ 345 Brown, Wendy, 293 Bruce, Lenny, 229n47 Buchenwald, 158 Buddha, 192 Buhler, James, 98, 102, 104, 105, 109, 120, 126 Bull, Michael, 7, 35n8 Buñuel, Luis, 166 Bürger, Peter, 139n4, 141n26 Burrough, William S., 5, 59, 66, 156, 223n10, 226n27 Burton, Richard, 261, 310, 329n25 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 300

Butler, Judith, 8, 226n30 Buzzcocks, 6 C

Cabaret Voltaire, 59, 112 Cage, John, 11, 275n6 ‘Caldey,’ 364 Cale, John, 120, 341, 372n11 Camera Lucida, 25, 26, 300 Camus, Albert, 170, 245, 250, 268, 317, 346, 364 ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You,’ 354 Capitalism, vii, viii, x, 15, 33, 35n8, 43, 44, 61, 79n2, 86, 88, 102, 111, 112, 114, 115, 133, 141n24, 149, 150, 153–155, 160, 170, 171, 174, 183, 188, 193, 205, 217, 225n22, 282, 284–290, 292, 313, 314, 323, 380, 382 Capitalist realism, 160, 165, 286, 340, 370, 377 Captain Beefheart, 73 Carcass, 144n55, 200 ‘Cardiff Afterlife,’ 321 Cardiff Millennium Stadium, 49, 354 Caretaker, The, 291, 293 Carter, Kevin, 249, 251, 277n15, 278n24, 300, 302 Cassette tape, x, 9, 111 Castro, Fidel, 25, 316, 317, 324, 330n32, 381, 385 Catatonia, 354 Catharsis, ix, 92, 95, 128, 300 Cattle Decapitation, 144n55 Cave, Nick, 71, 260, 365, 369

 Index 

CBS, 81n15, 151 CD, 9, 53, 54, 161, 312 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 204, 209 Charity, 25, 180, 310, 318, 322, 384 ‘Charles Windsor,’ 74, 227n34 Chomsky, Noam, 262, 282, 312 Christ, 168, 192, 238, 246, 247, 252, 260, 273 Christgau, Robert, 3 Christianity, 43, 172, 237, 238, 267–270, 273, 277n13 Chuck, D., 170, 226n25 Churchill, Winston, 217, 309 Cinema Action, 347 Cioran, Emil, 219 Clash, The, vii, 22, 26, 44, 57–59, 72, 75, 81n15, 81n17, 112, 150, 151, 157, 159, 161, 162, 165, 166, 224n11, 225n24, 277n20, 297, 306, 315 Class identity, 8, 31, 38n33, 303 Clock time, 125, 129, 144n57 ‘Close My Eyes,’ 318 Close-Up: From There to Here, 79n4 Cobain, Kurt, 5, 165, 234, 276n9, 278n26, 285, 286 Coca-Cola, 155, 160, 168, 194 Columbia, 35n8, 52, 56, 151, 156 ‘Comfort Comes,’ 191 Commodity fetishism, 60 Communism, 133, 193, 228n41, 281, 282, 284, 287, 288, 317, 324, 370, 385 Complex seeing, 34, 346–350, 359, 366, 370 ‘Condemned to Rock ‘N’ Roll,’ 173, 174 Conrad, Joseph, 253, 254, 260

425

Constructivism, 59, 347, 361 Consumerism, 20, 43, 58, 60, 63, 111, 116, 138, 149, 152, 157, 167, 172–174, 176, 183, 184, 206, 229n47, 230n55, 341, 377 ‘The Convalescent,’ 318 Convention, 4, 119, 167, 192, 196, 312, 367, 368 Cool Britannia, 187, 188, 190, 219, 294, 295, 305, 355 Cool Cymru, 354, 355 Copyright, 155 Corbijn, Anton, 82n23 Corbusier, Le, 301, 302 Corporeality and Adorno’s philosophy, 99, 128 and avant-garde, 201–205, 240 and popular music, 5–8, 122–125, 240–244 and the semiotic, 13, 30 COUM Transmissions, 241 Counterculture, 10, 50 Crackle, 290, 293 Crary, Jonathan, 141n24 Crass, 55, 81n15, 111, 112, 126, 151 Critchley, Simon, 276n8, 361 Critical model Adorno on, 30, 32, 136, 221, 239, 387 in Manic Street Preachers releases, 30, 136, 138, 366, 367, 377 theoretical concept, 76 Crowley, Aleister, 159 ‘Crucifix Kiss,’ 38n29, 172, 238 Cuba, 25, 225n23, 315–317, 324 Cubism, 95, 100

426 Index

Culture industry, 83, 84, 86, 88, 102, 103, 105, 106, 109, 111, 113, 115, 121, 126, 133, 135, 148, 163, 182, 185, 206 Culture jamming, 153–155 Cure, The, 190 Curtis, Ian, 37n23, 66, 67, 267, 278n26, 298 Cut art, 5, 35n4 D

Dachau, 194, 215 Dadaism, 35n4, 59, 154, 159, 165, 241 Dalle, Beatrice, 159 ‘Damn Dog,’ 49 ‘Dead Martyrs,’ 317 ‘Dead Trees and Traffic Islands,’ 229n46 ‘Dead Yankee Drawl,’ 78n1 Death metal, 121, 130 Debord, Guy, x, 28, 33, 136, 151–153, 168, 172, 222n1, 223n4, 234, 241, 281, 282, 377 Dee, Liam, 55, 109, 111, 119, 121, 122, 130, 143n48, 297 Delbo, Charlotte, 218 Deleuze, Gilles, 145n64, 222n1 Democracy, 171, 225n24, 284, 286, 384 ‘Democracy Coma,’ 35n8, 225n24 DeNora, Tia, 7, 9, 95, 96, 109, 114, 116, 127, 128, 139n6, 143n47, 290 Depeche Mode, 319, 362, 365

Depression, x, 24, 173, 179, 182, 183, 246, 263, 309, 377 Derrida, Jacques, 8, 34, 48, 61, 134, 136, 144n61, 145n69, 158, 222n1, 283–293, 320, 323, 326n8, 326n9, 330n39, 347 ‘A Design for Life,’ 17–21, 50, 53, 229n46, 294, 301, 303, 310, 328n19, 343, 355, 375 Détournement, 147–231, 242, 376 Devo, 56, 155 Dialectic image, 373n13 ‘Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel,’ 316 Die Brücke, 361, 365 ‘Die in the Summertime,’ 207 Digimodernism, 34, 339–346, 369, 371, 377, 380 Digital music, 9 Dionysus, 238, 245, 246, 252, 253, 277n14 Disability, 142n41 Disney, 79n1 ‘Distant Colours,’ 343, 344, 371n1 Distraction, 141n24, 189 Division of labour (in songwriting), 24, 38n27, 177 DIY, 11, 55, 111, 126 ‘Don’t Be Evil,’ 341 ‘Doors Closing Slowly,’ 262–264, 270, 274 ‘Door to the River,’ 319 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 51, 59, 204 ‘Dreaming a City (Hughesovka),’ 364 Dream Pop, 68–70, 72, 82n24, 156, 166, 169, 380 ‘Drug Drug Druggy,’ 180 Duffy, Carol Ann, 277n16

 Index 

Durutti Column, The, 168 Dylan, Bob, 27, 28, 36n17, 36n18, 108, 368 ‘Dylan & Caitlin,’ 342, 371n1 E

Echo and the Bunnymen, 328n21 Edwards, Rebecca, 351, 354 Edwards, Richey, vii, x, 1, 2, 10, 13–16, 23–25, 27–29, 33, 37n26, 38n28, 42, 52, 54–56, 61, 69, 73, 74, 77, 79n4, 80n6, 80n14, 126, 147, 157, 167–169, 173, 174, 176, 180, 185, 187, 188, 193, 197, 199, 209, 215, 219, 225n18, 225n20, 233–235, 248, 249, 251–255, 258–263, 267–269, 273, 275, 276n9, 276–277n13, 278n22, 278n25, 278n26, 278n28, 279n34, 281, 282, 294, 297–299, 306, 320, 321, 323–325, 326n9, 327n17, 335, 351–355, 358, 368, 372n5, 378 808 State, 223n9 Einstürzende Neubauten, 119, 195 Eliot, T.S., 225n22, 338 Ellis, Bret Easton, 183, 227n35, 230n56 ‘Elvis Impersonator: Blackpool Pier,’ 248, 299 Embodiment, see Corporeality ‘Emily,’ 28, 322 Emin, Tracey, 338

427

‘Empty Souls,’ 277n16, 320, 321, 330n38 Endgame, 95, 100, 129, 202, 204, 207 End of history (Fukuyama), 284, 286–289, 295, 296, 304, 308, 310, 318, 381 Engels, Friedrich, 287, 387n1 Englishness, 188, 190, 308, 355, 356 ‘Enola/Alone,’ 25, 299, 300, 327n13 The Entertainer, 263 Entertainment, 1, 2, 10, 12, 13, 20, 55, 73, 75, 79n1, 107, 108, 110, 117, 130, 131, 154, 229n47, 263 Entryism, 62, 76, 225n19, 337, 339 ‘Epicentre,’ 53, 317 Epstein, Josh, 118 Equus, 260, 261, 269, 276n13 Erraught, Stan, x, 10, 85, 98, 101, 103, 106, 109, 114, 119, 120, 122, 132, 139n8, 143n51, 291 ‘Europa Geht Durch Mich,’ 364 Europeanism, 34, 363, 365 Evans, David, 27, 228n42, 230n52, 373n21 Evans, Kieran, 27, 44, 53, 229n45, 297, 342, 344, 359, 360, 363 ‘The Everlasting,’ 305, 308, 309, 311, 353 Everyday life art and, 63, 151, 241, 379 music and, 60 Everything Live, 79n2 Everything Must Go, 17, 25, 28, 33, 34, 37n22, 53, 233–331, 335, 342, 347, 353, 369, 375 Expression (in music), 20, 67, 97, 335

428 Index F

‘Facing Page: Top Left,’ 267 Factory Records, 65 Fahrenheit 451, 228n44 Fascism, ix, 19, 86, 133, 306, 307, 353, 381 ‘Faster,’ 22–23, 191, 194, 209, 220, 228n39, 230n55, 294 Faulk, Barry, 36n14, 57, 81n16, 81n18, 81n21, 140n19, 141n23, 178 Feminine Is Beautiful, 156, 226n30 Fisher, Mark, x, 33, 34, 42, 63–67, 70, 189, 205, 222n1, 225n19, 283–286, 289–293, 305, 322, 323, 337, 339, 340, 370, 376, 377 Flexible accumulation, 112, 142n35 Fluxus, 59, 275n6 Folk, 9, 36n13, 108, 109, 111, 116, 126, 353, 356, 362, 368, 373n17, 380 Forever Delayed–The Greatest Hits, 25, 42, 50, 52, 53, 159, 169, 170, 224n11, 226n30, 337n32, 228n39, 277n15, 281, 299, 301, 303, 306, 307, 310, 319, 329n28, 330n33 Form modernist explorations of, 139n3, 379 and popular modernism, 63, 67, 204, 273 Foucault, Michel, 144n57, 194, 212–214, 239, 256, 330n39 ‘Found That Soul,’ 50, 80n10, 313, 314, 329n28, 339 ‘4 Ever Delayed,’ 52, 53, 319

4 REAL incident, 24, 52, 54, 173, 358 ‘4st7lb,’ 208, 209, 262 ‘1404,’ 338, 339 Frankfurt School, ix, 84, 145n65, 223n5 ‘Freedom of Speech Won’t Feed My Children,’ 314, 318 Freud, Sigmund, 88 Fripp, Robert, 229n47 Frith, Simon, 2, 4, 6–10, 15, 20, 21, 35n6, 84, 104, 105, 108, 112, 115–117, 139n1, 141n26, 142n36, 335, 336 ‘From Despair to Where,’ 180 Fukuyama, Francis, 283, 284, 286–289, 292, 293, 295, 296, 304, 308, 310, 314, 318, 325, 381, 382 ‘Further Away,’ 299, 327n17 ‘The Future Has Been Here 4Ever,’ 52, 325, 340 Futurism, 159 Futurology, 25, 26, 29, 34, 41, 53, 71, 324, 333–374, 385 G

Gainsbourg, Serge, 316 Gang of Four, 11, 31, 56, 58–62, 68, 70, 75–77, 83, 126, 132, 184, 185, 223n7, 248, 349 Gartside, Green, 61, 62, 71, 81n20, 134, 153, 334, 365 Gaudí, Antoni, 301 Genderbending, 48, 79n6 Generation Terrorists, 33, 38n29, 44, 49, 51, 53, 55, 80n7, 80n12,

 Index 

147–231, 233, 238, 242, 245, 251, 282, 330n37, 338, 363, 371n4 Genius, 21, 222n1, 246, 276n12, 276n13, 374n25 Ghosts, 85, 144n61, 272, 278n29, 287, 289, 291, 307, 313, 318–322, 324, 337, 339, 347, 371n5, 387 ‘The Ghosts of Christmas,’ 371n2 Gibbons, Jennifer, 310 Gibbons, June, 310 Giddens, Anthony, 193, 385 Gill, Andy, 61, 126 Ginsberg, Allen, 225n24 ‘The Girl Who Wanted to Be God,’ 250, 251 Gladstone, William Ewart, 311 Glamrock, 8, 46, 48, 72, 137, 165–170, 173, 180, 181, 224n15, 380 ‘Glasnost,’ 320 Godard, Jean-Luc, 59, 160, 194 God Save the Manics, 49, 264, 279n35, 324 Goebbels, Joseph, 162 Gogh, Vincent van, 159, 180, 278n26, 279n34 ‘Gold Against the Soul,’ 33, 49, 51, 53, 72, 147–231, 233, 282 ‘Golden Platitudes,’ 340 González, Elián, 315 Google, 341 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 212, 320 Gracyk, Theodore, 3, 4, 15, 113, 326n6 Gramophone record, 9, 103, 140n16, 140n20, 326n5

429

Gramsci, Antonio, 60, 61, 110, 113, 136, 141n29 Grateful Dead, 143n45, 275 Great Divide, 63, 64, 84, 102, 151, 256, 301, 379 Green, Hannah, 230n48, 279n31 Griffiths, Dai, 20, 177, 196 Grindcore, 121, 130 ‘Groundhog Days,’ 284 Group Material, 43, 150, 151, 154, 168 Grunge, 21, 53, 68, 154, 187, 189, 195, 219, 252, 339, 380 Guardian, 341, 375 Guernica, 100, 279n32, 318 Guns N’ Roses, 51, 165, 341 H

Hall, Stuart, 113, 142n41, 329n31 Hamlet, 287 Hancock, Tony, 337 Hanoi Rocks, 167 Hansa Tonstudio, 361, 362 ‘Happy ending,’ 319 Happy Mondays, 69, 223n9, 308 Hard rock, 167, 180, 380 Harvey, David, 67, 115, 142n35, 222n1, 283, 330n39 Hauntology, 145n69, 290, 292, 293, 326n8, 347 Havana, 316 H-bomb, 171 Hearst, Patty, 384 Heart of Darkness, 253, 260 Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, 277n20 Hebdige, Dick, 117

430 Index

Hedges, Mike, 21, 294 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm, viii–x, 87, 93, 282 Hegemony, 15, 38n34, 44, 60, 110, 117, 135, 141n29, 227n34, 240, 287, 350 “Heroes” (David Bowie album), 190, 361 Herzog, Werner, 265, 318, 358 Hesmondalgh, Dick, 36n15, 106, 141n21, 142n40 Heteropathic identification, 211–214 Heterotopias, 213, 214 High art, 102, 173 Hillsborough disaster, 307, 328n19, 342, 385 Hindley, Myra, 211, 213, 214 Hip-hop, 47, 55, 79n3, 113, 115, 119, 125, 142n42, 144n59, 164, 380 Hiraeth, 373n21 Hiroshima, 72, 162, 164, 186, 215–218, 327n16 ‘His Last Painting,’ 317 Hitler, Adolf, 157, 211 Hobbes, Thomas, 384 Hole, 180, 187 Holocaust, vii, 173, 174, 179, 215–218, 386 The Holy Bible, 1, 22, 23, 27, 28, 33, 38n34, 49, 51, 53, 65, 71, 82n27, 147–231, 233, 234, 245, 248, 252, 261–265, 270, 272, 273, 277n17, 278n21, 278n27, 278n29, 282, 288, 294, 297, 324, 325, 347, 352, 371, 373n13, 373n21, 378, 384, 386

Honderich, Ted, 303 Hook, 103, 104, 125, 130, 206, 211, 335 Hopkins, Anthony, 309 Hopper, Edward, 302 Horkheimer, Max, 83, 87, 88, 102, 140n17, 145n68, 149, 162, 183, 223n5 Hoss, Nina, 365 Howells, Neal, 50, 77, 80n10 Hughes, Ted, 309 Hughesovka, 364 Hullot-Kentor, Robert, 97, 106, 184 Huq, Rupa, 188, 189, 295 Hussein, Saddam, 79n1 Huyssen, Andreas, x, 63, 84, 86, 91, 102, 108, 110, 113, 130,139n4, 139n5, 145n63, 151, 226n28, 275n2, 281, 301, 330n39, 373n13, 379, 387n1 Hybridity, 204 I

Ibuse, Masuji, 215 ‘Ifwhiteamericatoldthetruthforoneda yit’sworldwouldfallapart’ (sic), 227n26 ‘If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next,’ 306, 308, 309, 329n23, 343, 353 Ikeda, Mitch, 38n32, 49, 51, 74, 220, 300, 319 ‘I Live to Fall Asleep,’ 320 ‘I’m Just a Patsy,’ 338 ‘I’m Not Working,’ 310–311 ‘Imperial Bodybags,’ 338

 Index 

‘Indian Summer,’ 82n29, 371n1, 372n8 Indie, 56, 61, 73, 82n29, 82n30, 154, 156, 161, 187, 189, 296, 319, 355, 380 ‘The Intense Humming of Evil,’ 194, 215–218, 288 ‘Interiors (Song for Willem de Kooning),’ 302 ‘International Blue,’ 342, 371n1 Intertextuality, 31, 42, 48–52, 54, 58, 61, 66, 70, 73, 74, 80n8, 158, 300, 368, 379 ‘Intravenous Agnostic,’ 314 In Utero (Nirvana album), 21, 51, 111, 180, 191, 262, 278n29 IRA, 22, 258 Islam, 253 ‘(It’s Not War) Just the End of Love,’ 79, 339, 371n1 ‘It’s So Easy,’ 72, 225n18

431

Adorno on, 104, 105, 120, 128, 141n28, 142–143n43 and critique, 120, 128 Jethro Tull, 67 Johnson, Ray, 50, 80n9, 339 Johnson, Robert, 159 Jones, Patrick, 25, 176, 252, 322, 327n11, 330n38 Jones, Rhian E., 27 Jones, Tom, 355 Josef K, 56 ‘Journal for Plague Lovers,’ 21, 25, 33, 53, 71, 111, 233–280, 297, 325, 339, 378 Joy Division, 31, 37n23, 58, 59, 64–68, 70, 71, 82n23, 82n27, 95, 167, 184, 190, 248, 267, 303, 352 Judge Dredd, ix, 252 ‘Judge Yr’self,’ 33, 233–280 K

J

‘Jackie Collins Existential Question Time,’ 266 Jameson, Fredric, 33, 34, 86–89, 99, 106, 109, 127, 135, 139n3, 139n7, 140n12, 141n28, 145n68, 146n71, 149–154, 157–159, 175, 182, 183, 202, 222n1, 223n4, 281–283, 285, 286, 289, 292, 307, 317, 318, 324, 325n1, 326n2, 326n8, 373n13, 376, 377, 382 Jarman, Derek, 51, 52, 80n11, 346 Jazz

Kafka, Franz, ix, 59, 63, 64, 66, 204 Kesey, Ken, 79n2 ‘Kevin Carter,’ 249, 251, 277n15, 278n24, 300, 302 Khmer Rouge, 171, 193 Khrushchev, Nikita, 212 Kierkegaard, Søren, viii, 48, 80n7, 312 Kippenberger, Martin, 194, 195, 228n43 Kirby, Alan, 340, 342, 345, 370 Kirby, Leyland, 291 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig, 50 Kitchenware, 161 Klein, Naomi, 153, 154, 189

432 Index

Klein, Yves, 342, 345 Know Your Enemy, 25, 27, 29, 34, 46, 50, 53, 74, 77, 281–331, 354 Kooning, Willem De, 302, 309, 319 Krims, Adam, 85, 112, 113, 126, 127, 131, 139n1, 142n37 Kristeva, Julia, 3–5, 7, 11, 35n3, 78, 82n25, 121, 123, 158, 164, 190, 199–206, 208, 215, 219–221, 233, 256, 264, 265, 378 L

Labourism, 44 Lacan, Jacques, 161 Laddism, 189, 296, 304, 308, 328n20 ‘Lady Lazarus,’ 277n16 Laibach, 22, 119, 155, 195, 223n8, 275 Laing, Dave, 36n15, 187 Lamacq, Steve, 1, 24 ‘Last Exit on Yesterday,’ 37n20 ‘The Last Time I Saw Paris,’ 363 Late style, 97, 346, 367–369, 374n24 ‘La Tristesse Durera (Scream to a Sigh),’ 72, 180, 183, 277n19 Laurens, The, 156 Leaving the Twentieth Century, 49, 60 Led Zeppelin, 57 Left melancholy, 292–293, 305, 309, 313, 317, 318, 322, 338, 339, 360 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 89–91, 94

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 169, 194, 212, 281, 303, 304, 385, 387n1 Lennon, John, 21, 36n17, 163, 339, 358 Less Than Zero, 227n35 ‘Let Robeson Sing,’ 53, 315, 317 ‘Let’s Go to War,’ 370 Levi, Primo, 154, 171, 179, 216, 265 Leviathan, 384 Levi Jeans, 225n22 Leviticus, 198 Lewis, Wyndham, 325 ‘Life Becoming a Landslide,’ 74, 180, 191, 227n34 Life Becoming a Landslide E.P., 180, 191, 227n34 Lifeblood, 25, 28, 34, 74, 264, 281–331, 333, 335, 384 Liminality, 361, 364, 366 Lipstick Traces (A Secret History of Manic Street Preachers), 25, 33, 35n8, 50, 51, 225n24, 252, 319 Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, 50 ‘Litany,’ 277n16 ‘Little Baby Nothing,’ 78n1, 79n2, 80n12, 172, 173, 175, 210, 226n30, 330n34 ‘Little Trolls,’ 354 ‘Liverpool Revisited,’ 342, 371n1 Lizzo, 240 Lloyds, 171 Locality, 34, 333–374, 377 ‘Locust Valley,’ 50, 339 Lords, Traci, 172, 175

 Index 

Louder Than War, 25, 74, 316 Lou Reed, 36n17, 29n30 ‘Love Letter to the Future,’ 338 Love songs, 1, 15, 37n20, 44, 62, 71, 134, 163 ‘Love’s Sweet Exile,’ 35n8, 38n29, 80n13, 225n24, 226n31, 245 ‘The Love of Richard Nixon,’ 322, 330n38 Low (David Bowie album), 35n4, 190, 361 Low art, 73, 102, 301 Lukács, György, 140n10 Lukes, Daniel, 27, 38n34, 200, 230n49, 230n51 Lydon, John, see Rotten, Johnny Lynk, Roy, 179 Lynskey, Dorian, 54, 153, 155, 187, 189, 211, 219, 282, 324, 345, 361, 369 Lyons, Sue, 51 Lyotard, Jean-François, 149, 222n1 M

Madchester, 68–70, 72, 156, 167, 169, 223n9, 380 Madness, 34, 234, 238, 243–248, 259–261, 264, 265, 271–273, 276n9, 276n12, 276–277n13, 277n14, 279n30, 279n31, 280n38, 344 Madonna, 22, 55, 131, 171, 240 Magazine, 8, 10, 28, 54, 71, 82n27, 88, 190, 230n53 Maier, Vivian, 342, 345 Mail art, 80n9, 339, 340 Mailer, Norman, 23, 210

433

Mainstream, 1, 10, 25, 56, 62, 115, 117, 134, 154, 172, 174, 189, 240, 242, 294, 296, 303, 305, 337, 339 Malcolm X, 169, 186 Malevich, Kazimir, 365 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 35n3 Manchester, 58, 59, 64, 65, 73, 304 Manic Millennium, 354 MANICS.NL, 28 ‘Manorbier,’ 360 Mao Zedong, 60, 169, 281, 282, 312 Marcus, Greil, 50, 56, 116, 223n5, 319 Marcuse, Herbert, ix, 84, 107, 108, 141n25, 166, 225n23 Marley, Bob, 159 ‘Marlon J.D.,’ 269 Marr, Johnny, 74, 321 Marschall, Clemens, 119, 144n54, 241 Marshall, Lee, 36n15, 65 Marx, Karl, viii, 34, 86, 88, 124, 151, 158, 159, 165, 194, 227n32, 281–283, 287–290, 293, 301–304, 306, 307, 311, 312, 314, 316, 318, 322, 323, 325, 326n9, 347, 350, 387n1 Masculinity, 36n17, 80n6, 105, 141n20, 169, 172, 175, 176, 188, 225n21, 230n49, 274, 311, 329n31 ‘Masking Tape,’ 53 Mass art, 102 ‘The Masses Against the Classes,’ 72, 224n11, 311, 317 Massive Attack, 38n30

434 Index

Materials, 24, 46, 53, 91–93, 96–99, 106, 113, 120, 122–124, 136, 145n63, 146n70, 146n71, 175, 206, 257, 274, 282, 302, 323, 353, 383 ‘Mausoleum,’ 194, 199, 200, 215 ‘Mayakovsky,’ 35n3, 366 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 166 McCarthy, 26, 73, 74, 76, 227n34, 315, 316, 318 McDonald’s, 171 McGovern, Jimmy, 307, 328n19 McKagan, Duff, 341 McLaren, Malcolm, 81n6, 166, 225n20 ‘Me and Stephen Hawking,’ 278n25 Medusa Touch, The, ix, 329n25, 384 Mekons, The, 56, 75, 76, 229n45 Melancholy, 292–293, 297–299, 302, 305, 306, 308, 309, 313, 317, 318, 321–323, 338, 339, 346, 359, 360, 373n21, 379 Memory (and popular music), 326n7 Mensa, 23, 210 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 7, 35n7, 145n64 Merthyr Rising, 303 Merzbow, 119 Messianism, 288 Metal, 121, 130, 143n46, 144n59, 177, 225n21, 252, 262, 263, 274 Metarock, 75 ‘Methadone Pretty,’ 225n24, 282 Middleton, Richard, 4, 6, 30, 85, 106, 109, 110, 114, 116, 123, 125, 139n1, 139n7, 142n31, 145n66, 326n7

Miller, Henry, 23, 210 Milosevic, Slobodan, 214 Miners’ strikes, 18, 44, 179, 303, 321, 322, 360, 370 Minima Moralia, x, 133, 149, 182 Minogue, Kylie, 226n26 Mirbeau, Octave, 28, 192, 204, 209, 228n40 Mishima, Yukio, ix, 43, 51, 52, 181, 190, 209, 229n47, 230n51, 234, 235, 255–259, 269, 272, 274, 276–277n13, 281, 329n29 ‘Miss Europa Disco Dancer,’ 313, 314 Modernism, 59, 62, 63, 67, 68, 81n18, 81–82n21, 86, 139n4, 175, 190, 199, 201–205, 222n1, 235, 255–257, 286, 301–302 Modernity, viii, 64–67, 84, 86–89, 91, 95, 97, 98, 100, 101, 114, 118–121, 124, 125, 128, 141n24, 144n56, 144n57, 148, 205, 235, 237, 239, 244, 255–257, 273, 275n3, 284, 326n3, 330n39, 382 Monadology, 89, 90 Mona Lisa, 173, 226n27 Monarchy, 43, 156, 157, 171, 230n55, 314 Monroe, Marilyn, 52, 80n12, 159, 165, 278n26 ‘Montana/Autumn/78,’ 329n23 Moore, Allan, 67, 177 Moore, Sean, viii, 23, 24, 249, 324 ‘Morning Comrades,’ 339 Morrissey, 36n17, 73, 74, 321

 Index 

‘Motorcycle Emptiness,’ 52, 53, 72, 176–178, 280n38, 319, 327n14 Motown Corporation, 163 ‘Motown Junk,’ 156, 157, 161–165, 196, 224n12, 226n27, 227n36, 355 ‘Mr Carbohydrate,’ 327n12 Multitextuality, 42, 48–52 Munch, Edvard, 55, 365 Munchausen, 132–136, 149, 236 Music hall, 188, 263 Musique informelle, 98 Mussolini, Benito, 211 ‘My Guernica,’ 318 ‘My Little Empire,’ 305, 310 N

Naish, Stephen Lee, 27, 46, 156, 191, 294, 308, 313, 315–318, 337, 339, 354 National Treasures–The Complete Singles, 25, 341, 354, 372n5, 373n20 ‘Nat West–Barclays–Midlands– Lloyds,’ 171, 175, 330n37 Nazism, 86, 87, 171, 200, 386 Neal, Mark Anthony, 79n3, 115, 163 Negativland, 155 Negus, Keith, 5, 6, 9, 11, 35n2, 36n15, 36n16, 165 Neoism, 155 Neoliberalism, 43, 188, 289, 314 Neopostpunk, 70, 319, 380 Nat West, 171, 175, 330n37

435

New Art Riot E.P., 37n20, 53, 156, 159–161, 282, 363 New Labour, 188, 189, 193, 295, 306, 308, 341, 344, 380 New Order, 69, 298 New York Dolls, 51, 169 ‘The Next Jet to Leave Moscow,’ 324, 370, 385 Nietzsche, Friedrich, vii, viii, x, 33, 43, 88, 145n66, 170, 171, 234–240, 242–248, 250, 252–256, 259, 268–275, 275n1–4, 276n11, 276–277n13, 277n14, 281, 322, 365–377 1984, 209, 219, 262, 321 Nirvana, 5, 21, 51, 111, 180, 187, 191, 228n37, 251, 262, 285 Nixon, Richard, 322, 324, 330n38 NME, 24, 54, 82n30 ‘Nobody Loved You,’ 327n15, 329n23 Noise, 11, 36n11, 68, 69, 82n27, 85, 118–122, 142n30, 143n49, 225n22, 286, 313, 341 Non-identical, 86, 98, 99, 101 Northup, Solomon, ix, 220 ‘No Surface All Feeling,’ 299 Novel With Cocaine, 261 O

Oasis, 38n27, 187–189, 222n1, 223n9, 248, 294, 328n20 ‘Ocean Spray,’ 50, 80n10, 284, 313, 329n29, 354 Odyssey, 87

436 Index

‘Of Walking Abortion,’ 210–212, 219 ‘Orgasm Addict’ (Buzzcocks song), 6 Orwell, George, 170, 190, 198, 209, 219, 228n44, 230n55, 262, 303, 306, 321, 381, 382, 384, 385 ‘Ostpolitik,’ 79n2 Otomo, Rio, 229n47, 255, 256 ‘Out of Time,’ 318 Owen, David, 239, 246, 275n3, 275n4, 276n11 P

Paddison, Max, 99, 102, 107, 109, 120, 140n15, 141n28, 144n54 Pankhurst, Emmeline, 322 Parfrey, Adam, 166, 175 Pastiche art, 158, 336 Pastiche-time, 283, 376 ‘Patrick Bateman,’ 183, 277n19 ‘P.C.P.,’ 194, 197, 213, 220, 228n44, 277n17 Pearl Jam, 180, 187 ‘Peeled Apples,’ 262, 265, 266, 269 ‘Pennyroyal Tea,’ 228n37 ‘People Give In,’ 371n1 Performance, 2, 7–9, 22, 23, 38n33, 48, 119, 121, 143n50, 169, 189, 192, 203, 204, 226n29, 240–243, 263, 275n6, 326n6, 344 Performativity, 5–9, 35n10, 48, 116, 143n45, 167, 226n30, 240 Perpetual present, 283, 284, 292, 325

Persona, 8, 79n6, 167, 170, 174, 181, 189, 191–195, 234, 240–244, 246, 253, 254, 259, 274, 277n13, 298, 311, 327n12 Picasso, Pablo, 100, 279n32, 309, 318 ‘Picturesque,’ 264, 279n35, 324 Pink Floyd, 56, 57, 279n30, 336, 371n5 Pinter, Harold, 23, 210 Pitch, 4 Plant, Sadie, 149, 152, 172 Plath, Sylvia, ix, 23, 176, 210, 230n47, 234, 250, 251, 272, 276n13, 277n16 Plato, 21, 145n67, 223n4 Poetry, vii, 2, 5, 11, 12, 16, 35n3, 36n17, 59, 73, 125, 133, 145n63, 145n68, 159, 217, 230n47, 234, 272, 358, 366 Polaroid, 305, 307, 328n22, 339, 340, 342, 356 Pollock, Jackson, 299, 327n13 Pop, Iggy, 50, 52, 72, 361 Popism, 159, 160, 340 Popular modernism, 32, 42, 62–68, 83, 147–231, 273 Popular music (definition), 9, 36n13 Populism, 334, 342, 370, 371, 377 P-Orridge, 241, 243, 244, 276n7, 281 ‘Postcards from a Young Man,’ 20, 25, 34, 52, 71, 81n19, 325, 328n22, 333–335, 339–342, 346, 369, 371n1, 387 Post-Fordism, 112, 142n35

 Index 

Postmodernisms 33, 63, 99, 149–151, 158, 175, 222n1, 222n2, 326n2, 330n39, 336, 340 Postmodernity, 34, 115, 145n68, 148–151, 153, 157, 173, 175, 222n1, 240, 243, 282, 283, 285, 289, 292, 318, 370, 372n6, 377 Postpunk, viii, 21, 24, 31, 42, 46, 53, 55–64, 68–73, 75, 76, 82n23, 82n24, 82n27, 112, 117, 137, 168, 169, 184–187, 189, 191, 195, 218, 241, 262, 371, 380 Poststructuralism, 61, 114, 222n1, 231n60, 324 Pot, Pol, 175, 212 Potter, Dennis, 302 ‘Pretension/Repulsion,’ 265, 266 Price, Simon, 19, 22, 24–27, 56, 151, 166–168, 170–172, 174, 176, 181, 185, 190–192, 195, 196, 199, 206, 208–212, 215, 224n13, 228n44, 234, 235, 251–253, 255, 258, 261, 262, 268, 278n26, 294, 297, 300, 308, 334, 352, 353, 356, 362–366, 368, 370 Prince, 52 Production (of music), 142n31 Professor Griff (Public Enemy), 24, 162, 171 Progressive rock, 128 ‘Prologue to History,’ 308, 353 Promise of happiness, 96 Prostitution, 186 Proust, Marcel, ix, 95, 204

437

Pseudo-modernism, 340 Psychedelia, 68, 72 Public Enemy, 22, 24, 26, 47, 55, 56, 75, 77, 79n3, 80n14, 119, 120, 154, 162, 171, 224n16, 225n25, 378 Punctum, 26–28, 300 Purity, 62, 88, 192, 193, 198–201, 204, 207–210, 244, 255, 257–259, 261, 267–269, 272–274 R

Radiohead, 305 ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,’ 300 Rave, 16, 68, 154 ‘Ready for Drowning,’ 309, 329n25, 344, 353 Reagonomics, 43 Red Krayola, 117 ‘Red Rubber,’ 372n10 ‘Red Sleeping Beauty,’ 74 Red Wedge, 188 Reed, Lou, 36n17, 279n30 Reflection Adorno on, 91, 98, 103, 106, 127, 182 within Manic Street Preachers releases, 132, 136, 376 Reflections in a Golden Eye, 28, 269, 272, 280n38 Reification, 95, 138 ‘Removables,’ 251, 278n24 ‘Rendition,’ 338 ‘Repeat,’ 55, 156

438 Index

‘Repeat (Stars and Stripes),’ 55, 224n16 ‘Repeat (UK),’ 55, 171, 224n16 Resistance Aesthetic, ix political, 44, 281 Resistance Is Futile, 25, 34, 333–335, 342, 343, 345, 346, 369, 371n1, 380 Retrofuturism, 289, 346 Retromania, 70, 325n1 Revisionism, 386 ‘Revol,’ 194, 212, 228n43 ‘Rewind the Film,’ 25, 29, 34, 333–374, 380, 385 Reynolds, Simon, 23, 24, 38n31, 56–62, 64, 67, 69, 70, 72, 73, 75, 77, 81n18, 82n25, 82n27, 112, 117, 119, 143n50, 155, 168, 184, 185, 224n14, 241, 325n1, 352 Rhythm, 2–5, 9, 12, 22, 36n11, 36n17, 57, 106, 122–124, 128, 143n47, 144n58, 146n71, 177, 178, 194, 196, 251, 303, 360, 367, 378 Rimbaud, Arthur, 28, 47, 170, 258, 278n26 Robeson, Paul, 315–317, 329n31 Rock, viii, 3, 4, 9, 16, 22, 25, 29, 31, 36n14, 37n25, 46, 57, 59, 67, 68, 70, 81n18, 116, 128, 137, 140n19, 151, 154, 161, 164, 165, 167–169, 173, 175, 180, 181, 187, 189, 206, 305, 313, 314, 319, 325, 327n12, 335–338, 340–342, 346, 353, 356, 369, 380

‘Rock and Roll Music,’ 312, 314 Rock ‘n’ roll, 46, 56–58, 60, 70, 72, 77, 117, 137, 140n19, 157, 164–166, 168, 173, 174, 176, 225n21, 242, 312, 313, 336, 338, 341, 345, 369, 380, 384 Rodchenko, Aleksandr, 361, 362 Rosa, Hartmut, 284, 326n3 Rose, Gillian, 275n1 Rose, Lucy, 357 ‘Roses in the Hospital,’ 47, 49, 53, 72, 223n9, 227n34 Roth, Tim, 328n22, 339 Rotten, Johnny, 57, 81n18, 230n54 ‘Royal Correspondent,’ 314 ‘R.P. McMurphy,’ 79n2 Rumble Fish, 176, 177, 327n14 ‘Running Out of Fantasy,’ 358 Russolo, Luigi, 59, 119 S

Sands, Bobby, 258 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 317, 364 Savage, Jon, 57–59, 64, 66 Saville, Jenny, 49, 53, 194, 200, 261 Schoenberg, Arnold, ix, 63, 91, 93, 100, 120, 121, 140n9, 145n63, 146n71 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 66 Scritti Politti, 11, 31, 56, 58, 60–62, 70, 71, 75–77, 83, 132, 134, 337, 339, 349, 365, 378 Sebastian (Christian saint), 51, 52, 259 Second Viennese School, 95 Selby Jr., Hubert, ix, 37n20, 190, 206, 210

 Index 

Self-harm, see Auto-mutilation Semiotic (elements of lyrics), 4, 11, 14, 17, 19, 22, 23, 33, 46, 78, 137, 197, 221, 272 Send Away the Tigers, 25, 34, 53, 324, 325, 334, 335, 337–340, 342, 369, 371n1, 371n3, 371n5, 372n8 ‘Sepia,’ 299–301 Seppuku, 255, 257, 259 Serial killers, vii, 211–214 Severn Bridge, 25, 234, 356, 372n5 Sex Pistols, 22, 28, 44, 49, 57, 58, 81n16, 81n18, 81n21, 156, 157, 159, 166, 230n54, 266, 317, 341, 378 Shakespeare, William, 228n44, 287, 298, 338 Sham 69, 161 ‘She Bathed Herself in a Bath of Bleach,’ 267 Sheen, Michael, 372n9 ‘She Is Suffering,’ 51, 82n28, 195, 223n9, 228n43, 229n47 Shellac, 21, 111 Shoegaze, 68, 69, 157 ‘Show Me the Wonder,’ 359 Simmel, Georg, viii, 65, 237, 326n3 Simple Minds, 49, 71, 261, 362, 364 Simulacrum, 223n4, 370 Situationism, vii, 33, 141n25, 150–153, 159, 165, 223n3, 223n7, 275n6, 282 Skids, The, 157, 162, 384 ‘Slash ‘N’ Burn,’ 51, 80n13, 164, 171 ‘Sleepflower,’ 179 ‘Sleeping with the NME,’ 54

439

Slowdive, 69, 157 ‘Small Black Flowers That Grow in the Sky,’ 249, 251, 258 Smith, Patti, 59, 369 Smiths, The, 73, 74, 76, 321, 322, 330n32, 341 Socialism, 44, 296, 306, 344 ‘Socialist Serenade,’ 308, 311, 344 Social relevance (of popular music), 15 ‘So Dead,’ 80n12 Solanas, Valerie, 210, 341 ‘Solitude Sometimes Is,’ 320 ‘Some Kind of Nothingness,’ 71, 82n29, 328n21, 371n1, 372n10 Sonic Youth, 59, 313 Sony, 35n8 ‘Sorrow 16,’ 164, 196 So That You Can Live, 37n22, 347–350, 357, 360 Sound, 2–7, 9, 16, 20–22, 29, 30, 35n7, 35n8, 36n11, 37n21, 47, 57, 59–62, 68–71, 73, 74, 77, 93, 97, 117–119, 122, 130, 137, 162, 164, 166, 167, 169, 180, 187, 189–191, 195–198, 203, 205, 216, 217, 221, 248, 249, 252, 262–265, 290, 291, 293–295, 304–307, 312, 313, 316, 319, 335–337, 340, 342, 356, 357, 360, 362, 363, 378, 379, 384 Soviet Union, 212, 372n9, 385, 387n1 ‘So Why So Sad,’ 50, 80n10, 313, 330n33

440 Index

Spanish Civil War, 168, 306, 315, 343 ‘Spectators of Suicide,’ 74, 171, 224n15 Specter, 281–331, 350, 376 Speech (and music), 35n1 Stalin, Joseph, 212 Stalinism, 86, 287 Standardisation, 54, 108, 163 ‘Stay Beautiful,’ 51, 80n7, 173, 225n24, 226n27, 227n35 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 26 Stone Roses, The, 69 Street, John, 9, 10, 21, 116, 143n44 Strummer, Joe, 22, 151 Stuckism, 336 Studium, 26, 27 Subaltern, 114, 127 Subculture, 10, 117 Subjective art, 182, 275n2 Sublime, 52, 87, 257, 268, 273 Suedem, 223n9 Suicide (band), 77, 119 ‘Suicide Alley,’ 72, 156 Sun Tzu, 50, 312, 313 Suprematism, 361 Surrealism, 154, 158, 159, 166 Sutcliffe, Peter, 212, 213 Symbolic, 3–5, 7, 14, 15, 17–21, 30, 68, 78, 82n25, 124, 137, 144n58, 165, 166, 173, 174, 176, 177, 197–199, 201–203, 207, 209, 214, 219, 221, 264–268, 271, 279n30, 376–380 elements of lyrics, 11–13, 18, 23, 29, 37n21, 125, 164

Symbolic order, 5, 82n25, 144n58, 199, 202, 203, 207, 209, 214, 219, 264, 265, 268, 279n30 ‘S.Y.M.M.,’ 307 ‘Symphony of Tourette,’ 180 Synthpop, 380, 384 Szeles, Erika, 172 T

Taxi Driver, ix, 159, 190, 227n35, 253, 280n38 Technology (and popular music), 9 ‘Tennessee,’ 172 Thatcher, Margaret, 44, 179, 229n47, 295, 303, 341, 345 Thatcherism, 18, 43, 45, 347 ‘Theme From M.A.S.H. (Suicide Is Painless),’ 54, 180, 224n11 Therapy?, 231n58 ‘There by the Grace of God,’ 319, 322 Thin White Duke, 242, 243 ‘30-Year War,’ 360, 384–386 This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours, 19, 25, 27, 28, 34, 53, 54, 276n10, 281–331, 336, 342, 344, 353, 373n16 ‘This Is the Day,’ 341 ‘This Is Yesterday,’ 229n47 ‘This Joke Sport Severed,’ 270 ‘This Sullen Welsh Heart,’ 357 Thomas, Dylan, 310, 321, 339, 345 Thomas, R.S., 297, 305, 339, 353, 379 Throbbing Gristle, 11, 22, 56, 119, 195, 216, 241, 352 Times Square, 49

 Index 

Tin Pan Alley, 103, 104, 131, 143n53 ‘Together Stronger (C’mon Wales),’ 354 Tonality, 2, 109 Top of the Pops, 22, 48, 166 ‘To Repel Ghosts,’ 321 Toscanini, Arturo, 109 Totalitarianism, viii, 86, 190, 193, 210, 243, 282, 317, 385 Tower Colliery, 303, 353 Toynbee, Jason, 15, 104, 113, 115, 117, 141n26 ‘Train in Vain,’ 72 Trauma, 85, 126, 131, 218, 287–289, 298, 321, 323, 326n4 Tricky, 189 Truth content, 93, 97, 108, 123–125, 383 Tse-Tung, Mao, 312 ‘Tsunami,’ 305, 309, 310, 353 Twelve-tone technique, 91, 92, 95, 106, 129 2000 AD, 28, 198, 229n45, 252 U

U2, 155 Übermensch, 244, 245 ‘UK Channel Boredom,’ 76n2, 156 Ukip, 344, 385 ‘Underdogs,’ 338, 371n1 Urban Dance Squad, 144n59 Urbanity, 15 ‘Us Against You,’ 227n34

441

V

‘Valley Boy,’ 353 Velvet Underground, 59, 120 Verbal space, 195–198, 262, 264, 279n33, 379 Vernon, Jim, x, 115 Vietnam, 79n1, 108, 225n23, 253 ‘The View from Stow Hill,’ 364 ‘Virginia State Epileptic Colony,’ 262, 267, 280n38 ‘Vivian,’ 342, 345 Vorticism, 325, 331n41 ‘The Vorticists,’ 331n41 W

Wagner, Richard, viii, 91, 92, 106, 131, 139n8 Wales, 18, 34, 304, 310, 338, 344, 350–357, 359, 360, 364, 367, 372n9, 373n15 Walkman personal stereos, 7, 35n8 ‘Walk Me to the Bridge,’ 363–365 Walzer, Michael, 145n67 Warhol, Andy, 160, 165, 171, 210, 340 Watership Down, 50 Watson, Ben, 120, 121, 130, 142–143n43, 223n6 ‘Wattsville Blues,’ 354 ‘We Are All Bourgeois Now,’ 74, 318 Weber, Max, viii, 88, 100, 239, 314 Webern, Anton, 63 ‘We Her Majesty’s Prisoners,’ 157 Welsh identity, 44, 351, 373n18 Welshness, 188, 349, 351, 352, 355, 356, 374n21 West, Kanye, 38n28

442 Index

‘What’s My Name,’ 72 Whiteman, Paul, 109, 141n28 Who, The, 38n27, 51, 187, 339, 341 Wilde, Oscar, 330n36 Willemen, Paul, 34, 139n4, 347–350, 366, 370, 373n13 Williams, Raymond, 110, 135, 136, 141n29, 143n47, 347, 351, 357 ‘William’s Last Words,’ 263 Wilson, Tony, 65 Windowless monad, 83–146, 201, 202 Windsor, Charles, 74, 227n34 ‘Winterlovers,’ 372n8 Wire, Nicky, vii, 23–26, 38n28, 38n32, 44, 47–49, 52, 54, 69, 71, 73, 80n6, 167, 176, 210, 228n43, 231n58, 235, 248, 250, 252, 263, 266, 277n16, 277n20, 281, 282, 294, 295, 297, 306, 310, 311, 313, 320, 322, 324, 327n11, 327n12, 328n22, 329n28, 329n30, 330n37, 335, 339, 341–343, 345, 346, 352–354, 356, 360–362, 365, 368, 373n14, 373n17, 375, 376, 378, 379, 385 Wiseman-Trowse, Nathan, 8, 10, 52, 68, 356 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 61, 77, 81n20, 134, 136, 153 Wodtke, Larissa, 27, 38n34, 195, 200, 210, 230n50, 231n57, 231n60, 265, 278n27, 326n9, 347, 373n13 Wool, Christopher, 50, 78

Word art, 50, 78 Working class, 18, 19, 23, 31, 37n25, 43, 47, 65, 69, 81n16, 86, 145n65, 179, 223n9, 294–297, 303, 304, 307, 308, 313, 315, 328n19, 328n20, 339, 345, 347, 348, 351, 352, 364, 370, 375, 385, 386, 387n1 ‘Working Class Hero,’ 339 Working through the past, 231n57, 381, 386–387 ‘Wrote for Luck,’ 223n9 Y

‘The Year of Purification,’ 314 Yeltsin, Boris, 212, 213 ‘Yes,’ 206, 207, 229n44 ‘You Love Us’ (Heavenly version), 156, 159 Young, Neil, 36n17 ‘You’re Tender and You’re Tired,’ 311 ‘Your Love Alone Is Not Enough,’ 53, 280n36, 335, 337, 371n1 ‘Yourself,’ 180, 183 ‘You Stole the Sun from My Heart,’ 72, 305, 308, 309, 336, 373n16 Youth culture, 10, 161, 189 Z

Zappa, Frank, 11, 37n20, 59, 120, 121, 129, 142n43, 143n52, 143n53, 223n6, 369 Ziggy Stardust, 8, 242, 274, 276n8 Žižek, Slavoj, 155, 286