Manic Street Preachers Destructive Alienating Cultural and Despair Filled Tracks POLL RESULTS

This Is Yesterday is grand, except for the rather pedestrian drumming.

6. 4st 7lb (from The Holy Bible) [9 votes, 1 first place, 244 points, 1994]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qy2ebaAGMU0

Best song that begins "Days since I last pissed"...

nah it's fantastic tho, my #3. I definitely prefer Richie when he's empathising with the lost and damned, than when he's in pure polemical mdoe.

Richey, wth

Great to see Sleepflower get so high! I'm a little surprised to see This is Yesterday in the top 10 too, great track as it is.

Since the Manics, how many other British bands can we name whose lyrics were actually about concrete reified concepts, if you see what I mean? Something I think I took for granted about the band at the time are the issues being addressed here - some of the ideas here are misguided, but well intentioned and intelligent. I can't think of many more recent commercially viable acts who've achieved anything similar.

Not sure there's been anyone like them before or since, in terms of how deeply they burrow into such matters. I was going to say 'politics', but that feels like a very inadequate description of what they were doing.

I was thinking about the sheer hostility they provoked when they arrived, and how contempt for going in for 'concepts' was so much part of that. I hope the h8ers enjoyed the years of Noelisms that followed.

5. Kevin Carter (from Everything Must Go) [9 votes, 1 first place, 252 points, 1996]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLDr0QNCUd4

RIPeat (and Masses Against The Classes)

Again, I can't bring myself to like Kevin Carter because it's nearly the same as The Trickster by Radiohead.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBHRiKZY2fk

have loved both songs for years and never made the connection. can't say it bothers me much now the connection has been made...

cool to see sleepflower break the top ten. that and from despair definitely rise above the flaws that keep the rest of the album down. this is yesterday is a good but unspectacular track, surprised to find it so high. 4st 7 i just couldn't vote for, not for any lack of appreciation, but taken out of the context of the album and looking thru a 'top trax' lens, it's too much. kevin carter is good, the EMG track that nearly made it on for me, but 5 is kinda lol. does that mean australia is still to come? oh dear.

Trickster / KC don't sound that similar now I listen to them side by side, but still, very similar tempo/chord progression.

KC wins in the trumpet solo stakes. Lyrically too.

This Is Yesterday is grand, except for the rather pedestrian drumming.

I actually quite like the drumming - when the guitar solo starts and that simple but emphatic drum line comes in, it's maybe the only sunny/optimistic moment on the entire album.

don't really "get" Sleepflower, kinda just sounds like generic arena rock to me.

4. A Design For Life (from Everything Must Go) [11 votes, 2 first place, 275 points, 1996]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfEoVxy7VDQ

oh hello. shit juss got real.

Ha! I didn't think that would win.

allsimgonnasayandimgonnaberealbriefhereisthatireallyfuckinhatethatterriblegoddamnsongthereisaidit

Heard it a few too many times to vote for it, but I figured it'd place about there.

TOO LOW

It's not really a terrible song though, is it? It's not like we've just put symm in the top five.

"ADFL" isn't the best example, but I've always loved the sound of EMG, production-wise - somehow both shiny/colorful and ever-so-slightly raw.

no, we've put one of the best pop songs of all time in instead.

3. Yes (from The Holy Bible) [11 votes, 2 first place, 344 points, 1994]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mtwZaRObP8

Gah, I was hoping it'd win. What a track.

xp Ha, exactly - one of the greatest singles of the 90s. Not just a terrific lyric, melody and arrangement but a biopic-perfect break with the past and ideal introduction to Nicky's more humanist, melancholy, old-school socialist worldview. (Which was there previously but always overshadowed by Richey and never this beautifully executed.) I remember reading that when Nicky gave James the lyric he requested "a sense of melancholic victory" from the music. I think the lyric was originally longer but James pared it down to create a sense of space and grace in contrast to the scrunched-up verbosity of The Holy Bible.

The orchestral version of ADFL on Forever Delayed is really nice.

everyone i've loved or hated always seems to leave

and #2 is...?

2. Faster (from The Holy Bible) [11 votes, 3 first place, 347 points, 1994]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hMqpR9AogI

"just an ambulance at the bottom of a cliff " refers to a story involving a childs playground at the top of a cliff, people were worried that the children would fall off and die, but instead of erecting a fence they put an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff so that they could get them to hospital quickly. I havn't a clue if this is a true story but i think it reflect a lot in soceity and its twisted logic. Has anyone else heard this story and remember it more complete than myself?

xp

<3 <3 <3 FASTER <3 <3 <3

v close between 2 & 3 !

I agonised about Yes and This Is Yesterday for my no.1. If I'd gone with Yes it'd've been #2 (at least!)

Faster: Richey's best lyric? James' best treatment? Love the sheer - I gotta say it - manic braggadocio, something that simmers under most of the rest of THB, even the obvious victim songs like 4st 7lb or Yes. "Self disgust is self obsession", and though he seems to spurn the former here he obviously is still suffering from the latter.

I can't see that youtube right now, but I hope you've gone with the incredible Top Of The Pops performance.

yes it is and yes it was

I'm all in favour of bands coming across like a deranged terrorist cell. Faster is such a gloriously lean, hard, aggressive, brutal piece of music and polemic.

The narrator could be the son of the guy from First We Take Manhattan.

I. AM. AN. ARC-EE-TECT!

it's such a bold statement of personal agenda, an only slightly hysterical 'fuck you, i'm right, the world is wrong'. if he had had the faith in himself to really be this guy, who takes on the world, instead of the guy who is beaten down by it, i guess things would have turned out differently.

1. The Ballad Of The Bangkok Novotel (b-side to Found That Soul) [312 votes, 89 first place, 3001 points, 2001]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42955-rehKk

GET IN!!

it took me all day to register 88 socks but goddammit, now we are actually here, it was all worth it

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sorry, just recalculated actually it's

1. Break My Heart Slowly (from Nicky Wire's classic I Killed The Zeitgeist) [400 votes, 94 first place, 3122 points, 2006]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ejh7Z0KmbBw

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_CdKESCVynAI/SbzlrtMjXuI/AAAAAAAACTg/6RMCOkDKTc4/s400/James%2BDean%2BBradfield1.jpg