Talk, if you so desire, about _The Holy Bible_ by the Manic Street Preachers

there are left-wing arguments against gun control, though i've never really been sure what "fuck the brady bill" meant in the context of that song. the police constable line is bad but the rest of PCP feels like it's largely directed against right-wing/statist policies (banning shakespeare, opposing euthanasia, calling anti-choice policies "pro-life"). it's also hard to know how to take a "critique" of political correctness when it comes with lines like "king cigarette snuffed out by her midgets."

i agree that "inhabiting other perspectives" is the best way to understand the lyrics on THB. i remember in some interview around this time richey told simon price that he admired the harsh sharia law regime in sudan. even nicky said that he didn't quite understand what some of richey's lyrics meant, so i think there's always going to be some ambiguity there.

"PCP" always felt to me like "fuck, there's only one song left on this thing, lemme cram in as many contrarian statements I may or may not believe in under four minutes as possible". And I've always enjoyed it that way!

I also don't think you can understand the political mixed messaging on this without noting the non-political stuff from the same sessions like "This Is Yesterday" or "Too Cold Here". I've never got the sense listening to this that Richey derived a ton of fun from playing devil's advocate or whatever.

Honestly, all this runs deeper than politics (and certainly deeper than devil's advocacy, yeah).

i've never really been sure what "fuck the brady bill" meant in the context of that song.

Well, the other part of that lyric is "If god made man they say/ Sam Colt made him an equal."
This is a theme they revisit a few times from different angles:
"If man makes death, death makes man"
"God gives life, god taketh it away, not you."

It's about judgement. The fundamental question at the core of The Holy Bible may be 'who has the authority to judge?'
and it doesn't take a clear stance on this. It's really more concerned with raising and investigating the question, and the album both examines and demonstrates in deeply unsettling ways how moral judgement can be both dehumanizing and empowering. Perhaps *especially* on the more intmate material like 4st 7lbs.
Trying to pin down the band's political stance is the wrong approach to this record IMHO. It's far too distrurbing to be taken as a ringing endorsement of anything, but it's equally immersive and compelling. If THB is overtly against anything, it's complacency.

By the way, I think Journal for Plague Lovers is closer to the sound of Generation Terrorists, and probably closer still to their earlier day-glo punk stuff like New Art Riot than THB. There are passages that refer very explicitly to THB, like the Peeled Apples intro and riff, Bag Lady... JDB invented a singular musical language for this album that seems designed to unsettle. Brittle metallic textures, nauseating modulation fx, bII chords that undermine the sense of key, Klezmer harmony - I don't hear any of that on Journal. It's a much straighter hard rock sound.

The Klezmer stuff evokes the religious element, but also the Eastern European landscape, WW2. It hammers you over the head with Holocaust imagery, really.

If there's a heavier album in all of r'n'r I haven't heard it yet.

What's an example of klezmer harmony on this? Never picked up on that influence.

So, I do think the brief lead guitar break and solo in Archives of Pain are supposed to evoke a Klezmer dirge, probably more in approximation than any studied imitation. That's the one I had in mind, but... are there others? I thought there were several, but glancing at the tracklist now, I don't recall any others. Sorry to disappoint!

lol no worries

I do agree w brad that this perfect album sounds exceptionally perfect and prescient at this time. I think I've said this elsewhere but JDB's overall work on this album is unbelievable and that sometimes gets overlooked amidst the tragedy of it all.

I think the view that it's James's masterpiece has been gaining traction? I haven't read much about this band tbh, at the time I was more plugged in most articles concerned the resentment of "old fans" toward new fans who got onboard with everything must go.

It's a major masterpiece album and James deserves a great deal of the credit for that, yeah.

Agreed that PCP is basically a postcript. It's the lightest track on there by far. Probably a necessary measure.

relistening once more and freshly in awe of the solo in "This Is Yesterday", a moment of theatrical uplift worthy of Queen

This Is Yesterday is my favourite track on the LP.

"why do anything when you can forget everything?" kills me every fuckin time

"fuck the brady bill" was inspired by the "left" libertarian canard that the bill was intended to strip gun rights from poor african americans. [citation needed]

this is yesterday is probably my favorite track on the album too. i was taking a walk the other week and listening to THB and the line simon quotes just crushed me. and yeah it is definitely JDB's album as much as richey's, he really took the challenge of those lyrics (some of which probably seemed virtually unsingable) and ran with them. it's on a whole other level than any other manics album (tho i'm enough of a fan that i can find something to love about all of them).

I'm amazed by artists like JDB and Elton John that routinely write to other people's lyrics. I'm only an amateur songwriter but I find my lyrics and music are always informing each other, and the ability to change one to suit to other seems crucial

And I agree that many of Richie's lyrics look unsingable on the page, so that's an even greater feat in JDB's case

his geetar playing is totally unreal throughout too

"fuck the brady bill" was inspired by the "left" libertarian canard that the bill was intended to strip gun rights from poor african americans. (citation needed)

the language might be blunt but "gun control efforts by a racist system disproportionately impacts black people" is a pretty defensible take

https://blogs.ischool.berkeley.edu/w231/2018/02/27/racial-bias-in-the-national-instant-criminal-background-check-system/

It may be Richie’s brainchild, but JDB’s soul carries the vision. Wouldn’t have worked otherwise.

And I agree that many of Richie's lyrics look unsingable on the page, so that's an even greater feat in JDB's case

The way that they force the lyrics to fit the vocal melodies has always struck me as pretty singular and something I'm surprised doesn't get mentioned more. (I know only their early albums and have no idea if they continued doing this.)

oh they did

yes it just evolved from "how do I make a song from this inscrutable polemic" to "how do I make a song from nicky wire listing off his collection of posters"

"fuck the brady bill" was inspired by the "left" libertarian canard that the bill was intended to strip gun rights from poor african americans. (citation needed)
the language might be blunt but "gun control efforts by a racist system disproportionately impacts black people" is a pretty defensible take

https://blogs.ischool.berkeley.edu/w231/2018/02/27/racial-bias-in-the-national-instant-criminal-background-check-system/

. That's a convincing take on the line in the context of the song. So the idea is Sam Colt made men equal (to one another). It was another footnote after all...

Dissing the guy who inadvertently video taped the Kennedy assassination seems uncalled for tho - any ideas what that one's about?

'Assassination porn' is my best guess.

Like, comparing the fascination with the Zapruder tape to pornography. Abraham Zapruder was the first to watch it in private. Idk.

like being able to watch the crucifixion on repeat

Wow. Glad I asked, thx Brad

Been thinking about this album and thread in the last couple of days (I don't dare listen, it's like opening pandora's box). Assumed the prescience referred to had something to do with covid-19 LOL. Not sure why I thought that since the conversation here highlights its relevance to this particular moment: That reducing everything to opposing dualities/binaries is bullshit and reality is a clusterfuck.
Duh. Embarrassingly slow on the uptake. I mean, I don't even call myself a liberal.

I'm very slow at everything including reading, so I don't read a lot of books. But there were two periods in my life when I read a book every 2 or 3 days. The first one was in the 8th grade, this was the only album in the world that mattered, it was all-enveloping so I went online and found a list of Richey's favorite books and read almost all of them over a period of some months. The thing is, that seems to be the common narrative, seems to be everyone's story about about this record. And people talk about this like it's embarrassing, like it's not absolutely incredible that maybe tens of thousands of kids responded to this album that way.

In terms of the emotional/psychological impact, no other rock music was the same combination of bleak and immersive. I never listened to a lot of metal and the only other music that came close to that for me was gangsta rap. Like I said, I don't dare play this album in certain moods because it's so potent, it usually puts me in a deep funk. But I'm glad that I was 13 and not 35 when I heard this. It's much harder now for music to penetrate like that.