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

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.