![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dog_eared_chroniclesEverything (A Book about Manic Street Preachers) by Simon Price
This is going to be a weird one, it's from such a specific flash-in-the-pan moment in my life. Also, this is the first book that I really wish I had recently re-read before it came up on my list. I'll add it to the pile by my bed, but in the mean time -- here goes:
I'm not Welsh or British generally or even European -- not for lack of trying, believe me, I spent an embarrassing number of hours as a teenager just *willing* myself to become 90s Helena Bonham-Carter. For better or worse, I was not successful and so I remain American.
Despite this, I became beyond obsessed with the Welsh band Manic Street Preachers for a 3 - 4 year period in my late teens/early 20s. This never would have happened if I hadn't traveled to Norway during that time, I'm sure. Except for Richey Edwards, whose still-sad disappearance makes the rounds on American true crime shows & now podcasts every once and a while, MSP had zero presence or cultural cache in the US. Like, I'm sure I was not the only American MSP fan at that time, but I'm also pretty sure that if you got everyone together who fit that description we couldn't fill a Greyhound bus.
I'm gonna note here that being an American probably really (negatively) impacts how or if I understand MSP. As this book makes clear, in fact, MSP aren't "for" Americans. Whether intentionally or not -- depending on who you ask, it goes either way -- they haven't courted an American audience in decades. So I'm writing this with that in mind; this is definitely not meant to be an explainer on the group.
I don't remember how I first learned about MSP. It was probably in Q magazine, which (before I went to Norway) I used to buy for, like, $13 each at Record & Tape Traders bc British oh my god. This is all honestly a little painful to type, how could ANYONE stand to be around me? Anyway, I somehow happened to learn about the existence of MSP while in Norway, which was lucky b/c I actually had access to their music there. Before streaming services existed, you were looking at a $40 price tag to get their CDs in the US and not even my pretentious 20 year old ass would pay that.
I immediately became obsessed. I bought all their existing albums on CD. I bought CD singles of songs from their existing albums. I bought B-sides. I bought magazines. I bought more magazines. I bought white posterboards, which I taped together to make a 8 ft x 6 ft enormous canvas on my wall, onto which I drew a portrait of Nicky Wire in Sharpie. Which my parents, for reasons that I'm not sure about, took from me when I moved and hung in their dining room where it remains to this day.
And I bought this book. (And the gorge Mitch Ikeda MSP photograph book which I'm sure I will get to at some point.) I devoured this book, I absolutely loved it -- in part because it's not even remotely like the other musician biographies that I've read before. (This reminds me that I have a 400 page book about The Who lurking somewhere in the house that I haven't thought about in a decade.)
"Everything" is a series of essays, centered firmly around the MSPs & their... I'm gonna have to use this word b/c I can't think of another, so apologies in advance... "journey" as a band. But the themes of the essays are so much broader and so much more interesting.
This book gave me a clearer view into 80s-90s British (specifically, Welsh) class politics than I'd ever had before. It also functioned for me, just like MSP did themselves, like a gateway to all kinds of other media I'd never explored before. Not just music -- in fact, I'd say it didn't turn me on to any other music, but to authors (Rimbaud) and poets (Larkin) and concepts (Marxist pop). It sounds pretentious now, I guess -- but I was pretentious then. And totally into it.
It also paints a... more clear-eyed view of Richey Edwards than I'd seen in other media. I don't know if it's a true view, obviously, but I didn't think it was a totally romanticized or exploitative view of his alcoholism, depression, self-harm, insomnia, and eventual (probable) suicide/disappearance. And it paints a similarly clear-eyed view of the painful, necessary ways the group & each individual member was forced to change, cope and modify -- at least through the date of publication of the book -- as a result of his disappearance.
I carried my love of MSP back to the US with me. More than one roommate of mine in the early 2000s got trapped into an extremely nerdy conversation about DIY punk aesthetic with me as a result, ha. I really fell away from following the band after a couple years, though -- but I've held on to this book b/c I remember just what a massive spell it cast on me back then.
Next: The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Reading: still The Magicians
This is going to be a weird one, it's from such a specific flash-in-the-pan moment in my life. Also, this is the first book that I really wish I had recently re-read before it came up on my list. I'll add it to the pile by my bed, but in the mean time -- here goes:
I'm not Welsh or British generally or even European -- not for lack of trying, believe me, I spent an embarrassing number of hours as a teenager just *willing* myself to become 90s Helena Bonham-Carter. For better or worse, I was not successful and so I remain American.
Despite this, I became beyond obsessed with the Welsh band Manic Street Preachers for a 3 - 4 year period in my late teens/early 20s. This never would have happened if I hadn't traveled to Norway during that time, I'm sure. Except for Richey Edwards, whose still-sad disappearance makes the rounds on American true crime shows & now podcasts every once and a while, MSP had zero presence or cultural cache in the US. Like, I'm sure I was not the only American MSP fan at that time, but I'm also pretty sure that if you got everyone together who fit that description we couldn't fill a Greyhound bus.
I'm gonna note here that being an American probably really (negatively) impacts how or if I understand MSP. As this book makes clear, in fact, MSP aren't "for" Americans. Whether intentionally or not -- depending on who you ask, it goes either way -- they haven't courted an American audience in decades. So I'm writing this with that in mind; this is definitely not meant to be an explainer on the group.
I don't remember how I first learned about MSP. It was probably in Q magazine, which (before I went to Norway) I used to buy for, like, $13 each at Record & Tape Traders bc British oh my god. This is all honestly a little painful to type, how could ANYONE stand to be around me? Anyway, I somehow happened to learn about the existence of MSP while in Norway, which was lucky b/c I actually had access to their music there. Before streaming services existed, you were looking at a $40 price tag to get their CDs in the US and not even my pretentious 20 year old ass would pay that.
I immediately became obsessed. I bought all their existing albums on CD. I bought CD singles of songs from their existing albums. I bought B-sides. I bought magazines. I bought more magazines. I bought white posterboards, which I taped together to make a 8 ft x 6 ft enormous canvas on my wall, onto which I drew a portrait of Nicky Wire in Sharpie. Which my parents, for reasons that I'm not sure about, took from me when I moved and hung in their dining room where it remains to this day.
And I bought this book. (And the gorge Mitch Ikeda MSP photograph book which I'm sure I will get to at some point.) I devoured this book, I absolutely loved it -- in part because it's not even remotely like the other musician biographies that I've read before. (This reminds me that I have a 400 page book about The Who lurking somewhere in the house that I haven't thought about in a decade.)
"Everything" is a series of essays, centered firmly around the MSPs & their... I'm gonna have to use this word b/c I can't think of another, so apologies in advance... "journey" as a band. But the themes of the essays are so much broader and so much more interesting.
This book gave me a clearer view into 80s-90s British (specifically, Welsh) class politics than I'd ever had before. It also functioned for me, just like MSP did themselves, like a gateway to all kinds of other media I'd never explored before. Not just music -- in fact, I'd say it didn't turn me on to any other music, but to authors (Rimbaud) and poets (Larkin) and concepts (Marxist pop). It sounds pretentious now, I guess -- but I was pretentious then. And totally into it.
It also paints a... more clear-eyed view of Richey Edwards than I'd seen in other media. I don't know if it's a true view, obviously, but I didn't think it was a totally romanticized or exploitative view of his alcoholism, depression, self-harm, insomnia, and eventual (probable) suicide/disappearance. And it paints a similarly clear-eyed view of the painful, necessary ways the group & each individual member was forced to change, cope and modify -- at least through the date of publication of the book -- as a result of his disappearance.
I carried my love of MSP back to the US with me. More than one roommate of mine in the early 2000s got trapped into an extremely nerdy conversation about DIY punk aesthetic with me as a result, ha. I really fell away from following the band after a couple years, though -- but I've held on to this book b/c I remember just what a massive spell it cast on me back then.
Next: The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Reading: still The Magicians
