| Tupac Shakur – Hail Mary Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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I love Tupac, but give it up, he's dead. Number one he didn't have the money at the time (since he was pretty much broke in 1996 since Death Row was only paying him in leased cars and jewelry) that it would take to fake his death. He didn't just disappear like Manic Street Preachers guitarist Richey Edwards, he would have found a body to put in his place, pay off the doctors, coroners and police to lie. Then he'd have to get a fake passport, possibly plastic surgery since he was so famous he'd be instantly recognized in public practically everywhere, and with all the people involved in the plot for him to go into hiding nobody has talked? Somebody would have sold their story by now. Plus a big part of the alive theories center on his returning from "death". Originally he was supposed to return in 2000, then 2003 (7 years), then on September 13th, 2006, then on July 7th, 2007. I think it's clear he isn't returning. Because he died on September 13th, 1996. Yes, there are very bizarre circumstances surrounding his death (like the 7's, the "I Ain't Mad At Cha" video, having so much material ready to posthumous release) but strange occurances happen in lots of people's deaths, famous and unfamous. And as for all of his talk about "leaving", I think Tupac fantasized about it because he was incredibly stressed out about the prospect of returning to prison or being unhappy with his Death Row contract, but that doesn't mean he went through with it anymore than Lenny Kravitz wasn't planning on going underground after singing "I wanna get away, I wanna fly away." Who hasn't thought about the relief leaving your existence during stressful times would bring? |
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| Manic Street Preachers – William's Last Words Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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Nicky edited down the lyrics to a way where there’s no other way to view them but as a goodbye or suicide note. I find that very odd since the Manics have gone out of their way to dispel the belief that Richey committed suicide after abandoning his car. Or maybe with close to 15 years gone they now accept the belief? But in the context of seeing the entire piece, it is clearly not about Richey. It is about an old man on his death bed having one of his final conversations with an old friend. The piece is very long and Nicky used very little of it, using only a few lines from “William” and completely editing out the other end of the conversation from his friend. But much like Elliott Smith or Kurt Cobain’s last songs, due to the fate of the writer, it’s almost impossible to not view them as a statement of intent. Even though they’re more than likely just misinterpreted character pieces. It’s not like their work wasn’t bleak before their inner-turmoil got too much. By the time they all made their final decisions, writing was probably the last thing they cared about. |
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| Manic Street Preachers – Virginia State Epileptic Colony Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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This definitely was influenced by Richey’s stay in a mental institution. In institutions they keep the patients sedate so they’re easily controllable (“They sit around tables rendered dumb“), and give them menial activities like arts and crafts, in addition to making them do chores to keep them occupied. (“Cleaning cooking and flower arranging. Dissolves a kind of liberation.”) I believe it’s also drawing a comparison to institution life and working class life, the same way Small Black Flowers drew comparisons to captive zoo animals and humans held captive by oppressive society. Your boss is your doctor, your duties at work keep you too occupied to put up a fight for control, ect. I have absolutely no idea what the “Piggy” chant means. |
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| Manic Street Preachers – She Bathed Herself in A Bath of Bleach Lyrics | 15 years ago |
| A lot of lyrics on JFPL deal with the imagery of bad relationships as torture. This definitely fits into that mold. It doesn’t have the religious imagery to go along with the suffering theme as other songs do, but it definitely equates emotional torture to physical. | |
| Manic Street Preachers – Pretension/Repulsion Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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A song against falsely objectifying beauty through the media. Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres was one of the first artists to change the way a woman’s body looked for added sexuality, when he famously painted a woman with an extra-long back because he found it more sexually attractive in his famous work Grande Odalisque. It was like the original version airbrushed photoshopping if you think about it. “Born-a-graphic vs. Porn-a-graphic” also touches upon the same thought. Very few women in pornography or tamer sexualized photos are natural, either through caking on far too much make up to re-make their face, or through plastic surgery like breast implants. At this stage in his writings, Richey was writing some short-hand phrasing that was almost like an inner-code only he truly understood (like on “Removables”) I don’t think they’re throw-away lines, but just something only he understood. My guess is he was writing about how so many people obsessed with their beauty are so self-loathing. Maybe "Shot from shot The androgyny fails" is referencing models? They are obsessed with their looks, and also some of the most miserable people in the universe for it. |
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| Manic Street Preachers – Journal For Plague Lovers Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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This definitely seems to be about people who believe god is responsible for everything that happens and life is destiny over choice. True believers always say they leave their life in god’s hands, and justify misery in the world as “part of god’s plan” instead of wanting to do something about it. This song definitely could have fit in on The Holy Bible since so much of the world’s evil is done in the name of some kind of god, which somehow makes it okay. And unfortunately, with the war on terror, this sentiment sounds incredibly fresh even though it was written in 1994. Some things never change. But just think about how great Richey's songs about the post-9/11 world would have been. It's something Nicky doesn't touch on nearly enough. |
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| Manic Street Preachers – This Joke Sport Severed Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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I think ElleVeeElle is correct. Also there’s a ton of references relating attempts at relationships to torture, which really shows you where Richey’s head was at. If The Holy Bible was a hellish view of the outside world, then Journal For Plague Lovers does the same for your own little world in a lot of lyrics. Leaders lie, lovers lie. And when you come to the conclusion that there’s no such thing as true perfection attainable whether in society or romance, it’s not an easy thought to take for idealists. |
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| Manic Street Preachers – All Is Vanity Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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Yeah, I think this is about wondering if Communism is an easier life than western democracy. Both systems rule you with an ironfist regardless, and arguably only offer the illusion of a choice, so would life be easier if those illusions of choice were gone? All western democracy really brings to the table to make it different these days is its obsession with public perception (All Is Vanity) so maybe those living under communist rule are happier than us with supposed freedom? I don’t personally agree with that, but I think that’s what Richey was getting at. |
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| Manic Street Preachers – Doors Closing Slowly Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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I think this one is in part looking at the sacrifice of relationships people feel the need to make to be successful at their occupation of choice. You can’t obsess over work (especially in the entertainment field) and be away from home endlessly and expect to have a happy family waiting on you. You’re going to have a mate feeling lonely and rejected and children you sacrificed the joy of parenting in watching them grow up. You can’t have it both ways. “Listen to the selfish ones. They are the voice of accomplishment.” Also looking at the religious imagery combined with the sacrifice of relationships is quite interesting. Christianity is all about sacrificing and maybe even suffering for salvation. Relationships also have that same need to make sacrifices that you might not want to do to appease your mate, or in religion’s case your god. Like those in the Catholic Church who deny themselves human relationships for religious relationships, it's the same thing in a way. (Except without the whole Altar Boys thing....) |
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| Manic Street Preachers – Marlon J.D. Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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The verse about being whipped in the face was a reference to the Marlon Brando film “Reflections In A Golden Eye”, which Nicky says was one of Richey’s favorite movies. He also lifted the “Learn to live without clutter” line from the film. “So see, so see Marlon J.D.” Maybe J.D. doesn’t stand for James Dean and I’m way off. But assuming it does, Dean and Brando were briefly mirror images of each other: two 1950s film icons, sex symbols, beloved actors. But their lives took two different paths. James Dean died young and beautiful in an auto accident, he’s frozen in time forever as he was in “Rebel Without A Cause”. Marlon Brando lived a long life, lost his good looks and due to his erratic behavior lost the same favor he had with people in the 1950s. And although Brando is thought of highly as one of the greatest actors to ever live, Dean’s brief career was untarnished and gets to be viewed in the “what might have been light”. For all we know it would have been Dean embarrassing himself at Michael Jackson’s 2001 Madison Square Garden concert if he had lived. But he left the world at the top of his game and for a lot of people (including Richey unfortunately) that is desirable compared to declining in later life as all humans do. |
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| Manic Street Preachers – Another Invented Disease Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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There's nothing that explicitly says in the lyrics anything about a belief in AIDS being engineered in a lab. But the line "Their armies feed the ghetto lame. Government approve it just the same" could refer to the conspiracy theory (although there is very strong evidence showing it is true) that crack-cocaine was pushed into the ghettos by the CIA-Contra debacle. This would keep the underclass forever the underclass by giving them criminal records either for using or selling the drugs that would prevent them ever getting good jobs. But the rest of it seems, as my nothing pointed out, seems to be about the evils of consumer culture. If you make people believe there is something wrong with them (they don't dress cool enough, their teeth aren't white enough, they need to cover skin blemishes, ect, ect, infinite ect) then you can sell them a cure. And in the age of American prescription drug ads that are marketed to let people know they have a disease they didn't know they had so they should talk their doctor into letting them buy the over-priced cure.....it's especially resonating. |
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| Manic Street Preachers – Me and Stephen Hawking Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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I think this song is decrying the future" cloning, engineered food, were both hot topics in the mid-90s. People freaked out when faced with the moral question of how cloning humans will be handled. "Today it's a cow, tomorrow it's you." "African Punch and Judy show at half the price" I think refers to the capitalist phenomenon of outsourcing labor to countries that could get it cheaper. This was just beginning when Richey wrote this around mid to late 1994. So it is impressive he was on to it this early. And hopefully this won't start any Tupac-like rumors that he's still out there writing new songs. It just shows how frightening his intellect was. (Yeah, I believe he's dead personally.) "A hundred thousand watch Giant Haystacks in a Bombay fight." Giant Haystacks was a famous British professional wrestler, an icon of working class England. Having him "in a Bombay fight" might refer to the fight the working class UK will have with India over outsourced labor jobs. Not in a racist way, since Richey was hardly a BNP-sympathizer, but in the way that's there's only so many factory jobs to go around and if another country can do them cheaper, very few corporations care if they're taking them away from the west. "Me and Stephen Hawking, we laugh We missed the sex revolution When we failed the physical." Such a great line. And it's shocking the same guy who wrote the pitch-black outlook of The Holy Bible came up with it a year or so later. It's probably just a punchline. But if you want to look deeper at it, maybe it is saying Hawking, due to his physical handicap is really just an (incredible) brain without much of a outer body. And Richey probably saw him as a much more dignified human being for it. If you read Richey's interviews, he really saw himself as anti-sexual, so I guess he identified with that. Oddly. |
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| Manic Street Preachers – Jackie Collins Existential Question Time Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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Existential question means questioning the meaning of life. Jackie Collins is a lowbrow novelist who writes trite books obsessing on relationships more about lust than love. I'm sure it really peeved Richey that more people cared about reading her idiotic novels than reading thought provoking books. "Situationist sisterhood of Jackie and Joan. Separates us the questions without a home." Jackie's books, and her sister Joan's movie roles, often glorify infidelity and sex without a loving relationship. Richey, although according to Nicky he never really had a real relationship and often mocked relationships (like on Life Becoming A Landslide) really had longings for a serious romance, even if he really didn't believe in it. Towards the end of his life he grew very conservative in his views on sex and spoke out against the 90s anti-monogamy sexual relationship as "love" (the question without a home.) |
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| Manic Street Preachers – Peeled Apples Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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Man, this is such a deep, deep song. Each line carries so much weight. Nobody writes lyrics like this any more. "The more I see, the less I scream." You get numb to tragedies and injustice when you see so much of it. So the more you see, the less you feel a strong reaction (scream). "The figure 8 inside out is infinity" Talking about running in circles, never getting anywhere. "The naked lightbulb is always wrong" A naked (uncovered) lightbulb brings enough light to see everything. You see the ugliness in life you want to really ignore. "They make your break complete" Focus exposes what is broken. "Then they blow it to kingdom come" People would rather wait until something is totally destroyed that take the effort to fix it. "Riderless horses on Chomsky's camelot" A riderless horse is a tradtion at American state funeral processions. Noam Chomsky wrote a book called "Rethinking Camelot" tearing down myths about John F. Kennedy, showing he wasn't as good of a leader as the re-writing of history makes him out to be. "Camelot" is a name given to the Kennedy family compound since they are treated as the closest thing to American Royalty. "Bruises on my hands from digging my nails out" A martyr/crucifixtion reference. "A series of images against you and me" People would rather focus on someone else's problems than their own. "Trespass your torment if you are what you want to be" If you succeeded at what you want to do in life, don't bemoan it. "I once impersonated a shopwork dummy" Richey was seen as just MSP's mascot in the days before he was respected as a lyricist, since he didn't actually play any instruments. The Holy Bible made people respect Richey, but before then he was mocked and hated by non-fans. "The Levi jean will always be stronger than the Uzi" I believe this is a pun on (Primo) Levi gene. Levi was a Holocaust survivor who wrote books and poems about his experiences in Auschwitz, one poem is in the artwork to MSP's Gold Against The Soul album. This says the will to survive is stronger than the violent force and oppression its up against. "A dwarf takes his cockerel out of the cockfight" Cockerel is a young rooster, taken out by another small, weak being (a human dwarf). So that's talking about the weak not putting up a fight. "Falcons attack the pigeons in the west wing at night" Falcons are big, strong, violent birds that always get their way (those in power) Pigeons are like the impoverished weaklings of the birds. Even though pigeons (impoverished people) outnumber falcons (the powerful), they still get dominated. And the inner-dealings to screw over the majority of the world are done in darkness (The West Wing of the White House, where the work is done, at night.) |
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