#manic street preachers 1996

[iamtryingtobelieve]

Here chewing your tail is joy

[m0tel6mxzzy]

she is suffering — manic street preachers / carrie (1976) / x (2022) / delta of venus — anaïs nin / ready or not (2019) / scream (1996) / you first — paramore / don’t worry darling (2022) / the witch (2015)

[sleepflower93]

Manic Street Preachers - Last Christmas

[intravenous-agnostic]

📸: Rob Watkins

[albedoeffekten]

Manic Street Preachers in Pop #19 (Spring 1996)

Text: Andres Lokko Photo: Pennie Smith

There is an already existing translation up on Forever Delayed, but in my opinion it’s not translated that well. It’s readable tho!

[oldgigtickets]

Manic Street Preachers Everything Must Go album playback @ City Art Gallery, Manchester. 1996.

[musicandotherdelights]

Daily Listening, Day #985 - September 11th, 2022

Album: Everything Must Go (Epic, 1996)

Artist: Manic Street Preachers

Genre: Alternative Rock, Britpop

Track Listing: 

"Elvis Impersonator: Blackpool Pier"

"A Design For Life"

"Kevin Carter"

"Enola/Alone"

"Everything Must Go"

"Small Black Flowers That Grow In The Sky"

"The Girl Who Wanted To Be God"

"Removables"

"Australia"

"Interiors (Song For Willem De Kooning)"

"Further Away"

"No Surface All Feeling"

Favorite Song: "The Girl Who Wanted To Be God"

[bisnes-socks]

The Big Finnish Music Project for International Kääryleet, part 2.

Go to part 1 for context. We continue where part one left off, and we're in the 1980's right now, as the list is (more or less) in chronological order.

Hanoi Rocks

One of the most successful Finnish acts internationally, especially in the 1980's, and they were a significant influence on the entire genre of glam rock. The likes of Foo Fighters, Manic Street Preachers and Pearl Jam have all mentioned Hanoi Rocks as a favourite or an influence, and Axl Rose has said there would be no Guns N' Roses if it wasn't for Hanoi Rocks. This is one of their earliest hits, Tragedy.

Dingo

Hysteria is the only word to describe the popularity of Dingo in the 1980's. They had a couple of huge hits but they broke up quite soon after reaching their peak. They've made comebacks since, but never reached the same popularity as what they had for a couple of Dingo hysteria years in the mid 80's. This is one of their big hits, Autiotalo. 

Popeda

Considered to be the fathers of "äijärock". I don't know how to translate äijä, but if you look at them and their vibe, you'll get the idea. They're also part of the Manserock scene of Tampere. They are hands down one of the oldest still active rock bands in Finland, a band that just simply everyone knows. This is their song Pitkä kuuma kesä, originally from 1985. This live performance is from 2002.

Leevi and the Leavings

Iconic. The moment. The voice of the nation. A poprock band that never performed live (only one exception) but were insanely popular, especially in the 1980's. The frontman of the band, Gösta Sundqvist (passed away in 2003), is considered one of the best songwriters in Finland, and is definitely one of the most beloved. Leevi and the Leavings had their own recognisable sound while also being quite experimental. Their lyrics are often exactly the sort of thing that i've mentioned in multiple Käärijä analysis posts as being incredibly Finnish: songs about difficult and hard subjects with actually kind of hilarious lyrics at times. I could have chosen soooo many different songs from them, but decided to go with Teuvo, maanteiden kuningas, simply because I felt like it and because it slaps.

Kaija Koo

Kääryleet might know Kaija Koo as the artist who was the main act of the Helsinki Olympic Stadium gig. She rose to fame in the 90's and has had quite a steady career ever since, slowly growing to her iconic status. This is one of her huge hits, Tinakenkätyttö.

Aikakone

As 90's as it gets. Aikakone basically defines the 90's dance vibe in Finland, and this song is etched into every millennials brain. Very much just a Finnish version of the same style of music, that was globally massive in the 90's. The song is Odota, from 1995.

Apulanta

One of the biggest names in Finnish rock. They started in the 90's and have been a significant influence in the scene ever since. This is one of their early cult classics, Anna mulle piiskaa, from 1996, which i chose because i figured kääryleet appriciate whipping references.

Ultra Bra

Icons of the 90's, the favourite of all liberal millennial hipsters. Known for their distinctive sound produced by four (originally five) lead singers, and having quite a large band set up where brass and horns play a big part. And also for their yellow raincoats. Their song lyrics are often very poetic and kind of.. odd, thematically speaking, like they have a whole song about pike, the fish. Most of the song lyrics are written by Anni Sinnemäki, who has since become a politician. Their composer and pianist is Kerkko Koskinen, a very influential and highly regarded musician and composer. Ultra Bra is doing a comeback at the moment.

This is one of their biggest hits, Sinä lähdit pois, from 1997.

End of part 2. We've reached the 90's, and the next part is reaching the turn of the century, so exciting times ahead musically speaking.

[the-90s-music-colosseum]

September 24th - a very important day for '90s music

Released on September 24th, 1990 (dates vary by region):

AC/DC - The Razor's Edge

Fields of the Nephilim - Elizium

Released on September 24th, 1991 (dates vary by region):

Red Hot Chili Peppers - Blood Sugar Sex Magik

Nirvana - Nevermind

A Tribe Called Quest - The Low End Theory

Pixies - Trompe le Monde

Kyuss - Wretch

Primal Scream - Screamadelica

...and many more including Van Morrison, The Cult, Kid 'N Play, Prong, Thompson Twins.

Originally scheduled for this day but delayed until October: Soundgarden - Badmotorfinger

Released on September 24th, 1996 (dates vary by region):

Weezer - Pinkerton

The Roots - Illadelph Halflife

Sheryl Crow - Sheryl Crow

John Parish and PJ Harvey - Dance Hall at Louse Point

Making this post has made me aware that I missed a lot of very important album birthdays in the past three weeks and I am very sorry to: *deep breath*

Muse - Showbiz, Bjork - Homogenic, Nine Inch Nails - The Fragile, Tori Amos - To Venus and Back, Type O Negative - World Coming Down, Hole - Celebrity Skin, Manic Street Preachers - This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours, Blonde Redhead - In an Expression of the Inexpressable, Mariah Carey - Butterfly, Incubus - S.C.I.E.N.C.E., Dream Theater - Falling Into Infinity, Tool - Ænima, Jamiroquai - Travelling Without Moving, Suede - Coming Up, R.E.M. - New Adventures in Hi-Fi, Blur - The Great Escape, Red Hot Chili Peppers - One Hot Minute, The Notorious B.I.G. - Ready to Die, Nirvana - In Utero, Melvins - Houdini, De la Soul - Buhloone Mindstate, Sepultura - Chaos A.D., Nine Inch Nails - Broken, Blind Melon - Blind Melon, Madonna - Erotica, Suzanne Vega - 99.9F°, Talk Talk - Laughing Stock, Guns N Roses - Use Your Illusion, Hole - Pretty on the Inside, Ozzy Osbourne - No More Tears, Rush - Roll the Bones, Cocteau Twins - Heaven or Las Vegas, Megadeth - Rust In Peace, Judas Priest - Painkiller, INXS - X, and anyone else who I forgot.

September is such a brilliant month for 90s albums! I'll try not to miss any more important birthdays.

[daisies66]

Manic Street Preachers for Arena Magazine, c. 1996

📸: Mark Mattock

[all-rock-and-roll-is-homosexual]

Manic Street Preachers Everything Must Go Tour ad scanned from the November 1996 issue of Select Magazine

if you like my scans and want to repost them off of tumblr or crop/otherwise make edits to any of the photos contained within this article please credit my blog, and if you're feeling extra generous and want to help me out you can donate via my ko-fi donating will allow me to obtain more magazines to scan and upgrade my equipment.

[iamtryingtobelieve]

Twenty foot high on Blackpool promenade

Fake royalty second hand sequin façade

Limited face paint and dyed black quiff

Overweight and out of date

[freakingoutthesquares]

THE QUIDS ARE ALRIGHT Select Magazine, November 1996 Words: Siân Pattenden Photographs: Patrick Ford (I think)

The 1996 Mercury Music Prize. Pulp got the gong, the wonga went to War Child and Jarvo’s eyes went funny!

Primal Scream, Suede, M People, Portishead... The past winners of the Mercury Prize are as varied as the day is long. “And cursed,” according to Mr Jarvis Cocker. Tough luck that Pulp won then.

The awards themselves were mild affair. Lots of suits from record companies stared at Bryan Ferry. (Sitting at a table with his old Roxy Music mucker, Brian Eno.) People toasted the greatness of the music industry, and astounding leaps in telecommunications.

And not very many pop stars showed their faces: both the Manic Street Preachers and Oasis were across the pond, unable to attend, and there was surprisingly little celebrity hanger on action.

Though there were a few live ‘turns’ Underworld and Black Grape didn't play on account of the tricky nature of their life performance. Presenter Richard Jobson – cut out of the BBC coverage - read from an auto cue and didn't make any jokes.

Pulp spent the evening enjoying the bountiful champagne wine on offer and trying to get their mates into the dinner. They didn't think they had a chance of winning, although they weren't saying who they thought would. Shaun Ryder was surrounded by girls wanting his autograph for most of the time, looking rather chuffed with the whole affair. His money, he said, was on Pulp taking home the gong.

Norma Waterson, Select’s favourite Brit-folk chanteuse sat and ate her grub, not fulfilling her ambition to meet Jarvis. He kept nipping around anyway. Brian Eno table-hopped. (Perhaps Bryan Ferry had said something nasty about his nose.) Underworld scoffed, drank lager and cheered their own video.

Finally, after the caviar, or quiche for the vegetarians, the winner was announced. A shiver went down Pulp’s collective spine. They weren't kidding when they went up to receive their award, they gave the money, £25,000 to War Child and tried to fob the award off on someone else.

Jarvis refused to touch it, claiming he'd be doomed if he did. “Everyone goes crap after they've won it,” he said. Guitarist Mark Webber picked it up, and Cocker convinced him he'd been jinxed. In spite of such bad vibery, Island Records had the astounding foresight to book a couple of hotel rooms so that Pulp could have a party into the small hours (Robbie Williams turned up ‘specially).

But Jarvis still didn't know why they were celebrating. Mark Webber agreed: “We've been trying to give the award away all night, then we thought of all the bands we'd like to give it to who should be jinxed,” he said before disappearing into the thick of the booze up.

Transcription by me. More info on PulpWiki

Not to say that the prize IS cursed, but Russell did leave a couple of months later and, well...

[hoodssery]

Recommending Albums 1 & 2

So technically, calling this either "Recommending Albums 1" or "Recommending Albums 2" is wrong, because my recommendation of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea was called “Recommending Video Essays #8” because I didn't know if I was ever gonna recommend another album, especially so soon. However, it's still the first instance of "Recommending Albums" as a title. So what I'm gonna do is cheat and just say that this is 1 & 2.

Recommendation 1 can be found here.

Recommendation:

The Holy Bible 20 – Manic Street Preachers

The Holy Bible 20 (or just The Holy Bible) is an album that I haven't ever really heard many people talk about. To me this is shocking, and to the annoying RateYourMusic dweller part of me, is just downright unacceptable. It also may not be that shocking in reality.

The Holy Bible came out in 1994, a single year filled with so many unbelievably influential and important albums like Illmatic by Nas, Dummy by Portishead, The Downward Spiral by Nine Inch Nails, Grace by Jeff Buckley, Ready to Die by The Notorious B.I.G., Weezer's self-titled Blue Album, Superunknown by Soundgarden, MTV Unplugged in New York by Nirvana, and Diary by Sunny Day Real Estate. In the years before 1994 (most notably for me), My Bloody Valentine's Loveless (1991) became the singular Shoegaze album, A Tribe Called Quest's Low End Theory (1991) largely dictated what Hip-Hop would sound like for the coming decades, and Nirvana would inform the world about Seattle grunge rock with Nevermind (1991) and In Utero (1993). This train of revolutionary albums chugged through to the end of the 20th century as well with Radiohead's The Bends (1995) and Ok Computer (1997), Outkast's ATLiens (1996) and Aquemini (1998), Elliot Smith's Either/Or (1997), Lauryn Hill's The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998), Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (1998), etc. This single decade spawned so many of the most recognizable, popular, and highest rated albums of all time, so to be drowned out among the all time greats is maybe to be expected.

But, The Holy Bible 20 should absolutely be one of these recognizable classics, and absolutely deserves to be talked about as much as Rage Against the Machine's self titled debut or Nine Inch Nails' The Downward Spiral.

The mention of these albums specifically are of particular interest for comparison as they share a lot with The Holy Bible. Rage Against the Machine is a really easy comparison to make. They're pretty similar sounding albums, although Rage Against the Machine lays way more into the metal side of Punk Rock. The Holy Bible has some really catchy riffs both in the lead guitar and bass and is just as head-bang-able as any good Punk Rock album should be. It's instruments are more often than not really clear and bright for the genre, only using heavy distortion and loud, complex sound for the choruses of songs where the energy goes way up. It's never cheery, but it definitely reflects the bands British origins. James Bradfield's voice very clearly and sharply cuts through the instrumentals when he sings and gives the most to the album's shockingly clean sound.

Both of these albums go through song-by-song, serving almost as revolutionary crys for the disgruntled group of mostly suburban high-school aged kids in the nineties who sees the flaws and cruelties of modern capitalist society and wants change. Largely aiming at the most relevant target around for this, white America and the institutions they created, the albums (in the most simple reading) go “Fuck off, I see what you're doing here and how you marginalize people. Die.” For Rage Against the Machine this most notably comes in the form of comparing the hardcore right wing accelerationists like the KKK and contemporary neo-nazi movements and modern police forces and the people who work for them, and the racial injustices spawned out of the idea of white supremacy. The album is also a call to arms to take back power for the people. “We gotta take the power back!” For The Holy Bible it's drawing the comparison between modern (for the nineties) gender politics and the systematic marginalization of anyone considered other, and a telling of how the constant re-enforcement of the “normal” affects those considered abnormal. The Holy Bible takes a more poetic approach to the overall presentation of the message compared to Rage Against the Machine, which is mostly just a really banging call to arms.

Potential Content Warning for Suicide and Self-Harm

While this an accurate summary to The Holy Bible 20 it misses the some of the finer points of the album that allowed me to make the kind of pretentious sounding comparison to Nine Inch Nails' The Downward Spiral; an album largely about Trent Reznor's declining mental state in the face of a society who seems content with eating itself alive to keep in it's direction. The Holy Bible 20 was mostly written by Richey Edwards, who served not as the bands vocalist or a player of the instrumentals, but as the band's spokesperson and main lyricist along with the band's bassist Nicky Wire. I don't know a lot about Richey, but what I do know is that Richey was very open about having pretty severe depression and self-harm issues in interviews and from what I understand had an issue with alcohol abuse. Richey has been a missing person, since February 1, 1995, and has been legally presumed dead since 2008.

While a lot of songs can be read as, and are, really powerful critiques of how the systems of power in today's society marginalize anyone deemed unfit to be the normal, the perspective of a lot of what the album is about changes when you know that most of it was written from the perspective of someone who was really struggling with themselves mentally and would go missing 6 months after the album was released. It's not just an example of how these injustices and hardships can hurt and negatively shape and mold people into broken people, it's a first hand account. This makes a lot of the lyrics on the album even more sad and tragic than they already apparently are, and adds a new context to the entire album.

The first track “Yes” is a critique of the mind set consumerism creates for both the rich and poor, but with knowing what Richey went through, the account of the emptiness of depression starts showing through. “She is Suffering” and “4st 7lb” transforms the the messages about beauty standards into really haunting accounts of problems with self-image and self-worth. This in my opinion is what really makes this album special. It is a biting, unrelenting, extremely blunt critique of the system that disregards and hurts people for the feeling a uniform feeling of normalcy that anyone can pick-up and understand that is formed and shaped around a hidden perspective of someone that can't seem to help themselves. It's really sad, really haunting, and all of it is put over some of the most catchy riffs of the 90's.

The music is great, and really makes me feel like a kid from suburban Illinois in 1996 who really hates going to church, but what it has to say both on the surface and the more sub-textual accounts is what really makes this worth listening to.

It's one of my absolute favorite albums of all time. 10/10.

Other Recommendations:

I just talked about them a little bit, but both Rage Against the Machine (1992) and Nine Inch Nails' The Downward Spiral (1994) are really worth listening to if you even just like music. I personally like The Downward Spiral more because of how unique it still sounds to this day, so if you can only listen to just one I would pick that one.

But don't pick just one. Listen to them both. Please listen to them both. Please. Okay thank you bye <3

[intravenous-agnostic]

📸: Rob Watkins

[everydayesterday]

Shuffle your favorite playlist and post the first five songs that come up. Then copy/paste this ask to your favorite mutuals.

Pearl Jam - Release (1991) ("I'll ride the wave where it takes me" this was the song that changed how I viewed music, especially the four-minute instrumental outro; my first epiphany back when I was but a boy; I associate it with the old-growth rainforests and the shores of the Pacific NW.) Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! (2008) ("Larry made his nest up in the autumn branches / Built from nothing but high hopes and thin air" I should probably listen to more of his stuff, as this is the only Nick Cave album I own; I also quite enjoy the score work that Cave and Warren Ellis did for The Proposition.) The Decemberists - The Rake's Song (2009) ("What can one do when one is widower? / Shamefully saddled with three little pests / All that I wanted was the freedom of a new life / So my burden I began to divest" a recounting of how a father killed all of his children. My ex-laws hated this song.) Doves - There Goes the Fear (2002) ("Think of me when you're coming down / But don't look back when leaving town today" I saw these guys at Temple Bar in Dublin and a drunk accosted them before even starting the show, trying to get a request in that he'd written on a small piece of paper; it turned out that the song he was requesting was their biggest song to date; the lead singer read it aloud, and replied "Yeah, we'll get to it." the crowd found this highly amusing; maybe you had to be there. anyway, this song has absolutely incredible percussion.) Esthero - Black Mermaid (2012) ("And I've spent most of my life deep down inside myself / I've dreamt about the possibility of someone else" she's actually a friend of mine going way back to the geocities/angelfire fansite days before official artist websites existed; I was unofficial marketing and she reached out; we're about the same age, so we hit it off, and I've had the good fortune of some incredible life experiences with her. I had the benefit of hearing this song in its infancy at least 5 or 6 years before it was released and before it had anything more than a chorus. a very cool thing about this song is that it forms a plot point in the film "Nappily Ever After," where Sanaa Lathan actually sings the song herself.)

bonus content (the songs that followed): Manic Street Preachers - A Design for Life (1996), Animotion - Obsession (1984), Bill Withers - Grandma's Hands (1971), Primal Scream - Kowalski (1997)