#manic street preachers she bathed herself in a bath of bleach

[omegaremix]

Omega Radio for August 5, 2024; #382.

Who Killed Society: “Nothing New”

Bitch Magnet: “C Word”

Wreck: "Song X"

Sludgeworth: "Angry Man"

M.O.T.O.: "She's Not Ready"

Didjits: "Who's Ready To Get High?"

Volcano Suns: "Punching Bag"

Sixteen Tons: "Drug Drivin'"

Fugazi: "Smallpox Champion" (Albini demo)

Pegboy: "Never A Question"

Melt Banana: "Chicken-Head Raccoon Dog"

Screeching Weasel: "Celena"

Naked Raygun: "Hot Atomics" (redux)

Flogging Molly: "Salty Dog"

Jawbreaker: "Caroline"

Federation X: "Real American Kids With Real American Ids"

F-Minus: "Sweating Blood"

Leftover Crack: "Life Is Pain"

Haymaker Riot: "You Might Know Who We R..."

Gogol Bordello: "Sally"

Vitamin X: "Full Scale Assault"

Local H: "Patrick Bateman"

Fred Schneider: "Coconut"

Palace: "Arise, Therefore"

Will Oldham: "Joya"

Nina Nastasia: "A Love Song"

Frames, The: "Rise"

Songs:Ohia: "Keep It Steady"

Scout Niblett: "I'll Be A Prince"

Joanna Newsom: "Cosmia"

Scott Weiland: "Missing Cleveland"

Bonnie 'Prince' Billy: "I Don't Belong To Anyone"

Parallax Ensemble: "Parallax Game"

Frank Iero & The Future Violents: “A New Day’s Coming”

Laura Jane Grace: "The Mountain Song"

Wedding Present, The: "Brassneck"

Silkworm: "Oh How We Laughed"

Low: "Transmission"

Guided By Voices: "It’s Like Soul Man (Sprout)”

Portastatic: “Late Night Wait Around”

Owls, The: “I Want The Quiet Moments Of A Party Girl”

New Year, The: "Newness Ends"

Electrelane: "On Parade"

Ponys, The: "Another Wound"

Sparklehorse: "Evening Star Super Charger"

Jarvis Cocker: "Further Complications"

Cloud Nothings: "No Sentiment"

Screaming Females: "Something Ugly"

Foxy Shazam: "Gonzo"

Nothing: "In Metal"

Womps: "Dreams On Demand"

Metz: "Common Trash"

Ty Segall: "Orange Color Queen"

Flat Worms: "Antarctica"

Silver Apples: "Daisy"

Cheap Trick: “I Want You To Want Me” (unreleased Albini demo)

Robert Plant & Jimmy Page: "Walking Into Clarksdale"

Iggy & The Stooges: "You Can't Have Friends"

Pixies, The: "Gigantic"

Poster Children: "10,000 Pieces"

Ut: "Safe Burning"

Hum: "(Is Like Kissing an Angel, She Said)"

Breeders, The: "Happiness Is A Warm Gun"

Mule: "Mississippi Breaks"

Failure: "Pro-Catastrophe"

Nirvana: "Heart-Shaped Box"

P.J. Harvey: "Rid Of Me"

Sloy: "Pop"

Tar: "Topless, Mindless, Senseless"

Amps, The: "She's A Girl"

Veruca Salt: "Shimmer Like A Girl"

Auteurs, The: "After Murder Park"

Bush: "Personal Holloway"

Pansy Division: "You're Gonna' Need Your Friends"

Chevelle: "Mia"

Cinerama: "And When She Was Bad"

Manic Street Preachers: “She Bathed Herself In A Bath Of Bleach”

Hugh Cornwell: "Gods Guns And Government"

Deluxe broadcast: first of two five-hour Steve Albini tributes.

[chewbokachoi]

I got tagged by @voidika !

RULES: post 5 songs associated with your OC, followed by 3 outfits they would wear.

Cassan

5 Songs

Panic Drills by Sleigh Bells because... -vaguely gestures to everything-

Room Full of People in Your Head by Cloud Cult because I'm an asshole

Peach, Plum, Pear by Joanna Newsom and other people (but I'm a heretic who likes the Joanna Newsom version best)

She Bathed Herself in a Bath of Bleach by Manic Street Preachers

Be-9 by Versus - This is one of her constants; this is a song that will always follow her wherever she goes.

3 Outfits - I know the black and white one is two, but she'd wear the one with the long sleeves.

[byronsmuse]

She’d walk on broken glass for love She thought burnt skin would please her lover To keep love alive and lust beside Kind people should never be treated like… Empty arms and naked heart The love she sought through faltering thought Table for two, such a sweet delight Whispers “I love you my darling” tonight...

Manic Street Preachers – She Bathed Herself In A Bath of Bleach

[iamtryingtobelieve]

She'd walk on broken glass for love

She thought burnt skin would please her lover

To keep love alive and lust beside

Kind people should never be treated like flies

Empty arms and an aching heart

The love she sought through faltering thought

Table for two, such a sweet delight

Whispers I love you my darling tonight

Love bathed her in a bath of bleach

Brush her hair no one else will

Don't hurt her anymore stop now

But salmon pink skinned Mary still caring

[reubsworld]

This Mess of a Man: The Manics and Masculinity

The Manics never really bought into rock’s testosterone mythology — they’ve always been determinedly androgynous (albeit reluctantly, in some cases), and their entire aesthetic has drawn heavily on the more gender-bending aspects of rock’s past: glam, LA spandex rock, punk. The band’s lyrical/political wing — ie. Nicky Wire and Richey Edwards — took great pleasure in subverting rock’s machismo, and the fact that James Dean Bradfield and Sean Moore are more conventionally masculine has only heightened the sense of fascinating variety in the confines of a single group.

Beyond this, both Wire and Edwards have written from a female perspective in a manner that seems at least both well-intentioned and credible. These songs have addressed subject matter that many of their contemporaries would approach with trepidation — prostitution and the male gaze (“Little Baby Nothing”), eating disorders (“4st 7lb”), self-mutilation (“Roses in the Hospital”), destructive relationships (“She Bathed Herself in a Bath of Bleach”) — and generally done so with insight and compassion. Their interest in feminism is also reasonably well-documented — after all, this is a band who were quoting Andrea Dworkin when James Brooks was still in diapers (not, incidentally, a jab at Brooks, whose ongoing engagement with feminism has been fascinating.)

Personally, though, for all that the band’s feminism has been welcome and inspiring, I’ve always been particularly fascinated with their examination of the other side of the gender binary: the nature of masculinity. For all that rock ‘n’ roll is full of chest-beating declarations of manliness, songs that make a genuine attempt at addressing what it means to be a man are thin on the ground — Joe Jackson’s “Real Men,” Pulp’s “I’m a Man,” a few others.

For all their we-destroy-rock-'n’-roll bravado, from the very beginning, there was always something deeply vulnerable about the Manics’ lyrics — some of intentional, no doubt, some of it I suspect less so. Edwards, in particular, seemed deeply ambivalent about many aspects of manhood. Sex was memorably described as “nature’s lukewarm pleasure” on The Holy Bible album track “She Is Suffering,” but even before then, both he and his co-lyricist had oscillated between bravado (“Starlover,” for instance, and the ripsnorting cover of Guns N’ Roses’ “It’s So Easy” they used to do live) and vulnerability. As I wrote yesterday, Gold Against the Soul-era b-side “Comfort Comes” summed this up neatly, switching between the two perspectives in the course of one song.

Anyone who has one Y chromosome can relate to this — as a man, you’re meant to be relentlessly sex-positive, and any ambivalence about it is by implication a slight on your manhood. And even beyond sex, the Manics’ early to mid-'90s output took aim at traditional manifestations of manhood: marriage (“Hibernation” and “Comfort Comes”), libido (“Nostalgic Pushead,” and its killer opening line “I am the raping sunglass gaze/ Of sweaty man and escort agencies”) and even grooming yourself in the morning (“Yourself”.)

The most plaintive expression of this came with “Life Becoming a Landslide,” which found Bradfield howling the simple declaration “I don’t want to be a man” — the immediately obvious implication is that this is a statement of not wanting to grow up, but then, perhaps there are gender implications beyond that, because as well as discomfort with the societal implications of manhood, many of the band’s lyrics also discuss a discomfort with the body. Clearly, this is something particularly identified with Edwards — apart from his well-documented eating disorders, the imagery of torn skin and mutilated forms appear throughout his lyrics, both in his earlier work and on the lyrics that eventually surfaced on Journal for Plague Lovers.

But for all that Edwards’ lyrics moved repeatedly through this territory, the most simple and powerful declaration of gender ambivalence in the band’s ouevre comes instead from Nicky Wire.

Manic Street Preachers — “Born a Girl”

“Born a Girl” is truly one of the most confessional and compelling rock lyrics you’ll ever read,  especially its startling chorus: “I wish I had been born a girl instead of what I am/ Yes, I wish I had been born a girl and not this mess of a man.” It can be read in a variety of ways — as a declaration of latent transsexuality, as an expression of dissatisfaction with the male gender in general, or just as a deeply personal meditation about gender identity.

There’s another layer of complexity added by the fact that Wire gave these lyrics to Bradfield, the band’s most conventionally masculine member, to sing. This wasn’t lost on the singer, whose thoughts on the song are worth quoting in their entirety:

“If I get, ‘What a fucking poofter,’ who fucking cares? Obviously I’m famous for not being androgynous like Nick and Richey were, so because I’m singing someone else’s emotions and ideals I have to describe it to people, like addressing small child: No, he’s not gay, no he’s not a Madam Jo-Jo TV, but he feels there’s no description for him. I think these are Nick’s purest thoughts, complete, unabashed… not courage, that’s too pugnacious, but just… there’s no shame. Whatsoever. He loves wearing dresses, he prefers women’s clothes and he says at the end of the day his favourite person in the world is his mother, because she’s the most pure, beautiful and sensitive person he’s ever known.” [via]

That’s perhaps the most succinct declaration of what’s always fascinated me about the Manics’ examination of gender and masculinity. They’re one of the few bands to look honestly at what it means to be male, and to understand that as with any aspect of sexuality, masculinity is a spectrum — not, as Richey Edwards once wrote, a “fixed ideal.” Their continuing exploration of this idea has been a source of inspiration and insight for me, and I suspect I’m not alone.

[erkankarakiraz]

. MANIC STREET PREACHERS/ Journal for Plague Lovers/ 2019 1."Peeled Apples"3:33 • 2."Jackie Collins Existential Question Time"2:24 • 3."Me and Stephen Hawking"2:46 • 4."This Joke Sport Severed"3:04 • 5."Journal for Plague Lovers"3:45 • 6."She Bathed Herself in a Bath of Bleach"2:18 • 7."Facing Page: Top Left"2:40 • 8."Marlon J.D."2:50 • 9."Doors Closing Slowly"2:52 • 10."All Is Vanity"3:35 • 11."Pretension/Repulsion"2:05 • 12."Virginia State Epileptic Colony"3:25 • 13."William's Last Words" (featuring the hidden track "Bag Lady") _____ Released in May 2009 by record label Columbia. Recorded between October 2008 and February 2009 and produced by Steve Albini and Dave Eringa, it features exclusively posthumously published lyrics by Richey Edwards, who disappeared on 1 February 1995 and was presumed deceased in 2008. It is the only Manic Street Preachers album in which the lyrics for every song were written solely by Edwards. (Buca Yedigöller) https://www.instagram.com/p/B5a9VylA9bEt2DN728Gv3CAGvcpyiUXCHkoYj80/?igshid=eezfvkzsox8j