#the original unedited lyrics and the final album versions and the remixes i just love them all and have lots of thoughts

[jesuisgourde]

also honestly the original lyrics to jackie collins existential question time are so bitchy and i really love them i mean look

I fully respect JDB and Nicky's right to edit Richey's lyrics because sometimes they're a lot and also because that's how it's always been since the beginning but also come on, this is so fucking good why'd you take that second verse away it's so bitchy

[jesuisgourde]

This may be another Unpopular Manics Opinion but I actually really really like the weirder JFPL remixes, especially the Fuck Buttons remix of Virginia State Epileptic Colony, the Patrick Wolf remix of This Joke Sport Severed, and the Optimo remix of Journal For Plague Lovers.

I really like the remix of Virginia State Epileptic Colony that Fuck Buttons did because it’s a dub mix that doesn’t just take the lyrics and put a dance track over them, it captures the feelings that I think are part of the song. It turns the lyrics into this background murmur, voices that are in the middle of the mix but you can’t make them out, like voices in your head or people talking just down the hall and trying to keep you from overhearing. The beat is consistent, but has this lovely gently ascending instrumental bit - which has been switched to A major in the mix when the original song is in A minor - that starts partway through and sits between the bass beat and the whispers. And then suddenly at the end it just wrenches itself into these metallic ringing, screeching sounds that fade away, but there’s no indication whether it’s a sound of resistance or a sound of collapse.

I’ve posted about it already but I didn’t like the Patrick Wolf remix of This Joke Sport Severed at first because it’s really weird. But unsurprisingly I think he tapped into a feeling that is apparent on the entire album, and expressed it in a way that is really interesting. It’s not a pretty remix and it’s not a dance remix, it’s this insane, overwhelming, twisting, out of step remix that captures so well the overstimulating feeling of the world. I think it’s so cool because it’s not trying to capture the words of the song -- the words are already expressing themselves -- it’s trying to cause them. The remix with it’s weird out of sync clapping and children cheering samples and the insane bells/dinky piano noises and the way it literally speeds up faster and faster at the end is mimicking the circumstances and experiences and feelings that will result in the loss of self and the confusion and the desperate withdrawal that the lyrics express.

The Optimo remix of Journal For Plague Lovers captures the album’s struggle to communicate through compounded fragments, since most of the remix is just the dance beat using a sample of an incoherent syllable clipped from JDB singing (I think it’s a fragment of “all cuts”). It also captures the (unedited version) individual song’s focus on the negative of both religion and medical practices, since the one full sample it uses in the middle and then again at the end is just “only a god can bruise” over and over again, with this really cool rushing “alarm/siren” sound emphasising it. The siren sound is this panicky thing slightly smoothed over by the rushing, but it flanks the “only a god can bruise” samples in a way that feels like a warning. Then the samples drop away and it’s just flat out electronic stabbing out at the airy beat before returning to the sample, which has a distorted echo of itself behind this time. The final thirty seconds of the song has the beat tripping over itself, and then the final “only a god can bruise” ends not on the sample of JDB singing beautiful, but on the twisted, distorted echo rasping “bruise” as it fades away. It feels like the original lyrics’ focus on wounds, gore, pain, and the false efficacy of religion in the face of evidence of a cruel god.