| Manic Street Preachers – Close My Eyes Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| It is certainly written by Nicky in the first person about life in the band, but I don't think anyone writing from this perspective has ever quite got the tone as precise as this about the unique situation it is. Clearly when you make music and put it in front of people and then repeat to fade, you enter a kind of limbo where you're invested in the music but also you lose grip on it and it becomes something else. I'd say there's an added bittersweetness to how their history has informed where they've ended up, which the "back to memory, back to the start" line nods to. This wasn't new ground for Nicky, he'd touched on it before: "in the beginning, when we were winning, when our smiles were genuine". I don't think it's anti-fan. It's a very subjective point of view on what it's like on a human level to kind of front something like the Manic Street Preachers. You're constantly torn between the responsibility of it and the chore it becomes. "It's not about us anymore" really sums it up - it's resigned, and the overall tone of the song is kind of a lament to the glory days of their story, and how you are ultimately a prisoner to time, to change, to memory. | |
| Manic Street Preachers – Close My Eyes Lyrics | 16 years ago |
|
Yes, I agree. It's actually quite an intelligent take on the situation the band had found itself in, and any band finds itself five, ten years into its career. The key line is "it's not about us any more". You get swept along in the journey of what it is and when you look up you realise it's turned into something quite different and even from the very heart of the band you can't tell if it's got anything to do with you anymore. I love this because it's not self-indulgent, it's got that tinge of honesty that 'The Everlasting' has, admitting to your fans that you're maybe not what you were, but in doing so they create a new language of what's lost. It's like that Beckett quote "maybe my best years are gone..." finding strength in what's gone. The Manics are particularly good at this when they get it right. |
|
| Biffy Clyro – That Golden Rule Lyrics | 16 years ago |
|
The Wire, Season four, episode 7. Bunk Moreland interrogating Omar Little: "Aw yeah. That Golden Rule..." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unto_Others |
|
| Bloc Party – The Marshals Are Dead Lyrics | 16 years ago |
| I believe the "when I am dead, and the Marshalls are dead..." line from 'Atonement' is purely coincidence, since in that passage Briony is referring to the character Paul Marshall and his wife, whereas in this song it is 'marshals' meaning guide or official. | |
| Bloc Party – The Marshals Are Dead Lyrics | 17 years ago |
|
It's about not buying into idea of there being people to 'marshal' your taste, fashion sense and ideas through the media. It puts forward an idea that all forms of media and culture are to be treated with suspicion. On the hand you have a sloganeering approach, "attention fashion victims!" and on the other you have this slightly more cryptic, personal take which imagines someone washed out by it in quite a filmic, Orwellian way. Their thoughts are "cancelled out" and life becomes ordered and symmetrical and almost militaristic. The line "a country that grows us but cannot contain us" stretches the metaphor of culture as a country or government, and while its citizens are schooled in what constitutes 'art' or 'fashion' in actual fact they cannot be policed by those cultural ideas and eventually can only break free of them, much like Winston attempts in '1984' I guess. But this isn't about some far off police state, it's about life now - the era of television, celebrity magazines, mass media. |
|
* This information can be up to 15 minutes delayed.