Black Square

General CommentA few bits of quoting and paraphrasing:
"Art is never modern, art is primordially eternal"- Austrian abstract expressionist Egon Schiele
"Art is never finished, only abandoned"- Paul Valery (often misattributed to Da Vinci or Picasso)
"Free yourselves from the tyranny of objects"- Kazimir Malevich

The title is a reference to Malevich's Black Square, a Russian futurist opera concerning the capture and murder of the sun and the ending of time, and a black, square artwork which functioned as its third act. To Nicky Wire this canvas symbolised "punk. This is it. I am stripping the world of everything you have seen before and this is the reality of now."

According to John Gray's recent The Immortalization Commission (the book which Wire credits for bringing Malevich back to his attention), after the death of Lenin in 1924, the black square came to mean something else. It was the inspiration for the Soviet premier's cuboid tomb, intended to be a 'fourth dimension' beyond the possibility of death itself. "Lenin's death is not death," wrote Malevich, "that he is alive and eternal, is symbolized in a new object, taking as its form the cube."


The Manics have always been as much a portal as a band, a gateway to a whole universe of art and ideas. Nicky said "We saw ourselves as transistors, like Stockhausen said, we're just transistors to another life. Because all those things that we picked up, mostly from watching the telly or listening to music, we were trying to get across how enriching that was."

[Credit for all this information has to go to Quietus magazine btw]

(And can I add that the little melody at the start is VERY similar to The Cardigan's Hold Me. That is all.)

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