I am all the things that you regret
A love letter to the lyrics of Faster by Manic Street Preachers
Wherever it can, pop always accelerates to the explicit. In the 50s, Elvis’ TV appearances had to be filmed from the waist up. Now nudity abounds. The Who’s f-f-f-f-fade away in the 60s seems a quaint sidestep these days compared to the filth and fury that punk and hip-hop forcibly injected into the mainstream.
But it’s not just what pop is allowed to do or say that has become more explicit over time. What it wants to say has also changed. It reflects life, ideas, realities more authentically than ever. Once pop fractured and expanded, the mainstream’s acceptability filter became easier to ignore. Pop could channel the minds and experience of its audience in ever less mediated ways.
Since that audience is largely a teenage one, it’s no surprise that pop’s portrayal of teenage attitudes has evolved exponentially too. The angst, frustration and arrogance of the teenage mindset used to be intimated, suggested, communicated in code. But by the 90s a record like Faster by the Manic Street Preachers was able to lay it bare in an entirely new way. The song is appropriately named — a kind of nominative determinism for pop’s tendency to acceleration. But it mainlines the caustic mix of certainty, self-loathing and hateful accusation that defines that age like nothing else I know.
It is utterly thrilling.
In the 50s, it was what pop represented rather than said that made it dangerous, and that therefore underlined its appeal to its audience. Rocknroll was code for sex, of course. Dancing was the vicarious stand-in you could do in public. Rebellion was in rocknroll’s DNA, but rarely did it try to incite a riot. By the 60s, The Who may have been sidestepping swearing, but they were also explicitly saying dangerous things. They directly reflected, and amplified, their audience’s urges — it’s not just you, you are part of My Generation. “Hope I die before I get old” they sang. Such had an audience’s expectation of authenticity intensified that the line is repeatedly thrown back at an ageing Pete Townshend, like some reneged-on manifesto. You promised us! You let us down!
If a death wish was shocking, the explicit pledge of suicide that arrived with Mott The Hoople’s (OK, Bowie’s) All The Young Dudes was even more so.
Well he rapped all night about his suicide
Said he’d kick it in the head when he reached 25
Don’t want to stay alive
When you’re 25
This is the unthinkable re-cast as the merely obvious. The ennui rises from those lines like a dismissive wave of the hand. Not so much a rebel yell as a deliberately bored whatevs. If The Who got more explicit about identity, what Bowie nailed was belief — specifically, a teenager’s lack of it in anything other than their own youth.
The 70s took a lot of 60s ideas and extended them, stretched, made them more extreme. But here’s the thing. Suicide was never really the point. Getting old, for the Mod kid in My Generation, and for Bowie’s Dude, signifies giving up, giving in. They may appear to offer a cheap promise to end it all, but each song is really a collective summoning of youthful rage. They are pop pledges to not go gentle into that good night. They are a reckoning with the tired, middle-aged minds that controlled what you could and couldn’t do, think, and believe, even during the 60s and 70s. These were minds not so much burnt out as dried up — limp rags with the fun and hope systematically twisted out. Know-it-alls turned awful cold, putting people down, just because they get around. Imagine that level of antipathy. Townsend’s astute diagnosis of its source was jealousy. Kids felt victims of a generational judgment that was fuelled by envy — the envy of those who missed out, who sidelined themselves from the fun, and turned their bitterness on the youth that came after them.
My Generation didn’t come out of nowhere. It is a reaction, a resistance to what its audience feared it might turn into. Hope I die before I become like that.
And if I do — well, might as well kick it in the head.
All The Young Dudes and My Generation lifted the veil. They represented a new possibility — the possibility of rejecting what your parents and their peers presumed fundamental. They gave permission to the pop audience to dismiss those conventions for what they were — pure pretence, a mere construct, one that people decided to believe in but make everyone else pay for. These songs were the moment pop went full-on Holden Caulfield, pointing out and sneering at the phonies, wanting nothing for itself other than the right to be different, the right to be new, the right to be right. It was the start of a generational sulk we’ve yet to talk ourselves out of.
And that — that’s what being a teenager really feels like. But Faster went even further.
I have a theory that if you squint hard enough at Faster you’ll see those 60s and 70s teenagers peering back. It’s the whip smart Mod who read more books, but isolated himself from his generation. It’s the Young Dude for whom it’s more than a pose — the one who really means it. It’s the Holden-a-like anti-phoney, but with the missing ingredient of self-awareness finally in place. This is a teenager who sees right through you, sees right through everything. Is better, too, at calling out the sham that no one else can or wants to acknowledge, and the envy that drives it. This song doesn’t need a suicide bid to shock. It shows rather than tells. Its 90s sensibility means grand statements are yesterday’s news. Instead Faster takes us deep into the psyche. It’s a horrifying, unflinching look at a fractured, fragile mind. And ultimately it says – this could be any of us.
This theory comes from the time when friends and I would spend first-year university evenings discussing and dissecting The Holy Bible, the album that brought us Faster, and a visceral, tightly coiled, flailing descent into the abyss. We decided that Faster’s oblique rage was really about, if it could be ‘about’ anything, the distilled essence of being a teenager. Nihilistic, hopped up on hate, unable to bear the parodic, paper-thin pretence of it all. And we were primed for it. Fired up on philosophy, politics, theatre, literature — or at least the clumsy first year connections we clutched at as we shared our respective reading lists. We were 18/19, caught between self-knowledge and self-doubt, discovering new truths in the books that lined the library, inside the small rooms that were our homes ten weeks at a time, and within the densely packed lyric sheet of The Holy Bible. We must have been unbearable.
It’s not surprising Faster was so magnetic to people like us. It revels in how well-read it is, its quick fire alliteration signalling the kind of assimilated wisdom we were after:
I am stronger than Mensa, Miller and Mailer
I spat out Plath and Pinter
These are poets of the persecuted and dispossessed, youthful badges of anti-establishment arrogance, wielded as weapons of reason, as proof of an instinctive intelligence. The kid singing this is smarter, angrier, more perceptive than his or her 60s/70s forbears. That accusatory, envy-driven subtext, unearthed by Townsend and made more explicit by Bowie, is now out front and centre, being hurled back at the phonies.
I am all the things that you regret
A truth that washes, that learns how to spell
You once wanted to be me, the song says, and if you hate me it’s because you wish you could have stayed me for longer than you dared to. Only you can’t admit it. And now I am your equal. I am civilised through learning. I have escaped my fate. Now you have to deal with me.
Education has saved him, empowered him, created him. That Mod stutter (awful c-c-cold) is gone. In its place is a burning articulacy, a scorched earth vocabulary cramming too many words, too many ideas, into each line. This is pop at its most accelerated.
There are few shades of grey at 19. The certainty of our own brilliance is often pitched against the perceptions of others, and Faster starts with a statement of full-on misunderstood genius:
I am an architect, they call me a butcher
I am a pioneer, they call me primitive
I am purity, they call me perverted
But this isn’t self-aggrandisement. In fact, it’s the opposite. He knows how others see him. He plays the role of expected of him. Hates it. But hates the alternative more. Teenage logic means he has his cake and gets to eats it too.
I am idiot drug hive, the virgin, the tattered and the torn
Life is for the cold made warm and they are just lizards
Self disgust is self obsession, honey, and I do as I please
A morality obedient only to be cleansed, repented
‘Self-disgust is self-obsession’ is a line that has always come back to me. Get over yourself. That’s been useful now and again. And that ‘honey’. I’ve always loved it, for its levity, its knowingness — so camp, so in control. But that’s pretty much the only light relief. The rest is a painful self-awareness, umbilically linked to a steadfast refusal to obey. And we wonder why we can never win with teenagers.
The crushing loss of innocence is here, too, expressed in physical, almost brutal terms. As if growing up is an unavoidable descent into ugliness, so that nihilism is all you have to cling to.
The first time you see yourself naked you cry,
Soft skin now acne,
Foul breath so broken,
I know I believe in nothing but it is my nothing,
This is the state of mind captured in the record’s opening seconds, too. The words aren’t part of the lyrics, but they’re worth noting. A sample from the film of 1984, it has John Hurt as Winston Smith whispering I hate purity,
hate goodness, I don’t want virtue to exist anywhere, I want everyone corrupt.
Blank out the world. Take it down with you. It’s easier than trying to change it.
It’s a state of mind in which there’s no resting place. The furies are everywhere. Maybe, after all, it would be easier to give in, to become like that.
Sleep cannot hide thoughts splitting through my mind,
Shadows aren’t clean, false mirrors, too many people awake,
If you stand up like a nail then you will be knocked down,
I’ve been too honest with myself I should have lied like everybody else.
It’s tempting. But no. One last summoning of the will. At the end, an existential call to arms, a desperate plea, repeated over and over, to not give up the fight that the enlightened owe the rest of the world. A commitment to rage against the dying of the light.
So damn easy to cave in, man kills everything
So damn easy to cave in, man kills everything
So damn easy to cave in, man kills everything
So damn easy to cave in, man kills everything
It was our first year at university that Richey Edwards disappeared. Faster started to look like it might be an anatomy of his own mind, or at least it seemed likely that it would be remembered as such. Given his history, it’s pretty likely that what the song actually captures is the profound cognitive convulsions of depression. But, at the time, unexposed as we were to those very real problems suffered by so many, we preferred the more solipsistic idea — that Faster is the teenage wasteland writ large, and by extension a song for anyone feeling angry, misunderstood, on the outside. And there are truths in here relevant to everyone, I think. Certainly most of us will have felt it would have been easier if we had “lied like everybody else.” Faster, like the best art, tells us something uncomfortable about ourselves but seeks to convince us we have the power to change it. Its effect was so strong that as the world tried to understand what had happened to Richey, and Faster became the first signpost on the map he’d left behind, we felt the song deserved, or maybe we felt we owed him, a more meaningful, a more philosophical, interpretation. One we might have chanced upon while talking in our rooms, or read about in our books.
As much as pop accelerates, as much as its trajectory tends towards the explicit, we still love most the heroes that we find most mysterious, that most stubbornly resist or defy explanation. And because of what happened in 1995, or perhaps more because of what he achieved prior to that, Richey became one of those heroes. A very pop hero. One that accelerated to the outer limits of what pop could do. A hero who never quite died, but never did get old either. He just… went, became suspended in our imaginations. Forever caught between self-knowledge and self-doubt, just as we were at 19. Forever separate. Forever young.
He never had to compromise, never had to become like that.
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