Resilience is Beautiful
Manic Street Preachers break new ground on 13th album Resistance Is Futile, exploring the internal space between acceptance and rage and championing the artistic spirit
Manic Street Preachers are now well into their third decade as a band. In a recent radio interview for BBC Radio 5 Live, bassist and chief lyricist Nicky Wire revealed the only artist signed to their record label longer is Bruce Springsteen!
It was never supposed to be that way. In the flush of youth, the Manics were a band you expected — indeed they intended — to burn out in a magnesium white flash of glitter, spray paint and situationist polemic. The iconoclastic aesthetic they made their own was borne of a pre-digital era, when music was still a physical form, still capable of commercial and cultural impact.
In 2018, the landscape they survey is unrecognisable by comparison. The digital age has torn asunder old assurances, undermined old sales models, fragmented culture through a wealth of choice online and on-demand, even the political climate is more divisive than at any point in the band’s career.
With all three Manics now approaching 50 years of age, it’s hard not to fear their 13th and latest album will be tantamount to a mid-life crisis. Yet, as their history has proved, out of such crises, Manic Street Preachers produce some of their most creative and inspirational work.
At first glance, the album’s title, Resistance Is Futile, seems at odds with a band who have prided themselves on fighting for their ideals for the best part of a generation. In interviews, both Nicky and lead singer James Dean Bradfield have admitted it reflects a certain resignation. Clearly they feel unable to hold back the tide of progress, no longer able to muster a youthful revolutionary zeal.
Yet the music itself sounds far from defeatist. In fact, the album’s 12 tracks ripple with energy. Melodic and urgent, this is far from the sound of a band vanquished. James has admitted to a desired sonic irrepressibility but on deeper inspection the lyrics too allude to a further duality in that title. Despite Nicky’s protestations to the contrary, the evidence here suggests he has been unable to escape his defiant nature. If anything, it’s resistance to that trait which appears futile.
Hence we have the juxtaposition of lines in opener People Give In. “People get tired, people break down” James sings, for all the world sounding utterly resigned until he follows up with an emphasis on the words “People stay strong”.
The same sentiment flows, Mersey like, through Liverpool Revisited, Nicky’s ode to the families of the Hillsborough victims, their resilience in the face of an establishment determined to vilify them inspiring a euphoric anthem to the people and culture of Liverpool. As James described in a track-by-track run through for Virgin Radio, the song is “the sound of victory.”
Indeed, the album contains as many small victories as it does submissions. Vivian, for example, idolises the photographer Vivian Maier, whose stunning work was only discovered after her death. Someone so committed to art for arts sake, she never soiled the purity of her motivation through recognition. “All that history you never compromised” James sings with a genuinely heartfelt admiration.
Indeed, an immersion in the virtue of art is one of the great themes of Resistance Is Futile, Nicky oft citing the activist Phil Ochs prior to the album’s release, who claimed “In such ugly times, the only true protest is beauty”.
Therefore, while James focuses on the confusion and complexity of an era post referendum, post General Election in his self-penned love letter to the past Distant Colours, Nicky offers us International Blue, glorifying in a colour invented by French artist Yves Klein, his intention to represent moving from a state of nothingness into what Klein called a ‘blue profundity.’
Elsewhere, Dylan & Caitlin rages against the dying of the light with another in an increasingly long line of powerful Manics duets, here with fellow Welsh artist The Anchoress, who brings passion and pathos to a song highlighting the tempestuous, yet inspirational, relationship of playwright Dylan Thomas and poet Caitlin Macnamara.
Amongst the vignettes to fallen heroes there is personal reflection too, particularly in Hold Me Like A Heaven, which arrives as a fully formed pop classic. “Tattered manifestos” may “litter the mind” but as James achingly croons “Hold me like I’m lost in your heaven” you realise the Manics still write with a vitality that belies their elder statesman status.
Despite the desire for widescreen melancholia, Resistance Is Futile also finds time to go on the attack. Never more so than on Broken Algorithms, where the pounding rhythm of Sean Moore’s drumming proves this is a band who still know how to play hard and fast. The digital world squarely in Nicky’s sights, we are set a challenge to “rise up against” ourselves, remembering, as we “caress the beauty” of our screens, that global tech companies make it their mission to “own your dreams.” Nicky now says he finds the tech companies more scary than any politician, James adding “… And it would be nice if they paid their tax.”
There’s further scolding on Sequels of Forgotten Wars, which could be read as a critique of our self-curated, self-conscious online bubbles. “A blue screen for a tribal horde” cries James over driving guitar. Surely the “echo in a chamber of purity” represents a twist on the online echo chamber of social media, although it’s hard to imagine Nicky seeing it as pure.
Things return to the elegiac on In Eternity, a paean to David Bowie, the intellectual, culturally curious rock superstar, the like of whom we shall never see again. As the song culminates in the couplet “Closed the curtains in LA, open them up on a Berlin day”, the symbolism of Bowie’s gift for artistic renewal is not lost.
As seems customary with recent Manics albums, Resistance Is Futile closes on a Nicky vocal, the delicate poetry of The Left Behind, which finds our protagonist waiting for the end of time, lamenting a world which has passed him by. “My grip is somehow getting loose”, he despairs, in a seeming admission the band won’t be able to continue indefinitely.
And so the album’s end is somewhat a summation of its whole. An acceptance of defeat but with a will to continue in bloody minded disregard, at least for now.
When your eye lingers on the album artwork following that first listen, it resonates with new meaning. The Samurai Warrior, photographed by Franz von Stillfried-Ratenicz, conveys all in a look. A beautiful, sad, proud warrior who, with the coming of the gun, knows his time is up, yet displays stoicism, dignity and defiance nonetheless.
The Manics may no longer know their left from their right, may not know whether to continue defying the modern world or accept it, but in delving into that uncertainty and exploring the space between acceptance and rage, they have found a new protest, this time through the sanctity of art. In doing so they have created one of the most fascinating and, I suspect, enduring albums of their career. Resistance is futile, perhaps, but resilience has proved itself beautiful indeed.
