This Is Life Being Lived
Aaron Lake Smith on The Manic Street Preachers' ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’ + Time Doing Its Work
The first time Linda put on the Manic Street Preachers song "Motorcycle Emptiness," I thought, what IS this shit.
Of course I knew who they were. Had been hearing about them for decades. When I was in my late teens and early twenties, every Gen-X alterna-Silver-Jews-loving guy always seemed to be rambling on at parties about The Manic Street Preachers, The Stone Roses, The Jesus and Mary Chain. But I could not hear those frequencies yet. Too jangly and vague and adult. That stuff was for older people, it had the stink of the tomb. We were punks. Punks burrowing down deeper and deeper into crust and metal and extreme noise terror. We could appreciate a little Beat Happening or Le Tigre put on at a dance party, but most of the music we loved was about killing cops, killing yourself, and the wanton cruelty of the capitalist system.
James Carville once famously said, "When I see an old calendar, I see George Bush’s face on it.” When I heard The Manic Street Preachers or The Stone Roses, I saw a guy with kinda long hair and a beard and a flannel and a middle-age paunch.
But now I was dating that guy. Her name was Linda. She just had the music taste of a 50-year-old man. And I loved her.
While cooking or on drives, Linda would put on Oasis, Ride, My Bloody Valentine, The Manic Street Preachers. I would feel: I don’t hate this, this isn’t objectionable at all, but it doesn’t speak to me.
We respected each other’s tastes and evolved a kind of Venn Diagram policy. We would take turns playing our own stuff for each other, then pivot to what we both loved: The Clash, Erasure, Weezer. It’s good to compromise on dumb things like music. And simply avoiding the big things that might make you fight is a good relationship policy. Maybe the only sustainable policy.
I often found myself thinking, oh, how cool is this, I'm listening to Massive Attack with an indie chick in a stripey shirt, my younger self would love this.
Oh God, I loved her so much.
I also fretted, oh, I hope Linda doesn’t leave me. I knew there were whole legions of nerdy, shut-in 50-year-old bookstore guys out there dreaming about one day finding themselves a good woman with whom they could share their love of The Stone Roses. We went and saw The Jesus and Mary Chain in Stockholm, and I swear she was one of the only women there who hadn’t been dragged by her husband.
I’ve listened to a lot of Gen-X bands through Linda over the past couple of years, but the only one that has wormed its way into my heart is The Manic Street Preachers. I don't know how to explain it. The songs are NOT catchy. There are often no proper verses and choruses; the same riff will just drone on and on. The lyrics are often obtuse and hard to reach, both world-wizened and really bubblegum at the same time. Stories born of the experience of being young Welsh glam-rocker dirtbags, I suppose.
It was NOT a self-conscious, getting-into-a-band thing. Oh, Wire is a very interesting band, they're so smart and political and post-punk blah blah blah. It happened slowly. I had to listen to the songs dozens of times before they sunk in. It was like looking at a Magic Eye. It was a feeling-thing.
All good things in life are feeling-things.
Take the opening for "Design for Life.” It’s “political” I suppose, but more than that it's an anthem of European resignation:
Libraries gave us power
Then work came and made us free
What price now
For a shallow piece of dignity
I wish I had a bottle
Right here in my dirty face
To wear the scars
To show from where I came
I guess what you had was some shock-communist, drug-addled Welsh lads in eyeliner playing songs that sometimes sounded like Bon Jovi and sometimes like The Replacements but then also like The Smiths. But none of these comparisons really does justice to the strange gumbo.
Ultimately, the song that really did it was “Motorcycle Emptiness.” It kept coming on: every time we started cooking or were trying to get hyped up to leave the house or out at some dive bar. The song squeals along for six minutes, nondescript and jangly. Under neon loneliness / motorcycle emptiness. But the lyrics in the verses are dark and strange:
Your joys are counterfeit
This happiness corrupt political shit
Living life like a comatose
Ego-loaded and swallow, swallow, swallow
What are they talking about? I have no idea. On the one hand, it sounds like lyrics written by an angsty 14-year-old who paints his fingernails black. But it also sounds really cool.
Last winter, I took Linda to Myrtle Beach. Where I vacationed when I was a kid and went on spring break as a teenager. I wanted to show her the Hooters reality I came out from: Ripley’s Believe it Or Not, The Grand Ole Opry, Calabash-style seafood buffets, the giant beach tourist stores where you can buy a boogie board or hermit crabs—all the things that are nostalgic and comforting to me.
It was cold and the dead of winter and the boardwalk and arcades were all empty. I took her to a bar I kind of like, The Bowery—all sawdust and Confederate flags. It’s where the band Alabama got their start. It was packed with good, salt-of-the-earth old Southern couples, everyone was respectful and normal and nice. But also there was this little gang of extremely online Zoomer Hitlerjugend types that stuck out like a sore thumb. When Linda went up to the bar and ordered a Bud Light—not being totally up on the controversy around that beer at that time—they muttered “leftist faggots.” I guess they had seen the Confederate flags and in their idiot Zoomer minds decided this must be a racist bar, a sanctuary for the tiki torch whites. But they were wrong, they were fucking up the good Southern vibe, it was clear they didn’t belong, the bartender seemed genuinely apologetic and eager to get them out of there.
When I was growing up, it was the rednecks and frat boys calling us faggots—now we were middle-aged and were getting called faggots by literal children! I can’t lie, it felt nice. We went over to the jukebox and they had “Motorcycle Emptiness,” so of course we had to put it on. For me, the band had become a portal to some musical space where things didn’t feel so explicit or defined. A vague, undefined kind of rebellion. Like wearing eyeliner and listening to Bowie in the early 70s.
Why does it sound so punk and seething when they sing Culture sucks downwards / Itemize loathing and feed yourself smiles? We subjected the entire bar to the song, then paid our bill and waltzed off into the foggy night.
We flew over the ocean back to Europe’s always-foggy non-summer months—back to the indigenous territory for this type of music, for Britpop, for Oasis and Massive Attack—back to the land where the people don’t carry a bit of sunshine in their hearts and no one cares about Sublime. I now know several Manics records by heart and listen to them nonstop, during all activities: driving, cooking, walking. Their mood isn’t really pensive or depressed or angry, but more: this is life being lived. This is time passing. This is a life built of habits and routines. I suppose I have, in the end, become the Gen-X guy. Time has done its work. I can hear the frequencies a bit more. But I still don’t get Oasis. ✹
I ride so I can have permanent AC/DC in my head