24 years ago today, the most important song of my life was
released.
I would have first heard it on MTV, probably in the morning while I got ready for school. This was 1996, and MTV was awash with British guitar bands, grouped together under the umbrella of a thing called ‘Britpop’. I liked some of the Britpop bands at the time but didn’t really love any of them. Oasis had some good singles. Blur had good tracks in the middle of patchy albums that I tried to convince myself I liked more than I did. I would find out there were better, and less celebrated, bands mixed in with the rubbish hair-cuts and worse vocals that plagued that scene but that came later. What I found first was ‘A Design For Life’ by Manic Street Preachers.
Of course, I had no idea when I first heard it what the song was actually about. I didn’t have the lyrics written down. I didn’t have the political consciousness to know that, for example, when singer James Dean Bradfield bellowed And we are told that this is the end in the chorus that it was a reference to Fukuyama’s book The End Of History And The Last Man. I didn’t know that two years earlier the band had released the nihilistic post-punk masterpiece The Holy Bible, that the band’s principle lyricist Richey Edwards had disappeared 14 months previously, or that ‘A Design For Life’ was a creative and commercial rebirth that saved the band’s career.
So, what did I know? Well, I knew that in a sea of bands trying desperately to prove how arch and carefree they were, the Manic Street Preachers had an 'it' that they very much meant. I might not have understood what they were singing about, but I could tell from the singers impassioned vocal that it here was a sincerity lacking in the achingly cool British bands of the time. And I could tell that here was a singer who could actually, you know, sing. Singing has always been very important to me – I sang in choirs as a child and I’ve always been drawn to bands with good singers, and it was very obviously that the singer in this band had lungs.
The music was equally arresting – the waltz-like intro going back and forth like a tide that turns into a huge wave with the riff that introduces the chorus. And then come the strings, for which the only word is ‘soaring’. In the middle of a sea of mediocre bands making bland, safe music, ‘A Design For Life’ felt like it mattered.
And then there was the video. The band mime the song in a large room with video screens dotted around, on which was displayed news footage and clips from old films, interspersed with slogans - ‘Violence For Equality’. ‘Useful Is Beautiful’. ‘Tomorrow Is Too Late’. ‘Ugliness Corrupts The Heart And Mind’. ‘When Freedom Exists There Will Be No State’. ‘Man Does Not Create. He Discovers’. Did I know what these things meant? No. Did I want to know? Hell yes.
It’s a video of brilliant jump cuts. A crowd of the wealthy walking in top hats and tails jumps to a full-screen caption of Orwell’s ‘Hope Lies In The Proles’[i]. A woman wearing a hideously expensive white hat with a red bow is replaced by a man walking away from what looks like demonstration with blood pouring from his head, edited to perfection so the bow and the wound occupy the same place on the screen when it cuts. A black man[ii] falling onto grass while playing with his children, intercut with people being knocked to the floor by police. A split-screen of a member of the hunt on horseback in his red coat and police on horseback dispersing a crowd. In an era in which the closest you normally got to a political statement was that a band liked cigarettes and alcohol, this was something else, something thrilling.
It was a little later that I saw the lyric written down, and even later that I understood it. But my progress in understanding the lyric matched my progression in understanding my class. The opening couplet set it as far apart from the ruling musical orthodoxy as could be imagined;
Libraries gave us power / But then work came and made us free
Seldom has so much meaning been packed into a single couplet. The first line is a reference to the libraries in Wales that were built with the money from miner’s donations, one of which in Pill has the slogan ‘Knowledge is power’ written above the door. It’s an immediate rejection of the parody of working class life pushed by the Britpop bands – stupidity, banality and violence – and a defiant reclaiming of the intellectual life of the working classes. The second line of the couplet can be read ironically – freedom through wage slavery – but also refers to another slogan above an entrance; ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ (‘Work brings freedom’) which was above the entrance to Auschwitz, where the band had visited while on tour. A warning of what can happen when you stop seeing someone as a complete person and reduce them to a set of stereotypical characteristics, making them seem less than human.
The song goes on to list clichés of the working class – We don’t talk about love / We only wanna get drunk – and that We are told that this is the end – the lie of the classless society that Prime Minister John Major said he wanted to create and that his successor Tony Blair would also strive for, both regarding being working class as something to escape from, a culture lacking in value and one that somehow didn’t matter in an era of Panglossian Capitalism – that we were living in the best of all possible worlds and that we were all somehow becoming middle-class. They were wrong at the time of course, that’s not how capitalism works – something that became extremely clear by the sharp increase between the Haves and the Have Nots that was just an economic crisis away.
It was this understanding of working class culture beyond the lazy clichés that began to make more and more sense to me. I didn’t follow the news as a teenager – my parents watched it and read newspapers but I was only interested in the sport. That changed. I switched my intentions at the last minute and studied Sociology and Government And Politics when I chose my A-levels the next year. I decided I did want to go to university after all. And I found that my reading list got longer with every album and single the Manics released, as each one had at least one quote from writers, thinkers and artists printed in the sleeve. The ‘A Design For Life’ CD single had two such quotes – one from Antoni Gaudi and the other from Le Corbusier. Some consider this pretention – I consider it education.
Of course, there have been as many influences on me as on anyone else – family, friends, unpredictable events lived through. Maybe if I hadn’t heard this song, understood it, and followed the trails it laid down to other bands, writers and artists, I’d have become the person I am now anyway. But if nothing else, ‘A Design For Life’ was a shortcut to so much that I now value in life, and that’s no mean achievement for a 4-minute pop song.
I would have first heard it on MTV, probably in the morning while I got ready for school. This was 1996, and MTV was awash with British guitar bands, grouped together under the umbrella of a thing called ‘Britpop’. I liked some of the Britpop bands at the time but didn’t really love any of them. Oasis had some good singles. Blur had good tracks in the middle of patchy albums that I tried to convince myself I liked more than I did. I would find out there were better, and less celebrated, bands mixed in with the rubbish hair-cuts and worse vocals that plagued that scene but that came later. What I found first was ‘A Design For Life’ by Manic Street Preachers.
Of course, I had no idea when I first heard it what the song was actually about. I didn’t have the lyrics written down. I didn’t have the political consciousness to know that, for example, when singer James Dean Bradfield bellowed And we are told that this is the end in the chorus that it was a reference to Fukuyama’s book The End Of History And The Last Man. I didn’t know that two years earlier the band had released the nihilistic post-punk masterpiece The Holy Bible, that the band’s principle lyricist Richey Edwards had disappeared 14 months previously, or that ‘A Design For Life’ was a creative and commercial rebirth that saved the band’s career.
So, what did I know? Well, I knew that in a sea of bands trying desperately to prove how arch and carefree they were, the Manic Street Preachers had an 'it' that they very much meant. I might not have understood what they were singing about, but I could tell from the singers impassioned vocal that it here was a sincerity lacking in the achingly cool British bands of the time. And I could tell that here was a singer who could actually, you know, sing. Singing has always been very important to me – I sang in choirs as a child and I’ve always been drawn to bands with good singers, and it was very obviously that the singer in this band had lungs.
The music was equally arresting – the waltz-like intro going back and forth like a tide that turns into a huge wave with the riff that introduces the chorus. And then come the strings, for which the only word is ‘soaring’. In the middle of a sea of mediocre bands making bland, safe music, ‘A Design For Life’ felt like it mattered.
And then there was the video. The band mime the song in a large room with video screens dotted around, on which was displayed news footage and clips from old films, interspersed with slogans - ‘Violence For Equality’. ‘Useful Is Beautiful’. ‘Tomorrow Is Too Late’. ‘Ugliness Corrupts The Heart And Mind’. ‘When Freedom Exists There Will Be No State’. ‘Man Does Not Create. He Discovers’. Did I know what these things meant? No. Did I want to know? Hell yes.
It’s a video of brilliant jump cuts. A crowd of the wealthy walking in top hats and tails jumps to a full-screen caption of Orwell’s ‘Hope Lies In The Proles’[i]. A woman wearing a hideously expensive white hat with a red bow is replaced by a man walking away from what looks like demonstration with blood pouring from his head, edited to perfection so the bow and the wound occupy the same place on the screen when it cuts. A black man[ii] falling onto grass while playing with his children, intercut with people being knocked to the floor by police. A split-screen of a member of the hunt on horseback in his red coat and police on horseback dispersing a crowd. In an era in which the closest you normally got to a political statement was that a band liked cigarettes and alcohol, this was something else, something thrilling.
It was a little later that I saw the lyric written down, and even later that I understood it. But my progress in understanding the lyric matched my progression in understanding my class. The opening couplet set it as far apart from the ruling musical orthodoxy as could be imagined;
Libraries gave us power / But then work came and made us free
Seldom has so much meaning been packed into a single couplet. The first line is a reference to the libraries in Wales that were built with the money from miner’s donations, one of which in Pill has the slogan ‘Knowledge is power’ written above the door. It’s an immediate rejection of the parody of working class life pushed by the Britpop bands – stupidity, banality and violence – and a defiant reclaiming of the intellectual life of the working classes. The second line of the couplet can be read ironically – freedom through wage slavery – but also refers to another slogan above an entrance; ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ (‘Work brings freedom’) which was above the entrance to Auschwitz, where the band had visited while on tour. A warning of what can happen when you stop seeing someone as a complete person and reduce them to a set of stereotypical characteristics, making them seem less than human.
The song goes on to list clichés of the working class – We don’t talk about love / We only wanna get drunk – and that We are told that this is the end – the lie of the classless society that Prime Minister John Major said he wanted to create and that his successor Tony Blair would also strive for, both regarding being working class as something to escape from, a culture lacking in value and one that somehow didn’t matter in an era of Panglossian Capitalism – that we were living in the best of all possible worlds and that we were all somehow becoming middle-class. They were wrong at the time of course, that’s not how capitalism works – something that became extremely clear by the sharp increase between the Haves and the Have Nots that was just an economic crisis away.
It was this understanding of working class culture beyond the lazy clichés that began to make more and more sense to me. I didn’t follow the news as a teenager – my parents watched it and read newspapers but I was only interested in the sport. That changed. I switched my intentions at the last minute and studied Sociology and Government And Politics when I chose my A-levels the next year. I decided I did want to go to university after all. And I found that my reading list got longer with every album and single the Manics released, as each one had at least one quote from writers, thinkers and artists printed in the sleeve. The ‘A Design For Life’ CD single had two such quotes – one from Antoni Gaudi and the other from Le Corbusier. Some consider this pretention – I consider it education.
Of course, there have been as many influences on me as on anyone else – family, friends, unpredictable events lived through. Maybe if I hadn’t heard this song, understood it, and followed the trails it laid down to other bands, writers and artists, I’d have become the person I am now anyway. But if nothing else, ‘A Design For Life’ was a shortcut to so much that I now value in life, and that’s no mean achievement for a 4-minute pop song.
[i] A
slight misquote – the original read ‘If there is hope, it lies in the proles’,
but that doesn’t work so well as a slogan.
[ii] I
mention the family’s colour because I suspect it was an attempt to present a
positive image of a black family in the midst of footage of violence and riots
involving mostly white people – a reverse of harmful and untrue stereotypes.
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