Music

You Need to Hear this Song #15

Heavy Rotation — Motorcycle Emptiness, Manic Street Preachers (Generation Terrorists, 1992)

Heavy Rotation was a music industry term for songs that one way or another got a lot of airplay. It referred to the large amount of rotation that a particular record got on turntables at radio stations. Since, until the 1980s, this was the only way to get new music into the ears and brains of listeners, heavy rotation meant increased sales. These were good for record companies and artists alike.

Today, some of us still put records on at home and give them a spin. Most of us don’t. However, the term still applies, though in a different way. Streaming services like Spotify sell subscriptions to listeners and then pay artists based on listens. At least, that’s the way we think it works.

For me, heavy rotation means a song that is in my head for some reason. Maybe for a moment, maybe for a day, maybe for longer. It’s a song that you come back to from time to time and still feels just as good.

This series of articles is dedicated to these songs.

Here, I aim to highlight a particular song by a particular band or singer. We should know a bit about the band, a bit about where the song fits into its history and where the song fits into what was happening in music at that time. Then there’s the song itself. Who’s playing on it, what are the lyrics getting at and why is it so good? How does it still occupy sonic space in our lives?

I’ll (try to) keep it short. It shouldn’t take you any longer to read than the song itself. To that end, I’ll put a Youtube clip of the original recording at the top of the article so you can listen as you read. Or not. And because a song is often much different live than in the recording studio, I’ll stick a live clip on at the end.

What song is in your head right now? Here’s one that won’t leave mine today:

#15 — Motorcycle Emptiness, Manic Street Preachers (Generation Terrorists, 1992)

When “Everything Must Go” came out in 1996, I’d only been peripherally aware of Manic Street Preachers up to that point. But that album — their fourth — in all its large screen, cinematic grandeur only made me want more. That lead me back to the record store to purchase “The Holy Bible” (1994), “Gold Against the Soul” (1993)and “Generation Terrorists” (1992), which is where Motorcycle Emptiness is from. Their massive sound starts there and continues through fourteen total albums up to today.

The Manics are an honest to god straight ahead rock and roll band with honest to god Welsh working class credentials. Bass, drums, guitar, vocal. The albums that they’ve put out in the 30 years since 1992 speak to this. So does their live show.

Originally a quartet, the disappearance of Richey Edwards in 1995 (who has still not been found, but is presumed dead, despite frequent “sightings”), changed their sound somewhat. Nicky Wire on bass (and the writer of most of the songs), Sean Moore on drums and James Dean Bradfield as guitar and vocals front man took the music further away from glam and closer to a more bare bones rock sound.

Motorcycle Emptiness is their opening salvo in their rage against the consumer, corporate and media machines. The stand they take in the lyrics of this song are as true today as they were 30 years ago. Perhaps even more true.

“Culture sucks down words”. Words like happy, sad, love, hate, survival, them, us. We use them so often, do they mean anything to us anymore? Or are they just used to sell us things? “Itemize loathing and feed yourself smiles”. Just keep buying, be happy, everything will be fine after this Big Mac.

“Organize your safe tribal war / Hurt, maim, kill and enslave the ghetto”. This is literally happening right now. In fact, it has been the case since well before 1992 and has continued ever since. It might actually be the natural resting state of humankind.

“From feudal serf to to spender / the wonderful world of purchase power”. And likely back to feudal serf who owns nothing in the future, as the capitalist economies of the world struggle to keep us on track on the hamster wheel. It’s the return to normal, they tell us.

“Living life like a comatose / ego loaded and swallow, swallow, swallow”. Celebrity culture and its nonsense existed then too, no question. But there was no social media, hell there wasn’t even an internet yet. What has happened since? Has our approach to life improved? Have we been presented with ways to be more alive, more aware of the world we live in? Perhaps, are we listening? Are we changing our habits? Or have our lives become even more comatose, addicted as we are to the screen, to easy entertainment, to limitless consumption? To influencers, to celebrities, to our narcissistic selves and our artificial online personae?

The Manics looked around at their world in the early 90s and predicted it all to us then. Consumerism and consumption are empty, they are hollow. Participating in these with the expectation that they will improve your life is a nonsense and will only lead to further self loathing. They exist to keep us so fixated on our treadmills that we don’t have time or energy to stop everything, take a look around and understand what is happening in our immediate surroundings and in the wider world around us.

You can buy that motorcycle if you want to, but it will only lead to continued emptiness. That we are still lead to believe otherwise, is the only thing that keeps revolution at bay.

Musically, the song is a tour de force and an immediate, urgent, swirling, and instantly hummable tune. The repeated guitar scale is iconic and I never get tired of hearing it. At 2:38 a string and piano interlude comes in to calm things for a moment. “All we want from you are the kicks you’ve given us”. That’s it, that’s all we want and straight into a descending piano scale at 3:29 and into a heavy guitar chord follows directly, It’s here that the roof comes off in any live version.

The Manic Street Preachers told us the unvarnished truth and now here we are, increasingly conscious that it is getting close to the time when the bill is coming due.

See here for a taste from Glastonbury in 2014, of what you’d get if you manage to see them somewhere good this summer.

If you made it this far, it will occur to you that if this is #15 in this series then there must be 14 previous ones. This is a correct assumption and these are linked at bottom of the #14 article, should you be interested:

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