i am an architect; they call me a butcher
on the manic street preachers' the holy bible (1994)
[note: this letter contains discussions of eating disorders]
The first time i heard a song by the Manic Street Preachers, it was the coldest day of my life and my ankle was bleeding. i was in a city far away with not a clue as to what i was doing there, really, and so spent most days wandering around between classes, sick with jealousy at the sounds of happy people who seemed not to lack with the intensity i did. Often, while waiting for the light to change, i’d press the toe of my boot into the lip of broken tiles on the pavement as if my half-hearted attempt at lifting it might unearth some writhing mass there beneath that, in its enormous ancient knowing, might give me answer. Obviously that never came to pass. Everything i dreamed felt impossible and stupid. So i kept walking around, shivering and unable to meet anyone’s eye, and pretended that this constituted living. The only relief in all of this – and i don’t mean to be dramatic – were my headphones and the sounds of the Manics through them, which acted as a merciful padding against everything and everyone around me. i listened to ‘Yes’, the opening track of their 1994 album The Holy Bible, no less than 15 times in a row while hobbling around that day, the stinging in my ankle growing ever more insistent, without once thinking that i should stop to buy some band aids. The blood had probably ruined my sock by the 10th time the chorus rolled around, but i didn’t notice until i finally peeled the rag off my foot upon my return. That’s the kind of music it was – loud, rough barking that you put on when you felt your life was at its flattest, but there was nothing else to do but move because if you paused to think about it too long you’d surely stop forever.
Somewhere between the revelation of my ankle’s iridescent, strangely bloodless epidermis and a hundred replays of the album, i found myself beginning to imagine its corpus of songs as a body flayed open and luminescent with injury. Not necessarily because of my own opened body, but because the album was itself already that way, and my own wound merely conducted the expansion of that existing impression – Until it grew so wide / That all my Life had entered it1. The Holy Bible, as far as i can think of in my own musical education, is singular in its expression of horror at simply being in the world at the end of the 20th century. It is the body of a century of mass death by machine, spread and flayed open to be endlessly punished and fed upon, thus only spreading its infection. The third track on the album, ‘Of Walking Abortion’, certainly relishes in condemning this rotted ecosystem of ‘little people in little houses’ who are ‘like maggots, small, blind, and worthless’. Though this may initially ring with a repulsed condescension at the world’s population, the final line of the song refracts this seemingly simple trajectory of disgust. With the ever-escalating screaming litany of ‘Who’s responsible? You fucking are’, the ambiguity of the ‘you’ involves not only the listener, but folds the band into the warm stench of rot which latches onto all who step into its vicinity. The band, then, are equally aware of their own helpless position in this food chain, feeding on the same corpse but at the very least making an attempt to try and spit some of it out.
i think the Manics surprised me the way they did because i’d always associated such a grotesque bodily register with something of the medieval, with some cultural assumption that a regular Tuesday afternoon in the olden days consisted of heading to the town square to see some poor sod torn limb from limb2. Or, like the sculpture of St. Bartholomew who stands resigned and steely-eyed in Milan’s Duomo, holding his sagging skin flayed off his body as if it were armour.
Clattering around somewhere in my mind was Foucault’s famous declaration from Discipline and Punish, which claimed that the disappearance of the public execution following the 19th century meant that punishments abstracted the body and were now instead laid out against the soul. While i do think this holds a vital observation, especially re: the cultivation of an atmospheric pressure of punishment that keeps people self-surveillant and ‘in line’, it’s also too convenient a categorisation to be…true, for lack of a better word. Bodily punishment – torture, if you will – obviously continues to take place, just that it often goes hand in hand with legacies of imperialism which dole out punishment onto specific bodies3, who are not the ones Foucault was thinking about when he spoke of a subject4.
The Manics, despite their citations of the man5, rail against this notion of an abstracted body throughout The Holy Bible, a desecrated sacrament emerging in the last decade of the 20th century which is nothing short of a mangled mess of entrails, so thoroughly flattened and torn asunder that it hardly resembles a body anymore. The album is a total assault on the senses, interested only in evoking disgust in its audience, if only so the irreconcilable intensity of the feeling might force out some alternative way of living. From the disjointed guitars and horrifying lyrics detailing the banality of sexual exploitation on the opening track ‘Yes’, to the unnervingly industrial sonic landscape which underlies the Holocaust reference in ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’, the album fashions a relentlessly hostile aesthetic which it hurls at the listener and dares them to enjoy. Like on the track ‘Mausoleum’, which features a sample of writer J.G Ballard’s deadpan statement: “I wanted to rub the human face in it’s own vomit, and force it to look in the mirror.” As human beings geared towards survival, there is a tendency to not consume what disgusts us – the Manics, in my reading, seize upon this affective survival instinct in order to open up the possibility of something Else6. What that is, exactly, remains unborn, but i do still think there’s something to be said about that intentional deepening and widening of the wound, if only to fashion it into some kind of doorway through which another way of being might be imagined.
It is, however, impossible to get to that other place without first acknowledging the blight left by where we are now, and that is exactly what The Holy Bible gears itself towards. Oscillating wildly between shrieking at its own diseased form and flinching from the blighted history of the twentieth century, the album is a jagged scream which laments the impossibility of ever attaining a clear separation between filth and purity in light of this history. Over the course of its thirteen tracks, the album lays out the inevitable spread of defilement from the ideology purveyed by institutions such as the government and hospitals – in tracks such as ‘Archives of Pain’ – to individuals and citizens, who are then absorbed into believing in its attractive, future-oriented narratives of redemption without affording any attention to the bodies mangled under the crushing weight of history.
i, personally, think that all of this is most clearly encapsulated on the seventh track of the album, ‘4st 7lbs’. It’s definitely more comprehensible than any of the other tracks of the album, mainly through its linear narrative depicting the downward spiral of its anorexic narrator, which also means that it all plays out in the ever-shrinking expanse of one body, instead of through the vertiginous invocation of a hundred years of cruelty. And, more crucially, i think it's an incredibly precise record of the ascetic impulse that often lies behind self-starvation, especially considering the notion that ‘the starving body is itself a text, the living dossier of its discontents’7. The narrator’s anorexia here is then not just about appearing skinny, as is so often assumed, but is starvation used as a representative weapon which forcibly exempts her from participating in the exploitative paradigm which is constructed as an inherent condition of modern life. Something similar – albeit in the inverse – might be observed with trends like that of the fairly recent ‘clean girl’, whose preoccupation with the skinny white body rid entirely of any sort of blemish forms an altar to capitalism and worships the possibility of being able to consume one’s way to a pure existence. The Manics, of course, know by now that there is no such thing, but there still persists the escapist desire to be saintly and thin.
The most distinct thing about ‘4st 7lbs’ is its rigid and vertebral rhythmic structure, so unrelenting in its enforcement you could easily reach out and run your fingers along the nodes poking through its paper-thin skin. The resulting effect is this teetering precarity of tension and balance in the knowledge of the knife’s edge between life and death which marks self-starvation. When the verses kick in, they launch into a hideously matter-of-fact catalogue in which flesh atrophies and gives way to ridges of bone – we hear of ‘Cheeks sunken and despaired / So gorgeous, sunk to six stone’ and a ‘Stomach collapsed at five’. However, while this might seem overly reliant on the central tenets of an anorexic narrative, the chorus is where a dizzying expansion of reasoning takes place so suddenly as to be almost unbearable. Pushing aside the superficial motivation of thinness so explicitly illustrated across its verses, the narrator’s anorexia takes on an edge of the metaphysical as the lyrics plainly rattle off: ‘Problem is diet’s not a big enough word / I wanna be so skinny that I rot from view / I wanna walk in the snow / And not leave a footprint / I wanna walk in the snow / And not soil its purity’. By purposefully shattering the notion that ‘diet[ing]’ might even begin to make legible the reasoning underlying narrator’s anorexia, the listener is left at the mercy of her extreme desire to ‘be so skinny’ as to ‘rot from view’. Here, the viscera invoked in the phrase ‘rot from view’ finally affords a label to the grotesque emaciation detailed on the verses; the song is itself an account of the body slowly, graphically, and – most troublingly – methodically decomposing from its environment. The disappearing body, through the horror of its wasting away, only reinforces its presence.
To gouge away in order to reveal something – what? i think that’s what’s most troubling about this album. At the end of all this destruction, containing lofty statements of such confidence like ‘I am an architect / they call me a butcher’, what, exactly is there to do? Yes, standing there – skin carefully peeled away, columns of muscle exposed, arterial highways stretching across every inch – but what?8 the body, in thousands of agonies9, persists, but it will always be preserved in this tattered state. Nonetheless i still think there’s something intensely important about that. i don’t need this feeling resolved. If anything, i want it to stay open, and to continue performing its own opening over and over again, if only because it then opens something painful and pestilent in me. Like a statue from five hundred years ago, marbled and raw for all of time.
that’s all for this one. thanks for giving it your time. see you when i see you <3
A Not Admitting of the Wound (1188) by Emily Dickinson: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56455/a-not-admitting-of-the-wound-1188
obviously this was a sweeping assumption, and not entirely true. Robert Mills writes about it extensively in his introduction to Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure, and Punishment in Medieval Culture (available on libgen)
https://arab.org/click-to-help/palestine/
obviously written about much more extensively and eloquently in Gayatri Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’
some argument as to whether or not this is true, because bassist Nicky Wire claimed the title ‘Archives of Pain’ comes from a Foucault chapter title (not true, as far as i’ve looked). but also given that ‘about 70%’ of the lyrics on this album came from their notoriously literate rhythm guitarist Richey Edwards [http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=Manic_Depression_-_Melody_Maker,_20th_August_1994 and https://radicalreads.com/richey-edwards-favorite-books/], i wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t at least foucault-adjacent
taking extensively from Sianne Ngai’s ‘Afterword: On Disgust’ here, from her book Ugly Feelings
from Maud Ellmann’s The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing, and Imprisonment
syllabus here: Gouge Away, Pixies. Dress Rehearsal Rag, Leonard Cohen. Faster, Manic Street Preachers.
mangled version of a dostoevsky quote sorry
jesus this is incredible thank you
loveeeee this