1998 Manic Street Preachers: If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next

The boys from the Blackwood had come along way since their 1992 debut and its attendant ambitions of "make one album, sell 16 million copies of it, and then split up". Never happened of course, any of it (they're still an active band as I write), and by the time 1998 had rolled 'round the arrogance of youth had waned until their early fire smouldered in mainly their lyrics. 'If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next ' was the lead single from the 'eagerly awaited' follow up to 1996's ground zero breakthrough 'Everything Must Go' and, in effectively setting out under one roof all that was good and all that was bad about what the Manics had become, it's a single that splits me neatly in half to the extent that I could feasibly write two separate entries for it.

The first would deal with the song itself and my attendant disappointment (yet lack of surprise) at seeing a band once hell-bent on lobbing incendiary bombs both into and out of the medium reduced to peddling AOR to frustrated drive time warriors dying to 'do' a 'Falling Down' but too scared the boss would find out. The distortion of the Eno-like treatments that play it in promise discord, but 'If You Tolerate This' soon lapses into pedestrian shuffle and fist clench chorus that strives for the anthemic but gets lost on the way until James Bradfield's rising "will be next"s are the attempts of desperate relatives at CPR long after the doctor has called the patient dead. Bottom line; 'If You Tolerate This' is a good title in search of a song - the Manic's lyrics frequently painted their music into a corner with no neat or easy scans and rhymes and here too they're forced to walk clumsily straight through and leave behind messy footprints.

But then my second review would take a different tack, one that harked back to that 'good title'. 'If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next'; think about it. It resonates in a confrontational awkwardness that refuses to trip off the tongue which, as it was taken from a Republican propaganda poster from the Spanish Civil War, is unsurprising. What is surprising is being presented with a song concerning idealistic Welshmen heading abroad to fight Fascists in Spain at the tail end of a bland 1998 line up. It's like finding a copy of Guy Debord's 'Mémoire' and its sandpaper cover nestling amongst a shelf full of Dan Brown and Bridget Jones and slowly wearing them to shreds.* Lines like "So if I can shoot rabbits, then I can shoot fascists" (taken directly from contemporary sources) are startling enough in their own right, but barked out in the middle of the Boyzone's and the Billie's they ring like a clap of thunder and perform a shredding of their own in their demonstration of what other uses popular music can be put to outside of a general scene that had become terribly insular.

Politics and music have long walked hand in hand, but only rarely has the combination garnered mass appeal to the extent of producing a number one single. And while I'm never a fan of intellectual posturing for the sake of it, there's a passion behind this cause that, for me, will always ensure that, just as JK Rowling apologists are wont to claim 'At least it gets the kids reading', whatever the shortcomings of the song there's forever merit enough in 'If You Tolerate This' on the level that it (hopefully) generates a thinking and questioning of its own. Music as education - now that does appeal, and taken that way alone then the song's deficiencies become an irrelevance.

* Actually, with that subject matter, 'If You Tolerate' would have been right at home in eighties indieland alongside the likes of Easterhouse (who once wrote a song about Lenin's period of exile in Europe) and The Redskins - surely the only band to have ever written a song about the failure of the workers in the 1919 Berlin uprising to learn lessons from the Russian Revolution ('It Can Be Done') -"Look at Petrograd! Look at Barcelona! Fight against the land, fight against the land & the factory owners. Same fight today against another ruling class, learn a lesson from your past". Quite. No number ones here though.