CHAPTER 6
Yes – She is Suffering – 4st 7lb
“In the 19th century, it seemed as if everyone was slowly dying of consumption. Consumption came to be viewed not in medical terms (medicine had little to offer anyway), but in popular terms, first as romantic redemption, then as reflection of societal ills. The consumptive prostitute, for example, could be a moral deviant redeemed by suffering and death. […] The pallor and wasting, the burning sunken eyes, the perspiration-anointed skin — all hallmarks of the disease — came to represent haunted feminine beauty, romantic passion, and fevered sexuality, notions reinforced by the excess of consumption deaths in young women.”
– David M. Morens, “At the Deathbed of Consumptive Art”
“Don’t be misled: The imperative to ‘Enjoy!’ is omnipresent, but pleasure and happiness are almost entirely absent. We can have as many vibrators as we like, and drink as much booze as we can physically tolerate, but anything else outside the echo chamber of money-possessions-pleasure is strictly verboten.”
– Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman
Richey: “The only perfect circle on the human body is the eye. When a baby is born it’s so perfect, but when it opens its eyes it’s just blinded by corruption and everything else is a downward spiral.”
(qtd in Bailie, “Traumatic”)
Itself a downward spiral, a ring of Dante’s inferno, The Holy Bible is also full of smaller circles: an animal’s defensive coil on “Die in the Summertime,” the navel-gazing that concludes “4st 7lb” and, on “Yes,” the cyclical routines of sex work and wage labour fused into purgatory’s circle. “Yes” sets the tone for The Holy Bible well: a song, like the album, full of sunless afternoons and plagued streets, disease, fever, nausea, swarming insects and ambulances at the bottoms of cliffs. Bradfield’s vocal is notably restrained throughout, almost cautious, fraying at the edges as the choruses conclude, suggesting a narrator beaten-down and hemmed in by pressure and powerlessness, but it also expresses a quiet stamina and focused flexibility when delivering the intricate lyrics — a feat not always matched during live renditions. The song’s breathless and raw reportage contains some of the album’s most evocative lines, mixing panic attack, personality crisis, prurience and pity.
Saying thank you and offering your seat to the elderly float incongruously in “Yes”’s stew of mental collapse and bodily degeneration, but they fit logically into the song’s themes of keeping up appearances through rituals and coping mechanisms so deeply embedded in everyday life that they become automatic. Adherence to social conventions of politeness and courtesy are one way for an individual to retain some measure of control over a disintegrating interior landscape, and for a society to avoid falling into Hobbesian chaos. The greater the internal churning, the more important it becomes to maintain an external facade in which rules are obeyed, orders followed and individuals presented as upstanding members of society. Like “Faster,” “Yes” takes defiant, exhilarated pride in just about holding itself together, in keeping the cracks just about adequately papered over. With the unsettling inclusion of self-harm among these accepted conventions and coping mechanisms, the album starts as it means to go on.
“Yes” employs its sex work metaphor as a tool of social criticism, blending it with a veiled critique of the music industry — MSP as “the band that like to say yes” — as well as broader social and economic power relations. Something that makes the song’s chosen metaphor particularly eyebrow-raising is the furore over Richey’s acceptance of a handjob from a sex worker on the band’s troubled April 1994 tour of Thailand. Adding to their manifold points of crisis in that year, the tour was described by accompanying NME journalist Barbara Ellen as “a morality coma” (19). Less shocking than it was exasperatingly predictable, the behaviour Ellen records in the city’s red-light district and strip clubs cleaved to a certain tedious archetype that was depressingly endemic in the newly laddish 90s and which jarred with the band’s ostensibly progressive politics. Was it naïve to expect any different? Ellen’s interview makes clear the context of imperialist, racist and sexist power relations in which the Thai sex industry is mired, and the complicity of Western tourists in this. Richey attempted, when challenged, to counter these concerns by invoking an equivalency in exploitation between East and West:
All developing economies abuse their young. When Britain was a developing economy we sent our children up chimneys and down coal mines and out into the street to steal. This is just abuse on a wider scale. When we ask the Thai people about these girls they say that most of them want to be here. […] It’s hard for us to imagine what it’s like to live in a zinc hut in 125-degree heat with no sanitation and basically no future. Who can blame these people for getting out any way they can? (17)
This justification ignores the fact that some parties have the agency and power to enjoyably or profitably participate in such “abuse” — whether capitalism or sex work — while others can only take part as the exploited party. This is the dynamic which “Yes” mercilessly outlines rather than obfuscates. The song’s broader point is the fine line between exploiter and exploited, and how the same individual may be both in different circumstances. “Of Walking Abortion” excoriates Western consumers who feel themselves oppressed while benefiting from the exploitation of sweatshop labour. In “Ifwhiteamerica,” domestic racial oppression runs parallel to a foreign policy of imperialist exploitation. The album’s blurring of totalitarianism and sadomasochism also blurs the line between atrocity and pornography — in both cases, power produces desire and the results are shocking and transgressive. In the libidinal economies mapped by “Yes,” celebrity, sex work and wage labour merge in a perfect storm of mutual exploitation. Power in The Holy Bible is inescapable and infects all relationships — there will always be someone or something to submit to, and someone or something to exploit.
Richey’s fatalistic attitude towards his use of prostitutes was of a piece with the posture the band had adopted since their early days, in which sex and love were considered distractions at best and destructive at worst. A number of Manics lyrics express pessimism or disdain towards relationships and seldom make any distinction between good relationships and bad, assuming that both love and hate will end in abandonment. The negativity Richey could demonstrate in the same interview towards committed relationships (“I’ve seen so many people get left or hurt. It looks terrifying”) and towards groupies who expected some level of affection (“There’s no passion involved for me so it would be immoral to pretend there was”) displays a contradictory attitude in which sex and love are at once valueless — and therefore hold no power — and powerfully terrifying, a source at once of boredom and of fear.
This psychosexual tension runs throughout the album. While “This is Yesterday” and “Die in the Summertime” uphold an ideal of childhood purity against the adult world’s corruption, “Faster” begins with a sample of John Hurt balefully intoning Winston Smith’s line from 1984: “I hate purity, I hate goodness, I don’t want virtue to exist anywhere, I want everyone corrupt.” Smith’s contempt here is towards the Party, loyalty to which requires a corrupted idea of purity as political conformity. The rejection of purity, the acceptance and promotion of corruption, can therefore become a means of social and political rebellion, whether against Big Brother or the PMRC. But the use of sex as political weapon need not imply any personal tenderness or connection; indeed, in 1984 it is Julia’s recklessly rebellious commitment to sex for its own sake that brings about the downfall of herself and Smith. Elsewhere on the album, “4st 7lb” ecstatically records the disappearance of the protagonist’s secondary sexual characteristics and their “sex” itself, the deliberately reduced body “naked and lovely” in contrast to the tears and tension induced in “Faster” by the uncensored naked form.
In this shrinking from sex we are now, of course, floundering in the stagnant waters of “She is Suffering,” the album’s third single release, which reached #25 in October 1994. The song is dripping in disdain for “nature’s lukewarm pleasure” — a line I’m happy to believe targets sex itself rather than women, but a song doesn’t have to be misogynist to be boring. Richey may well have explained that “she” in the lyrics is not female per se, and that the song is concerned with the Buddhism-inspired need to free oneself of desire in the pursuit of peace. Beauty as terrible and as terror may well allude to Yeats and Dostoevsky. None of this improves the plodding, murky drudge of “She is Suffering,” which comes close to sounding like filler, or at least a non sequitur, with little connection to the rest of the album. Its polished precision seems to give it more in common with Gold Against the Soul — it particularly recalls “Life Becoming a Landslide” — or the later bombast of Everything Must Go. (Incidentally, it’s interesting to note that charges of misogyny are hardly ever laid against “P.C.P.,” even though that song pointedly characterizes the shrill, shrewish and censoring voice of political correctness as “she” and “her.” This might simply be down to “P.C.P.” being a far more enjoyable song.)
The artist-as-prostitute is a laboured simile, but “Yes” makes sex work a metaphor for labour of other kinds, painting all aspects of modern existence as a kind of prostitution. In the universe of “Yes,” the idea of Everything for Sale has taken on the feel of a religion, or a dystopian law by which the song’s narrator, although exhausted by obedience, must abide. The line “to show displeasure’s shame” had multiple resonances in a decade that relentlessly focused on euphoria and hedonism, on getting loaded and having a good time, and in which one’s personal happiness was also a high-stakes game of conspicuous display. “Having it all” became an instruction to be unescapably obeyed, not a potential choice that one could take or leave. Work (production) and play (consumption) fused into a compulsory, mutually-reinforcing round of obligations and performance.
Two years before The Holy Bible, the band had hired businesswoman and former underage porn star Traci Lords as a guest vocalist on “Little Baby Nothing.” “We wanted her or Kylie,” remembers Richey, “because at the time they were both women that were perceived as puppets. No one could imagine that they might have their own vision on how they wanted to be sold.” Hearing the song at the age of thirteen or so, I had no idea of Lords’ history, and received her only as a compelling vocal counterpart to Bradfield. On the single’s publicity photos, I saw her as a proponent of the same fake-fur wrapped, glossy-lipped glam aesthetic I admired in Courtney Love or, closer to home, Kenickie, or indeed the Generation Terrorist era Manics themselves. With Richey and Nicky to either side of her in similar leopard-print and eyeliner, she looked entirely at home. Her look for the single was a feminine reclaiming of sleaze and camp, an unfashionable identity in the 90s which differed from that of Riot Grrl, from “ladettism” and from the heroin-chic look of Kate Moss. By the time of The Holy Bible, though, the images associated with the band seemed far more vulnerable, frail and subjugated than this — it was hard to imagine any of the girls or boys in the lyrics of “Yes” being able to transcend their exploitation, to be able to sell themselves instead of being sold.
Richey’s introductory note for “Yes” — “The majority of your time is spent doing something you hate to get something you don’t need” — could have been taken from several recent analyses of twenty-first century capitalism. Wage labour can feel not merely dislikeable and alienating but actively pointless and damaging to self-development and community, which are eroded by the focus on producing and consuming for the profit of a few. By conflating sex work and wage labour, and suggesting no meaningful distinction can be drawn between the two, the song reflects some feminist arguments that sex work should be regarded as little different from other kinds of labour, in a similar way to how the unpaid “emotional labour” undertaken overwhelmingly by women under capitalism should also be counted as work.
In an increasingly squeezed and unstable job market, the act of compiling a CV or attending an interview has become an exercise in “selling oneself” both personally and professionally as a desirable worker — an exhausting process in which qualifications must be offered alongside an accommodating, dedicated personality; a willingness to please. This is an act that much of liberal “one percent feminism” does not challenge or criticize but actively encourages, seeing the gaining of high office or getting rich as feminist ends in themselves (see Power and Foster). The idea that empowerment or liberation for a female artist like Kylie or Traci Lords would constitute having “their own vision of how they wanted to be sold” demonstrates the degree to which this perspective had become embedded in 90s ideas of female empowerment. Even if women were offered the opportunity to “take charge” of our sex and sexuality, it was in the expectation that we would oversee its being sold to the highest bidder, that we would find empowerment and enjoyment in the ability to extract a high price for ourselves. The idea of not selling, of taking ourselves off the market, was never presented as an option.
In a decade marked by debates on whether the presentation of female sexuality was empowerment or exploitation, the possibility of being sexual on our own terms was repeatedly denied. Women could say yes to being “protected” by a paternalistic authority from the corrupting and exploiting influence of “raunch culture,” or we could say yes to engaging in and conforming to its ideals. What we couldn’t seem to do was opt out of both: when competition is everything, and someone else will always say “yes” if we don’t, we are denied the choice, the right and the relief of saying “no.”
Anwen Crawford: “My favourite song on The Holy Bible is, I think, ‘4st 7lb.’ What a turn around from the lyrically patronising, musically plodding misfire of ‘She Is Suffering’! The lyric still astonishes me. The music still astonishes me: the way it slows into that terrible, final reverie […] I think it is an entirely truthful song – artistically truthful and ethically truthful. It tells the truth about how that disease feels from the inside.”
In a world where someone will always say yes, saying no — denial, abstinence, resistance and withdrawal — takes on greater significance. “4st 7lb,” the seventh track of thirteen, is in many ways the heart of the album. Its lyrical invocations of stalled growth and arrested development mark a digging in of adolescent heels, a refusal to be dragged into the next stage of life, to “bud and never flower.” Whereas most of the album sounds as brutal and distasteful as its subject matter, and unequivocally pities or condemns what it describes, “4st 7lb” is devastating in the lush, daydreamy torpor it creates, seeming to luxuriate in its own malaise. Its frank explicitness defies definition, blending reportage, fantasy, voyeurism and exhibitionism. The idea of choice is woven throughout the lyrics, insisting on the narrator’s agency even as it brings her closer to death. “4st 7lb” is a significant song for many fans, whether or not they can identify with what the lyrics depict.
The historical ebb and flow of anorexia is difficult to trace, particularly given the lack of recognition of the disease before the later twentieth century. A flood of stories on the dysfunctional relationship between young women and food appeared from the mid-90s onwards, with tentative medical findings giving way to lurid sensationalist accounts and intrusive speculation over celebrities, giving the impression that self-starvation was endemic among young women in 90s Britain. Analyses often blamed this on the proliferation of unattainably perfect media images of women, to which “ordinary girls” struggled to live up. The emotions and motivations that inform “4st 7lb,” however, do not merely stem from a refusal of adulthood or passive imitation of media images. Those who have experienced anorexia characterize it similarly in more complex and often politicized ways, as recognition and refusal not of adult sexuality itself, but of the mantle of social obligations and objectification that comes along with it.
In 1993, Jeffrey Eugenides published The Virgin Suicides, a novel which, although set in the 1970s, managed to capture a very 90s impression of doomed female youth in stifling suburbia. A sample from its film adaptation would appear, alongside some of Richey’s unused lyrics from this era, on the Manics’ 2009 album Journal for Plague Lovers. The novel’s title characters, five sisters suffocating in domestic isolation, range in archetype from “cherubic misfit” to “carnal angel.” As the story unfolds, their horrifying, cinematic self-destruction cannot be understood by outsiders, who, like listeners of “4st 7lb” and like some observers of Richey’s decline, can feel by turns like archivist, obsessive, confessor and creep. Like The Virgin Suicides, “4st 7lb” invokes the potent mystical-horrific power of the unhappy teenage girl, in which strength, control and empowerment can paradoxically be expressed through a militant show of weakness, denial and refusal, up to and including death. It also suggests virginity — defined not necessarily in sexual terms, but in terms of remaining untouched and apart from the outside world — as a state of strength, to be aspired to and permanently maintained rather than lost.
Richey’s notes for “Faster” include the phrase “strength through weakness,” but in “4st 7lb,” too, physical weakness — and the mental self-discipline its attainment requires — is perversely celebrated as a sign of power, superiority and impending triumph. Vanishing breasts and hands like trembling stalks become beautiful medals of honour. The protagonist’s ecstatic masochism, and the song’s unflinching cataloguing of progress in destruction, also bear traces of an earlier medieval tradition of female self-starvation. At a time when fasting was held to denote female holiness or humility and underscore purity, as well as constituting a means for women to exert some measure of control, the phenomenon of anorexia mirabilis saw women spend long periods in pursuit of spiritual enlightenment by taking in no food but the Eucharist. In “4st 7lb,” the narrator remains precariously anchored to her dissatisfying earthly form, in no way reconciled to the idea of recovery. Like “Faster,” the song takes pride in falling apart, presenting self-destruction as the only logical reaction to an unbearable world — and as superior to submission and acceptance of it. From this perspective, as with “Faster,” by losing one can “win.” Locked in the song’s deadly logic, by taking in nothing of the outside world and therefore remaining uncorrupted by it, one can become a martyr, a sacrifice, a saint.
Nicky: “Anorexics do see themselves as having complete control, wanting to withdraw into themselves so that the ‘state’ – banks, shops, everything is obliterated and they feel some self-control, which has always attracted Richey.”
(qtd in Double 12)
The 90s were bizarrely balanced between the pushing of female empowerment through entrepreneurship and ambition and the pull of constant arguments within politics and academia that, despite legal and material gains, girls were drowning in unprecedented levels of anxiety and despair, expressing this in the rise of eating disorders, cosmetic surgery, self-harm and depression. As anyone who’s been a teenager will tell you, the anxiety experienced in growing up is nothing new; a 1950s study found “widespread dejection and a desperate striving for perfection” among British youth, with “very few girls content with how they looked” (Dyhouse 212–16). The 90s, though, saw an explosion of awareness and interest in teenage female angst, into which were woven the threads of disordered eating, binge-drinking and self-harm. The patron saint of female neurosis was of course Princess Diana, her loneliness and unhappiness in a loveless marriage manifesting in self-harm and bulimia, a struggle for control over her body as she felt control over her life increasingly taken away. The themes of isolation, breakdown and despair expressed in books like The Bell Jar found an echo in the self-conscious confessionals of Tori Amos or Alanis Morissette, and in the revelation of dependency on medication and therapy described in Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation and Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted. Media handwringing over supposedly screwed-up and starving girls was in some ways the flipside to concern over loud, binge-drinking ladettes — either female bodies were taking up too much space in 90s Britain, or they weren’t taking up enough.
A 2005 study suggested rates of anorexia had in fact remained stable in the 90s, while bulimia — characterized by cycles of binging and purging — had risen dramatically (Currin et al.). But even if there was no actual epidemic, the reproduction everywhere in media and culture of smack-skeletal, pale and hollow-eyed young women certainly contributed to the impression that there was. It’s difficult to say (it was certainly difficult to say when I was fourteen) whether the sudden visibility of female self-harm, disordered eating, and half-articulated generalized despair made us feel as though cracking up was somehow a new normal, that having no wounds to show meant you fell short of the fucked-up female ideal — or whether seeing these things acknowledged, in however sensationalized a way, made us feel less alone in our own unarticulated discomfort. At any rate, Richey’s expression of dissatisfaction, and his chosen methods of self-harm, made him a rare male exponent of what was held to be a typically female malaise.
In his part of Wales, Richey once observed: “the women are as bored as the men, but the men will go out to the pub and beat the shit out of everyone else; the women will stay at home and concentrate on surviving” (qtd in “Preaching”). Male rebellion against domesticity and conformity has often involved identifying these things with women: the nagging wife or girlfriend, the stifling mother, the trap of fatherhood. Female rebellion, as a consequence, has had to follow a less straightforward and ready-made path, and is often seen as passive and internalized rather than active and external. “4st 7lb” expresses rebellion and rage in a feminine register, weaponizing the things that have historically been used to control and restrict women: adherence to physical ideals of youth and thinness, taking up little space, coping and carrying on until it kills you.
At a point where the internalized violence of self-harm and disordered eating was seen as a female preserve, Richey’s use of it to express personal crisis unsettled these boundaries, as did his decision to “speak” through a female protagonist. Female listeners who identified with Richey — particularly traditionally unlistened-to teenage girls — could partake of this tragic-heroic identity in a way that might otherwise be denied to them, or could simply see their feelings reflected in a way that would not be automatically disbelieved, dismissed or derided. Throughout the album, however, there remains a tension between depicting feminized suffering as a point of solidarity between artist and audience, and appropriating or fetishizing it.
Looking at Jenny Saville’s cover art for The Holy Bible, entitled Strategy (South Face/Front Face/North Face), the listener cannot help but associate and contrast the woman depicted in “4st 7lb” with the images of starved, injured and exploited female bodies more generally contained within the album. The painting’s title becomes significant in this respect: disordered eating can be a strategy of resistance, a refusal of the consumption otherwise encouraged at every turn. It is a strategy which can give the appearance of conforming to physical and social expectations of thinness, obedience and self-discipline, while taking them to extremes in order to use them as a tool of resistance. From this perspective, the central impulse of anorexia is not weakness but subversion: the anorexic channels their energies into producing a dysfunctional parody of the feminine ideal. It is, to adopt an industrial analogy, the same kind of passive resistance as working-to-rule: we refuse to do what we should by doing only and exactly what we are told to.