She is Suffering (from The Holy Bible) - Manic Street Preachers (1994)
"Nature's Lukewarm Pleasure"
The Holy Bible by the Manic Street Preachers remains one of the most extraordinary and immersive albums of the past three decades. It has spawned a number of PhD theses dissecting its content, as well as major literary studies like Triptych, and its own entry in the 33 ⅓ book series dedicated to significant individual albums. The disappearance in 1995 of the album’s chief lyricist, Richey Edwards, provides an added dark element to the weight of the album.
Despite now being over two and a half decades old, given our current turbulent global political climate, it is an album that is arguably more relevant than ever. I have an essay of my own in the works, built around the album’s relationship with Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes and the emotional and political battle between historical memory and nostalgia. Yet it is some way off completion.
However, most critiques of the album have a tendency to either overlook, misinterpret, and/or disparage one particular song – She is Suffering. It’s something that is a persistent irritant to me, so I thought the song was worthy of an exploration on its own.
She is Suffering was obviously the one song on the album where the band attempted to create something that could potentially be played on the radio. It’s more spacious, and with conventional song structure and melody. So stylistically it stands out among songs more indebted to the taut and barbed sounds of post-punk. Yet it is a song that thematically does sit comfortably within the album, even if musically it is a little (although not entirely) distinct.
The first issue with the song, and what leads to most confusion, is the title. “She” here is not referring to a woman per se, but it is a euphemism for “desire”, or more specifically, sexual desire. This may be a little linguistically fraught, but given Edwards was a heterosexual man in order to write about his desire in an abstract manner there was no avoiding a certain objectification (in the broad, non-degrading sense of the term). Although this should not be construed as issuing blame.
The song is a rumination on Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths – the central tenets of the religion’s philosophy. These truths are; the recognition that suffering exists; the understanding that it is human desire that leads to suffering; that letting go of these desires will alleviate suffering; and that it is the Noble Eightfold Path that will lead to transcending this suffering.
She is Suffering is Edwards’s focus on the second of the Noble Truths. While Buddhism sees all desire, physical and material, as problematic, Edwards is engaging with the complexity of his own, and men’s more broadly, sexual desire. Expanding this further to grapple with the idea of intimate relationships in general.
Unlike his bandmates and childhood friends, bassist/lyricist Nicky Wire and drummer Sean Moore, who married their partners from when they were teenagers, Edwards felt that such relationships were beyond him. Not that he was unattractive, but that relationships require ways of being in the world that he was incapable of. For someone who was such an incessant over-thinker, who saw every action as a socio-political dilemma, there was a tension between this way of being and the necessary submission to certain social norms that is required to form relationships.
The central concept and repeated hook of the song’s verses Edwards’s interrogation of “beauty”. He was a man who had an obsession with aesthetics, both with his own and that of others. But there is also a deeper concern here than this may superficially suggest – the perennial internal struggle over what men can and cannot possess. While men may crave beauty, they can never possess it in the way women can. Men’s dominance of women can be viewed partly through this jealousy – the attempt to “own” something that is more innate to femininity than masculinity.
There is a recognisable danger here in crossing over into the worldview of Incels or Men Going Their Own Way; movements that are mired in their own lustful desires – and their inability to act on them – which create dark mental burdens that lead to strong and often violent resentments. Yet these movements are built on a fundamental hatred of women, a belief that women owe them sex, and that this is part of the natural order of humanity. Male supremacism is at their core.
These are ideas that neither Edwards nor the band as a whole could ever be accused of championing. Indeed, She is Suffering’s preceding song on the album, Of Walking Abortion, is about these immature male and masculinist deficiencies that provide the fertile soil for fascism. Its title taken from radical feminist Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, where she writes that the Y Chromosome is an incomplete X Chromosome, meaning that “…the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage. To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples.”
Indeed it is the blunt objectivism of much male sexual desire that provides the emotional and intellectual struggle of She is Suffering’s lyric. Unlike male supremacism that sees sex as a fundamental right, and has a casual comfort in the violent aspects of male sexuality, Edwards is instead grappling with the implications of these desires. Is genuine affection at the core of male sexual desire, or is it driven by something more primal? A darker force within masculinity? If this is the case, is the only ethical response to simply not participate?
Edwards’s own answer to this question came with another lyric. In 2009 the band released an album constructed from lyrics that Edwards had given them a few weeks before his disappearance, called Journal for Plague Lovers (a prescient title bastardised from the Daniel Defoe book A Journal of the Plague Year). This album contained a song that can be seen as She is Suffering’s sequel. If She is Suffering is centred on recognising the second Noble Truth of Buddhism, then This Joke Sport Severed was Edwards’s bitter attempt to move onto the third, to transcend suffering by disconnecting from desire. To give up on the idea of human relationships. The way Buddhist monks, Sadhus, or Christian monks do.
This Joke Sport Severed carries with it the awful weight that Edwards didn’t just disconnect from the idea of forming relationships. Unlike Buddhist monks who submit themselves to the following Noble Eightfold Path, he chose not to actually do the difficult spiritual work to transcend his desires, he instead chose to vacate life itself (his body has never been found, but he was declared legally dead in 2008). Although there is probably a middle path here that would have been more culturally appropriate for the member of a then-mildly successful rock band.
Yet there is a contradiction at the heart of this seemingly awful conclusion to his life. As Edwards had a strong ethic for, and fascination with, self-discipline – being highly sympathetic to the discipline of those who would disconnect themselves from expected norms in search of a higher principle or political goal. However, this self-discipline intersected within him as a more destructive form of self- denial. This is the strong subtext that runs through She is Suffering and it is what relates the song to two others on The Holy Bible – 4st 7lbs and Faster.
4st 7lbs may be the album’s most disturbing song (depending on how you rank its various subject matter, as there’s a lot of competition). Written as a diary entry of an anorexic teenage girl, it is based on Edwards’ own difficulties with - and perspective on – the eating disorder. It is a song about both an unhealthy obsession of the public culture towards beauty that is also a component of She is Suffering - as it name-checks 90s models Kate Moss, Kristin McMenamy and Emma Balfour, as well as 60s model Twiggy – and about an intense form of self-discipline – “Such beautiful dignity in self-abuse.”
It was Edwards’s belief in this extreme form of personal resistance as the critical marker of human dignity that also drives Faster. When Nicky Wire suggested Edwards write a song about the pace of social change in the 20th Century called Faster, Edwards instead took the word’s homonym – one who fasts – and wrote about his own defiance to basic human needs and what he saw as social misconceptions around such acts, leading to the extraordinary boast – “I am stronger than Mensa, Miller and Mailer, I spat out Plath and Pinter.”
Edwards believed this kind of self discipline to be a political act. Starvation was a form of resistance that no outside force could effectively counteract. If one was willing to submit themselves to a cause in a manner that was to the detriment of one’s own health it demonstrated an unwavering commitment. It gave their act an unimpeachable power. The opening line of Marlon J.D from Journal for Plague Lovers also illustrated a similar notion of non-violence, of being a defiant internal resistance to outside forces - “He stood like a statue, as he was beaten across the face.”
This perspective was cultivated by a teenage fascination with Bobby Sands, the imprisoned and abused IRA operative, who staged a hunger strike in H-Blocks prison in 1981. This hunger strike took on greater power when Sands ran in – and won – the Fermanagh and South Tyrone by-election that year from his cell (the UK government subsequently changed electoral laws so prisoners couldn’t run for office). He died of starvation a month later. It was an act that proved influential in gaining the necessary political traction for the republican movement in Northern Ireland that would eventually lead to the Good Friday Agreement. And with Sinn Féin looking like it may have a good chance of soon winning power in the Republic of Ireland, it is still having knock-on effects four decades later.
Powerful statements of intent like those of Bobby Sands had purpose for Edwards. Although he attached no direct political cause to his own self-denial, he was of a worldview that sought meaning from action. A recognition that one existed permanently within Kant’s Categorical Imperative, and this created a sense that new worlds could be constructed through careful individual behaviour, and, most importantly, that humans needed to be more than just physical pleasure maximising vessels.
Indeed the final line of She is Suffering is this very critique, as Edwards describes sex as “Nature’s lukewarm pleasure,” an act that satisfied a very small component of the human soul. The end of the Cold War had moved Western society into this brave new world that was seemingly post-political, built on a popular culture of thoughtless indulgence and triumphalism. The misunderstood warning of Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History and the Last Man” recognised that to submerge humans’ political nature would eventually lead to both careless political errors, as well as a chaotic cultural backlash.
While Blur’s Girls & Boys defined the basic sentiment of the era, its laddish hedonism was everything the Manic Street Preachers despised. The Holy Bible itself was a hand-grenade hurled in Britpop’s direction, built on nostalgia as the era was, and lacking any of the political intent that they valued in art. If life was solely about “shagging birds and havin’ a laugh” then it was of little substance and meaning. “Lukewarm” was Edwards being polite.
She is Suffering can be understood as this tension between the personal and political. A recognition that all acts are political, but that to submit oneself solely to this perspective can be debilitating. The suffering here is not that of Buddhism’s Noble Truths, it is the suffering of being consumed by ethical caution. To not recognise that the social aspects of humanity are also central to any idea of the “good,” and to be social requires a certain compromise with social norms. This doesn’t mean being comfortable with the darker aspects of male sexuality, but instead to not let these impulses – and practices – define human connection.