“You know the myth of Staggerlee, that he would kill for a stetson? The Manic Street Preachers would kill for a Sega Megadrive.”
– Richey James Edwards

Hey remember 1992? What a year of possibilities, huh? The musical landscape was truly a-changin’. It was a divisive time in our culture; let me tell you, in my school you were either a Vanilla Ice man or an MC Hammer man — there were no in betweens! And of course, if you were above the age of 9 at the time, you were probably aware of that newfangled “Seattle Sound,” with Nirvana’s surprise ascendance making record execs scramble to sign a new crop of unknown bands that encapsulated grunge’s lumberjack chic.

Across the Atlantic in England, it was a bit of a different story. The two major operatives in hip music were shoegaze, a style apparently defined by its performers’ uncanny ability to untie each other’s shoes onstage using only their eyes, and Madchester/acid dance. It was a strange time indeed, and an even stranger time for a wild entrance by a socialist-posing, Rimbaud-quoting glam band that shamelessly favored Guns ‘n Roses-style sleaze metal and Clash-style polemics over moody Dinosaur Jr. and Pixies-esque eccentrics.

But that’s exactly how the Manic Street Preachers rolled.

Not only that, but before the Manic’s debut album, Generation Terrorists, was released, the band stated publicly that they planned to release one album that would be bigger than Appetite for Destruction, headline London’s Wembley Stadium for three nights, and then burn out.

A little backstory: The group, originally called Betty Blue, was formed in Wales by school friends James Dean Bradfield (guitars), Sean Anthony Moore (drums), Nicky Wire (first guitar and then bass) and Flicker, who soon departed and was replaced by the band’s own over-thinking-man’s Sid Vicious, Richey James Edwards. It was Edwards who was responsible for most of Manic Street Preachers’ outrageous Sex Pistols-style posturing in the press, as he spouted off pretty little quotables like “We will always hate Slowdive more than we hate Adolf Hitler.” In a notorious interview with NME in which writer Steve Lamacq questioned the band’s true devotion to the punk ethic after signing to Columbia Records, Edwards angrily carved the words “4 Real” (um, make that a number and a word) into his arm with a razor to prove his sincerity to his art.

So by the time Generation Terrorists was released, there was already too much riding on it for the album to become the wildly successful hit the band promised. And sure enough, it wasn’t; the album sold a respectable 250,000 copies and peaked at #13 on the British pop charts, but that was certainly nowhere near the cultural Molotov cocktail that Edwards and co. desired. In hindsight this may well have had everything to do with the burgeoning grunge phenomenon that overshadowed any group in 1992 that reeked of hairspray. But one could also argue that hard rock fans just didn’t dig their juicy riffs served with a side of the band’s ham-fisted, dilettantish “poetry.” Here’s a taste of the pseudo-Marxist gumbo of lyrics that make-up the otherwise fantastic anthem “Motorcycle Emptiness”:

“Life lies a slow suicide / Orthodox dreams and symbolic myths / From feudal serf to spender / This wonderful world of purchase power.”

Video for the album’s first single, “Stay Beautiful”

Kurt Cobain these guys weren’t. But then again, they weren’t exactly Winger. Winger, for better or worse, probably wouldn’t chant of “I accuse history!” in a rock anthem about drug abuse. There’s something fascinating and respectable about the complete bloated ambition of Generation Terrorists, from the 70-minute running time to the quotes that accompanied each song on the original record sleeve’s tracklist. (”‘Progress is a comfortable disease’ — ee cummings” accompanies “Slash ‘n’ Burn,” “‘I talk to God but the sky is empty’ — Sylvia Plath” accompanies “Motorcycle Emptiness,” and so on …) The Manics take on all of the modern world’s big abstractions — consumerism, drug abuse, the working class, liberalism, Nazism, America, war, poverty, rock and roll — like a doe-eyed college freshman who’s just read his first Noam Chomsky lecture. On paper it sounds kind of like if Filippo Marinetti fronted Motley Cruë.

But if you can believe it, despite all the band’s amateur nihilist rhetoric, Generation Terrorists is a genuinely fun, balls-out rock album, albeit completely out of touch with its own time. Stalwart producer Steve Brown brings an incredibly polished hard rock sound to the band, who for all its anarchist ways, can really play. The album reminds me of something Greil Marcus once wrote about Fleetwood Mac: I’m paraphrasing here, but it was about how you can take lyrics that sound benign and dull on the written page and wrap the perfect music around it and they suddenly spring to life. In the Manics’ case, you can take an utterly ridiculous art-school manifesto and string it around kick-ass Hanoi Rocks riffs and they basically sound like kick-ass Hanoi Rocks songs. It also helps that Bradfield’s slurred, Welsh dialect is mostly incomprehensible throughout, so you could be blissfully ignorant of the lyrics as you listen.

Six singles were released from Generation Terrorists, including “Motorcycle Emptiness,” the upbeat “Slash and Burn” and the near-grunge “Stay Beautiful.” But honestly nearly every track on the album sounds like it could’ve been a single, each one pumped up with a banging chorus and non-stop gain-heavy riffage from Bradfield. “Born to End” could’ve been an outtake from the Clash’s Give ‘Em Enough Rope, “Natwest-Barclays-Midlands-Lloyds,” despite grim lyrics about “Words of euthanasia, apathy of routine,” is incredibly catchy.

Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, it seems that Generation Terrorists was born to self-destruct. After it failed to live up to expectations, Bradfield said of the album, “If you make a record as good as Appetite for Destruction it sells; if you don’t it doesn’t.” After two more albums that failed to become hits and the mysterious disappearance of Richey Edwards in 1995 (he’s been presumed dead ever since), the band changed its sound to fit a Brit-pop mold along the lines of Oasis to greater critical and commercial acclaim. Never again would they release anything as, well, balls-out as Generation Terrorists. But for all its flaws, it’s a thoroughly enjoyable album, perhaps because it flaunts its contradictions so carelessly and youthfully. I’m also a sucker for big, bombastic, flawed, overreaching albums.

For fans of: Guns ‘n’ Roses, Sex Pistols, Hanoi Rocks, Mötley Crüe, balls-out anthems, heavy gain

Video for “Motorcycle Emptiness”