Richey
This is what my iPhone lock screen looks like:
For the non-sighted: Richey Edwards, missing guitarist/lyricist of British rock band Manic Street Preachers, posing for a photograph wearing sunglasses and a hat while holding a cigarette.
To be honest, I'm actually growing a little disenchanted with Richey Edwards.
When I first started looking up the Manic Street Preachers for the old hits I liked I didn't think well of Richey at first, there was something about him that I felt uncomfortable with. This opinion changed quickly. I began to admire him a lot over the past one month or so -- obsessively following Tumblr sites, reading his interviews, etc. -- because he seemed to be a Real Life Nihilist, someone who was burned through the intensity of his personal convictions (in this case, driving himself mentally ill and committing suicide). I admire radical people simply because I am not radical myself; I am conservative, I don't take chances, I calculate my costs. My friends have been imprisoned for their political convictions -- not long, though, a day or a week or a month or so -- but I am still afraid when I face a line of cops.
Anyway, Richey Edwards: of all the heroes I have -- from Doris Lessing to Dostoevsky to Temnyson's St. Simeon Stylites to John Keats -- he has been the most physically gorgeous, and he is probably the ideologically weakest. There's no doubt he felt very strongly about his ideas, but they were all a mess, all incoherent. It takes a while -- after shifting through the interviews and lyrics and sound bites -- to realize that there's very little you can string out of his thoughts to form a cohesive worldview. That's not to say it wasn't there, but when you compare it to the other guy I really got obsessed over and started imitating (John Keats) there's a real difference between the strength of their ideas.
(I know -- 29, and still imitating heroes? -- well, I don't have kids, I can be as young as I please.)
Anyway, the value that he's left me with is to recognize the value of physical beauty and performance. You can be a good writer, but so what? You and twenty thousand other people. Be beautiful, be explosive, seize the attention of the audience. Good writing is good writing, but a little performance will always help.
Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.