Top 100 10s: 100. MANIC STREET PREACHERS - "Postcards From A Young Man" (Patreon)

“I’m quite prepared to admit I was wrong,” sings James Dean Bradfield on this song about ageing and reflection, and rejecting those things for a moment or two of bloody-minded resolve. He doesn’t sing it like it’s true.

It won’t have escaped your notice, but you’re older than you were in 1999. Me too, it sucks, I know. But maybe you’ve made the best of it, grown into yourself, found what makes you happy. I hope so. In a lot of ways, I’m in a better place than when I made a list of my Top 100 Records of the 1990s, pushing my opinions out, day on day, to an imaginary audience, trying to pretend I was a music writer.

At the end of the 2000s, I was, in some financial sense, a music writer. I had a column in Pitchfork and one starting in the Guardian, and while I made an expansive list that year, I never got far with writing about the records. I was busy, and not motivated, and too deep in the horse-trading world of public lists to feel like looking back for my own.

But now here I am again, trying to put a rope around a decade, and write a hundred things about songs I liked. It feels more difficult, but it feels right because it’s so difficult that it’s absurd too, and absurd things might be fun.

The biggest difference between twenty years ago and now is that I know how much I don’t know. My 1990s list felt, in some deep private smugness, like the work of an eclectic and discerning listener, and I tried to write like that listener, as if each choice had been carefully selected from dozens of others.

Looking at it now, it is what it was, postcards from a young man who’d been a passionate reader of the music weeklies, who’d followed some of their writers (at a nervous distance) on the journey to rave, who’d discovered a way for his ornery streak to come out in online brawling. Who’d listened, honestly, to nowhere near as much as he thought he had.

In 1999 it felt like a noble effort – or at least like a fun piece of critical cosplay – to try and sum a decade up. In 2009 I got to do it for money and it was a fucking nightmare, if I’m honest. In 2019… where would you even start? 

My listening in the 2010s has been so spatchcocked, months of paying attention followed by years of broken receptors, formal games and chance encounters, the recommendations of dear friends and of fathomless networks. All refracted through my life and my body, a fat white man, no longer young, a contented Dad living in a collapsing polity.

“This world will not impose its will”: I first heard this song long past the point where I imagined I’d ever care again about the Manics. Nothing else I’ve heard by them this decade has its defiance, or its ambiguity, or its stiff-legged swing, like a man kicking the blankets off his legs on a winter morning and getting up one more time to drag himself through the day, because the alternative is to stop, and sink into the fog of resentment and disappointment. The way you see other men doing.

“Postcards” feels like a band taking stock and rededicating themselves – in an awful irony, its specific type of catchiness recalls solo Morrissey to me, someone who really has sunk into the dark. It’s a song where hope beats regret, but only just, and with the rueful foreknowledge that it’s a vote that’ll be rerun many times yet. Still, a win for all that. 

I know I believe in nothing, this band once quoted, but it is my nothing. Here they’re saying, I know I believe in bullshit. But it’s my bullshit. That’s a progression. And it was the only possible place I could start.