The cover of the Manic Street Preacher’s album Everything Must Go is a declaration of absence. From the title itself and the empty parentheses hovering below it, to the photos of the band with ashen skin and vacant expressions floating in the middle of a blank blue space, it is clear something is/was/will be missing. Absence. Presence. Past. Present. Future. On Everything Must Go these concepts bedevil and recur as time becomes a labyrinth alternately releasing and entrapping the band, including the member no longer there: Richey Edwards. The Manic Street Preachers’ guitarist and lyricist disappeared not long after the release of the band’s difficult but masterful third record, The Holy Bible. The Manics’ subsequent album Everything Must Go (1996) is commonly thought to have been recorded in response to Richey’s disappearance. Richey, however, wrote five of the album’s twelve songs and his participation helped to shape the album’s uncertain approach to absence and presence, memory and forgetting, and as it was and how it is. The more the band tried to “shed some skin” in order to free themselves from “the memory” and to “escape from [their] history”, the more they enmeshed themselves in Richey and the past, creating a future that would forever include him. This paper will consider Everything Must Go 20 years after its release, examining Richey’s disappearance from both factual and symbolic vantage points while tracing its influence on the album’s preoccupation with the liminality of time.
About the presenterSharon Becker
Sharon Becker is a Lecturer II in English at Towson University where she teaches American literature, first year writing, and semiotics. Her current research is best represented in her semiotics class which uses K-pop videos to teach students to analyze visual texts. In addition to writing about masculinity and male identity in K-pop, she is interested in beginning work on Thai and Korean BLs.