Details

Subject(s)

• Rock music—Scotland—History and criticism [Browse]
• Jesus & Mary Chain (Musical group).—Psychocandy [Browse]

Series

33 1/3 [More in this series]

Summary note

The Jesus and Mary Chain's swooning debut Psychocandy seared through the underground and through the pop charts, shifting the role of noise within pop music forever. Post-punk and pro-confusion, Psychocandy became the sound of a generation poised on the brink of revolution, establishing Creation Records as a tastemaking entity in the process. The Scottish band's notorious live performances were both punishingly loud and riot-spurring, inevitably acting as socio-political commentary on tensions emergent in mid-1980s Britain. Through caustic clangs and feedback channeling the rage of the working-class who'd had enough, Psychocandy gestures toward the perverse pleasure in having your eardrums exploded and loudness as a politics within itself. Yet Psychocandy's blackened candy heart center - calling out to phantoms Candy and Honey with an unsettling charm - makes it a pop album to the core, and not unlike the sugarcoated sounds the Ronettes became famous for in the 1960s. The Jesus and Mary Chain expertly carved out a place where depravity and sweetness entwined, emerging from the isolating underground of suburban Scotland grasping the distinct sound of a generation, apathetic and uncertain. The irresistible Psychocandy emerged as a clairvoyant account of struggle and sweetness that still causes us to grapple with pop music's relation to ourselves.

Bibliographic references

Includes bibliographical references (pages 117-120).

Contents

• The living end
• In a hole
• My little underground
• Sowing seeds
• Upside down
• Never understand
• Inside me
• Something's wrong
• Just like honey
• Some candy talking
• Taste the floor
• Taste of Cindy
• Reverence
• Epilogue. Cut dead.

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ISBN

• 9781628929508 ((paperback))
• 1628929502 ((paperback))

LCCN

2016287230

OCLC

962058401

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