The Jesus and Mary Chain's Psychocandy: 33 1/3 Series: Paula Mejia: Softcover Book

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Taste the Floor
Chapter One: Never Understand
Chapter Two: Just Like Honey
Chapter Three: In a Hole
Chapter Four: Sowing Seeds
Chapter Five: Taste of Cindy
Chapter Six: Some Candy Talking
Chapter Seven: My Little Underground
Chapter Eight: The Living End
Chapter Nine: Cut Dead
Chapter Ten: Inside Me
Chapter Eleven: It's So Hard
Chapter Twelve: Something's Wrong
Chapter Thirteen: The Hardest Walk
Chapter Fourteen: You Trip Me Up

Published: Oct 20 2016
Format: Paperback
Edition: 1st
Pages: 136
ISBN: 9781628929508
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
Dimensions: 6 x 5 inches
Series: 33 1/3
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing