"Motorcycle Emptiness" | ||||
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Single by Manic Street Preachers | ||||
from the album Generation Terrorists | ||||
Released | 1 June 1992 | |||
Format | CD, vinyl (7", 12"), cassette | |||
Recorded | Mid 1991 | |||
Genre | ||||
Length | 5:06 (edit) 3:35 (short edit) 6:09 (album version) |
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Label | Columbia | |||
Writer(s) | James Dean Bradfield, Nicky Wire, Sean Moore, Richey Edwards | |||
Producer(s) | Steve Brown | |||
Manic Street Preachers singles chronology | ||||
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"Motorcycle Emptiness" ( sample ) is a single by Welsh alternative rock band Manic Street Preachers. It was released on 1 June 1992, through Columbia Records. It was the fifth single to be released from their debut album, Generation Terrorists.
The track is slower paced than most others on the album. Its lyrics are inspired by S.E. Hinton's book Rumble Fish, about biker gang culture. The lyrics have been interpreted by the band as an attack on the hollowness of the consumer lifestyle offered by capitalism, describing how society expects young people to conform.
The song was derived from the early Manic Street Preachers songs "Go, Buzz Baby, Go" (with which it shares the chord structure and the phrase "Motorcycle Emptiness" late in the song over the verse chords) and "Behave Yourself Baby", a rough demo with a similar structure, that has the lines "All we want from you is the skin you live within", similar to "All we want from you are the kicks you've given us" in this song.
Some of the lyrics are taken from the poem "Neon Loneliness" (the first line of the chorus, "Under neon loneliness", is a direct lift) by Welsh poet Patrick Jones, the brother of Manics bass guitarist and lyricist Nicky Wire. "Motorcycle Emptiness" was also included on Forever Delayed, the Manics' greatest hits album, in October 2002, and released as a reissued single from the compilation in February 2003.