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then transferred to a Science College in Leytonstone. He used to have dreads. Massive nu-metal fan.

Let's not make this a thread about them.

I myself didn't do a degree (I did a year course for my own pleasure, with my own money) so I don't see going to uni a must. Of course it does depend on what you want to do with your life. I was lucky enough to be raised with computers in every corner of the house so I got my job through that.

when my granda died he left me some money, which is what I'm using for uni- if I didn't have that I'd have to have a job or live in some sort of £30 a week 20 bed student hell hole and survive on microchips.

However the debt thing doesn't bother me that much- while I agree in principle that higher education should be entirely free, what the raising in university fees amounts to is middle class kids earning LESS money in the future. It's not a debt in the sense that the bailiffs are gonna come round and take your telly. It means that your future earnings will be less. Which I still don't agree with, but ultimately I'm not really that arsed if some kid from the home counties has to shop at Morrissons rather than Waitrose in ten years time. Definitely not worth rioting about.

Hope you got paid for this.

because it hasn't.

I don't really get behind political stuff generally. I don't think it's massively 6th Form because (to me) 6th Form politics is all about being very middle-to-upper-class and getting all concerned about 'issues' and believing you're the first person to see those. There's both an aspect of naiveté and of pretension to that.

This doesn't have any of that. Are the lyrics a bit fucking obvious at times? Yeah I guess they are: but what they're addressing is a bit big and obvious and in terms of context, as a song specifically about the issue for a film specifically about he issue with a video specifically to make that point I'm not sure you can be any other way about it.

You can make clever political statements with incredible lyrical prose but the problem there tends to be people understanding what you're saying without you being obvious, which requires a lot more faith from them.

people who have actually listened to their lyrics but presumably just think the music's good enough even though the words are misguided, or whatever such people think about good sentiment.

But then they challenged themselves by trying to convey politics through pop / rock songs so it's hard to get a whole political theory into verse - chorus - verse.
You're right in that they just had slogans, quotes and allusions to political subjects and that the listener had the option whether to follow up on it or not. Perhaps that subtle approach is more successful as a lot of time people get turned off by having an opinion rammed down their throat in a song. It's not fair to say no-one engaged with their politics because I did, maybe you did and there's a few others of us who read the books and did the research after it being referenced by the Manics. I don't really look to a pop song to completely educate me, just point me in the right direction.
The Manics got asked a lot in the early days whether anyone was picking up on the political stuff and they admitted it was probably futile but it was at the core of what they were trying to achieve - getting popular to spread their thoughts. They may have failed although they said they'd be happy if they turned just one person on to the same writers and theorists as them.

not sure its 100% applicable, although Im too stupid to say why currently..let me sleep on this....