ManBREAK


My girlfriend says they make her want to shag young men. They rap. They harmonise. They have rock-power. They are ManBREAK. With their searing guitar-driven Molotov-pop the are touted as East 17 go Clash. The album Come and See is a political polemic with swirling guitar riffs and stories of lives ravaged by a degenerate system and its political pimps.
Playing to crowds of 25,000 in the States with Live! and Luscious Jackson, they have dominated the college airwaves for months. The band is fronted by Swindelli, a hyperactive, all-singing-and-dancing marxist John the Baptist. He is a pop prophet marking the countdown to cataclysm, courting the aura of raging malediction.
On the new single, Round and Round, Swindelli harangues: "I've got the weight of the world and it's resting/ there's no immediate help for us all/ on every shoulder whose head is protesting/ there's another one with their back to the wall." Yes, as rappers, ManBREAK are essentially didactic. Their grasp of ideology and its psychic effects mirrors the sense of injustice, the belief that no one is listening or understands, which is the cross born on the shoulders of every adolescent.
Their last single, Ready Or Not, had massive pop hit written all over it, yet it couldn't get on the Radio 1 playlist. Too poppy for the Evening Session? Too rocky for daytime play? A too righteously true piece of agit-pop? Get hold of it. Ideology is the name given to the promises that unrestrained capitalism cannot keep, and the fantasies it canot deliver. ManBREAK are a reminder that happy endings are for newsreaders.

Written by John O'Reilly; from The Guardian, September 12, 1997

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