Contempt is a glimpse of the past
The arrival of two brand new songs from the vault with the Know Your Enemy reissue was a surprising sight: after all, the Manics’ b-side folders were always so bountiful that you had come to expect that any leftover material from the albums would have always seen the light of day. And that’s apparently indirectly the reason why it took until 2022 for “Rosebud” to be released: per the Manics’ court producer and “fifth Beatle” Dave Eringa, Wire had mistakenly assumed they had already released it as a b-side until they started pulling together the material for the re-release. It’s innocuous enough that it could be plausible (though given Wire’s obsessive archivist tendencies it’s hard to believe), and at the very least they saw to fix that error once they spotted it: “Rosebud” is a genuinely worthy addition to the discography.
The telltale signs of the Know Your Enemy era run all over “Rosebud”: the slightly disjointed, quietly experimental feel which lands it squarely in its parent era, the jagged acoustic edge, the organ and the ever-so-slightly raw sound. In fact, it’s such a striking time capsule that hearing it in the middle of the more contemporary Manics years really drives the point in of just how much the band has changed over the years. Listening to it alongside the other b-sides and bonus tracks of the period, it slots in perfectly – there’s none of the obvious demo-itis that happens with most archeological “previously unreleased” finds that end up in deluxe reissues. “Rosebud” is a fully formed song, and not just that but it’s also a well-written one. Both the disjointed groove in its verses and the sudden anthemic lift of the choruses are immediately striking and they stay with you, and the song doesn’t waste much time wrapping its curious hooks around the listener. The highlight of the song are Sean’s drums; once again very much in line with how he operated during the Know Your Enemy era, and subtly taking the lead of the song’s flow.
That said, as much as the reissue tracklist tries to convince otherwise – where this is placed on the more contemplative Door to the River disc of the newly-split double album – I don’t think for a second the band ever genuinely thought this was a strong contender for an actual album slot: it says enough that not only was this taken off the ultimate 16-track “best of” version of Know Your Enemy but then promptly forgotten so hard that it took two decades for the band to remember it. It’s also why I keep referencing b-sides and bonus tracks, because what ultimately ended up on the final original album made its own kind of mad sense, leaving the various non-album songs to weave all kinds of atmospheric slow-burner side paths. The murkiness and pace of “Rosebud” bears more similarity to songs like “Pedestal” or “Groundhog Days” than anything on the album, but keep in mind this was a truly rich period for b-sides and there’s no shame in that comparison. And as already referenced, despite the timespan between conception and release, it hasn’t lost any of that period’s charms: so much so that hearing it for the first time was like meeting a friend decades later after you had already forgotten what they looked like. There’s a bizarre pseudo-nostalgia around the song because it’s so close to that original era, and that’s in no way shape or form a bad thing.
Given my positivity about how much it reminds me of the past, the song’s message couldn’t be anything different. “Rosebud” is obviously a reference to Citizen Kane, the story of an elderly rich man who retreated his own bubble of treasures gathered over the years with his wealth, never able to fill the hole he had in his life as he yearned back to his innocent childhood days. It isn’t unheard of for Nicky to write an entire song about a fictional piece of work but the entire lyric seems to eventually trail off from Kane into something more personal; and the concept of building a world of your own out of things you gather isn’t too far off from “The Convalescent” which described that very world in great detail. If Rosebud is meant to represent the last tangible piece of your carefree days, then the refrain of “I think I lost a rosebud sometime today” seems to mark a breaking point, the moment when all of your optimistic innocence has been broken by the world around you. Which not only makes it an angle more befitting of Wire, but also the darker flipside of “Just a Kid” where that happiness still existed. If this had been a b-side back in the day, slotting it right after “Just a Kid” would have been absolutely beautiful.
While not properly a single, “Rosebud” was released as a promotional item for the Know Your Enemy reissue and received a video consisting of holiday-themed footage taken from the BBC Archives. If there’s a deeper meaning to it, I’ve missed it.
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