A note before we begin

This has been a surprisingly difficult article to write, partly because of what it’s about and partly because of the process of writing it.

For the last few months I’ve been experimenting with a structured interview process for developing articles. Rather than sitting down with a blank page, I talk through a subject conversationally, explore the memories and observations attached to it, and only start writing once the shape of the piece becomes clear. Usually it works remarkably well. This time it didn’t, or rather, the technology didn’t.

What started as a short retrospective on the thirtieth anniversary of Honeycrack’s Prozaic turned into something else entirely. At one point I found myself crying while trying to explain why the album mattered to me. I then spent roughly ten minutes dictating a story I rarely talk about.

The software lost it.

I took a break, gathered myself, and tried again. The software lost that version too. By the third attempt I was furious.

In total I probably lost more than thirty minutes of dictation. Under normal circumstances that would have been irritating. In this case it felt strangely symbolic because the story I was trying to tell was already one of the hardest stories I have ever tried to put into words.

Which is perhaps where this article really starts, not with Honeycrack, not even with the song.

But with the fact that some stories seem to resist being told at all.

Thirty years of Prozaic

A few weeks ago I realised that it had been almost exactly thirty years since Honeycrack released Prozaic.

I’ve always thought it was one of the most underrated albums of the 1990s.

Partly that’s because of the music itself. The melodies are fantastic. The album is full of hooks. It’s warm, energetic and surprisingly accessible. You can easily put it on in the background and remember the choruses long before you remember the lyrics.

Which is perhaps part of the problem.

Because once you start paying attention to the words, you discover a very different album.

Beneath the melodies sits an extraordinary amount of frustration, anger, grief, disappointment and empathy. Not performative outrage. Not the kind of anger designed to impress other people. Something more personal than that.

Something that sounds suspiciously like a group of men trying to process things they weren’t really supposed to talk about. That observation feels particularly interesting in hindsight.

The 1990s are often remembered as a period where men were emotionally closed off, emotionally unaware, or simply not having certain conversations. Looking back, I don’t think that’s true.

What I think is that many of those conversations were happening already. They were just happening indirectly. Through music, through humour, through work, through drinking, through anger, through art.

The emotions were there. The language often wasn’t.

Listening to Prozaic again, what struck me wasn’t how dated it sounded. It was how modern parts of it felt.

One song in particular stopped me in my tracks: “No, please don’t”.

The song tells the story of a young woman who was sexually assaulted by somebody who later dismissed it as youthful stupidity. A mistake. A misunderstanding. Something that happened a long time ago. The repeated refrain is brutally simple.

No. No, please don’t. No, I don’t want to. No.

The song’s central argument is that no should have been enough, today that feels almost self-evident. What surprised me was realising how unusual that moral clarity felt at the time. The song systematically dismantles every excuse before it can be deployed. Drink. Youth. Misunderstanding. Attraction. Regret. None of them matter… Quite simply, no should have been enough.

Anyway, while I was listening to it again, I found myself thinking about something that happened during my third year at university.

The story I wasn’t planning to tell

There was a girl on my course who, in hindsight, probably fancied me, but at the time I was completely oblivious. One evening she turned up at my room after a night out. She was absolutely paralytically drunk.

At the time I didn’t drink. I smoked plenty of things, but I didn’t drink. So I let her in and we sat and talked for a while. Eventually we started kissing. One thing led to another and before long we were both naked. That was the point where I became uncomfortable.

Partly because I wasn’t especially interested in taking things any further, but mainly because she was so drunk. It felt wrong. So I stopped.

I apologised, explained that I didn’t want to continue, and suggested we go to sleep instead, which we did.

Or at least I did.

Several hours later I woke up to discover that she was having sex with me.

I had not agreed to it.
I had not initiated it.
I had explicitly stopped what had happened earlier.
I asked her to stop, she did, that was the end of the incident.

At least, that’s what I thought at the time.

What stayed with me wasn’t actually what happened that night. What stayed with me was what happened when I later tried to describe it.

At some point afterwards I found myself telling the story to a group of friends. I used the word that most people would instinctively use to describe sex without consent.

The reaction was immediate, apparently men couldn’t be victims, apparently men always wanted sex, apparently… men couldn’t be raped.

The facts of the story seemed almost irrelevant. What mattered was that the story itself didn’t fit the model people carried around in their heads.

Then, years later, when I described behaviour from my ex-wife as abusive, I received a remarkably similar response.

“Don’t be stupid. Men can’t be abused.”

Looking back now, those reactions feel extraordinary, at the time they were not.

What the song understood

One of the reasons I found myself crying while writing this article is that I suddenly realised why that Honeycrack song affected me so strongly.

Not because the situations were identical, not because male and female experiences are identical, but because the underlying principle is exactly the same.

• The woman in the song says no and nobody treats that no as sufficient.
• I said stop, that should have been sufficient too.

In both cases the reality of what happened mattered less than the stories people wanted to tell about it afterwards.

Listening to the song now, what strikes me is how uncompromisingly it rejects those stories.

• It doesn’t negotiate, minimise, explain.

It simply insists that reality matters and perhaps that is why the song feels so far ahead of its time. Not because it anticipated a political movement but because it recognised a human truth.

Catching up

The strange thing is that the world has changed. Not completely or perfectly, but materially.

Today I can tell that story and most people immediately understand the principle involved, even if they disagree about terminology or interpretation.

Thirty years ago many people rejected the possibility outright. That change matters.

Which brings me back to Prozaic, this album wasn’t telling us something new, it was telling us something true. The truth was already there. The empathy was already there. The outrage was already there. Culture simply wasn’t very good at hearing it.

People often talk about social progress as though somebody suddenly discovered a better idea and everyone else gradually adopted it. I increasingly suspect the reality is messier than that.

Sometimes the artists get there first. Sometimes the musicians get there first.

And… sometimes… a song written decades ago understands something that society won’t properly discuss for another generation and so it quietly sits on a shelf for thirty years waiting for the rest of us to catch up.