Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [10]
Beside the artificial world is an iconography in their lyrics that comes from dark children’s books: swamps, rivers, animals, arks, and rowboats riding ambiguous tracks of light to the moon. Within these lyrics—and also in the musical counterpoint of chimes, strings, lullaby—an old personal view is opened, a desperate wish for small, safe spaces. It promises sanctuary, a bit of quiet in which to think.
Such a pretty house
and such a pretty garden.
No alarms and no surprises,
no alarms and no surprises,
no alarms and no surprises please.
But when the songs try to defend the small and safe, the effort comes hand-in-hand with grandiose assertions of power and violence, which mimic the voice of overwhelming authority that should be behind our dread-filled contemporary universe but never speaks—or else the words speak, somehow, for us.
This is what you get
this is what you get
this is what you get
when you mess with us.
It just isn’t clear whether this voice is a sympathetic voice or a voice outside—whether it is for us or against us. The band’s task, as I understand it, is to try to hold on to the will, to ask if there is any part of it left that would be worth holding on to, or to find out where that force has gone. Thom Yorke seems always in danger of destruction; and then he is either channeling the Philistines or, Samson-like, preparing to take the temple down with him. So we hear pained and beautiful reassurances, austere, crystalline, and delicate—then violent denunciations and threats of titanic destruction—until they seem to be answering each other, as though the outside violence were being drawn inside:
Breathe, keep breathing.
We hope that you choke,
that you choke.
Everything
everything
everything in its right place.
You and whose army?
We ride—we ride—tonight!
And the consequence? Here you reach the best-known Radiohead lyrics, again banal on the page, and with them the hardest mood in their music to describe—captured in multiple repeated little phrases, stock talk, as words lose their meanings and regain them. “How to disappear completely,” as a song title puts it—for the words seem to speak a wish for negation of the self, nothingness, and nonbeing:
For a minute there
I lost myself, I lost myself.
I’m not here. This isn’t happening.
A description of the condition of the late 1990s could go like this: At the turn of the millennium, each individual sat at a meeting point of shouted orders and appeals, the TV, the radio, the phone and cell, the billboard, the airport screen, the inbox, the paper junk mail. Each person discovered that he lived at one knot of a network, existing without his consent, which connected him to any number of recorded voices, written messages, means of broadcast, channels of entertainment, and avenues of choice. It was a culture of broadcast: an indiscriminate seeding, which needed to reach only a very few, covering vast tracts of our consciousness. To make a profit, only one message in ten thousand needed to take root, therefore messages were strewn everywhere. To live in this network felt like something, but surprisingly little in the culture of broadcast itself tried to capture what it felt like. Instead, it kept bringing pictures of an unencumbered luxurious life, songs of ease and freedom, and technological marvels, which did not feel like the life we lived.
And if you noticed you were not represented? It felt as if one of the few unanimous aspects of this culture was that it forbade you to complain, since if you complained, you were a trivial human, a small person, who misunderstood the generosity and benignity of the message system. It existed to help you. Now, if you accepted the constant promiscuous broadcasts as normalcy, there were messages in them to inflate and pet and flatter you. If you simply said this chatter was altering your life, killing your privacy or ending the ability to think in silence, there were alternative messages