Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [105]
Heidegger’s retort is simple: “The turning of an age does not occur at just any time by the eruption of a new God or by the new eruption of an old God from an ambush. Where is he supposed to turn to, upon his return, if men have not already prepared for him his residence?” (“Why Poets?” p. 201). They’re not going to “sweep down in a country lane,” in other words, and “show me the world as I’d love to see it.” Not, that is, until we can turn and welcome them: “The gods who ‘were once here’ ‘return’ only ‘at the proper time’—namely, when there is a turn among men in the right place in the right way” (“Why Poets?” p. 201).
Kid A, then, marks a break with the previous albums, as Radiohead steps up to fill their role as our modern poets. And while the album is still decidedly Radiohead, all the same I can’t escape the feeling that everything is new. The missing lyrics sheet, Thom explained to NY Rock in December of 2000, is because there’s “no point in taking the lyrics alone, apart from the music. That’s one of the reasons why we won’t have a lyric sheet with the album. You just can’t separate it.” The album presents not a picture of alienation, but the experience of it. The band’s much-discussed move into “electronica” territory brings the listener inside the alienation of modernity, shot through with technology. And a new theme emerges: disappearance. Staring the danger right in the face, the poet now “risks more,” facing the possibility of disappearing completely. (But isn’t this also the point? After all, as Yorke says on his solo album, “The more you try to erase me / The more that I appear.”) All of this is risked, though, to allow us to really understand what it means to be inauthentic and alienated; from the technological ordering of “Everything in its Right Place,” to the dumb isolation of “Idioteque,” we can stare into the abyss and find it staring back. Critics who complained that the album lacked “soul,” “warmth,” or “humanity” cut right to the heart of the matter while missing the point completely.
So if we ask, “What is Radiohead’s music about?” the answer “alienation” is correct, as far as it goes. Still, it seems inadequate on a more fundamental level. Radiohead’s music is not “about” alienation; it is alienation. But rather than it being nihilistic, their music offers us the only real hope we have: as Heidegger tells us, paraphrasing Hölderlin, “The closer we come to the danger, the more brightly do the ways into the saving power begin to shine and the more questioning we become. For questioning is the piety of thought.”
18.
The Signature of Time in “Pyramid Song”
MICHAEL THOMPSON
After hearing “Pyramid Song” from Amnesiac, most people say, “Something’s not quite right with that song.” Still, the song is entrancing. It could be Thom Yorke’s lilting howl, an oddly soothing wail, that draws us in. Or it could be the haunting lyrics that float over the piano—“a room full of stars and astral cars”—that sets imaginations wandering. These lyrics describe jumping into rivers, swimming with black-eyed angels, and going to heaven in a little row-boat to find all of your lovers—a story that has inspired much speculation about the real meanings and references in play. (Among others, the most popular contrivances include linking the lyrics to Dante’s inferno and the Greek river Styx, Tom Waits’ “Clap Hands” and themes of suicide.) Yet neither the vocals nor Yorke’s delivery seems