Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [116]
“Kid A” continues the theme begun in “Everything in Its Right Place.” It begins with music sounding like a lullaby interspersed with barely audible lyrics which, just like the first track, push the same questions of “What is being said? What does this mean?” Evading categorization is one of the many trademarks of Lyotard’s postmodernism. In his first book, Discours, Figure, he wrote:
This book protests that the given is not a text, that there is within it a density, or rather a constitutive difference, which is not to be read, but to be seen, and that this difference, and the immobile mobility which reveals it, is what is continually forgotten in the process of signification. (Discours, Figure, Paris, 1971, p. 9)
There are certain ideas or feelings that evade signification by words. Words cannot touch these feelings or express them, Lyotard says, because of this gap of “constitutive difference” between what is there to be seen but cannot be “read” into words. The opening of “Kid A,” in this light, is a kind of fable about how we respond to the linguistic situation: Yorke’s murmuring is so provocative, and repetitive, that people begin to mimic its articulations. “We’ve got heads on sticks,” the lyric goes, “and you’ve got ventriloquists”—copycats, plagiarists, or epigones, perhaps—who mimic the initial articulation. The song finally settles into a pied piper motif, where the people play follow the leader, and Yorke sings in a computerized voice, “The rats and children follow me out of town, The rats and children follow me out of their homes, Come on Kids.” In a sense, these lyrics from “Kid A” can also be seen as an attempt to lure the listener out of the safety and security of modern, mainstream music, a moment that rightly stands as an expression of Lyotard’s conception of the differend as an idiom for what cannot be put into precise terms just yet, but which still must be articulated.
Epigones in Their Right Place
There’s a well-known interview on MTV during which Radiohead was asked: “How do you feel about the fact that bands like Travis, Coldplay, and Muse are making a career sounding exactly like your records did in 1997?” Yorke replied, “Good luck with Kid A” (Wikipedia entry on Radiohead). Lyotard (and his many followers, perhaps) see a postmodern counterpart to this phenomenon, as well, in the way that “a vanguard machine” first produces values and ideas that shape the identity of those who follow them. Once a work of art is understood in common parlance, it is often co-opted by the mainstream and reduced to a commodity for mass consumption, an idea that German philosopher Walter Benjamin highlighted quite specifically in the early twentieth century in his essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In the postmodern condition which Lyotard describes, the production of knowledge creates a system that “seems to be a vanguard machine dragging humanity after it, dehumanizing it in order to rehumanize it at a different level of normative capacity” (Postmodern Condition , p. 63).
Many artists, like Radiohead, seem to think of themselves as a vanguard in this sense. Their goal is to effectively criticize and transform values, rather than simply make money as entertainers. In this sense, we can see Kid A as a message to other bands who may get more airtime on the radio and television, but whose music comes off as nothing more than artistic ventriloquism. They are like the rats following Radiohead out of town (to be drowned). But with Kid A, Yorke’s point is clear. Good luck following along.
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