Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [121]
Not that this market-driven pigeonholing required much of a philosophical response on the band’s part. With a few exceptions (for example, the anti-corporate ‘Banana Co.’, issued as a B-side in 1993 and 1996), Thom Yorke’s early lyrics tended to solipsism and self-pity. Any sense of political awareness, or engagement with the wider world, was reserved by band members for press interviews, although they did give the impression that they found the latter aspect of showbiz about as enjoyable as root-canal work without anaesthetic. It seemed they disliked the corporate crassness that required them to play “Creep” in front of a bevy of jiggling bikini babes, as they did on MTV’s Beach Party show, but they went ahead with it.
No Chance of Escape
The band’s social comment became more acute (albeit still only implicitly political) with the release of The Bends. “Fake Plastic Trees,” for example, offers a chilling snapshot of the hyperreal environment to which Baudrillard alerts us, and the remorseless logic that takes us from thoughtless consumerism to an entirely artificial existence. As in a theme park, nature (represented by plants and earth) is rendered in plastic; then come the polystyrene people. Even lust, that primal motivator rock’n’roll mythology, becomes synthetic. “She tastes like the real thing”; she’s a genetically-engineered, focus-group-driven simulacrum of what a woman ought to be, packed with “nature-identical” flavorings; the unreal reality of a Coke ad. But that’s good enough for an admirer who can only offer his “fake plastic love” in return.
The socio-political content came into much sharper focus in 1997, with OK Computer. Now, as well as the articulation of self-loathing to which fans and critics had become accustomed, the band seemed to be striving for a bigger picture, concocting a critique of modern society stumbling towards the new millennium, dazzled by the banal neon of global capitalism.
The most explicit example of this on the album was the seventh track, “Fitter Happier.” Delivered in an emotionless, computerized voice over a minimal backing track, it expresses the vacuity of contemporary consumer culture as a string of disjointed phrases. The emotional impact comes from hearing a non-human voice expressing sentiments of such all-too-human banality (“on Sundays ring road supermarket”) and poignancy (“like a cat tied to a stick”). It conjures up memories of the quietly deranged computer HAL, from 2001: A Space Odyssey and the confusions between real and unreal, analogue and digital, raised by the virtual worlds that arose with globalized computer technology. These online worlds, such as Second Life or World of Warcraft, gave new impetus to Baudrillard’s warnings about society’s inability to perceive its own drunken lurch into a state of hyperreality.
In Baudrillard’s terms, “Fitter Happier” presents us with a simulacrum, comprising not visual images, but words. The haunting slogans, many of them apparently drawn from company training manuals, reveal the rhetoric with which capitalism disguises its own hollowness (“an empowered and informed member of society”). Silent Gray’s cover of “Fitter Happier,” on the tribute album Anyone Can Play Radiohead (Vitamin, 2001), uses the same voice program to ‘speak’ the slogans. Although the passage isn’t physically copied from Radiohead’s original (in the sense of sampling a section from a record), it is a copy in the Baudrillard sense, sonically identical, a simulacrum in sound.
Radiohead may have been taking a few tips from the Situationists, a European avant-garde artistic collective with roots in Marxist criticism of capitalism. This groups often