Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [122]
“Fitter Happier” is, in many ways, the band’s first successful attempt to break away from the orthodoxies of alternative rock, which had become as restrictive as the clichés it had sought to escape. This move towards electronic experimentalism forced the band and listeners alike into a reappraisal of what popular music has become. As Joseph Tate put it: “The band’s music, I argue, is not a distortion of ‘real rock’, but an uncovering of its absence, its phantasmic structure.”75 If Yorke and his colleagues were seeking to expose the void at the heart of capitalism, how could they exploit as their preferred medium a genre that was equally empty, equally dishonest?
This Just Feels Like Spinning Plates
The band’s retreat from the traditions of guitar-based rock music became even more evident on the subsequent two albums, Kid A (2000) and Amnesiac (2001). In place of old favourites such as the Pixies and the Smiths, the band drew from a variety of new musical traditions. On these records, the influence of dance-floor electronica (in particular acts associated with the Sheffield-based Warp label), New Orleans jazz, early-1970s Krautrock and the challenging works of twentieth-century composers like Olivier Messiaen, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Paul Lansky can all be heard.
However, simply replacing guitars with samplers, aesthetically satisfying as it may have been, wasn’t dealing with the problem. It wasn’t just rock music that had become a simulacrum of half-remembered flakes of folklore, most of them nothing to do with music per se (Elvis from the waist up on the Sullivan show; Bowie announcing his bisexuality; the newsflash of the Lennon shooting; that embarrassing Milli Vanilli track to which you lost your virginity). For Radiohead, it was the entire mode of production and transmission that had become a glossy fraud.
Yorke had long been brooding about this contradiction. His lyrics about the evils of global capitalism, encouraged by his readings of Noam Chomsky, Will Hutton, Naomi Klein and others, were transmitted around the world thanks to global capitalism. In attempting to expose the simulacrum, he was adding more layers to it. As early as 1998, he admitted the extent to which he was implicated in the scam:
Then there’s the false authority in mass-producing a work which gives it a false sense of significance. The thing of taking responsibility for your work is to a high extent bullshit because a big part of it is simply that yours is being mass-produced and someone else’s isn’t. Yours is getting marketed in ways that other people’s isn’t, and that’s part of how people approach it, independent from the work itself. (Mary Gaitskill, “Radiohead: Alarms and Surprises,” Alternative Press, April 1998)
Later, as technological developments conspired to make the traditional record company structure redundant, Yorke further expressed his frustration:
I like the people at our record company, but the time is at hand when you have to ask why anyone needs one. And, yes, it probably would give us some perverse pleasure to say ‘F——you’ to this decaying business model. (Josh Tyrangiel, “Radiohead Says: Pay What You Want,” Time, October 1st, 2007)
From 2000, Radiohead began extending the scope of their subversion from the nature of the music itself to the way it was presented to the audience. There were no singles from the Kid A album. Press interviews were all but non-existent, and communication with listeners came in the form of cryptic postings on the website and viral blips. Most significantly, the whole album appeared online three weeks before the official release date, and rumours persist that, far from being an act of copyright piracy, the leak was a premeditated decision by the band.
It seems as though Radiohead’s purpose was, in part, political. By disrupting the normal modes