Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [124]
In the end, it was the intrusion of reality at its most mundane (the need on the band’s part to feed the children, pay the electricity bill, maybe buy that nice new guitar; the wage-slave mentality that Yorke had skewered in “Fitter Happier”) that necessitated the maintenance of the original simulacrum, the hyperreal version of what ‘Radiohead’ really is. And the punters, bless them, bought it.
This Isn’t Happening
Baudrillard exaggerates, and his hyperbole is part of his charm. For the most part, there is some sort of reality behind the simulacrum. Las Vegas and Disneyland and your nearest McDonald’s exist as concrete and steel and glass. Baudrillard’s notorious contention that “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place”76 is true only in the sense that the interrelation of media and politics and economics meant that Joe Blow sitting at home watching CNN had a false impression of what was going on. Bullets still got fired and people still got killed.
And, despite the distractions of music and video and interviews and website posts and even a book about their relationship with philosophy, Radiohead do exist, in the sense that five Englishmen come together with guitars and computers to make noise, and when they’re happy with the noise, it is deemed to be Radiohead music.
To an extent, it’s that deeming, that discrimination, that brings down the shutters, and makes what we hear in their music a simulation of the ‘real’ Radiohead. Even when we hear music that’s supposedly in its raw, unadorned state, we only hear it by permission. For example, the song “How I Made My Millions” (an extra track on the “No Surprises” single, released in January 1998) consists of little more than Thom Yorke mumbling and noodling in his living room on a piano, while his partner does the housework in the background. It sounds ‘real’, but it’s only a packaged sliver of reality, like a few seconds of Big Brother. And it’s only in the universe of our perception because Yorke and our colleagues allowed it to be there.
A live gig is as close as most of us will get to an ‘authentic’ experience of Radiohead (especially because the band tend to eschew fancy, theatrical effects, and there’s always the delicious prospect of events sliding beyond their control) but even in this context, authenticity is compromised. The atmosphere, the excitement, the consumption of drink or drugs, even the weather can affect the spectator’s objectivity. And then there’s hindsight, especially when delivered in the form of music journalism. The journalist Paul Trynka made this comment on the band’s performance at the Glastonbury Festival in June, 1997:
When I’ve talked to people since who witnessed that performance, it’s been galling to hear the odd person describe it as merely ‘a good gig’. It wasn’t. It was something far more profound.77
Just as it has been decided by pundits that In Rainbows is really more about the pay-what-you-like hoopla that surrounded its own release rather than the music, so this Radiohead performance in the south-west of England in the summer of 1997 has been pigeonholed as “profound.” Baudrillard might reasonably have argued that, like the Gulf War, the Glastonbury Festival (and Woodstock, Monterey, Coachella, and others) Did Not Take Place, because the combination of nostalgia, hype, dope, senility and heatstroke make an objective reality impossible to ascertain.
Thom Yorke had come to a similar conclusion only a few days before the Glastonbury performance. On stage at a concert in Dublin, he had an experience that might best be described as a mixture of acute dissociation, stage fright, and an out-of-body experience. Under the collective gaze of the 38,000-strong crowd, he was overwhelmed by the desire not to be there; in fact, the urge not to be at all.
Yorke’s creative response to the episode was eventually released as “How to Disappear Completely,” on Kid A. It’s an intriguing document of a