Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [125]
How to Reappear Completely
Don’t forget that the band’s roots lie in alternative rock, the twenty-first-century manifestation of existential, outsider culture. The desire for invisibility, for absence, that first brought Radiohead to global attention, and which still permeates their music (“I don’t belong here” in “Creep”; “I’m not here” in “How to Disappear Completely”) speaks to a tradition that goes back as far as Shakespeare’s Hamlet, encompasses Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Camus and still has resonance in the life and work of Ian Curtis of Joy Division and Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain.
They and Yorke and Morrissey and Michael Stipe and Pete Wentz and the other titans of anguished alt-rock might appear to be diametrically opposed to the extravagant simulacra of showbiz. But their angst is not really a challenge to the fakery of modern media. It’s only because mainstream culture is so inescapably unreal that a little bit of misery feels refreshing once in a while. As Baudrillard put it: “Melancholia is the brutal disaffection that characterizes our saturated systems.”78 Radiohead’s glumness is just a way of dealing with the hyperreal world, of coming to terms with it, and, in fact, of manifesting themselves within it.
Which makes it seem as if Radiohead have failed in their post-OK Computer quest to oppose, to subvert, to demystify the systems and structures that rule us with their superficial luster. Their best attempt comes in the pleasing articulation of gloom and inadequacy that fills their discography and in their attempts at a different model of consumer capitalism. Which is not to dismiss them, because as Yorke opines in “Optimistic” from Kid A: “You can try the best you can / The best you can is good enough.”
22.
Sexier More Seductive
PERRY OWEN WRIGHT
After albums addressing themes as diverse as techno-phobia, techno-politics, and techno-honey, Radiohead has released an album principally about sex: In Rainbows. While it initially struck me as odd that a band I tend to consider interested in more cerebral pursuits would take things below the waist, it doesn’t require philosophers with difficult names representing incomprehensible schools of thought to tell us that sex is everywhere.
It’s in the siren songs of the ads that call us to delicious consumption and in the ruby red lips of our cartoon rabbits in drag. It’s the burning light under the bushel of David Bowie’s codpiece-eyeliner mélange. In fact, I think we can go so far as to say that the ubiquity of sex has spread more widely than the contact high in front of the main stage at Bonnaroo.
But we currently find ourselves in a historical epoch at odds with itself. While the historical and philosophical movement known as the Enlightenment hardly offered a uniform philosophical worldview, or even a distinct and easily definable period, the movement did in fact march its parade to the tune of a broadly identifiable foundation of presuppositions. With the simultaneous rise of the notions of individual rights and the nation-state, a bevy of revolutions sprang up against political and religious institutions. Slave traders in The People Business™ were out; rationalism, the scientific method, and Natural Law were in. In the broadest sense, rationality and observation were taken to be the predominant avenues to objective truths and reality.
And so we inherited a world propped up by these Enlightenment ideas. Myths and gods were killed off in the name of science and the real. Bodies were dissected and diagramed, effectively disenchanted