Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [13]
On the first mature album, OK Computer, a risk of cliché lingered in a song of a computer voice intoning: “Fitter, happier, more productive”—as if the dream of conformist self-improvement would turn us artificial. But the automated voice’s oddly human character saved the effect—it seemed automated things, too, could be seduced by a dream of perfection equally delusory for them; then the new commensurability of natural and artificial wasn’t a simple loss, but produced a hybrid vulnerability when you had thought things were most stark and steely. The band was also, at that time, mastering a game of voices, the interfiling of inhuman speech and machine sounds with the keening, vulnerable human singing of Thom Yorke.
Their music had started as guitar rock, but with the albums Kid A and Amnesiac the keyboard asserted itself. The piano dominated; the guitars developed a quality of organ. The drums, emerging altered and processed, came to fill in spaces in rhythms already set by the frontline instruments. Orchestration added brittle washes of strings, a synthetic choir, chimes, an unknown shimmer, or bleated horns. The new songs were built on verse-chorus structure in only a rudimentary way, as songs developed from one block of music to the next, not turning back.
And, of course—as is better known, and more widely discussed—on the new albums the band, by now extremely popular and multimillion-selling, “embraced” electronica. But what precisely did that mean? It didn’t seem in their case like opportunism, as in keeping up with the new thing; nor did it entirely take over what they did in their songs; nor were they particularly noteworthy as electronic artists. It is crucial that they were not innovators, nor did they ever take it further than halfway—if that. They were not an avant-garde. The political problem of an artistic avant-garde, especially when it deals with any new technology of representation, has always been that the simply novel elements may be mistaken for some form of political action or progress. Two meanings of “revolutionary”—one, forming an advance in formal technique, the other, contributing to social cataclysm—are often confused, usually to the artist’s benefit, and technology has a way of becoming infatuated with its own existence.
Radiohead’s success lay in their ability to represent the feeling of our age; they did not insist on being too much advanced in the “advanced” music they acquired. The beeps and buzzes never seemed like the source of their energy, but a means they’d stumbled upon of finally communicating the feelings they had always held. They had felt, so to speak, electronic on OK Computer with much less actual electronica. And they did something very rudimentary and basic with the new technologies. They tilted artificial noises against the weight of the human voice and human sounds. Their new kind of song, in both words and music, announced that anyone might have to become partly inhuman to accommodate the experience of the new era.
Thom Yorke’s voice is the unity on which all the musical aggregations and complexes pivot. You have to imagine the music drawing a series of outlines around him, a house, a tank, the stars of space, or an architecture of almost abstract pipes and tubes, cogs and wheels, ivy and thorns, servers and boards, beams and voids. The music has the feeling of a biomorphic machine in which the voice is alternately trapped and protected.
Yorke’s voice conjures the human in extremis. Sometimes it comes to us from an extreme of fear, sometimes