Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [20]
Art, on the other hand, is typically taken to be expressive. It is not typically understood as saying anything testable about the world. We feel uncomfortable calling a painting or a song true or false because, the point is, a work of art expresses something the artist feels. While most think Radiohead and other bands create music that is mainly expressive and emotional, there is a way to see it as also being cognitive, as telling us something about the world.
At the very least we know from listening to “All I Need” something about how Thom Yorke feels about the world. But do we know this for certain? Are we positive that he wasn’t writing ironically? Or that he tossed a bunch of words into a bag and drew them out randomly, arranging them into a song as he went? Unless Thom himself came right out and honestly explained his writing methods and thoughts in detail, we’d never really be certain that the lyrics truly expressed his feelings about something.
There’s a simpler answer, however. We can learn about ourselves through a piece of music. Think back to the lyrics “I only stick with you because there are no others. You are all I need.” When I hear these lyrics together with the slow and haunting music, I reflect on my own life. Am I only staying with my partner because there’s no one else? Maybe they are all I need but do I want more? It could very well be that these thoughts were already dancing around in your subconscious, but it wasn’t until you heard the song that they came welling up to the surface. The song focuses an idea or a question on which we can sit back, reflect, and apply to our own lives.
2 + 2 = 5
The “All I Need” video actually makes an argument about the world by combining all three elements of rhetoric: the logos, pathos, and ethos. First, the band has credibility, or ethos. (Whether or not this ethos is deserved or should apply to arguments about child exploitation can be debated, but I’m not going to do that here.) Second, we’ve already described the emotions the song elicits as a form of pathos. And the logic of its argument, that one child is a winner and the other a loser in our global economy, is clear. But it is the combination of the three modes of rhetoric that makes the video actually stronger and more convincing than a straightforward ethical argument. Consider a standard response in defense of the global economic conditions the video addresses: “So what? Children need to work—it teaches them proper values and instills a work ethic.”
There’s a well-known philosophical thought experiment which helps explain why “All I Need” is more powerful than any cognitive argument like this. Robert Nozick asks us to imagine an “experience machine” (Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books, 1974). Suppose it were possible to plug ourselves into this machine and experience anything we choose. Always wanted to be a part of Radiohead? Plug into this machine and you can be a member of the band! You can go on the tours, experience the fame and glamour, get the women, or go to the best parties. Just program your particular fantasy and plug into the machine. The best part of it is that while you’re in the machine, you don’t even realize that this experience isn’t real. If this is sounding familiar, the plot of The Matrix has often been related to this thought experiment. So, as Radiohead fans, this deal sounds pretty good to us, doesn’t it?
Maybe not. Even in The Matrix, most characters choose not to experience the life inside the experience machine once they know there’s a choice. Nozick argues that there are good reasons for their decision. The most important is the idea that we want to actually do things. But in the experience machine “there is no actual contact with any