Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [3]
1.
Is Radiohead the Pink Floyd of the Twenty-First Century?
GEORGE A. REISCH
The whole point of creating music for me is to give voice to things that aren’t normally given voice to, and a lot of those things are extremely negative. Personally speaking, I have to remain positive otherwise I’d go fucking crazy.
—Thom Yorke, Pitchfork Interview, August 16th, 2008
All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be.
—“Breathe,” Dark Side of the Moon
Watching Radiohead perform at an outdoor amphitheater, rock critic Jim DeRogatis flashed back to “Pink Floyd at Pompeii,” a concert filmed inside an ancient amphitheatre near the famous village. “No other band today,” DeRogatis said of Radiohead, “has the power to transport a crowd of more than 30,000 to foreboding alien landscapes and the shadowy places of their nightmares in quite the same way.” Radiohead, he concluded, is “the Pink Floyd of Generation Y.” Message boards and blogs are filled with similar comparisons. “Radiohead is the new Pink Floyd,” they say, or, “Radiohead is better than Pink Floyd.”
But neither Radiohead nor Pink Floyd—well, Roger Waters, at least—would agree that their music is about remote, interstellar spaces or imaginary, dreamlike experiences. These two bands have earned enormous respect and devotion because their music speaks to things in this world. Treating music as an escape, a mere occasion for a party, is so off-the-mark in Pink Floyd’s case that Waters once became spitting mad at noisy, drunken fans. That episode in 1977 nudged Waters down a creative path that led to The Wall—a now classic, double-barreled, four-sided critique of war, cruelty, social conformity, looming madness, and alienation (not aliens).
True, there was a time when Pink Floyd was all about ‘spacerock’ and psychedelia. Legendary founder Syd Barrett, who died in 2006, pioneered the genre in the mid to late 1960s while Waters and David Gilmour were mainly along for the rocket ride, learning how to set the controls and write songs. Yet after Barrett’s demise, Waters took the ship out of interstellar overdrive, turned it around, and headed back to the planet of his earthly obsessions.
Radiohead got their ‘space-rock’ reputation with The Bends (opening with “Planet Telex”) and, mainly, OK Computer. Pitchfork said the album moves through “space at 1.2 light years per hour,” while Qmusic said “the first three tracks (of a five-song, continuous, 25-minute suite that’s as brilliant as any music of the last decade) all mention aliens or interstellar activity in some capacity.” Amazon.co.uk agrees that “OK Computer heads out into the cold deep space of prog-rock and comes back with stuff that makes mere pop earthlings like Stereophonics tremble.” If DeRogatis is right that Radiohead has taken over the ‘space-rock’ mantle from Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett’s famous black cloak—the one he famously wore and sang about in “Bike”—is now draped over Thom Yorke’s shoulders. Titles like “Sail to the Moon” and “Black Star” invite the comparison, while “Subterranean Homesick Alien” may even point to Barrett himself. Yorke sings about aliens who “take me onboard their beautiful ship, show me the world as I’d love to see it.” When he returns to “tell all [his] friends,” they would think that he’d “lost it completely”—“They’d shut me away, but I’d be alright.”
But Yorke’s interest in spaceships and aliens is like what Barrett said about his cloak. It’s “a bit of a joke.” As the chapters in this book show, Yorke’s lyrics and music speak directly to our lives and times. Pink Floyd may have been “just fantastic” (as the suit in “Have a Cigar” bellowed), but Radiohead has little interest in fantasy, spaceships or aliens. These things which are “not normally given voice to” have long fascinated existentialist and, especially, phenomenological philosophers. They have to do with the world we know and experience, but they can’t be effectively addressed using ordinary language in ordinary ways.
The Band Is Just Phenomenological
Why not? Because