Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [32]
To see what I mean here, try taking the opening lines or section of some of Radiohead’s songs after Pablo Honey (which is still rather conventional in this respect) and juxtaposing them with the concluding section or phrases. Here’s a couple of examples. The first pair is from “Black Star” (The Bends):
Opening:
I get home from work and you’re still standing in your dressing gown
Well what am I to do
I know all the things around your head and what they do to you
Concluding lines:
What am I coming to?
I’m going to melt down.
Or, try this pair from “Pyramid Song” (Amnesiac):
Opening:
I jumped in the river and what did I see?
Black-eyed angels swimming with me
A moon full of stars and astral cars
Closing:
There was nothing to fear and nothing to doubt [repeated several times]
The music of this song has no regular or easily discernable rhythm and presents a good example of the sonicscape finally enveloping the words of the song.
So what’s happening here, where a song seems to present a relatively clear meaning or feeling which is never quite developed and becomes lost by the end? Seen through the lenses of abject aesthetics, we might say that the song enacts the passage from something ‘objective’ and communicable to its dissolution in the formless and fluid realm of the abject.
Not Another Brick in the Wall
So far, we’ve talked mostly about what these new lenses help us see; now we need to consider how they change the way we look at things. Again, like buying a new pair of shades, the best way to do this is by trying on and comparing several different ones. Two groups with whom Radiohead is often compared are the Beatles and Pink Floyd, so a brief look at their aesthetics should help us here. (You might check out some of the chapters in the volumes in the Popular Culture and Philosophy series dedicated to these groups as background for these comparisons.)
While the Beatles’ body of work was so diverse that it probably traversed several different aesthetics, most of us will first think of their songs and albums exploring altered states of consciousness (psychedelia and transcendental meditation), especially Sgt. Pepper’s, Magical Mystery Tour, and Yellow Submarine. No better symbol of the aesthetic of these works could be found than those rose-tinted glasses that John Lennon (and many of us as well!) often wore during this period. Taking their cue from (among others) the writings and teachings of Dr. Timothy Leary and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Beatles took us on tours of alternative worlds accessed through psychedelic drugs and transcendental meditation. In the face of the complex reality of a brutal and increasingly pointless war, the violent birth-pangs of the Civil Rights Movement, and all-too-frequent assassinations and political repression, they offered us an escape into more brightly hued, clearly outlined, and exhilarating worlds of our own ‘inner space’.
If we were to sum up their operative aesthetic in this period in one word, it might be ‘transcendence’. The basic point was that, however ugly and cruel ‘reality’ was and however resistant to change it might be, it was always possible to transcend this through the alteration of your own consciousness: “You better free your mind instead” as John Lennon told us. Of course, this vision of the world seen through rose-tinted glasses proved to be a utopian dream that, even for the Beatles, died pretty quickly, but it did leave a significant imprint on the history of rock as well as on our collective cultural memory of the 1960s.
While Pink Floyd’s early work was clearly influenced by this ‘aesthetic of transcendence’, the recordings and performances for which they are most remembered, especially The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall, signaled a dramatic change of aesthetic lenses. By the mid-1970s,