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By Root 923 0

psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Following this line of thought, we might say that there are two sides to the ‘fluidity of meaning’ at the heart of abject aesthetics. On the one hand, it can definitely be disconcerting, even traumatic, in places where it highlights boundaries crumbling and meaning collapsing and dissolving before our eyes. But there’s another side to this, too: if boundaries are uncertain and meanings fluid, there’s also the possibility of establishing new boundaries and constructing new meanings. In an important though not always sufficiently recognized sense, abject aesthetics (and more broadly ‘postmodernism’) is not just about ‘deconstruction’—it also opens the possibility for ‘reconstruction.’

I’d say that Radiohead’s two latest albums, Hail to the Thief (2003) and In Rainbows (2007), are exactly this. In the first, a new, if vague-edged, political stance seems to emerge amidst a somewhat disjointed assemblage of musical devices and lyrical themes familiar from their earlier work. In Rainbows, though not as directly political as the last, seems to signal a new departure or, perhaps better, the end of one cycle and the beginning of another. As Thom asks on “15 Step” in the first line of the album, “How come I end up where I started?” There is both an emotional directness about this album that reminds us of their first album, Pablo Honey, but also a clarity of purpose more like OK Computer than anything else they’ve done to date. There’s still plenty of the experimentation we’ve come to expect from the band (for example, complex rhythms and ample doses of electronica), but there’s also a gentleness in Thom’s voice and lyrics and a lyricism in Jonny’s guitar work that we would hardly have expected.

So, what color are ‘abject lenses’? First, I’d have to say that they’re probably about a medium-gray tint: they register the world pretty much as it is, but with its colors a bit muted and blended together. Second, to strain my metaphor a bit, I’d go on to say that they are progressive trifocals. They reveal (depending on what part we’re looking through) a world of fairly distinct and well-defined meanings when seen at a distance, but which blur and dissolve when we attempt to view them up close, in terms of our own immediate bodily experience. However, somewhere in between, there’s a ‘sweet spot’ that takes some effort and practice to find, a sort of precarious mid-distant region of relative clarity where we realize that it’s just the nature of forms and meanings both to dissolve and then reassemble themselves into new, perhaps unsuspected patterns.

While these shades will never show you a vibrant fantasy world, neither will they leave you isolated and alienated from the world, other persons, or yourself. What they (like Radiohead and, in fact, postmodernism itself) will do is require some effort on your part to find that ‘sweet spot’ where there’s enough form and meaning to allow you to keep looking while remembering that these ‘objects’ are always precarious, that your focus will continually change. In the end, Radiohead shades may not be for you and I’m certainly not trying to sell you on them, but they’re at least worth trying on for a while.

6.

Why Such Sad Songs?

MICAH LOTT

For it is not easy to determine what the power of music is, or why one should take part in it.

—Aristotle, Politics

Why is it that a person should wish to experience suffering by watching grievous tragic events which he himself would not wish to endure? Nevertheless he wants to suffer the pain given by being a spectator of these sufferings, and the pain itself is his pleasure. What is this but amazing folly?

—Augustine, Confessions

Open up your skull, I’ll be there.

—“Climbing Up the Walls,” OK Computer

“The Bends” begins with a burst of energy. Guitars, bass, and drums come in together, quickly followed by Thom Yorke’s opening howl. The energy builds throughout the song, reaching its climax just before the song ends as Yorke cries out, “I wanna live, breathe, I wanna be a part of the human