• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 946 0

It’s as if saying or singing aloud of what can hardly be discerned without a sense of despair might somehow let some air in. And with The Eraser, Yorke means to give voice both to the voiceless disenfranchised, those on the death-dealing end of brutal economies, and his own ambivalence over the fact that a rock music celebrity would actually have a go at doing such a thing. If the ridiculousness of it all feels indefensible, this is exactly the redeeming risk of the poetic prerogative, that gesture that requires no self-justification. The lyric is its own credential. As Jacques Derrida observes, “A poem always runs the risk of being meaningless, and would be nothing without this risk of being meaningless, and would be nothing without this risk.”24

This word on the poetic witness evokes a strength made perfect in weakness, the risk of being misread, badly used, or misinterpreted that, we might say, characterizes all speech but which is especially necessary in the delivery and the reception of what comes to be called poetry. Poetry, as the poet W.H. Auden reminds us, unlike lawyers, guns, and money, doesn’t make anything happen (or supply its own interpretation). It just survives in the valley of its saying—powerless, in its way, even maybe just powerless enough to change everything. As Yorke put it to David Fricke of Rolling Stone in an account of the seeming incoherence at work in the music of Amnesiac: “It’s sort of bearing witness to things.”

And in this way, the song that we might do well to view as a grid or a representative posture for the entirety of The Eraser is “Analyze.” The labor of establishing and maintaining a sense of orientation in the workaday world, whether in an office cubicle, between military checkpoints, or sitting in a pub collating information, of making sense of what one takes to be the “facts on the ground,” will often yield the debilitating realization that one is still only “playing a part” in some death-dealing mechanism or another, that even our most artful resistance will often get co-opted within marketing formulae or somebody else’s not-so-edifying talking points. The sense we hope to make of things, Yorke intones over a hypnotic loop, might only be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Just as a solo project might only be a self-serving ego trip. But there’s something ennobling in the lamentation of pilgrimages gone wrong, the confession that there doesn’t appear to be enough hours in the day to achieve the work of seeing and thinking properly, something liturgical (liturgy as “the work of the people”) in speaking of the absence of longed-for coherence, making a note of how it brings you down.

No spark, no light, no time to analyze, Yorke sings, as if he’s operating out of some long-lost ascetic tradition, mourning the loss of good order. The song also strangely evokes the vocal stylings of tajwid (an Arabic term meaning “to render beautiful”) in which the Qur’an is recited in broadcasts reaching mosques and taxi cabs throughout the Middle East. Giving voice to the sense that there’s no time or space to make sense might make a way where there is no way. It’s the positive work of mourning we find in the elegiac tradition. Or as Yorke names this lyrical impulse, “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.”25

As an instance of speaking out of an existential crisis, giving voice to an angst that seems beyond available powers of description, “Analyze” seems to channel an almost mystical sensibility, not in the sense that the song in any way banks on a miracle, but rather by doing the work that the album as a whole seems to do, that seemingly ineffective poetic act that undertakes the “transformation of data into metaphor,”26 in Robert Stepto’s phrase, making words work against crushing realities, attempting exorcism, conjuring a space for analysis, redemption, and fresh articulations of what’s going on.

Against