Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [45]
Profanity Prayers
Radiohead don’t allow themselves an ironic detachment from their complicated vocation decrying the young-blood-sucking methods of mainstream popular culture while serving as a best-selling fixture within that culture. And The Eraser serves to make this dialectic disarmingly transparent. This tension is perhaps most intensely evident within “Black Swan,” a song which appeared, appropriately enough, as a theme song in Richard Linklater’s film adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly. “The basic fuckedness index,” will not be denied. It will in fact be asserted in an Ecclesiastes-like mantra. Real live humans are everywhere “crushed like biscuit crumbs,” reduced to bitumen like the dinosaurs, and the dead horses we see and feel with every step cannot be kick-started. Best to cross oneself and move swiftly on. The future will be what it will be, but in the meantime, Yorke is giving voice and bringing a word of relentlessly self-conscious dread pop that even problematizes itself, the opposite, we might say, of a self-legitimating imagination. The you and the I are poetically collapsed, and the listener is engaged. A mirror is being held up to the all-pervading dysfunction of our moment.
This is the sound of one man tinkering with words and samples, music and melancholy within a computer program, a man at least a little scandalized that his inchoate meditations can be made to feel catchy. Or as Maurice Blanchot observes, “It seems comical and miserable that in order to manifest itself, dread, which opens and closes the sky, needs the activity of a man sitting at his table writing and forming letters on a piece of paper.”29 In Yorke’s case, this sense of the surreal is only heightened by the strange fact of its commercial viability.
For better and worse, what Joni Mitchell called that star-maker machinery at work behind, around, and through the popular songs will foist upon an already overwhelmed and exhausted popular imagination one more poor, existing individual after another, enveloped as they are in an array of sad distractions. This is the sensibility of “Skip Divided” in which the celebrity stalker and the celebrity that is the object of the stalker’s manufactured affections (that whipped-up frenzy of insanity-enabling that is the “successful” ad campaign of all manner of best-selling commodities) are no longer distinguishable from one another. The speaker resides within a kind of marketing malfunction, awaiting a clear signal for landing, and blinded by the daylight of what he or she believed to have been a big connection within a dubious relationship of escalating codependency. In the wake of a transmogrification that leaves the speaker a creature formed and sustained by “electric veins,” the voice craves the number and location it forsook as it now wanders, phantom-like, without proper documentation or permissions secured, a voice neither lost exactly nor meaningfully found in the transaction of units sold in movement that might be merely mercantile.
This is the context of no context so powerfully described by George W.S. Trow, that “space for mirages of pseudo-intimacy” within which “celebrities dance”30 and the nameless millions enter into a waste of perfectly good emotion like a mob in search of a revolution, millions trapped alone in their target-marketed, tailor-made, informational echo chambers.
Like the album’s title track, “Skip Divided” generates (or is generated out of) some very dark questions concerning the relationship of the audience to the artist and vice versa. What’s being cultivated between these parties? Is it an unchecked and escalating