Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [5]
Take “No Surprises.” At first, Yorke seems to offer a parody or satire, strung together out of political and cultural clichés about home, security, and routine:
bring down the government, . . . they don’t speak for us.
A job that slowly kills you; bruises that won’t heal.
No alarms and no surprises; such a pretty house and such a pretty garden.
Yet wrapped in the plinkety-plink-plink music of a nursery rhyme or music box, the lyrics become less sarcastic (like The Kink’s “Shangri-la”) and more a study in the political infantilization—by cliché, chit-chat, conventional wisdom, and routine—of adults either unable or unwilling to live freely and creatively. Grant Gee’s video (in which Yorke sings the song with his head inside a glass or plastic sphere—more diving bell than space suit—that slowly fills with water) shows that these voting, mortgage-holding, commuters are drowning in passivity, ignorance, and denial. The truth voiced here is breathtaking, literally, since no description or analysis can match its musical and visual punch.
Subterranean Homesick Technology
Next to these false promises of domestic happiness, Yorke’s lyrics often point to the fragility of our advanced, technological civilization. “Infrastructure will collapse,” he sings in “House of Cards,” while OK Computer begins with a car crash—
In a fast German car
I’m amazed that I survived
An airbag saved my life. (“Airbag”)
Midway through the album, we fight depression and alienation fed by
Transport, motorways and tramlines,
starting and then stopping,
taking off and landing,
the emptiest of feelings. (“Let Down”)
And, near the end, we find ourselves in a crashed airplane (“Lucky”).
While clearly suspicious of technology, Radiohead still has a special credibility in this arena because they have so embraced technology as a creative tool. Their tastes in musical software, hardware and even antique electronic instruments (such as the Theremin-like Ondes Martenot that Jonny Greenwood plays) are omnivorous.
Pink Floyd were also renowned for their use of technology—projectors for their light shows, echo machines, Syd Barrett’s famous cigarette-lighter guitar slide, Dark Side’s synthesizer-based “On the Run,” and lots and lots of amplifiers. Part of Floyd’s early musical innovation, as Edward Macan argued (in Pink Floyd and Philosophy), was their commitment to electronic musical experimentation. 2 Songs like “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun” and “Interstellar Overdrive” build to jarring, disorienting crescendos (Macan calls them “breakthrough” moments) that take away your musical roadmaps and preconceptions in a bid to shock, awaken, and rearrange your perceptual capacities. If “Karma Police” seems scary, listen to “Careful with that Axe, Eugene!”
But the messages about modern life and technology from Pink Floyd and Radiohead point in different directions and take their logic from different cultural circumstances. Barrett’s penchant for musical exploration was embraced by the emerging LSD-thirsty London counterculture not many years after postwar rationing and bread lines had finally subsided in the 1950s. In postwar England, in other words, there were plenty of reasons to musically dream about far-away, fantastic places. Barrett and his band used far-out, fantastic electronics to do just that. Under Waters, as Macan explains, Floyd’s radical musical explorations of alienation gave way to lyrical indictments of education, capitalism and other human institutions. With aggressive nuclear powers to the east and west eyeing each other suspiciously through the 1970s and 1980s, Waters was less interested in conjuring psychedelic, transformative possibilities than in directly criticizing the oppressive, limiting realities he observed around him.
But these realities had vanished by the time OK Computer took the world by storm, some twenty-four years after Dark Side was released. The Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union were gone, the Balkan nations felt liberated, and many hoped that cold-war