Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [53]
This is really happening
Happening
You may catch a glimpse of akrasia. Turn the car around and take it back into the garage, hop on your bike, and head down to Lollapalooza, BPA-free bottle in hand. In terms of environmental virtue ethics, you will have put everything in its right place.
9.
We (Capitalists) Suck Young Blood
JOSEPH TATE
For the greater part of his life, the German philosopher Karl Marx (1818-1883) lived in London. One evening, feeling a bit overly nationalistic after a pub crawl—one beer each at the eighteen pubs between Oxford Street and Hampstead down London’s Tottenham Court Road—Marx is reported to have harassed a group of patrons at the last stop. Marx proclaimed: “No country but Germany . . . could have produced such masters as Beethoven, Mozart, Handel and Haydn; snobbish, cant-ridden England was fit only for philistines.” After igniting the ire of locals at the pub, Marx, with drinking companions in tow, fled into the night and threw paving stones at streetlights.
This anecdote, remembered by Wilhelm Liebknecht, one of the evening’s co-conspirators, gives us a glimpse of a human Marx. There’s likely little rhyme or reason to what prompted a Marx who was three sheets to the wind to trot out musical composers as the height of German achievement. Marx not only cherished the names of his countries’ great composers but mentioned them instead of other Germans—like Hegel, a major philosophical influence on Marx, or Goethe, one of the country’s greatest writers—who’d left the most obvious marks on his written work.
In conjunction with the work of Radiohead, if we can imagine a metaphorically “Nude” Marx—yet with wild hair and beard remaining for dramatic effect (he consciously cultivated the beard, letters reveal)—then we can rearrange the puzzle of his philosophy so at least some of the jigsaw pieces fall into place. Marx’s philosophy might be best summed up by a sentence from a work that pre-dates the multi-volume, oversized monument known as Capital: “Men make their own history, but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted.” This sentence, in some ways, captures what’s been dubbed “dialectical materialism,” the name later given to Marx’s philosophical outlook. But we don’t need to name Marx’s philosophy to understand the core of it: people exist in tension between what they would make of the world and what the world would make of them. This gets at what Thom Yorke and other members of Radiohead has seen as the problem for much of their lives as artist: they have stood in tension between what they would make of themselves and what their record company would make of them.
Bringing Radiohead together with bushy-haired Marx might seem like sucking the band’s blood. Marx never imagined digital distribution and he wrote nothing systematic on music. Plus, many of us come to Marx with too many presuppositions. For this essay, at least, set aside what you might know about Marx. I’d rather that we not, in Radiohead’s words from “Nude,” “get any big ideas.” Toss out the quotes from The Communist Manifesto or any ingrained ideas about Communism or Marxism that you have encountered. Marx would ask the same. He once heard a group call themselves Marxist and said, “I at least am not a Marxist.” Approaching Marx without preconceptions is difficult or maybe impossible—approaching a “Nude” Marx is maybe, as the Radiohead song says, “not going to happen.” But the Marx we rarely hear about was human. And he loved music.
Six Fluffy Wee Rabbits
Thom Yorke is troubled by making money. Gauging how the rest of Radiohead relates to money is harder. Interviewers tend to hound the other band members with less bark and bite, but when questions directed at Yorke tend toward record contracts or celebrity, his responses give away a singular unease. There’s wry misdirection: “It’s all for the cash!” Or over-direct anger: “we did not ask for a load of cash from our old