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By Root 881 0

get-togethers, he would sit in an aggressive sulk. The record contract was an albatross. If they made it to a second album, Yorke joked, it would be titled Unit, as in “unit shifter,” the music industry’s term for a single that helps sell albums.37 As Yorke would sing ten years later, the recording industry wanted the sweet meat, and by signing the contract and agreeing to whatever it demanded, Yorke must have felt he was using a pen dipped in his own young blood, a theme explored by the vampiric Hail to the Thief song “We Suck Young Blood (Your Time is Up.).”

The song verges on the over-obvious. The viscous, ill-timed handclaps and Yorke’s glacially slow delivery of the lyrics make it powerfully creepy:

Are you hungry?

Are you sick?

Are you begging for a break?

Are you sweet?

Are you fresh?

Are you strung up by the wrists?

We want the young blood

Before the album was released the song was at the center of a fake advertising campaign. In April 2003, posters appeared around Los Angeles and London advertising: “Hungry? Sick? Begging for a break? Sweet? Fresh? Would you do anything? We suck young blood. We want sweet meats.” If you fit the criteria you could call 1-866-868-4433, or 1-866-tot-hief. Someone, Yorke said in an interview, took it seriously: “Someone I heard on the radio completely missed the point, or maybe they didn’t. They kind of thought we were running some kind of Radiohead talent show. Just genius—that would have been perfect but sadly not.” Yorke rarely explicates the band’s songs, but this time he did: “It’s all very tied up with Hollywood and the constant desire to stay young, fleece people, suck their energy . . . It’s not really about the music business as such, definitely much more about the glamorous world of Hollywood.”

Radiohead had recorded Hail to the Thief in a several-weeks blitz in Los Angeles so Hollywood culture might well have been on his mind. But a version of the song had been circulating around Radiohead’s repertoire since at least 2001, when Colin Greenwood said the song was about “these multiplatinum artists hooking up with the latest French disco producer to do their new record.” Whether pointed at Hollywood or French disco producers, the target is likely what Yorke said it wasn’t: the music business as such, and how it exploits the very musicians it needs to succeed.

We Suck Young Blood

Marx would have liked Yorke’s comparison of a business, or a capitalist culture like Hollywood, to blood-sucking vampires. He made it too. Once a worker signs over their labor via a contract to a profit-making, capitalist enterprise, Marx wrote (quoting his long time colleague Friedrich Engels), the worker is stuck and “the vampire will not let go ‘while there remains a single muscle, sinew or drop of blood to be exploited’.” On another occasion he wrote: “Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.”

A capitalist—the business owner who lives off the work of others—is an undead, parasite that relies on the worker’s vitality. Marx was haunted not just by the image but the reality of the workers exploited at times to the point of crippling physical ailments. Capitalism was “wasting not only flesh and blood, but also nerves and brains.” Capitalism wants the sweet meats, the young blood and Yorke could feel it breathing at his neck.

When it came to digital sales, Yorke knew the vampire was not about to let go. Everyone made money off Radiohead’s music, except for Radiohead. Yorke explained in a Wired Magazine interview with David Byrne:

In terms of digital income, we’ve made more money out of this record [In Rainbows] than out of all the other Radiohead albums put together, forever—in terms of anything on the Net. And that’s nuts. It’s partly due to the fact that EMI wasn’t giving us any money for digital sales. All the contracts signed in a certain era have none of that stuff.

Yorke, uncharacteristically, wants his fair share, but you can’t fault him. What he saw happening was the vampires sucking his