Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [56]
Thom Yorke tried articulating this tension between what Radiohead would want to make of themselves and what their record company would make of them in 1997’s Meeting People Is Easy. Even though making music had brought them money, he feared money would dictate what music they made. It’s a lengthy quote and he has trouble wording just what the problem is, but his attempt is worth reading in full:
It’s like a supply and demand thing. It’s like: “Well, this is what they want me to do, you know, this is what they want to hear, so I’ll do more of this. Because this is great and they love me,” and that can be the demise of so many recording artists. You know, because you suddenly, suddenly people start giving you cash as well, suddenly you’ve got money and you get used to this lifestyle and you don’t want to take any risks because they’ve got you by the balls. You don’t want to take any risks because like, why, you know you’ve got all this baggage you’re carrying around with you everywhere. And you can’t let go. You know you’ve got all these things you’ve bought or you’re attached to, or, you know, if you start spending all this money.
Just after this interview, the documentary continues with shots of Radiohead in the studio attempting to record new tracks. The shots are revealing but boring because they show a Radiohead afraid to take risks: the music industry has them, as Yorke says, by the balls.
The last song we see performed live before the credits role is an early version of “Nude,” the third song on In Rainbows, a song then untitled. Seconds later, Grant Gee, the director, cuts to Yorke joking with an MTV reporter that he’d like to call the song, “Your Home Is at Risk if You Do Not Keep Up Repayment,” but he’s not sure if the title’s “catchy enough.” Yorke’s deadpan-dark humor doesn’t spark a giggle in the room, but the risk the title alludes to is exactly the sort of risk Yorke fears losing. As he said, once you’re given money for what you do, you feel you need to keep doing what you do or risk losing what you have. The fear money engenders makes one afraid to take risks, and “that’s how they get you,” that’s how the record companies crack your little soul, as Yorke sings on Amnesiac.
Crack Your Little Soul
2001’s Amnesiac was overshadowed by Kid A. Though recorded during the same sessions, the band insisted Amnesiac was not a b-sides album, despite being labeled as such. One song on Amnesiac best gives voice to Yorke’s suspicion and fears surrounding money. The song twists and turns between self-help axioms (“Be constructive / With yer blues”) and suggestive but masked aggression (“There are weapons we can use”). It ends, however, with the song’s speaker comparing himself and an undefined “we” to currency, and the comparison isn’t pretty:
We are the dollars and cents and the pounds and pence and the mark and the yen, the yen we’re going to crack your little souls
The song is as strange as anything Radiohead has done: we can’t hear Yorke’s quiet voice well, yet he’s most clear when singing the admonishing lyrics, “Won’t you quiet down.” Musically it moves at a disturbing pace, building slowly then breaking down with anything but relief.
Yorke’s lyrics do, even if he might deny it, express concerns that intersect with comments he has made during interviews. If we could exchange Yorke’s lyrics for any passage of Marx’s it might be this one: Capitalists, those who accumulate wealth in order to accumulate more wealth, can
distort the worker into a fragment of a man, they degrade him to the level of a machine, they destroy the actual content of his labour by turning it into a torment; they alienate from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process . . . they transform him his lifetime