Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [64]
All in all, Rainbows suggests the possibility of a different future for music—a future with new rules and perhaps with fewer profits, but certainly with more freedom. Maybe there’s no pot of gold at the end of it, but over this rainbow, at least some of our dreams might come true.
Music is part of our cultural heritage, and part of our social interaction. The song which we sing along with is one which we should be free to share, perform, and remix. Every song is an expression, and a part of a conversation, and nobody should have the rights to tell us what we can and cannot do with words and sounds dear to us, and which speak to our hearts.
Yet, music is an industry, and managers, employees, and stock-holders have made investments of time and money, within an established legal regime, which they have a legitimate expectation to be able to recover. Songs are commodities in our society, and music given away undermines the viability of the system.
So, where do we go from here? We must go slowly; we must find new ways of supporting artists, and we must oppose legislation that cuts us off from our culture and that supports labels to the detriment of artists. If we can find a clear path forward, together, our culture may be ours again.
Radiohead’s Existential Politics. (First Against the Wall.)
11.
Nietzsche, Nihilism, and “Hail to the Thief”
DEVON LOUGHEED
We’re rotten fruit, we’re damaged goods. What the hell, we’ve got nothing more to lose.
—“Backdrifts,” Hail to the Thief
An eruption occurs one minute and fifty-three seconds into “2 + 2 = 5,” the first track on Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief. In some ways, it’s simply the culmination of a classic rock’n’roll meme: the quiet-to-loud buildup and release of tension that Radiohead has employed before, perhaps most famously on “Paranoid Android.”
Yet there’s a greater significance in this first moment of intensity on Hail to the Thief than in any comparable explosions on OK Computer. It serves as a wake-up call to the desolate, passionless, self-contemptuous characters (we could call them “the lukewarm”) of OK Computer, Kid A, and Amnesiac. The lyrics of these albums expose the suffering of a nihilistic life that denies the objective existence of “right” and “wrong.” The overwhelming sense of loneliness and isolation that saturates those three albums can be seen as a consequence of a loss of all morality. Read this way, these albums represent the existential nausea of a paranoid android who has discovered that the “truth” of moral claims are relative to each separate individual. To the inhabitants of the despondent psychic landscapes of these earlier three albums, Thom issues a rallying cry: “You have not been paying attention.”
Beginning with this critical exhortation, Hail to the Thief can be seen as a sharp break from the band’s previous efforts, acting against nihilist apathy towards life. Instead of a certain political apathy found in earlier albums, the lyrics on Hail to the Thief take on a prescriptive and distinctly normative quality, endorsing and rejecting different moral judgments. Thus, the pig in the cage, the paranoid android, and the self-professed “reasonable man” are encouraged to transcend their inhuman surroundings and, as Thom sings on “Sail to the Moon,” “know right from wrong.”
Yorke is not the only one concerned with the degeneracy and domination of human life in a post-industrial, acutely modern era. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) sees the potential nihilistic consequences of a loss of belief in morality. He warns about the “death of God”, by which he means a loss of belief in