Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [65]
The Lukewarm
The bleak landscapes of OK Computer, Kid A, and Amnesiac are a stage upon which characters play out lonely, stagnating existences. Living among the endless cycles of “transport, motorways and tramlines, starting and then stopping, taking off and landing” described in “Let Down,” these characters exemplify the dangerous mediocrity of what Nietzsche calls der letzte Mensch, or the “Last Humans.”43 They are passive, conformist, non-responsive, and content simply to avoid danger. They say NO to life. Like paranoid androids, they wander around reminding themselves that “ambition makes you look pretty ugly.”
As an example of one of these Last Humans, the exhausted protagonist of “No Surprises” begs for his life of “a heart that’s full up like a landfill, a job that slowly kills you, bruises that won’t heal” to continue uninterrupted. “Bring down the government?” he asks rhetorically, answering that he would rather “take a quiet life, a handshake, some carbon monoxide.” The obsessive-compulsive narrator of “Everything in Its Right Place” mindlessly repeats the titular mantra over and over while a sampled, incorrect echo suggests just the opposite. The rejection of life is clear in “How to Disappear Completely” with the claim that “I’m not here, this isn’t happening. I’m not here. I’m not here.” The “nervous messed up marionette floating around on a prison ship” described in “Optimistic” is utterly helpless and dependent on both puppet master and ship’s captain.
Sometimes the most exemplary (and thus, pitiful) thoughts of Last Humans are also those that are fragmentary, broken off from a more complete character. One can see this in the fragile call for help of “Release me” in “Morning Bell” or the lukewarm optimism of “I Might Be Wrong” (“I used to think there was no future left at all!”), an empty cheerfulness that is undermined when the new future is revealed to be suicide over a waterfall. The realization in “True Love Waits” that “I’m not living. I’m just killing time.” or of the “local man” of “Climbing Up The Walls” who has “the loneliest feeling” further reveals the broken nature of the Last Humans. In “National Anthem,” Radiohead reveals that if anything is going to unite these passive, spiteful characters, it is the acknowledgment that “Everyone has got the fear.”
Let Me Hear Both Sides
Nietzsche knows why these characters have ended up here—and why these lyrics strike nihilistic chords with so many listeners. During Nietzsche’s lifetime, he saw the idea of God-given morality lose popularity among the elite, and anticipated the gradual diffusion of this crisis of faith throughout humanity.44 According to him, humans have used “God” to fool ourselves into believing that moral judgments exist objectively. On this line of thinking, “right” and “wrong” and “good” and “evil” are not arbitrary, socially-constructed concepts, but rather, can be found in nature and/or religion and outside of humanity. But Nietzsche famously says that “God is dead.” We start to realize that there are as many logically contradicting “truths” in the world as there are people: “there are various eyes . . . and as a result there are various truths, and as a result there is no truth.” Each individual has his or her own perspective and personal “truths.” Without the myth of God prejudicing us towards certain actions as “right” or against others as “wrong,” existence itself becomes subjective, and we potentially experience a nihilistic