Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [73]
We Are Born Again
Compare the architecture of Yorke’s revolt to that of Albert Camus’s. In Camus’s novel The Plague, the characters adopt different attitudes to what seems like an incurable and unstoppable event. Some despair while others act together in the hope of overcoming the disease. By acting, the ones who hope achieve a happiness, similar to Sisyphus. Where The Myth of Sisyphus dealt with suicide, The Rebel deals with murder—and there’s a lot to be found in this book about the horrors of the twentiethth century.50 Just as Radiohead’s paranoid android doesn’t put anyone against the wall, Camus’s rebel doesn’t agree that murder is ever justified: only life allows for the happiness that comes from our confrontation with the world, and it must be allowed for everyone to enjoy it. If we ask, as Camus does and as Radiohead do, to live life according to our own rules and wisdom, we can’t refuse others the same. Absurdity is not an end in itself, as Radiohead’s songs show. It is instead a starting point. As we struggle to decide whether to accept our condition and or dream of an impossible one, it can also lead us to something else.
Our feeling that our situation is absurd and that we can only keep going as androids or in dreaming of becoming aliens can lead us to shout violently that our life is absurd (even though we might not do it literally). As soon as we become conscious of this absurdity, we have watered the seeds of revolt. Radiohead, as we’ve seen, give us specific reasons for nurturing this revolt, specific words to shout. Revolt is born out of a lack of understanding as well as a lack of reason or justice. Because it wants to transform the world, revolt gives us hope for the creation of something new. In revolt, therefore, we’re also saying yes to something, to our right to something better. We defend something from ourselves, we affirm that something in us is worth being defended and respected. We affirm our values and we appeal to others to take them on. Of course, there are pitfalls and dangers, which Camus’s book explores; but there are also great potentialities.
Camus updates Descartes in this way: “I revolt, therefore we are.” As soon as we feel that others will listen to us because they share our situation or because they are able to understand it, we identify our destinies with each other’s. We affirm that the value we are defending is also a value for everyone else and we join those others who can understand us and agree with us. Revolt and solidarity depend on each other: solidarity is the justification of the revolt that was its origin—and so a revolt is only true when it recognizes even for those whom it opposes what it claims for itself. The suffering of absurdity is no longer individual; it becomes shared as a feeling and as a task. The ultimate value that revolt defends is what we share with everyone else.
Sing Us a Song
Revolt is also a creation that allows us to listen to Radiohead differently yet again. We can follow their lyrics and look at what they tell us, but we can also listen to their “shout” (as Camus said) and we can find a meaning in the act of their expression, together with what they’re saying. By doing so, we’re taking their songs as part of another whole. It’s no longer the series of songs in a series of albums: instead, we’re listening to the whole that is the singing of the song, with everything it entails as far as performing, recording and distributing go. The whole is made up of the interdependence and the entwining of what is expressed and how it is expressed: we can’t separate content and form.
Let’s keep Camus as a guide for now to see the close relationship between revolt and art: both seek a unity, both refuse the world because of what is missing in it