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By Root 949 0

and because of what it is. Because of their inability to find unity in the world, both start from reality to create something else. They fabricate a closed universe: songs begin and end harmoniously, after having given us an arranged melody, while nothing does in the world. Music, like painting, sculpture or literature, stops the world at a certain moment or gives us a specific part of it, and takes away its indeterminacy. Art, like revolt, both refuses and consents: Radiohead refuse what is ugly and unjust, but they can’t affirm that everything in the world is ugly or unjust: they have to start with something. And those parts they keep in the universe they are creating shows us what they’re consenting to, what they’re trying to shine a light on, what they want to show us in a different light. They correct the world, they fix it, based on their capacities (in language and music) and on what they find in reality—and this correction is their style. Through it, as they are artists and as they are revolted, they give a new law to the world. Through the style deployed in their creative efforts, they make the world over with the slight deformation that is proper to both art and revolt. They force reality, expanding the meaning of certain parts while caricaturing others.

Somewhere We Will Meet

But to understand what Radiohead are doing, we have to go beyond the idea of creation, toward the idea of expression as articulated by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who wrote—and died—at around the same time as Albert Camus (although the two had very little to do with one another: to put it mildly, they detested each other).51 Merleau-Ponty is helpful in showing us that Radiohead go beyond revolt. They’re acting socially and politically by recording their songs and singing the words they sing. Revolt and art go together. Just by playing their songs, Radiohead infuse values into our societies, values that can end up changing them. We can hardly doubt, especially given the overtly political meaning of Hail to the Thief for example, that they have the intention of showing us our world differently, so that we may share their revolt and the values they suggest. And already, long before they make any overtly political statements, their songs are political. They open new possibilities and they’ll remain examples in the future—for those who’ll hear them and for those who’ll pick up a guitar. And we know how anyone can do that.

Merleau-Ponty suggests that what we expect of artists and of politicians is for them to lead us toward values that we’ll afterwards recognize as being our own, that they express what we’ve always felt and wanted to say without even knowing it. This is because they show us their values together with the roots of these values—the roots of their need to communicate them that spring out of their experience. As artists, their creations are attempts at showing us their world. But they’re not expressing thoughts that are clear, for those thoughts would have already been said. Instead, Radiohead try, time and again, to express muddled, uncertain things which still need to be expressed and to find a certain form on their records. And they do it on different levels: lyrically, there are thoughts about dysfunctional relationships or domination in society. Musically, Radiohead do it through songs like “How to Disappear Completely” where the detached, airy mood expresses a frame of mind or a kind of day we have. The very engaged “Electioneering” tells us how frantic the band feels with its harsh, scattered guitar lines. It’s the finished song that proves that there was something to express in the first place, that there was something important in the original “malaise,” which Merleau-Ponty calls a “fever.” The number of songs and ideas that lead nowhere are proof enough that sometimes there really wasn’t much, if anything, in the “fever.” And sometimes, as with “Big Ideas” (which was finally recorded and released on In Rainbows as “Nude”) it can take many, many years for it to finally be said and make sense.

In Merleau-Ponty’s terms,