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By Root 899 0

since they’re speaking as if they were themselves politicians and diminishing their distance with what they do. But there’s still quite a distance in the song’s second verse: nothing in Radiohead’s actions compares to the violence of riot shields and of cattle prods, or to the complete lack of control that’s implied in “voodoo economics” and in structures like the IMF. “Somewhere we will meet” may therefore be an admission that we will find a compromise with the “others”—and that we do in fact, meet, somewhere, with the people that deal in economics and the IMF, with those ventriloquists with their heads on sticks, with those unknown shadows at the end of our beds.

An overtly political meaning is also present in “The National Anthem,” if only because of its title. Thom Yorke’s voice here is so deformed that it finds its place among the other instruments, it’s layered like them and it takes part in their general confusion. And so the music here becomes most important. On one hand, the bass takes the lead, repeating the same melody over the course of most of the song and giving it its unity. On the other hand, the song features horns, like most national anthems, but horns that are in complete discord and that give an illusion of chaos. They highlight the menace in the booming, distorted bass line: if “everyone is so near” it’s because “it’s holding on” and “everyone has got the fear.” The question, What is it that’s holding on?, has two meanings: what is it that’s holding on? and, second, what does holding on mean?. If something is holding on, if we’re faced with a lasting overall menace, and if everyone is also holding on, then, out of discord, of conflict and confrontation, a certain harmony (musical and, figuratively, social) will emerge.

Radiohead’s revolt is creative because it’s an appeal and a call to others in whose lives their expressions find root and who may revolt together with them and turn things around. In sharing their music, they are not only acting artistically, but also politically. They aim for something positive, they want to shape us and bring us together by singing about us. For listening to Radiohead cannot simply be a passive activity; it is also hearing their call. We may choose to ignore it call and reduce their music to a commodity, to music we can buy and enjoy (which of course it is, in part). Or we may find ourselves in agreement with their expression of our lives, and from there, we can choose to hear their call, to try to go beyond what’s presented to us as impossible and out of our reach, and move toward an acceptance of absurdity and the creation of rules and wisdom that are our own.

13.

The Impossible Utopias in “Hail to the Thief”

SEAN BURT

If, in the summer of 2003, you had heard a few details about the forthcoming Radiohead album, the one that was said to be a more accessible return from the electronic experimentation of Kid A and Amnesiac to guitar-based rock, you likely wouldn’t have been surprised to open Rolling Stone and read Thom Yorke saying this about the genesis of the album:

It was a formative moment—one evening on the radio, way before we were doing the record. The BBC was running stories about how the Florida vote had been rigged and how Bush was being called a thief. That line threw a switch in my head. I couldn’t get away from it. And the light—I was driving that evening with the radio on—that was particularly weird. I had this tremendous feeling of foreboding, quite indescribable, really. To me, all the feelings on the record stem from that moment. (David Fricke, “Bitter Prophet,” June 26th, 2003)

Surely, with a title like Hail to the Thief, this new record would be Radiohead’s attempt to send a broad political message, a protest against an American regime that only weeks before celebrated its “mission accomplished” of enforcing its will across the globe. And that “tremendous feeling of foreboding,” Yorke’s explanation of “the gloaming” (a poetic term for the darkest period of the night, along with the name of a track on and the alternate title of Hail