Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [78]
Hail to the Thief has no interest in ironic self-congratulation. It gives us a darkly authoritarian world, projecting the listener head-first into a repressive regime straight out of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. This blurs the lines between the observing would-be critic of that world and the helpless person actually submerged within it. The very opening line of the first track (“2+2 = 5”), “Are you such a dreamer, to put the world to rights?” scoffs disaffectedly, like the ironic meta-protester, at the prospect of political idealism. But, in a chilling turn, the narrator immediately answers his own question by demurring, “I’ll stay home forever, where two and two always makes five.” This opening couplet suggests that political paralysis is borne not of critical, knowing distance, but of the dominant political ideology, neatly internalized. The militaristic imagery in the commands of the next track, “Sit Down Stand Up,” and the repetition of “payin’ attention” in “2+2 = 5,” envision a repressive system imposing its will on the populace. As the chanting of “Sit Down Stand Up” warns: “Walk into the jaws of hell. Anytime. Anytime. We can wipe you out.”
Hail to the Thief implies that a truly totalitarian society is one in which the control that the powers that be impose on the citizenry reaches into the home, into the family, and even into the mind. Instead of the “having-it-both-ways” irony of “White People for Peace,” Radiohead seems to want to have it neither way: effective protest music is not possible, but neither is a disavowal of engagement. We are in this world, we are a part of it, and critical distance is not an option. We are not in on the joke so much as the joke is on us.
The Sky Is Falling In
So Hail to the Thief has much to say about political consciousness, after all. But this political commentary actually comes with a surprise. Despite its opening references to authoritarian control, Hail to the Thief can actually be seen as a form of genuine utopian thought—as a counterpoint to the Orwellian dystopia that seems to be the easy interpretation.
But let there be no doubt about it: this record is bleak. It sketches out a fictional world dominated by fear and maintained through mind control. Several science fiction or horror elements form a minor, though repeated, motif. From the echoes of Nineteen Eighty-Four in “2 + 2 = 5,” to the monsters in “We Suck Young Blood” and “Wolf at the Door,” to the ill-defined plague in “Myxomatosis,” to the reference to Gulliver’s Travels in “Go to Sleep” (“We don’t want to wake the monster / ‘tiptoe round tie him down’”), the story worlds of the songs in Hail to the Thief evoke dark, uncanny places.
More insidious than boogeymen at the threshold, however, are the repeated implications that effective resistance is impossible. This theme is first found in “2 + 2 = 5” and reintroduced in “Go to Sleep (Little Man Being Erased).” This begins with some kind of anticipated conflict: “Something big is gonna happen,” which receives the response “over my dead body.” Resistance quickly dissipates as the narrator capitulates (“I’m gonna go to sleep / let this wash all over me”). The concept of not being in full control of one’s will is also perhaps hinted at in the black humor of “We Suck Young Blood,” which begins with a shuffling zombie-like hand-clap rhythm, and it continues into “Myxomatosis”—about which Yorke once said, “This song is actually about mind control. I’m sure you’ve experienced situations where you’ve had your ideas edited or rewritten when they didn’t conveniently fit into someone’s else’s agenda” (Chuck Klosterman, “Fitter Happier: Radiohead Return,” Spin, June 2003).
By the last track, “A Wolf at the Door,” the independent self has almost completely withered