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away. Over an incongruously stately waltz line, Yorke’s skipping half-rap creates a deeply claustrophobic scenario that explicitly rejects the possibility of resistance. In the face of a nameless threat, the narrator mutters “Get the eggs / get the flan in the face,” a phrase evoking the comedic protest tactic used by some anti-globalization groups serving pie to the faces of powerful political and economic figures. Soft dessert weapons, however, pale in comparison to the threats posed in the chorus (“I keep the wolf at the door but he calls me up / calls me on the phone tells me all the ways that he’s gonna mess me up / steal all my children if I don’t pay the ransom / and I’ll never see them again if I squeal to the cops”). Toward the end, even this nominal protest is dropped as the narrator retreats into a fearful shell, abdicating any role in resistance (“Someone else is gonna come and clean it up / Born and raised for the job / someone always does”).

The miasma of hopelessness that covers Hail to the Thief is probably best epitomized in “The Gloaming”, the song that Yorke himself—“the light”—takes to be the album’s thematic core. The scratchy, trance-like beat captures that sense of foreboding, of a “genie let out of the bottle, it is now the witching hour.” While the gloomy atmosphere of this track stands for Hail to the Thief as a whole, it also presupposes an objective distance unusual for the record. In contrast to the refrain of mind control throughout the record, whereby the narrators are either incorporated by the controlling regime, or cower in fear to it, here the narrator is able to cast him or herself against it. “We are not the same as you” resists assimilation. “Your alarms, they should be ringing” puts the narrator in the post of the sentinel warning against what is taking place.

Don’t Get Any Big Ideas—They’re Not Gonna Happen

The nearly relentless desperation found throughout Hail to the Thief is not the end of the story. Something about this project is deeply utopian. Not, of course, in its planning, but in its dedication to imagining a different world, even a world that is repressive. How does imagining a dystopia have utopian connotations? Recent writers on the idea of utopia can help us expand our concepts of utopian thought beyond the realm of pie-in-the-sky plans and crackpot schemes that we usually attribute to utopian thinkers and help us see the connection between utopia and the dismal world of Hail to the Thief.

To Ernst Bloch, the mid-twentieth-century German philosopher, the concept of utopia should not be limited to the confines of a proscribed literary genre (such as works by Thomas More or William Morris). Rather, the act of imagining a different, better world is a fundamental human desire found throughout all kinds of communication, literature, and arts (including music). Bloch’s massive, three-volume The Principle of Hope (Blackwell, 1986) is an attempt to collect the entire range of manifestations of this utopian impulse, from its most rudimentary forms in daydreams to more elaborate, meticulous plans.

A whole range of phenomena is found in The Principle of Hope, but there is a basic two-part division. Bloch articulates both a basic utopian impulse, or “abstract utopia” and the thought behind more rigorous, planned utopias, or “concrete utopia.”53 Abstract utopias are essential to utopian desire, for Bloch, even if they do not attain the complexity of utopian world-creation. Abstract utopian thought tends to be negative, to critique the current order of the world (wishing that, somehow, things could be different). Bloch finds abstract utopia ultimately lacking because it, unlike concrete utopia, is fleeting and not accompanied by a real will to change things and thus is susceptible to the feeling of nostalgia for former times. The underdeveloped impulse of abstract utopia instead finds its fulfillment in concrete utopian plans, which implies an informed commitment to change.

Bloch wrote The Principle of Hope during his brief stay in the United States in the 1950s, but he