• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 926 0

more direct hints of the yearning for a better world. It is not just about the relentlessness of an authoritarian vision, but also about the glimpses of hope that are real precisely because they are fleeting. Consider “Sail to the Moon (Brush the Cobwebs Out of the Sky).” Coming on the heels of the two claustrophobic tracks that open Hail to the Thief, this song balances the gloom and offers a glimmer of redemption. The main title evokes the archetypical space journey, hearkening back to the novels by nineteenth-century science-fiction pioneer Jules Verne (such as From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon). If the moon stands in for a place of imagination and promise, the elliptical lyrics that open the song (“I sucked the moon / I spoke too soon / And how much did it cost?”) seem to take back some of the relentless pessimism of “2 + 2 = 5” and “Sit Down Stand Up”. Yet, any possibility of escape remains only tentative and distant: “maybe you’ll / be president / but know right from wrong / or in the Flood you’ll build an Ark / and sail us to the moon.”

“Sail to the Moon” is hardly a concrete plan for a new society. But it does offer an uncertain hope for something different—not a castle in the sky, but a clearing away of the cobwebs. The bleakness still remains, but it lurks in the background as a glimmer of moonlight appears. But the next track slams the door on this brief glimpse of hope, dispelling this daydream as quickly as it arrived. “Backdrifts (Honeymoon is Over)” is a dystopian retreat. Its narrator hesitating in the face of the unknown, “backsliding” and announcing “this far but no further.” Even more, if the sky and moon of “Sail to the Moon” stand in for possibility and change, the subsequent song, “Where I End and You Begin (The Sky Is Falling In)” dramatically closes off the possibility of connecting that dream world with our own situation: “I am up in the clouds / And I can’t come down”. This is a variety of hope, but only one that floats in the abstract, unable at this time to find purchase in concrete reality.

Since hope won’t stick, we’re left desperate and searching for refuge and comfortable familiarity, even if that means resting in the safe arms of Big Brother. In “I Will,” Yorke sings “I will lay me down / in a bunker underground. / I won’t let this happen to my children.” This notion of retreat seems to be driven in large part by fear, a fear also replete in the breathless paranoia of “Wolf at the Door.” In that song, the thing that the narrator wishes to protect is, quite literally, the space of the family, identified as a stereotypical suburban domesticity, found in lines like “Stepford wives, who are we to complain?” or “Investments and dealers / cold wives and mistresses / cold wives and Sunday papers.” However, the obviously ideological content of phrases like “Stepford wives” remind us that, in the dystopian world of Hail to the Thief, even the most intimate areas of life—the family and even the mind—are not safe from the forces outside. “A Wolf at the Door” in this way brings Hail to the Thief full circle: the inability to keep the wolves at bay, even from the insulated home is a reiteration of “I’ll stay home forever / where two and two always makes five” in “2 + 2 = 5.” Dreamers imagine future hopes, but then backslide. Individuals consider resistance but are either assimilated or hole up in bunkers and wait.

Hope at the Door

But hope also bides its time. The unmistakably pessimistic conclusion to Hail to the Thief does not seem to lead to a total abdication of the impulse toward utopia. While “A Wolf at the Door” most certainly depicts the intimate sphere as a house of straw, “I Will” refuses to completely renounce resistance. The narrator of “I Will” perches in the bunker only to hold out in preparation for a renewed engagement. After the phrase, “I won’t let this happen to my children,” the song continues. “Meet the real world coming out of my shell / with white elephants / sitting ducks. / I will rise up.” “I Will” and the album as a whole both keep the future open, if