Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [87]
Hail to the Thief’s “I Will” portrays Radiohead’s take on this understanding of resistance perhaps better than any other track in their corpus. Yorke proclaims that, after hiding in a bunker, he will rise up, refusing to let harm come to his family: “I won’t let this happen to my children.” It is a clear and transparent message of a citizen resisting violence, a form of Arendt’s political action, in the face of overwhelming odds.
Yorke finishes “I Will” with the repeated refrain of “little babies’ eyes.” It’s almost as if he is alluding to the hope found in the infant’s visual exploration of the world as ultimately the same as his hope that the social future of the newborn will be one of a just plurality, shorn of any and all tyrannical or totalitarian violence and terror. Arendt would say this outro expresses the power of natality, the hope found in the power of acting anew as a free political subject. And there is no doubt that they would both say that this power of natality, of new political birth, is one in which the gun can never be pointed at the people, the source of true political power and action. But if, and when, it does happen, when “absolute power corrupts absolutely” rings troublingly true again, then it is the responsibility of all political subjects to say: “I will rise up.”56
15.
Evil and Politics in “Hail to the Thief”
JASON LEE
Everything begins and ends in eternity.
—Thomas Newton (David Bowie), The Man Who Fell to Earth
Be thankful for everything, for soon there will be nothing . . .
—Tagline, 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002)
On March 23rd, 2003, the United States bombed Baghdad. Some whooped with glee, believing this was an eye-for-an-eye victory against terrorism. But millions of others around the globe marched in protest. Saddam Hussein’s extermination of the Kurds should not be forgotten, but Osama bin Laden and Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction were nowhere to be seen. Revenge, along with the lust for blood and oil, was the victor.
Hail to the Thief was made between September 2002 and February 2003. So it was complete when the second Iraq war began. But there had been a tense build-up to the war and it was natural for fans and the media to see the album as a response to the invasion.57 With words like “FEAR” and “OIL” looming large on the album cover, this was a natural interpretation, invited even more by the apocalyptic lyrics of “The Gloaming” (Softly Open our Mouths in the Cold): “Go and tell the king that / The Sky is falling in.” The next line, however, tempers this interpretation: “When it’s not / Maybe not.” And Thom Yorke’s own ambiva-lence about the intended meaning of the album’s title complicates things even more. He has stated that he believes the 2000 election was effectively stolen,58 making “Hail to the Thief ” seem like an obvious play on the traditional American presidential anthem, “Hail to the Chief.” But in a Rolling Stone interview a year after the album’s release, he said:
they’re not so much songs about politics as me desperately struggling to keep politics out. If I could have written about anything else, I would have. I tried really fucking hard. But how can any sensible person ignore what’s been going on altogether? I couldn’t, I really couldn’t. Fuck, man, I would love to write lyrics free of politics! Send me on a retreat somewhere, where I can get it out of my system!59
In fact, the “thief ” in question, Yorke says, is John Quincy Adams, the sixth American president, who won the election of 1824 despite having received fewer votes than Andrew Jackson.60 Yorke’s title, then, is bigger than just a comment on the election of 2000. It points to the political metaphysics returned to again and again in the album’s songs—an enduring metaphysics of deception, fear, violence, and want suggested by all the words on the album’s cover, and allowing the album to transcend the specific wars, deceptions, and lives belonging to the period in which it happened to be made.