Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [88]
Getting All Literal
The line “Hail to the thief ” appears in track one, “2 + 2 = 5”, implying things are never as they seem. To begin to see what Radiohead is doing here, therefore, it might be useful to compare them to celebrated French philosopher Alain Badiou, who says that there’s an ancient tie between philosophy and poetry. What that tie might be is suggested by French poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) who saw poetry as a kind of “les révoltes logiques”, or logical revolts. Philosophy, like the best poetry and lyrics, pits thought against the defective state of the world and life.61 It revolts against the world—something that seems to capture in a nutshell Radiohead’s project.
But it’s not that simple. For Radiohead is also probing the question in this album of what the boundaries, the limits, are between us and the world. And between people—as in “Where I End and You Begin. (The Sky Is Falling In.)” In light of Radiohead’s interest in androids, this question becomes central. Recall here the Radiohead track “Paranoid Android,” the lead track from their addictive third album OK Computer (1997).62 The very idea of a sentient android blurs two of the fundamental categories through which we understand the world: mechanical objects and conscious beings. Inert, material substance and active, thinking souls, as Descartes believed everything in the world to be made up of. Or, radios that passively pick up signals and human heads with brains that think, act, decide and experience the world. A radiohead, or a person with a radiohead, would be some kind of blend between human and machine—perhaps like Newton, David Bowie’s character in The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg, 1976). Newton is an alien on Earth looking for water who comes to believe that Earth’s television signals are coming from his own head.
What does this have to do with politics? Everything. If we are all radio heads, sponging up everything thrown at us through our very atmosphere, we are susceptible to being controlled by our elected leaders, instead of them being controlled by us. “We don’t want the loonies taking over,” as “Backdrifts” puts it. But one thief may have already done just that, at least in part because many yearn to be led and controlled. There is in some, Nietzsche said, “an overwhelmingly forceful and pleasurable desire to be a function,” pure and simple.63 Just ask one of the Stepford Wives (Bryan Forbes, 1974; Frank Oz, 2004).
The importance of personal, political boundaries is underscored by sociologist and philosopher Ernest Gellner (1925-1995). As Gellner sees it, looking at another, if there is no fixed sense of self, means we cannot comprehend another.64 We only understand another through ourselves, yet we only understand ourselves through another. This helps make sense of the anxious dread within “Where I End and You Begin” (The sky is falling in)—especially with the lyric, repeated over and over, “I will eat you alive”. Yorke seems to point to an ultimate fear, to evil itself, emerging within this question of boundaries between our self and the world, between what is familiar and friendly, and what is other, very hungry, and inspires our greatest fears.
One philosopher to look at a similar sense of dread inside everyday existence is Martin Heidegger (1889-1976).65 Heidegger’s view is that the Other or source of evil is not any particular thing, only the lack or defect. We fear nothingness or the nothing (das Nichts), but perhaps we should not: “Horror is produced in subjective existence by the threat of real evil. Nothingness does not kill; being does.” Heidegger should know, given his controversial membership in the Nazi party before the Second World War.
Who Is This Devil in Disguise?
Elvis, like many before him, was singing about a woman. But “Hail to the Thief ” could be referring to the evil done as we negotiate the boundaries, at once metaphysical and political, between ourselves and others in the world. In some ways, the songs on Hail to the Thief evoke a stately presidential parade of horrors, as if the undead