Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [94]
First, it’s willful. No matter how oppressive the technological marring becomes, the voice still sings. It may be trapped, but it’s not going to quit. It may not be understood, but it’s still going to sing. And the evocative quality is as intoxicating as it is terrifying. Human expression may be entrapped, our avenues of expression becoming more and more ways toward dead ends rather than entry-points into effective, clear communication. But the digitally soaked voice of that song doesn’t care. So what if its very humanity is scarred by the very technologies meant to announce it? That’s no reason not to try.
And second, its failure makes it feel human. This is how Radiohead can embrace electronic music with Kid A without actually becoming electronic. In fact, they still remain inside the realm of pop music. It wasn’t as if Radiohead heard some interesting avant-garde electronic music and thought that they should imitate it for artistic or (even less likely) commercial success. Rather, the synthetic feel of Kid A seems more the product of a band exploring their surrounding technologies—technologies that were ready-at-hand when Kid A was recorded—and using those technologies to express something very human: the anxiety of living in an information age that claims to want to help us, yet feels more like an imposition than anything else. The song “Kid A” and its electronic saturation feel very much like a saturation in which we operate daily, whether through television, radio, internet, or phone lines.
Just as Gibson noticed, much of our lives are lived through the circuitry that enables our lifestyles. And the music we listen to is an important part of that electronic saturation. Radiohead’s evolution from Pablo Honey to Kid A itself reflects the degree to which we have become electronic in order to survive in “the information age.” “Kid A” is as much of technology as it is about technology. It disfigures voice as much as it is concerned with singing about disfiguring voice. Such an accommodation suggests that in order for humans to say anything in “the information age” we must become partly technological ourselves (or acknowledge how dependent on technology we always have been). Humanity itself isn’t enough. We need to use our technological environs. We need help.
I listened to the song “Kid A” for seven years before I became in any way interested in what the lyrics were saying. As far as I was concerned, for seven years, when that song emerged from the silence following “Everything in its Right Place” all I cared about was being washed in the strange familiarity of the way it feels, rather than the acknowledgement of anything particular that the lyrics might say. That was a beautiful experience because it felt, actually felt, like there was suddenly a band out there in mainstream global pop culture that knew how inarticulate I felt in the torrent of media I swam through daily, how trapped and protected I felt in my little world of global connection. How was it possible to say anything that might be heard, let alone understood, in a globalized culture that, no matter how much I depended on it, created a technological environment that trapped me as much as it protected me? The benefits of the world wide web, cell phones, laptops, television—all that stuff—were benefits that I depended on, but didn’t understand. So I lived with a low-level anxiety about the technology that surrounded me. The bands I listened to didn’t seem to understand this, or know how to articulate it. Radiohead did. And they did it by being inarticulate.
At Ease
I became interested in the lyrics of “Kid A” when I came across John Mayer’s acoustic cover of it. I listened because I