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By Root 1022 0

(with far less sympathetic results). This track narrates the story of a man who “wants to be loved and he wants to belong / He wants you to listen, he wants us to weep.” Like the protagonist of “Creep,” this man is desperately unable to connect with others. He struggles against this inability to form meaningful relationships, attempts to maintain control, but ends up further alienating others in the process. The same feeling forms the backdrop for “Stop Whispering”—“the feeling . . . that there’s something wrong”—as well as “Anyone Can Play Guitar.” Alienation is the looming threat in “Ripcord,” permeates the tragedy at the center of “Vegetable,” and is the “strange and creeping doubt” that drives “I Can’t.” Pablo Honey, you might say, establishes the base problem that will drive the rest of Radiohead’s work: the feeling of being cut off from others, unable to connect, fundamentally not at home.

It’s tempting—as so many have done—to chalk all of this “alienation nonsense” up to “the loser/slacker zeitgeist of the early 1990s” (as Radiohead fansite “Green Plastic Radiohead” puts it). But we would be hasty to simply smell the same old “teen spirit” in Yorke and company’s portrait (or, better, we’d be mistaken to think it’s only adolescence that “Smells Like Teen Spirit”). Alienation, as presented by Radiohead, is not simply a problem of some marginalized sector of society (teenagers, art school kids, scrawny Brits); it’s a bigger problem. As “Subterranean Homesick Alien” on OK Computer puts it, it’s a problem “of all these weird creatures / who lock up their spirits / drill holes in themselves / and live for their secrets.” It’s the human condition. It’s not “they” who can’t connect; it’s us. But why not?

Everything Is Broken

One thing’s certain: this inability to connect is not for lack of trying. It’s not “I Won’t,” but, “Even though I might, even though I try, I can’t.” Alongside the more obvious manifestation of alienation, there is another constant theme: passivity and the loss of control. Again, “Creep” introduces this loss (“I don’t care if it hurts / I want to have control / I want a perfect body / I want a perfect soul”), and it is a constant companion to the theme of alienation. In fact, this has been the fundamental problem with alienation all along: we only feel cut off, feel like we “don’t belong here,” because we cannot connect with others. The hostility of the world and our inability to act within it are in this way dependent on one another. We cannot simply explain the hostility of the world through our inability to engage with it, but neither can we simply blame our inability to engage with the world on its hostility; we need to understand our attunement to the world, and the character of the world itself, as somehow fundamentally connected. We are headed, that is, toward a phenomenological analysis of alienation—one that doesn’t split the world from our experience of it.

Using this as our way forward, let’s look at the albums Pablo Honey, The Bends, and OK Computer where this inability is expressed in two ways (not one after another, but simultaneously): first, as a passivity (the inability to act); and second, as an “emptying” of the self (having nothing to give, contribute, or call upon). The first is found in songs like “Prove Yourself ” (“I want to breathe, I want to grow / I’d say I want it, but I don’t know how”) and (obviously) “I Can’t.” But it echoes as well through “The Bends” (“Fall asleep beside the window pane / My blood will thicken”), “High and Dry” (“Drying up in conversation / you’ll be the one who cannot talk / All your insides fall to pieces / you just sit there wishing you could still make love”), and even “Karma Police” (“hysterical and useless”). Here the passive person (whether narrated first-, second-, or third-person) is unable to pursue his or her desires, and is instead either acted upon by the world (as in “Karma Police”), or is simply thrown to the disposal or mercy of the hostile world (again, “Karma Police” fits, but also “High and Dry,” “I Can’t,” and others). This