Thom Yorke, lyricist for Radiohead, is a fatalist. He's a glass-half-empty kind of guy. He's everything you want in a real artist -- dour, introspective and funny looking. That's not the thing I admire about him, though. The thing I admire about Thom Yorke and Radiohead is their ability to be on that cutting artistic edge and still be hugely popular.
Great music, in my mind, is inexhaustible: every listening allows you to discover something more or receive some new insight. "Great" also implies the work is, um, "interpretable" or "appreciatiateable" on many different levels. On first listen you can readily appreciate Radiohead’s experimentation with different electronic sounds, symphonic arrangements, guitar riffs and melodies and how they blend them together into a whole. They have demonstrated this on previous albums, but here the weird noises remain in the background while the full force of Yorke's lyricism and inflection moves to the forefront. In this context you appreciate the album's overall tone and lyrical thread, which, synthesized with the musical swells, leave the listener emotionally exhausted.
The theme of fatality of modern life runs strong through this album. One is tempted to attribute this to some messed-up point of view, but I think there is something deeper here. The clue to unraveling this dour trip is in the final song, “Videotape”, in which the singer states:
When I'm at the pearly gates
This will be on my videotape, my videotape
Mephistopheles is just beneath
and he's reaching up to grab me
This is one for the good days
and i have it all here
In red, blue, green
Red, blue, green
(“Red, blue, green”, of course, refers to the cable colors on the back of your DVD player and TV.)
Basically my thesis here is that Thom is writing about the futility of the “video” society, where everything has to be documented and shown to the world on YouTube. This leads to a life devoid of meaning, since everything is now not real but just for show. Since “Videotape” is the last song on the album it serves as kind of an epitaph for the album, and the “protagonist”, if you will, the persona singing in first person (which Thom Yorke creates) takes the listener on a little journey of futility.
The theme is stated plaintively in the opening lyric of the album in "15 Step":
How come I end up where I started?
How come I end up where I went wrong?
Won't take my eyes off the ball again
You reel me out then you cut the string
The perceived loss of individually in this context is stated most emphatically in the second song, "Bodysnatchers", in perhaps the album's most dramatic musical moment:
Has the light gone out for you?
Because the light's gone for me
It is the 21st century
It is the 21st century
It can follow you like a dog
It brought me to my knees
They got a skin and they put me in
They got a skin and they put me in
All the lines wrapped around my face
All the lines wrapped around my face
And for anyone else to see
And for anyone else to see
I'm a lie
The music that always gets stuck in my head from this album is Thom’s frenetic declaration that “It is the 21st century.” It’s something along the lines of, “Damn, we’ve come all this way and this is what we’ve created?” Making videos of ourselves is an individual act, but is it us or some false exterior “skin” that we’ve put ourselves in?
The setting of track 4, "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi", is underwater. The amazing instrumentality of this song creates a surreal scene where the singer considers his innermost thoughts and longings, as typified by being "in the deepest ocean" and highlighted by guitar, vocal, electronic and even steel drum arpeggios. It is here that we hit bottom.
Even relationships in the video world are fatalistic, which is typified sardonically in my favorite track "Jigsaw Falling Into Place":
A Jigsaw falling into place
So there is nothing to explain
You eye each other as you pass
She looks back and you look back
Not just once
and not just twice
Wish away your nightmare
Wish away the nightmare
You got the light you can feel it on your back
[A light,] you can feel it on your back
Your jigsaw falling into place
In this world even relationships are reduced to a pre-determined formula, just like being a piece of a jigsaw puzzle that, though minute, only is meant to lock into a pre-determined picture. This is the script; this is what people expect and what they want to see. Life is not life, it’s a screenplay. This is echoes the previous thought in the lyric from which the album takes its name (in the track “Reckoner”):
Because we separate like
ripples on a blank shore
(in rainbows)
(“Ripples” = video waves; “we separate” = it’s fleeting and futile; “blank shore” = a video monitor; “in rainbows” = red/blue/green = video.)
Art doesn't always make you happy, but it should make you think. This album makes you think about modern life and what it means to be “real”. The other thing it makes you think about is that it takes a damn good band with a high level of artistry to deliver this kind of message.
cds
p.s. Radiohead’s musicality is phenomenal and it’s easy to ignore the lyrics. But in my opinion you only get the full impact of the music when you figure out what Thom Yorke is saying. Here’s a web site that can help you with that: http://www.greenplastic.com/lyrics/.
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