Thom Yorke. Laughing?
The b-sides for In Rainbows features two moments where we hear Radiohead laugh. “Bangers & Mash” (at approx. 2:32 in) and “4 Minute Warning” (at approx. 0:58 in). Radiohead, in and since Meeting People Is Easy, has been the band that doesn’t laugh. That’s not so true. As Samuel JP Shaw put it, “Radiohead – good humoured? You’re having a laugh.” Um, yes. Another quote:
I believe that to dismiss the band as merely despondent is to miss a trick. Hail To The Thief as an album clearly doesn’t intend to present its listeners with a positive view of the world. However, the way that Radiohead present their manifesto of woe is not without a sense of fun.
Shaw has it right. Just listen to Yorke’s laugh. In Rainbows is less funny than Radiohead having fun. The songs are sexy, languorous–think of “Nude.” It’s fun, the band is having fun, and the song is funny: “You’ll go to hell for what your dirty mind is thinking.”
Now, that’s funny.
Near to the close of Hail to the Thief’s “A Wolf at the Door. (It Girl. Rag Doll.),” the lyrics run:
City boys in first class
Don’t know they’re born, they know
Someone else is gonna come and clean it up
Born and raised for the job
Someone always does
I wish you’d get up get over get up get over
Turn your tape off.
Insofar as these lyrics might remotely relate to this site, it’s necessary to at least acknowledge that Pulk-Pull* needs cleaning. Strange character strings have crept into various areas, replacing smart quotes, apostrophes, etc. Over the next week or so, shaking the rugs out will be a priority.
A new book is in the works, for release in 2009: Radiohead and Philosophy. I’ll be writing a chapter, as previewed here.
The band’s relationship to money has been on everyone’s mind, including those who thought the “pay what you want, no really” distribution method “demeans music.” But money as a problem, as something that corrupts, has been on Thom Yorke’s mind since at least 1998’s Meeting People Is Easy:
It’s like a supply and demand thing. It’s like: ‘Well, this is what they want me to do, you know, this is what they want to hear, so I’ll do more of this. Because this is great and they love me’, and that can be the demise of so many recording artists. You know, because you suddenly, suddenly people start giving you cash as well, suddenly you’ve got money and you get used to this lifestyle and you don’t want to take any risks because they’ve got you by the balls. You don’t want to take any risks because like, why, you know you’ve got all this baggage you’re carrying around with you everywhere. And you can’t let go. You know you’ve got all these things you’ve bought or you’re attached to, or, you know, if you start spending all this money.
That’s how they get you.
Just after this interview with a slightly clueless Australian journalist, shots of Radiohead in the studio attempting to record new tracks are revealing but boring, and boring because Radiohead is bored. The last song we see performed live before the credits role is an early version of “Nude,” a song then untitled. Gee shows us Yorke joking with an MTV reporter that he’d like to call the song, “Your Home Is At Risk If You Do Not Keep Up Repayment,” but he’s not sure if the title’s “catchy enough.” Yorke’s deadpan-dark humor doesn’t spark a giggle in the room, but the risk the title alludes to is exactly the sort of risk Yorke fears losing. As he said, once you’re given money for what you do, you need to keep doing what you do or risk losing what you have. But fearing this sort of risk makes one afraid to take risks, and “that’s how they get you,” that’s how the record companies crack your little soul: that’s how they get you by the balls.
And now the Shipping Forecast issued by the Met Office, on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, at 1725 on Saturday 19 April 2008.
Lundy Fastnet Irish Sea:
East or northeast 5 to 7, decreasing 4 or 5 later. Moderate or rough, decreasing slight or moderate. Occasional rain. Moderate or good, occasionally poor.
Audio for Lundy Fastnet Irish Sea Shipping Forecast 4/19/08
Hello.
Pulk-Pull* has reopened. I closed it not long ago after some difficulties that included:
- changing host setups (from a shared hosting environment to a VPS and back again)
- an SQL dump that was larger than the new shared environment could upload (global variables set at max of 8mb when I had 25mb)
- someone hacked into the site’s new WordPress installation before I could finish setting it up (sometime within a 24hr period)
- I moved
- I got a new job
- the new album from Radiohead seemed to defy description or interpretation
- updates had become intermittent and uninteresting
- my ideas of interpretation were changing (stuck between Eco’s notion of over-interpretation and Rilke’s description of criticism as “happy misunderstandings”)
- Bush was still in office
- et cetera, et cetera / fads for whatever
During all this hubbub, I lost several posts. Several meaning 3-5 or more or less, I wasn’t counting. One, I think, is still in electronic format elsewhere.
Why “happy misunderstandings” since 2000? What does the phrase even mean?
With nothing can one approach a work of art so little as with critical words: they always come down to more or less happy misunderstandings. Things are not all so comprehensible and expressible as one would have us believe; most events are inexpressible, taking place in a realm which no word has ever entered, and more inexpressible than all else are works of art, mysterious existences, the life of which, while ours passes away, endures.
-Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters to a Young Poet.
Rilke here gets at what I felt after hearing In Rainbows for the first time. Listening to “15 Step” just after midnight Pacific time. No words I wrote down could capture that moment–and I realized I was trying to capture a moment in words, not explain how the song fit into a larger critique of capitalism and so on and so forth. And if anyone has read the site over the last eight years, you’ll know that side-stepping this “critique of capitalism” was a departure, one I barely knew I was making until it was made. The way Radiohead released this album was on everyone’s mind; how “pay what you want, no really” was going to reshape the dying music industry. But all I could think about was how fucking cool it was of them to start a song with glitchy, electronic, staticy-rhythm that mimicked The Eraser that segued with a shear drop into Phil Selway’s powerful drumming and a Smiths-like guitar layered over a bass-line backed by clapping … a song whose parts would never be greater than its whole, a whole that was both very much a Radiohead song, but also so different that I was laughing outloud while listening to children scream and trying to follow the beat on my friend’s desk and fumbling around for a volume knob. And and and. And Radiohead has … funk? Funk so wide you can’t get around it. This, ladies and gentlemen, was and is: a rock album. And as Alex Ross wrote, how rock-and-roll is it to write about rock-and-roll?
And that’s where I am, where I think some other people are too. I don’t think, anymore, you stop moving in the face of movement. So, I’ve decided, instead of thinking I need to stop, realizing it was the skin I’d put me in and I don’t need to wait for someone’s hand up my ass to move my mouth.
Blink: 1 for yes, 2 for no.
A line from “Nude,” the third song on Radiohead’s In Rainbows, guides this essay: “Don’t get any big ideas.” Readers are asked to set aside the Karl Marx they know from The Communist Manifesto, from the history of Communism or Marxism. Marx himself would ask this of us: hearing that a group was calling themselves Marxist he said, “I at least am not a Marxist.” Admittedly, approaching Marx without preconceptions is difficult or impossible—approaching a “Nude” Marx is maybe, as the Radiohead song says,”not going to happen.” Yet, this may be the best way into his difficult, dense philosophy for beginning and advanced readers alike. That said, to begin, Marx’s philosophy could be summed up by a sentence that pre-dates the multi-volume monument known as Capital: “Men make their own history, but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted.” This sentence captures what later writers have dubbed “dialectical materialism,” the name later given to Marx’s philosophy. But a name isn’t needed to understand the core of Marx’s position: people exist in tension between what they make of the world and what the world makes of them.
Radiohead’s music, art and career plays out this tension—sometimes the world wins, sometimes Radiohead wins. Right now, arguably, with the successful digital self-distribution of their latest album, Radiohead is winning. And I don’t use the word “winning” lightly. Make no mistake: Marx saw this tension as a struggle, one to be won or lost, for better or worse. It is this notion of struggle that I trace in the real-world struggle of Radiohead as it’s voiced in songs (”Dollars & Cents,” the song from Amensiac this essay takes its title from), artwork (the anti-advertising of Hail to the Thief’s cover art), and the band’s record-industry relations, and lately happy lack thereof.
Since at least 1997 Radiohead has lived uncomfortably with the record industry’s control over their music and lives. That the “dollars & cents / & the pounds & the pence / the mark & the yen” were cracking Radiohead’s soul, is painfully clear in Grant Gee’s 1997 documentary Meeting People is Easy. Yorke explains in an interview at the close of the OK Computer tour how record-industry economics strip a musician of the ability to take risks, to experiment musically: once “people start to give you cash” Yorke explains, and “that’s how they get you.” As Gee’s documentary ends, we watch Radiohead disintegrating, yet amid this disintegration emerges “Nude,” a song that survived the soul-cracking we watch during Meeting People Is Easy, a song that appears, ten years later, on In Rainbows. This move from the palpable disaffection that permeates Meeting People Is Easy to the effortless, straight-forward and human-made sounds of In Rainbows isn’t obvious, but Marx’s philosophy helps us make sense of it—how history has made Radiohead and how Radiohead is making history.
The lyrics and music for “15 Step” are arguable the perfect opener for In Rainbows.
How come I end up where I started?
How come I end up where I was?
Won’t take my eyes of the ball again.
You reel me out and then you cut the string.How come I end up where I started?
How come I end where I was?
Won’t take my eyes of the ball again.
First you reel me out and then you cut the string.You used to be all right.
What happened?
Did the cat get your tongue?
Did your string come undone?One by one. One by one.
It comes to us all.
It’s as soft as your pillow.You used to be all right. What happened?
Et cetera, et cetera.
Fads for whatever.
15 steps then a sheer drop.How come I end up where I started?
How come I end up where I went wrong?
Won’t take my eyes of the ball again.
You reel me out and then
you cut the string.
As Mark Pytlik wrote:
In the end, that which we feared came true: In Rainbows represents the sound of Radiohead coming back to earth. Luckily, as it turns out, that’s nothing to be afraid of at all.
Radiohead asks the question on “15 Step”, “how come we’ve ended up where we started?”, but they ask the question just as they’re pointing us in the other direction, that is, where we think they probably are right now sonically. The song begins with the skittery cascade of beats Yorke has been (admittedly) siphoning from Warp Records (and which sound like of some of more difficult b-sides of the The Eraser, like “Iluvya”), but just as those beats gain traction we get pointed in another direction: to Selway’s drums working out nothing less than what I will call a kick-ass beat. Jon Pareles wrote for the NYTimes on Oct 11 that much of the album “comes across as fingers on strings and sticks on drums.” Those sticks on drums is exactly what “15 Steps” gives us, but not after making us look in the opposite direction first. The electronic beats never disappear completely, but layered on top and far in front we get Selway at his best, as well as a “Scatterbrain”/The Smiths-sounding guitar movement (is that Ed or Jonny or both?) that balances with an equally kick-ass bass-line from Colin Greenwood and Yorke’s voice slows down, a slowing down that the song’s start would never anticipate: “Used to be all right. What happened?” The cat, with all certainty, didn’t get Radiohead’s tongue. So, what happened? In Rainbows happened, one of the best albums of any artist of the last ten years made without, to borrow a phrase from Wilco, a company in their back.
Oh: and children yelling and clapping? Radiohead, making music that might be their must mature, turns to children for help. Genius.
Double-quick time: http://www.thebigask.com/index.php?f=1184935525426_89.
“Establish a society in which the individual has to pay for the air he breathes (air meters; imprisonment and rarefied air, in case of non-payment simple asphyxiation if necessary (cut off the air)” (31)
“All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.” (140)
Duchamp, Marcel. Salt Seller: The Writings of Marchel Duchamp. Ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.
“Those who sit in a glass house do wrong to throw stones about them; besides, the American glass house is rather thin, it will break easily, and the interior is anything but a gainly sight.”
Quote by Emma Goldman. From “The Traffic in Women,” an essay in Emma Goldman’s Anarchism and Other Essays.
When Rilke writes, “With nothing can one approach a work of art so little as with critical words: they always come down to more or less happy misunderstandings,” he’s not so much railing against criticism as he’s railing against bad criticism, or specifically aesthetic criticism as it was generally functioning in the late 1800s and early 1900s (pre-Scrutiny). Without delving into literary history (the study of how literature has been studied) for proof, Rilke’s letters themselves show how good criticism can work.
Another function of criticism can be to show how art functions in society (sociological criticism) and influences/affects (socio-economically, politically, and affectively) its audience. Criticism can also suggest how an audience approach a work of art. I might argue that’s what this site has done, at least by example: suggest one way to approach Radiohead (with an open mind, ready to draw any possible connections).
Reading Jean-François Lyotard, I came upon a compelling few paragraphs to explain how music, specifically the music of Luciano Berio, can resist being subsumed into circulation of capital; that is, resist just becoming another object to be bought and sold, bought and sold.
Lyotard begins this passage by stating that you can’t understand the “transgressive movement” of music outside “its relation to capitalism.” Before capitalism was widespread, art was understood as a “language of the passions,” (and in some cases, by some people, it still is). Thus, if art acts as a language, it functions like a language which means it functions using signifying system–a system of signs where one sign can stand for another thing or another sign. In other words, this is a system based on exchange (instead of having to show you a real glacier in conversation, I can exchange it for just the word “glacier” and you know what I mean without having to see the actual thing). Once art is understood to act as a signifying system, then its a system of exchange–and exchange is what capitalism is built on: “all signs can be transformed into goods; that is, any object … can acquire exchange value and can enter into the circuit of capital, and its production can engender surplus value” (47). Lyotard here is borrowing Marx’s terms for exchange value and surplus value, but you don’t need Marx to get at the gist of Lyotard’s argument. Once art is part of capitalism system of exchance (once art has exchange value as a sign), it can then gain in value, sometimes excessive value (surplus value: think tickets for sale at $150 a piece for the backrow of a stadium).
However, music has the capacity to act as “anti-art” (48) by subverting its status as a “language for the passions” (47). It does this in Berio’s music, and I think in Radiohead’s music (including Greenwood and Yorke’s solo work), by becoming, “works seeking to certify the existence of an irreparable alterity in the circuit, seeking to show by traces the presence of meaning irreducible to a linguistic or accountable signification” (48).
Some explanation (Lyotard’s known for density): the sort of genre-blending, noise-based music Radiohead creates isn’t easily reduced to one sign that’s easily exchangeable in the traditional circuit or cycle of capitalism. Of course, CDs, mp3s, etc. are exchangeable in terms of trade in the traditional sense: I can post an mp3 on this site, mail a CD. But in terms of capitalism, not so much: consider Radiohead’s absence from radio, but record-breaking album sales. Record-breaking album sales, but refusal to be used in advertising. No traditional advertising, but record-breaking sales. Radiohead, unlike Berio (Lyotard’s example) doesn’t sit completely outside the circulation of capital, but the circulation go on as usual. With that said, we end up where Radiohead is now: without a record contract and with the ever-growing expectation they stand poised to revolutionize the record industry with a new record label and/or distribution method.
One objection to this reading of Radiohead’s anti-art I’ve heard voiced before, by Terence Hawkes among others, runs something like this: they’re either participating in capitalism or not; you can’t do both–you can’t fight capitalism with record-breaking sales which means loads of money for someone, not everyone. But, this is the same dangerous dangerous distinction George W. Bush made on November 6, 2001: “You’re either with us or against us in the fight against terror.” This distinction between those with us and against was preceded by a an earlier distinction that vowed to not distinguish: “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.”
Bush’s logic has been critiqued elsewhere better than I can do here, and the example of Bush is an exaggeration in this case: but the exaggeration, I hope, brings home how Radiohead can participate in a capitalist system while not succumbing to it. In one way, the capitalist system, or more specifically, the global distribution of music the capitalist system has enabled, is enabling Radiohead to more widely circulate a critique of capitalism than they ever could otherwise. As others have argued, in this way, capitalism will be its own downfall. Capitalism wants rapid and wide distribution of goods: but what if those goods being rapidly and widely disseminated make you think twice about the very act of dissemination itself?
Here, I would turn to their last studio album and the opening song, “2+2=5.” A song that references Orwell’s 1984 and its resistance to ideology; a song appeared on an album that sold 300,000 in its first week. Yorke sings:
It’s the devil’s way now
There is no way out
You can scream and you can shout
It is too late now
Warning us there’s no way out may in fact be the best way out.
Lyotard, Jean-François. “‘A Few Words to Sing.’” Trans. Leonard R. Lawlor. Toward the Postmodern. Ed. Robert Harvey and Mark S. Roberts. New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1993.
Produced by me, joseph.
Produced by me, joseph.
Rainer Maria Rilke wrote,
With nothing can one approach a work of art so little as with critical words: they always come down to more or less happy misunderstandings. Things are not all so comprehensible and expressible as one would mostly have us believe; most events are inexpressible, taking place in a realm which no word has ever entered, and more inexpressible than all else are works of art, mysterious existences, the life of which, while ours passes away, endures. (17)
Later he continues his critique of criticism:
… read as little as possible of aesthetic criticismâ€â€such things are either partisan views, petrified and grown senseless in their lifeless duration, or they are clever quibblings in which today one view wins and tomorrow the opposite. Works of art are of a infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and be just toward them. (29)
Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters to a Young Poet. Trans. M.D. Herter Norton. Revised Ed. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1934.
In the notes for a print on Slowly Downward, Stanley Donwood writes:
In a book called ‘Brought to Light’ by Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz the numbers of people killed by CIA-sponsored state terrorism is measured in swimming pools. The average human body holds a gallon of blood. An Olympic swimming pool holds fifty gallons. The pools mount up through the book’s narrative, reaching a number I no longer wish to recall. This image haunted me throughout Radiohead’s ‘Kid A’ project, and here I’ve coupled it with a scary bear; the record’s iconic image, and a symbol of looming danger and shattered expectations.
The mentioned book, Brought to Light, was published in 1989. The swimming pool image Donwood references appears in the artwork for Kid A as well as in this antivideo.
What a strange and cryptic string of numbers and letters.
Track 7 on Radiohead’s Kid A is titled “In Limbo.” In a publication called “The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die Without Being Baptised,” the Vatican has now “buried the concept of limbo.”
John 16.24: “ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full.” Good Morning Mr. Magpie. Good Morning Mr. Magpie.
AngryApe, a music news site reports that Jonny Greenwood “is to release a compilation album this Spring [sic] of reggae songs.” Glide Magazine reports the same.
The Trojan Records website confirms the release here: “FEBRUARY 2007 … TJCCD345 - VARIOUS ARTISTS - JONNY GREENWOOD IS THE CONTROLLER.”
This is no doubt a result of this September 23, 2005 post to Dead Air Space.
Update, 10 January 2007: This banner ad arrived today from the good folks at W.A.S.T.E.:
On From the Basement, Thom Yorke performed “Down is the New Up,” a possible new Radiohead song. These may be the lyrics. Corrections are encouraged.
get yourself together
let the light pour in
pour yourself a hot bath
pour yourself a drink
nothing’s going to happen
without warningdown is the new up
what is up, buttercup?
down is the new up,
is the new upyour services are not required
your future’s bleak
you’re so last weekladies and gentlemen
without a safety net
I shall now perform a one-eighty flip-flop
I shall now amputate
I shall now contortbecause down is the new up
what if I just flip-flopdown is the new up
down is the new up
down is the new up
is the new upcrawled off and left us
crawled off and left us, you bastard
bastardyou’re on candid camera
the chink in your armor
topsy-turvy town
topsy-turvy town
shake your pockets out
pass it on, pass it down
topsy-turvy town
topsy-turvy towncrawled off and left us
crawled off and left us, you bastard
bastardcrawled off and left us
crawled off and left us
You can listen, but not see, here.
Today, “Videotape” was released via From the Basement.These may be the lyrics. Corrections are encouraged.
when I’m at the pearly gates
this’ll be on my videotape
when Mephistopheles is just beneath
and he’s reaching up to grab methis is one for the good days
and i have it all here in red blue green
you are my centre when I spin away
out of control on videotapethis is my way of saying goodbye
’cause I can’t do it face to face
or talking to you
after it’s too late from my videotapeno matter what happens now
I won’t be afraid because I know
today has been the most perfect day
I’ve ever seen
You can listen, but not see, here.