Author: joseph

Kevin Dettmar has these wise words to say about Radiohead.

Find some of my greenplastic.com news contributions here.

A line from “Life in a Glass House,” the last track on the new Amnesiac: “Once again, packed like frozen food and battery hens.” America has a Frozen Food Institute and Britain has a Frozen Food Federation.

Battery hens lead horrifying, horrifying lives:
Battery Hens Campaign.
United Poultry Concerns, Battery Hens.
Statutory Instrument 1987 No. 2020: The Welfare of Battery Hens Regulations 1987.

The minotaur icon (see Message 30 below) haunting the new Capitol Records website is vaguely similar to the Merrill Lynch line-drawn bull. The bull-head, then, of the Amnesiac minotaur, like the ML bull, may connect with the phrase bull-market. Again, the OED is instructive:

bull, n.1 Add: [IV.] [11.] bull market Stock Exchange, a market characterized by the rising price of stock, etc. 1891 Century Mag. Jan. 426 No office of its size in the Street made so much money for its customers in a *bull market. 1931 F. L. ALLEN Only Yesterday xii. 301 No aspect of the campaign was more interesting than the extent to which it reflected the obsession of the American people with bull-market prosperity. 1986 What Investment July 15/3 If historical precedent is followed, the present bull market will end by the next general election.

The ML logo was interestingly problematic in Japan: “The combination and clash of the two cultures is working both ways in terms of adapting to the nuances of Japanese culture. The companyís global logo, which features a bull on a grid, was initially perceived by some in the Japanese public to be that of a butcher shop showing barbecue on a grill.”

A crying minotaur: a sluggish market? One that would need to go hunting for bears. Bear markets. Tra la la la.

The title of “Idioteque,” the eighth song on Kid A, is presumably a conflation of “idiot” with a truncated form of “discotheque.” The word “idiot” entered the English language as a noun some time around 1350. The OED defines idiot as “1.a. A person without learning; an ignorant, uneducated man; a simple man; a clown.” A discotheque [a. Fr. discothËque, after BIBLIOTH»QUE. Cf. DISC n. 2d.] is “a club, etc., where recorded music is played for dancing.”

However, the title may also derive the thrust of its meaning from the original Greek prefix “idio-,” which means personal, private, peculiar, separate, or distinct. This meaning of the prefix prevails in words like idiolect and idiom. On “idiom” the OED states: “3. b. A characteristic mode of expression in music, art, or writing; an instance of this.”

In this context, the title provides an ironic commentary on the song’s lyrics which cut-and-paste lines from other songs. The song’s opening verse, “Who’s in a bunker,” may derive from REM’s “Underneath the Bunker.” The third line, “Women and children first,” recalls the Van Halen album of the same name. A line near the end of the song reads, “Take the money and run,” a verse that echoes the eponymous Steve Miller song. The source for the line that reads “Ice age coming” has been addressed in Message 13 below. The title, then, foregrounds the song’s satiric potential as it both participates in and undermines several traditional pop music conventions simultaneously.

The song’s enigmatic closing line, “We’re not scaremongering,” may have been excerpted from the following press release:

“As always, when raising one’s head above the parapet on this issue, a balance has to be struck. If one insists that sensible precautions be taken, one runs the risk of over-egging it till it looks like alarmism. We are not scaremongering: I believe that we have hit the right balance. But we are in earnest about these enforcement initiatives.”

Obviously, this link no longer works. –JT 1/3/03

Scenes from Meeting People Is Easy resemble the photography of Andreas Gursky, which is available here and there (MOMA). Radiohead’s music and cover artwork evoke artificial landscapes and disturbingly organized interiors similar to those documented by Gursky’s work.

An image of a tearful minotaur appears on the Capitol Records Radiohead site.

The seventh line of “Pyramid Song,” a new song to be released on Amnesiac, reads: “and we all went to heaven in a little row boat.” This is likely derived from a children’s jump rope song:

Three, six, nine
The goose drank wine
The monkey chewed tobacco
On the streetcar line
The line broke
The monkey got choked
And they all went to heaven in a little row boat

These lines also appear in Tom Waits’ “Clap Hands” (c.1985).

The tenth line (approximately) of “Paranoid Android” reads: “Kicking and squealing gucci little piggy.” Gucci sells products and kills animals.

The final line of “Paranoid Android,” “God loves his children, God loves his children, yeah!”, is a phrase from the Book of Mormon, 1 Nephi, Chapter 11, verse 17: “And I said unto him: I know that he loveth his children; nevertheless, I do not know the meaning of all things.” Also, Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs wrote and recorded a song entitled “God Loves His Children” (c. 1948) with Mercury Records.