Author: joseph

The third six-line stanza of “Optimistic” reads:

This one’s optimistic
This one went to market
This one just came out of the swamp
This one dropped a payload
Fodder for the animals
Living on animal farm

The first four lines allude to the Mother Goose folk song and finger game “This Pig Went to Market” (ca. 1728). In “The Pig: Profit and Loss,” Gilles Stassart writes that “contemporary art […] feeds off of flesh and pork-related problematics. Damien Hirst’s halved and bottled pigs reveal the inner and outer form of the pig, as if we had long-since forgotten it.”

The text of Animal Farm is available online.

Rock critics in various forums have promoted the new British band Coldplay as the next Radiohead, but claiming any such intimate musical kinship for Coldplay and Radiohead is like asserting Chris Rock is the new Mr. T. Radiohead and Coldplay are the most visible manifestations in the pop music eye of two very different traditions. Coldplay’s style is a descendent of The Smiths. Like Gene, another Smiths reincarnation, Coldplay’s lyrics aren’t quite as morbidly melancholy as the famed Manchester group, but their songs nevertheless pay an oblique tribute to Johnny Marr’s haunting guitar and Morrissey’s solipsistic moans of contorted, tortured introspection.

Radiohead, on the other hand has more in common with the Clash, and even REM, their acknowledged idols. But, with Kid A, they show the influence of Aphex Twin, as well as Brian Eno, musically. Thom Yorke’s lyrics evoke snapshots of failed and pressured suburban life juxtaposed against responses to a technological and environmental distopia. While Coldplay sings of the inner, emotional turmoil brought on by failed relationships, Radiohead has another, more social axe to grind with an eclectic, electric digital precision. Lyrically, the style couldn’t be more different. Witness Coldplay’s “Yellow”:
Look at the stars
Look how they shine for you
And everything you do
Yeah they were all yellow
I came along, I wrote a song for you
And all the things you do
And it was called yellow

Now, Radiohead’s “No Surprises”:

A heart that’s full up like a landfill,
a job that slowly kills you,
bruises that won’t heal.
You look so tired-unhappy,
bring down the government,
they don’t, they don’t speak for us.
I’ll take a quiet life,
a handshake of carbon monoxide,
with no alarms and no surprises

Radiohead, as their song “Talk Show Host” listlessly claims, is waiting for the listener with a gun, a pack of sandwiches, and a collage of fragmented sound textures. Coldplay, as in the song “Parachutes,” is waiting in line, patiently, loving you always with their own special millenial blend of brightened ennui.

Michel Foucault asks in The History of Sexuality: “By what spiral did we come to affirm that sex is negated?” One might ask: By what spiral did we come to affirm that the authenticity of music is negated by widespread commercial distribution?

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. 1976. Trans. Robert Hurley. Vol. 1. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.

The font used for the cover of Kid A, named PLAKATbau, is made by Buro Destruct, Berne, Switzerland and may be downloaded free of charge from Buro Destruct’s font page.

UPDATE Dec 15 2003: The second link above is no longer functional. The PLAKATbau font is now available here.

Read Curtis White’s Kid Adorno, an essay on Radiohead’s Kid A.

Approximately ten seconds (00.43-00.53 of 18.19) of Paul Lansky’s “Mild und Leise” is sampled on “Idioteque.” Lansky, a practicing composer and professor at Princeton University, has a home page that includes information on Radiohead’s usage of “Mild und Leise.” The song, available as an mp3 from Lansky’s site, was written in 1973 on an IBM 360/91 mainframe computer.

from BBC Online Weather Centre Shipping Forecast

LUNDY FASTNET
NORTHERLY BACKING WESTERLY 4 OR 5, INCREASING 6 FOR A TIME. WINTRY SHOWERS.
GOOD

IRISH SEA
NORTHWEST BACKING WEST 5 OR 6, DECREASING 4. SQUALLY SNOW SHOWERS.
GOOD

(see Messages 1 and 2)

The title song for Kid A borrows its closing lines from The Pied Piper of Hameln. The old German folk tale, which exists in numerous forms, recounts an historical event that may have occurred June 26, 1284. If the lyrics of “Kid A” speak for the performer (for Radiohead), the song reads semi-autobiographically as commentary on the band’s commercial success.

The singer’s voice, however, is dehumanized, a fact which renders an autobiographical reading problematic. Digitalized and unidentifiable, the voice, as the song suggests, emanates from among “heads on sticks.” The performers possess an alienated mask (“We’ve got heads on sticks,” line 3 and 5) while the consumer/listener possesses (has purchased?) ventriloquists (“You’ve got ventriloquists,” line 4 and 6): performers who animate a dead fiction. This fiction, however, is powerful, luring.

Equating the singing voice, or Radiohead, with the Pied Piper produces disturbing results: once lured by the Piper’s music out of town, the children were never seen again. Versions of the story have been recorded by ABBA and Jethro Tull. The story of the Pied Piper also plays a central role in the film The Sweet Hereafter. The screenplay is available online.

The bears, line-drawings also called test specimens, five of which appear in Kid A’s inlay art, resemble Philip Guston’s hooded men, with a difference. Ubiquitous on the band’s website, the bears act as cartoonishly violent corporate sycophants, but they simultaneously constitute a recognizable character-mascot for the establishment of brand identity. While Guston’s figures (often compared to Ku Klux Klansmen) gave a disturbing and sickly organic shape to American civil unrest and racial injustice in the late 1960s and early 70s, the terrifying bears hyperbolically satirize the twenty-first century’s redundantly aggressive consumerism. See Guston’s The Studio and City Limits. Interestingly, John Cage (see Message 14) was a friend of Guston’s.

The cover art for Kid A, done by Stanley Donwood (see Message 11) and Tchock (a pseudonym for Thom Yorke, Radiohead’s lead vocalist), evokes John Martin’s The Great Day of His Wrath (1851-53). Art for OK Computer, also by Donwood and the White Chocolate Farm (a pseudonym for Radiohead), more closely resembles the style of Cy Twombly’s Anabasis and Untitled. In a different vein, the cover and inlay art for Radiohead’s Airbag EP parodies contemporary marketing information gathering and dissemination methods.