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On February 11 an article appeared in the Times Higher Education Supplement about The Music and Art of Radiohead. Though the article was available online to subscribers only, it is accessible here.

The bottom “Threat Level” frame of Radiohead.com’s Scrapbook section now includes the following series of acronyms:

MIRV/GLCM/ALCM/SLBM/ICBM/SDI

These are largely US Department of Defense acronyms for military weapons and/or programs:

MIRV: Multiple Independently-Targeted Reentry Vehicle
GLCM: Ground-Launched Cruise Missile
ALCM: Air Launched Cruise Missile
SLBM: Submarine/Sea-Launched Ballistic Missile
ICBM: Intercontinental Ballistic Missile
SDI: Strategic Defense Initiative

While these acronyms can stand for other things (ICBM can also mean “International Charismatic Bible Ministries” and “Irredundant Consecutive Branch Method”), the military-industrial context is the most likely choice.

In the “Scrapbook” section of Radiohead.com, one randomized caption reads:

yes, tis the pulse of the life! my fears were in vain!
i wake i breathe, and myself again. don’t feel a thing.

This lines are an inexact quotation of Samuel Roger‘s “Verses Written To Be Spoken by Mrs. Siddons” from his 1814 Poems. The first eight lines form a verse paragraph:

Yes, ’tis the pulse of life! my fears were vain!
I wake, I breathe, and am myself again.
Still in this nether world; no seraph yet!
Nor walks my spirit, when the sun is set,
With troubled step to haunt the fatal board,
Where I died last–by poison or the sword;
Blanching each honest cheek with deeds of night,
Done here so oft by dim and doubtful light.

As this essay by Heather McPherson shows, Mrs. Siddons was a popular topic for late eighteenth-century poetry.

In the labyrinth of Radiohead.com’s current incarnation, readers can find two pieces of hotel stationary with scribbled lyrics and song titles. The first piece of stationary is from Chateau Marmont in Hollywood, California. The image:

It reads:

brush cobwebs out of sky
im with stupid >
the boney king of nowhere
backdrifts

while rome bleeds

its not you, its your government
moon mall
motheaten
genie let out of the bottle
gene lt out of a bottle

The second piece of stationary is from a Vila Galé Hotel in Portugal. The image:

It reads:

something big is
gonna happen
me me me all [unreadable]
someone’s son or someone’s daughter

we don’t want the loonies taking over
over my dead body
its your future so get used to it
over my dead body
riff

Samuel J.P. Shaw has written an essay entitled “Where Murakami Ends and Radiohead Begins: A Comparative Study” available online at exorcising ghosts, a site of Haruki Murakami resources in English (the essay is also available as a Word file). The essay finds compelling correspondences betweem Murakami’s novels and Radiohead’s music. Murakami has been interviewed by Salon.com, and Thom Yorke has mentioned reading his novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, as Shaw notes in his essay.

An interlude on the Radiohead.com web site entitled “Trustees” has the following text:

Well, they are private trustees. They’re not public trustees. And let’s not forget the Internet was developed through enormous public subsidy, through taxpayer dollars. And yet now we’re in a situation where these mergers are being greeted with exclamations of, if not surprise, then at least, “Wow, this is amazing; this is humongous, $350 billion.”
But the very mass media they’re increasingly corporatized are not asking the fundamental questions about these mergers. And I think people who are sitting at home contemplating what this really portends need to look at demanding and need, in fact, to demand antitrust action because in lieu of that, this is going to be looked at as a horrendous, perhaps irreversible step, towards the concentration of media control in very, very few hands.
Yes, this is the radiohead website.

This text is excerpted from a January 10, 2000 PBS NewsHour interview conducted by Ray Suarez with Jim Ledbetter, Bruce Leichtman, and David Bennahum regarding the AOL/Time Warner merger. This merger has been cited before in Radiohead’s art work.

djBC has mashed-up Radiohead and U-God. Available here: “Nothing In It’s Right Place” (sic). Via atease.

I will be lecturing on Radiohead and America at the University of Warwick in Coventry, England this May. An abstract of the talk:

“Radiohead’s America”

This multimedia presentation explores how Radiohead, an English experimental music group, critiques America’s global socio-economic influence in the twenty-first century. In their music, videos, cover art, and web sites, the band elaborates this indirect but incisive critique via complex visual, sonic and lyrical allusions to the work of novelists George Orwell and Thomas Pynchon; painters Anselm Kiefer and Jean Dubuffet; and musicians John Cage and Charles Mingus. In this way, Radiohead’s critique differs significantly from those by many English and American music groups and musicians. While Blur, Wilco, Ben Folds, Jimi Hendrix and others condemn post-industrial Americans’ isolation, apathy and consumerism, Radiohead targets America’s current world situation as an instance of a trans-historical, trans-cultural problem famously articulated by Lord Acton: power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Though this critique is a prominent part of the band’s music and art, Radiohead consistently denies that their work is anything but escapist. Using Adorno’s writings on lyric poetry, this presentation will clarify the band’s escapism as a tortured pastoralism where protagonists desire escape—from personal and private societal pressures, from impotent technologies—but never finally achieve it. This desire for escape plays an integral role in how the band imagines American political power. On their web site in December 2004, for instance, images of miniature crying minotaurs form a collage with an oil-well pump photograph and pictures of George W. Bush and his first-term cabinet members. In this digital piece (with the file name “nicepeople-1.jpg”), the crying minotaurs, supreme mythic symbol of impossible escape, manifest the band’s escapism as an exaggerated pessimism concerning America’s occupation of Iraq—or as their 2003 song “2+2=5” argues, “There’s no way out.” In conclusion, this presentation argues that Radiohead’s pessimistic aesthetic is a pastiche, one masking a serious call for committed political activism.

The book is now available for pre-order as a paperback on Amazon.com.

stayed in bed all day. very cold. the DEMONS are coming for me. so is the tax man.

http://www.chieftanmews.com/