Pulk-Pull*

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.

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 criticism—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.