As Radiohead arrive at the O2 this week on what is effectively a greatest hits tour, they find themselves in a novel and precarious position. For decades, the Oxford quintet reflected the zeitgeist so perceptively that it felt, at times, that they\u00a0were\u00a0the zeitgeist. An alienated band for alienated times. While Oasis, their near-contemporaries, looked to the past, Thom Yorke\u2019s cut-up lyrics for The Bends, OK Computer and Kid A looked to the future.<\/p>\n
Only, now we are in that future and all their prophecies have come to pass \u2014\u00a0 the Ice Age coming, the next world war, the four-minute warning, the tanks rolling in \u2014 Radiohead seem curiously out of sync. Having been vocally political for years, they have found themselves under attack for their position, or lack thereof, on Gaza and Israel. Last year, Yorke was heckled into briefly abandoning a solo live performance in Melbourne by a pro-Palestinian protester and has recently been taken to task by Roger Waters, formerly of Pink Floyd, for daring to play in Israel. The five members of Radiohead have meanwhile revealed that their differing stances on the conflict have nearly torn the band apart. Jonny Greenwood is married to Israeli artist Sharona Katan and has performed with Israeli musician Dudu Tassa, though UK gigs were cancelled after pressure from the BDS movement.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s possible to see the band\u2019s determination to relive past glories as evidence of mature disagreement. But still, here\u2019s another striking contrast. While the seemingly irreconcilable Gallagher brothers were able to put aside their differences earlier this summer, Radiohead\u2019s lap of honour comes with rancour and sniping. As prophets of the disaffected, they have long evaded criticism. But nothing lasts forever.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s possible to see Radiohead\u2019s current predicament as a mimetic crisis, to use Ren\u00e9 Girard\u2019s term. This is when groups of people are faced with problems and contradictions that are insurmountable within the terms of their worldview. Rather than confront these realities, the group establishes consensus, catharsis and a purging of responsibility through the sacrifice of a scapegoat. Girard called this the \u201csurrogate victim mechanism\u201d (which already sounds like a great Radiohead B-side). Faced with apocalyptic horrors, unable to hold the perpetrators to account, we turn to surrogates to punish, which is a driving force of recent atrocities in the Middle East and the response in the West. It results in the transference of animus from the butchers onto, for example, musicians, writers and artists, complicit and supposedly equivalent in their silence. Without proportion, the lines of culpability are made to blur. Human beings operate according to mimetic desire in Girard\u2019s view; they look to each other to find out what to believe and wish for. A generation had looked to Radiohead. Who better then to have as a scapegoat? The larger the sacrifice, the greater the coming harvest.<\/p>\n
When Radiohead first emerged in 1993, grunge was becoming a dead end, and a generation was searching for something more. Viewed as a one-hit wonder for their anthem \u201cCreep\u201d, Radiohead faced an existential crisis \u2014 but they had a crucial advantage over their American counterparts. Their focus was on disaffection rather than passive suffering or self-destruction. Disaffection was active, resistant, and could be approached with a much more complex musical palette. It could be used to create a portrait of an entire civilization rather than simply a tortured self.<\/p>\n
The leap in quality from their underwhelming debut Pablo Honey (1993) to The Bends (1995) \u2014 via the abrasive, deliberately uncommercial My Iron Lung EP (1994) \u2014 was enormous. With The Bends, Radiohead ascended to a lofty plateau that they have occupied for almost 30 years, longer than just about any comparable rock band.<\/p>\n
But Radiohead have never settled into a comfort zone in the manner of more well-adjusted bands, like U2 or Coldplay, say. The disaffection, which attracted hordes of\u00a0No Logo-reading Gen Xers, was not a performance. The discomfort was real (see the 1998 documentary\u00a0Meeting People Is Easy).<\/p>\n
While mistrustful of the music industry, Radiohead trusted their fans to accompany them into weirder challenging territory, from\u00a0OK Computer\u00a0(1997), the perfect encapsulation of pre-Millennial anxiety, to the daring electronic ruptures of Kid A\u00a0(2000) and the unfairly overshadowed\u00a0Amnesiac\u00a0(2001). These were not so much attempts to purge the normies accrued by\u00a0The Bends\u00a0as a conscious effort to kill the normie within. This was territory few fans expected or even knew existed.<\/p>\n
In the years that followed, the only real\u00a0musical\u00a0misstep has been the curiously incomplete and claustrophobic\u00a0The King of Limbs\u00a0(2011). But with hindsight, it was the band\u2019s most overtly political album,\u00a0Hail to the Thief\u00a0(2003),\u00a0released in the shock and awe phase of the so-called War on Terror, its title an allusion to George W. Bush\u2019s stolen election, that opened Pandora\u2019s box.<\/p>\n
Radiohead\u2019s greatest lyrical strength has always been collage. While your Bonos and Bruce Springsteens were bogged down in glaringly inauthentic authenticity, hokey storytelling and self-righteous preaching, Radiohead found a way to be obliquely political, reflecting society back to itself like a fractured mirror. Collage was both the medium and the message, Yorke\u2019s lyrical style anticipating the bombardments of disparate images and data that count now as daily life. It was also replicated in the art style Yorke developed with Stanley Donwood for Radiohead\u2019s cover art (currently on display at the Ashmolean in Oxford).<\/p>\n
The use of collage meant Radiohead could avoid literalism and the moralism that often accompanies it. It also gave them a freedom to juxtapose divergent subjects and tones together. One of the clich\u00e9s associated with the band is their focus on technology \u2014 the\u00a0depressed airport\u00a0tropes. But there are other lyrical tics that are just as prevalent. One is Yorke\u2019s use of the archaic, whether from the religious past (\u201cred crosses on wooden doors\u2019\u201d the Holy Roman Empire) or more recent ephemera (rag and bone men, toothpaste adverts). Medieval images recur, from \u201cheads on sticks\u201d to omens in the night skies, implying that for all our modern appearances we have not changed much from the days of the pillories and gallows. Fragments of bedtime stories and nursery rhymes are scattered throughout \u2013 the Cheshire Cat, Peter Pan, Henny Penny, the Boney King of Nowhere from\u00a0Bagpuss \u2014 adding to the feeling of menace and stolen innocence. The distance from childhood dreams to \u201ca pig in a cage on antibiotics\u201d is damning.<\/p>\n
Yorke is also adept at recontextualising managerial speak to sinister effect: \u201cYour services are not required,\u201d \u201cI will stop at nothing,\u201d etc. On \u201cElectioneering\u201d from OK Computer, the juxtapositions of \u201cRiot shields, voodoo economics \/ It\u2019s just business, cattle prods, and the IMF\u201d neatly encapsulate the anti-capitalism of that era. But it is still the poetic and enigmatic that truly stirs the heart, as in the anti-war anthem \u201cHarry Patch (In Memory Of)\u201d inspired by one of Britain\u2019s last surviving veterans from the First World War: \u201cI\u2019ve seen devils coming up from the ground\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
The cut-up style gave them space to be elusive and allusive and by critiquing everything, Radiohead may have felt immune to critique themselves. But the abyss has eyes too.<\/p>\n
From its title onwards,\u00a0Hail to the Thief\u00a0felt too on the nose. It was partially understandable given the social context of the time \u2014 the invasion of Iraq was being launched despite widespread public opposition in the UK. It was not a time when subtlety felt appropriate and Yorke\u2019s writing duly took on a more direct and overt approach. This resulted in powerful moments such as the Orwellian punk of \u201c2+2 =5\u201d and the later solo track \u201cHarrowdown Hill\u201d about the hounding and untimely death of the weapons expert David Kelly.<\/p>\n
But the album\u2019s most haunting moments are still notably indirect. \u201cI Will\u201d was inspired by the horrific massacre of hundreds of women and children by the US Air Force, whose stealth bombers directed two missiles down into the Amiriyah bomb shelter during the Gulf War, searing the images of victims onto the walls. \u201cI will lay me down \/ In a bunker underground \/ I won\u2019t let this happen to my children.\u201d The song ends as a lullaby, chilling partly because of what it leaves out. It is one of their most delicate and devastating tracks and proof that you must first move the listener before you can convince them.<\/p>\n
But one of the problems of assuming a political platform is that, like the Mafia, you can\u2019t retire. You have to be perpetually engaged and anything less than constant, dutiful service can be interpreted as signs of callous indifference towards the world\u2019s endless atrocities. With\u00a0Hail to the Thief, there was more of a sense of the lyrics being cut-up lectures, with a distancing of the evildoer as \u201cother\u201d. But to be convinced of one\u2019s own benevolence is to render oneself vulnerable, to blind oneself, and Radiohead have not been the only ones rattled by attacks from their own (see also Zadie Smith and Sleaford Mods, both pilloried for being insufficiently pro-Palestinian). At some point, all of us arrive at a moment when we feel like time travellers in our own lives, thrust into a future that makes little sense, still seeing the world in parameters that changed twenty years ago.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the problems of assuming a political platform is that, like the Mafia, you can\u2019t retire.\u201d<\/p>\n
And these backlashes against our former righteous heroes are all taking place in the\u00a0discourse chambers of the West, full of status-driven grift, bad faith, in-group policing, struggle sessions and stolen valour. Meanwhile the real victims of Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza, Israel and elsewhere are buried in the earth or piecing their shattered lives back together.<\/p>\n
Then again, in this sense, perhaps Radiohead never really did lose their ability to mirror the zeitgeist. That is both their gift and their curse. They predicted much of where we are today: the unwinnable trial of \u201cBurn the Witch\u201d (\u201cif you float you burn\u201d); the reflexive paranoia of \u201c2+2=5\u201d (\u201cdon\u2019t question my authority or put me in a box\u201d); even the mocking of the centrist in \u201cPackt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box\u201d (\u201cI\u2019m a reasonable man, get off my case\u201d). The villain in Radiohead songs was always conveniently someone else. We never imagine that the problem might lie within us and those we elevate.<\/p>\n
It is hard to imagine living through an apocalypse \u2014 but there are children in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Yemen who are afraid of the sky, and people mutilated in Cambodia, Vietnam and elsewhere, as a consequence of the decisions of our politicians. It is paralysing to witness such obscene violence: \u201cI have seen too much, you haven\u2019t seen enough.\u201d<\/p>\n
Still, whatever knots Radiohead have tied themselves into, when I listen to \u201cI Will\u201d, I can hear an attempt to close the gap, however imperfect. There is a vital role for artists to speak truth to power, to advocate for those who cannot, and this is never easy. It carries a weight but equally so does not speaking. Living in exile, having fled the Third Reich, Bertolt Brecht wrote of the dark age in which he lived, when to speak of nature felt callous, even criminal. Such thoughts have not passed, nor should they while the dark ages still exist.<\/p>\n
My own experiences as a child in Northern Ireland were slight compared to children in the 21st-century war zones of the Middle East, Sudan or Nigeria. But I did grow up surrounded by conflict, division and deprivation; I had a father who had been changed completely having been tortured as a child by the security services; and I was in an environment where \u201cwe know where you live\u201d was not an idle threat. One of the things I sought from music was a place of escape, transcendence, sanctuary and renewal, beyond politics.<\/p>\n
The moments I adore in Radiohead \u2014 and at times it really does feel like a secular form of worship \u2014 aren\u2019t the most political. It\u2019s when they transcend the rational: \u201cDaydreaming\u201d, \u201cReckoner\u201d, \u201cPyramid Song\u201d, \u201cLucky\u201d, the out-of-body dissociative experience of \u201cHow to Disappear Completely\u201d, the mothership of grief on \u201cDecks Dark\u201d.<\/p>\n
For a moment, there is an existence outside politics, language, money, identity, anxiety, ego. The sound of a multitude of voices in a field in Glasgow in 2017, singing \u201cPhew for a minute there I lost myself\u201d. If recent concert footage is anything to go by, the O2 gigs will have such moments of transcendence. The utopian endgame of politics is an escape from politics. The rich know this and the rest of us glimpse it in moments \u2014 physical intimacy, nature, dance, silence, music, escape into something beyond the divisions of babel. A moment of communion with thousands of complete strangers instead of the orthodox path of dismantling one other. Radiohead are at an impasse, disaffected again, and it is no bad thing. If politics is the cultivation of false certainties, art is a thing built from doubt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As Radiohead arrive at the O2 this week on what is effectively a greatest hits tour, they find…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":151423,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[85598,93,2944,61,60,278,652],"class_list":{"0":"post-151422","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-alienation","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-gen-x","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-music","14":"tag-radiohead"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=151422"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151422\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/151423"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=151422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=151422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=151422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}