The amazing synchronicity of cyberlife and music - after spending a day
walking in fresh mountain air, I went home to listen to "amnesiac" - full
volume - opened my cybermail, and came across this brilliant post (amongst
the current dross!) - I'm listening to "pyramid song" as I type - purely
inspirational :)

check it out at:

http://by.imedium.com/radiohead/amnesiac/48.html

http://hollywoodandvine.com/radiohead

regards

maria

-----Original Message-----
From: Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to poetry and
poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of domfox
Sent: Sunday, June 10, 2001 10:38 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: A Note on My Pent-Up Surplus


Radiohead are an interesting band, to say the least.

Yesterday I took some books back to the university library - first time I'd
been there in months, and it felt very weird - and got some new books out,
among them Adorno's _Minima Moralia_. The moment I looked at the subtitle,
I learned why the industrial band Alan (Sondheim) used to be in was called
"Damaged
Life", and it immediately became about twice as cool as it was when I
thought it was just a sort of punk rock name for a band (like "The
Exploited", say, or any of a number of other punk rock names referring in a
pointedly snotty and fuck-you sort of way to indigence, immiseration,
downtroddenness etc.).

Radiohead could have called themselves "Damaged Life", and it would've made
sense, especially to people who'd read _Minima Moralia_ all the way up to
the subtitle. Except, of course, that the name was already taken.

Radiohead are unlikely ever to do that thing with the microphone and the
vagina, however (something Alan Sondheim once did, although I don't know
whose the vagina was). For one thing, there are no vaginas in Radiohead -
their
loss, I guess. A lot of fuss has been made about how avant-garde their last
album was. Ahem. Radiohead's last album introduces some foreign bodies into
the corpus of - ahem - college guitar rock, and it does so in some
interesting ways. But no way is it avant-garde, unless you think
dissonance, or synthesizers, are somehow inherently avant-garde.

They did have an Ondes Martenot with them on stage. That isn't, as I say,
remotely avant-garde. But it is interesting, because Ondes Martenot's are
interesting, because the only piece of music I know about with an Ondes
Martenot in it is Messaien's _Turangalila Symphony_, which is an incredibly
beautiful and strange piece of music even though at times it sounds like
the soundtrack to a particularly over-egged Star Trek (TOS) episode
featuring lots of putrefyingly embarrassing Roddenbery-isms.

Some people find Messaien religiose. At times, I find Radiohead religiose.
Possibly parodically religiose, but it's there all the same. I think the
contempt that you hear in people's voices when they talk about "Prog Rock"
often has to do with a kind of religiosity. The camerawork in the BBC2
program I just saw Radiohead play live in was occasionally a touch
reverential. Thom Yorke playing the leper Messiah. I did find myself
wishing he'd give it a rest.

_Idiotheque_ is one of the best new Radiohead songs. Thom Yorke sang it
with a high-frequency warble that made him sound like John Lydon / Johnny
Rotten. Angry, incredibly angry. "We are not scaremongering / this is
really happening". I got images of Kosovo - "women and children first...".
Then: "Mobiles working, mobiles chirping / take the money and run, take the
money and run...". A week or so ago there was a program with John Berger
and a Brazilian photographer. I've forgotten the photographer's name, but
not his pictures. Berger was talking about globalization, about the
migration of rural populations towards the cities, which the photographs
showed: displaced persons, refugees, asylum seekers. "Les juifs", to quote
another of the titles of another of the books I got out of the university
library (Lyotard, "Heidegger et 'les juifs'"). I could have sworn that
Yorke was singing about all that.

It was great when Humphrey Lyttelton, octogenerian jazz trumpeter and
sometime Radio 4 comedy game-show host, joined them onstage for "In a
glasshouse". Not since Nick Cave did that murder ballad with Kylie Minogue
has there been a more improbable collaboration. It worked pretty well: I
think they understood each other.

Yorke mentioned that he'd been reading George Monbiot's "Captive States".
Monbiot writes columns for the Guardian; he's against genetically modified
crops, multinational corporations, the WTO and the IMF, the usual suspects.
I don't like him much, or his columns. Listening to Radiohead play live, I
started thinking about the anti-WTO demonstrations, the anti-globalisation
movement, groups like Reclaim the Streets. I thought "the politics of
affect". Radiohead present the affect in question. Their music is very
emotional, and it's not just about disaffection, or "angst"; neither is it
nostalgic or melancholic, except perhaps when it veers towards the
religiose (cf "Exit Music"). It is about pain, hope, fear, love, pettiness,
generosity...

Now I think it works something like this. The street theatre, the violent
confrontation, everything that the police and state paramilitaries seek to
repress (there are also anarchist / countercultural police and
paramilitaries, who share the same goal) in Seattle, Philadelphia, the city
of London and elsewhere, bears witness to an affect that is unspeakable
within "politics" as it is currently configured. The poverty of thought,
the tendency towards vacuous theatricality, compliant expressionism,
dejected sloganeering, "direct action" without mediation or reflection,
that characterises the movement - which I believe is in a strange way
attached to intellectual destitution, even to the point of an anti-
intellectualism that precisely mirrors the anti-intellectualism of the
ruling powers it seeks to confront, as if intellect were an obstruction or
a distraction whichever way you looked at it - is not an accident due to,
say, the low intelligence of those involved. Actually, many of those
involved are very highly intelligent, in case that matters. The cause is
rather that the affect itself is not capable of immediate political
presentation - not a "direct" presentation, in any case: never in the form
of "direct action", a fascist slogan if ever there was one; but also never
in the form of a manifesto, a programme, an "analysis" as the marxists
would have said, unless this were also somehow to take the form of an
anamnesis, an insistant deviation within what is presented towards the
unpresentable.

What I dislike about Monbiot is that he puts the feeling too quickly into
words, into rhetoric: he is a polemicist, not the fun kind. Fortunately, I
don't think that Thom Yorke is really picking up on the politics
of "Captive States". I think he's picking up on the affect that is already
fully implicated in the book's title, the feeling of being simultaneously
held hostage and held in stasis, frozen within a system or worldview,
a "picture that holds us captive". That is the affect that Radiohead are
concerned with, I would say fairly consistently and with great passion and
perverse dignity. Their bugbear is systematic control, surveillance,
determination: the exhausive hegemony of economic globalisation as a _fait
accompli_.

Now, globalisation - the end of history, and all that - is at best (or
worst) a flawed and menaced _fait accompli_, one whose accomplishments are
nowhere near fully accomplished or ready to be measured, sized up,
consigned to history. The pathos of the "last man alive", "trapped in the
belly of this horrible machine", as Godspeed You Black Emperor! put it, is
exaggerated. I do believe that: it's very powerfully attractive, this
notion that those of us who remain somehow unassimilated by global
capitalism constitute a tiny and doomed remnant, an elect minority of truly
free spirits; but it's a form of self-flattery.

There is no machine, such that everything that is not part of the machine
belongs to an indigent, waste-product, abjected humanity that can only
dream of rising up and dismantling the master-mechanism. This is just
another sex fantasy, and a tacky one at that. Radiohead's music is at its
worst, its most religiose, when it indulges this pathos. It is at its best,
however, when it is "totally wired", to borrow a phrase of Mark E. Smith's:
when it throbs with the energies of global information, global traffic;
when Thom Yorke's teeth chatter and Johnny Greenwood's guitar crackles and
squawks, and the sheer *messiness* of it all comes tumbling out of the
speakers.

The recognition that comes across is that much of what is most "vital",
most imaginatively capable about Radiohead's music comes not from the
longing for purity, the search for an exit or UFO-porthole view of the
world, but from its forays into noise, inefficiency, frailty (Yorke's voice
trembling on the edge of break-up, his head twitching like it's going to
fall off any minute), nervous energy, oversensitivity. Neuresthenia is a
double-edged sword. On the one hand, it leads to song titles
like "Everything in the right place". On the other hand, it points to an
unassimilable *excess* of feeling, a pained and joyful hyper-alertness.
Radiohead are currently one of the most wide-awake rock bands in the world.