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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.