In part one of my track-by-track revisiting of Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief, things got pretty dystopian pretty quickly. This is an album about dread, after all, and its opening tracks leave little room for the real-life hope that has reared its head in the face of the new administration. We’ve seen record protests, spiking newspaper subscriptions, confrontational Republican town halls, jammed Congressional phone lines, and a sense of activation among concerned citizens that I have never witnessed before. Pressure from the people and the press is yielding tangible results. This is encouraging.
But.
When I stick this disk into my CD player, I’m not looking to feel more optimistic about the state of the world; Radiohead’s music is perfect for wallowing in its darkness and articulating its myriad anxieties. So let’s go deeper into the thicket and see what we find.
(Brush the Cobwebs Out of the Sky)
The anxious intensity of the first two tracks recedes, at least temporarily, on “Sail to the Moon,” a haunting piano-driven daze that uses lullaby imagery to clash with point-of-no-return, end-times resignation. After the music finishes its opening swell, Thom Yorke sings of regret and resignation: “I sucked the moon / I spoke too soon / And how much did it cost?” It’s a guilty echo of the complacency of columnists and pundits who swore it could never happen. In the second verse, what once sounded like an older Bush reading a bedtime story to his son now sounds like the wishful thinking of the American citizen when the unthinkable becomes reality: “Maybe you’ll be president / But know right from wrong.” What happens if the president lacks the temperament or judgment to make these moral choices? The song follows that hypothetical: “Or in the flood you’ll build an ark / And sail us to the moon.” Is it an ark or a wall that will protect our country from the flood? Both are equally fantastical, and as the minor chords fall back to earth and resonate to a close, the listener feels no comfort from this bedtime story.
(Honeymoon is Over)
When a campaign is run on the promise of returning to the imagined glory of the past, you get a song like “Backdrifts”, a strobe-lit electronic slowburn that reminded 2003 listeners of Radiohead’s “experimental” previous albums, Kid A and Amnesiac. In hindsight it sounds nothing like those albums, and instead provides sonic context to the inevitable “backsliding” of progress that we are all witnessing. The lyrics describe resignation to this fact after initial resistance: “You fell into our arms / We tried but there was nothing we could do.” The pre-existing conditions for this acceptance include an assumption that things are worse than they are (“We’re rotten fruit / We’re damaged goods”) coupled with a Hail Mary urge to throw a flawed system away in favor of literally any substitute. In one particularly eerie instance of this album predicting today’s moment, the future president, while on the campaign trail, tried to pander to minorities with a nearly word-for-word echo of this lyric from “Backdrifts”: “What the hell, we’ve got nothing more to lose.” We’re about to find out how true that is.
(Little Man Being Erased)
If Hail to the Thief on the whole is my grieving album, “Go to Sleep” was my denial song on November 9th. “I’m gonna go to sleep / And let this wash all over me” sure sounded good the day after, when the whole world tried to calibrate between whiplash and fear. The song begins with a sort of call and response, with phrases like “something big is gonna happen” countered with the hook “over my dead body.” The former voice carries the warnings of those who saw the danger before it was elected. The latter voice carries the aforementioned complacency with which most political prognosticators – even the former president – made their predictions. Around the midway point the song shifts into a chugging electric-guitar jam as Yorke alternates between wanting to just sleep through the oncoming crisis and calling for action, warning that “we don’t want a monster taking over.” There’s even a proposed solution: “Tiptoe round / and tie him down.” Of course, it’s too late for preventative measures. That’s why the song ends with the passive option, the choice of the hopeless. An ironic wish for good fortune in your dreams: “May pretty horses come to you as you sleep / I’m gonna go to sleep and let this wash all over me.”
(The Sky is Falling In)
“Where I End and You Begin” has fewer direct political motifs on the surface, but if you listened to it on inauguration day, as I did, it still holds a desperate relevance. Lines like “I can watch and not take part / Where I end and where you start” reflect the helplessness of this transition of power, especially one supercharged with so many consequential uncertainties. Even though the White House still has an occupant and the federal government still purports to serve its citizens, something fundamental ended when the torch was passed to the pseudo authoritarian who holds it now. American ideals that had been taken for granted are now on the chopping block, and it’s a legitimate question just where we’re headed, or even where we are now. This song’s idea of location isn’t encouraging, setting our destination on tremulous ground: “X will mark the place / Like the parting of the waves / Like a house falling in the sea.” No matter how many times Thom Yorke repeats “there’ll be no more lies” during the song’s coda, I would bet money that he’s wrong.
(Your Time is Up)
Now, what to do with “We Suck Young Blood,” a hand-clapping piano-stomping dirge that would be right at home in the credits of an indie vampire film? It’s a strange but compelling track that rises to a crashing crescendo before the piano falls right back down the stairs, down to where all the creatures of the night hum in darkly beautiful harmony. Let’s assume in our context that Thom Yorke isn’t taking the point-of-view of literal horror vampires, and instead that his blood-suckers are people who thrive off the destruction and exploitation of those more vulnerable. “Are you fracturing? Are you torn at the seams? Would you do anything?” These vampires are vague enough to fit just about any metaphorical mold, as long as their victims are desperate and afraid, so why not see them as members of a party that wants to strip health care from the poor, or owners of a multi-billion dollar company that leech all the hard work they need and then refuse to compensate, or white-nationalists and their enablers who want to bleed the country dry of its values. Take your pick.
(Softly Open Our Mouths in the Cold)
“The Gloaming”, the song that serves as the alternate title track of this album, presents us with the beginning of “the witching hour,” in which the “genie let out of the bottle” can’t be put back in. Thom Yorke once again sings of a threatening “They” who “will suck you down to the other side” as the electronic background slurps up everything around it. This is an Us and Them track, complete with a blanket statement that scapegoats a whole group based on otherness, while slyly betraying the shallowness of those arguments: “Murderers, you’re murderers / We are not the same as you.” The melody rides on top of a seismically low, glitchy bass riff that suddenly drops away so Yorke can repeat “Your alarm bells / They should be ringing / They should be ringing,” echoing the thoughts of everyone who has ever fought against the argument that we should just give the man a chance and see how it goes. What’s the worst that could happen?
[Part 3 coming soon]