Title:Amnesiac By: Radiohead Released by: Capitol Released on: 2001 Rating (out of 10): 9 Date: 06/09/2001
Radiohead's Wild, Wacky World of Spatio-Temporal There-ness
New Radiohead; Amnesiac. What's it like? It's like a whole lot of things that are bad for you, but too complex to be described merely by their taxonomical umbrella handles, when books and fields of expertise and entire subsects of society have sprung up trying to paw their way into the heart of such darknesses.
OK. Sex, but not Dionysian (hokey Doors shit). Drugs, but not Dionysian (hokey Doors shit). Rock that doesn't, roll that doesn't. As with Radiohead's 21st century musical excursions in general, what isn't comes as easy and prolifically as pulp fiction, and what is is—fuck if I can tell you.
There is a there there. There never wasn't one. But here (with these theres) Radiohead take great and delicate care in deciding where to place these theres, and how to move between their theres to the result of there being even more of a there there, but without sacrificing any of the preliminary there-ness in the pre-transitional there state.
Never mind the where of the there; it's the how much. Sometimes Amnesiac doesn't require much in terms of your being there—it's like being shoved in front of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, an instantaneous experiential overdose—and of course those sense-shoves will be your initial favorite songs. The there can't be any more there, but then what? What are we looking at after the first there-plateau? A concept-album-type-deal? Some foul-smelling "aural movie"?
Probably something a bit more mundane than all that. Maybe it's like, your day at work. Short stretches of barely something that seem like nothing that seem like forever. Moments of insidiousness, moments of pleasantry. Arcs of crisis, tensions that never 100 percent un-tense. Moments of perceived (temporary) safety before the unsteady plunge into hyperreality (too much there there, and the ensuing separation of spiritual there from physical/rational there). Moments of dozing/waking in arrhythmic click with the braking/sputtering traffic outside (the there outside the personal, immediate there).
Radiohead's music makes everything an internal drama. The biggest, most theatrical movements of Amnesiac have nothing to do with the grand concepts of the Springsteen or Meat Loaf song: love, fun fun fun, the pursuit of the getting out of one's ya-yas in some spiffy vehicle. If there's an issue of "freedom" at all (which is what 34 percent of all rock songs are about), it's really more an issue of "space" (which is what roughly 6 percent of all rock songs are about, and most of those songs were written in the '70s).
This is not whoa-man space, though: It's (musically—I'm still working out the lyrics) the issue of whether Yorke as narrator wants, ya know, space, breathing room and the like—or whether space for him is stepping outside of a rocket ship without the proper apparatus and falling into a there so prodigious it loses all context of spatial reference and becomes a frightening fucking there-less void, and at that point you can take your notion of rock 'n' roll freedom and stick it where you're born to run.
In other words, even in the ultimate (corporeal, psychic, what have you) escape, he's right back where he started, ball-and-chained to his deepest fears. The point of Amnesiac being: We're screwed. Which, explicit or implicit, is the most rock 'n' roll thing about the whole goddamn album. So decide for yourself whether to buy it.
