...In the course of In Rainbows' ten songs, only three things happen. There are moments of realization, where total dislocation with where you are and total disassociation with what you've become are viciously brought to light. There are moments of intense and obsessive romantic longing, inevitably leading to some unsettling instances of pursuit...the sort of reaching out for the intangible, the unattainable, the impossible that gives the album its deceptively comforting name. And there are moments that I can only describe as a sundering...a dramatic, almost epiphanal break with the past that's perhaps hardest to unravel from the outside looking in.
How does it all fit together? I honestly didn't think it did, until I came across a radio interview with Thom Yorke and Ed O'Brien. Ed had been talking, not for the first time, about times during the band's post-Hail to the Thief layover when he'd be sitting in traffic, kids in tow, desperately thinking, "This is NOT where I should be! I should be playing arenas! I should be making music!" Thom sneaks in quietly, yet decidedly, to add, "If you really want to know, THAT is what the record is really all about." Turns out, if you take Ed's comment as a starting point, he's right.
On its face, In Rainbows lovingly upsets the delicate balance between mundane reality and what's become our collective modern-day fantasyland. It's the soundtrack to letting your mind wander after that attractive person in the frozen food section of the grocery store. Or watching someone crossing the street and wishing just for a second that you could leave your kids behind in the car and follow him or her. It's made of the stuff that causes middle aged women to fall in love with guys half their age that they meet on World of Warcraft, to get a divorce and move their families across the country to live in a basement with someone they only knew through the internet. That's a story I really heard, and I'm sure we've all seen its kind by now, with idle time spent online being blamed more and more for infidelity...housewives in chat rooms, etc. It can be a bachelor party, flirtation at the office and, yes, it could be fan-fic too. It is, in large part, about the sexualization of our shared escape from the world.
For Radiohead, this is obviously something new, and at the same time, it isn't. In Rainbows' escapism isn't too far off from the pleas for departure that abound in OK Computer's desolate suburbia. Yet, there are some big differences. For one, whereas OK Computer's flights of fancy really were fantastic, almost to the point of incredulity. People may lead empty lives, but do they actually hope that aliens will come and abduct them or that they'll sprout wings and soar above traffic and meaningless routine? Or is that Thom's highly imaginative nature coming through? In Rainbows is grounded in what's really on our minds: love. More importantly, even with contextualizing quotes like the one from Ed above, even with the 'xurbia' theme dominating the prerelease art popping up on Dead Air Space, there's next to nothing on the album to foreground its realizations, obsessions and departures in First World alienation. There's next to nothing to root the album in Ed's stilfing, panic-inducing car ride. Maybe the key party in House of Cards. Maybe the bar scene in Jigsaws Falling Into Place. Maybe the plastic packaging lurking in Faust Arp. But really, that's all.
That is a huge thing. That's how it can be equally true that In Rainbows is a conceptually coherent album, as Thom attests, and that it can be more open-ended and accepting of many different interpretations--again, Thom's words. Because there's not so much as a hint that commercialized modernity has completely disoriented the person we meet in 15 Step and disfigured the subject of Bodysnatchers, the album is instantly Radiohead's most inclusive work since its last true pop-rock offering, The Bends. Listeners looking to relate are freer to choose their own starting points, although Ed and a couple clues later on do color in the picture a little bit.
The 'romantic obsession' songs are what they are...either the cautionary tale told to oneself in Nude--Still a seductive torch song in spite of its singer's better wisdom!--or the full-fledged sick behavior of All I Need or Jigsaws. There's not much to be said here, except it all meets the standard of tremendously potent Radiohead work. One thing I always admired about the band is that they never out-and-out condemn anything. It's not even that they're musically non-judgmental; quite the opposite, as it seems they go out of their way to embrace and convey what horrifies them, more often than not, so that they can do justice to what they argue against. Kid A, for instance, was far too close to a tinkly, enchanting lullaby--and not the menace of a modified monster come to steal away our future. No Surprises is all peace and tranquility, what the retirement condo commercials on TV promise us--and not the stomach-clenching, repressed suburban misery that we actually get. My theory on this is that, for Radiohead, it's not just some story they're telling. The band wants to tell us how it is. Really, what life is like. And to do that, they make a song like Weird Fishes as otherworldly and thrilling a chase as possible, just like it would be in real life, even if the end result encourages us never to do anything like what happens in the song. That's the ultimate sign of trust in an audience, isn't it? Radiohead loves to show us how powerful emptiness and weakness can be, but at the end of the day, trusts us to know what side of fence both they and we should fall on. That's the brilliance of it. It's definitely not a good thing to find yourself "in rainbows," but you'd never know it from the sultry, comfortable album Radiohead crafted. What a band.
This same freedom and leaving it up to the listener comes back in remarkable places, namely, the centerpiece Reckoner and the closer, Videotape. This is, Thom rightly says, where all points lead to, where the album comes together and becomes an album. You could choose to look at it as more of the same...Thom helps in interviews by suggesting that, for him, the album came from moments where he couldn't avoid dwelling on the fact that he will have to die one day, and in the face of the scarcity and the preciousness of live, and the undeniable need to live life well that follows, the protagonist on "Reckoner" could be moving from the "Where am I? What have I done to myself?" of the album's first two songs and get panicked into the brazen pursuit of repressed sexual fulfillment that fills up the rest of the album. I don't see it this way myself, but when the possibility of Reckoner serving as this kind of bridge occurred to me, I stopped thinking of Videotape as song describing a family watching a dying person's postmortem proclamation of a life well lived, and I started thinking of it as portraying some unfulfilled guy who's run out on his family--the one in the backseat on the way back from the grocery store--to live out his fantasies, mid-life-crisis style, and is too cowardly to let his loved ones know face to face because, deep down, he knows it's the wrong decision and he's just rationalizing. At least that would explain why the song is so profoundly sad...
Again, it's possible, but I think I see it differently. For me, because neither Reckoner nor Videotape lays out the kind of gruesome, obsessive end that awaits in All I Need, because they're both left open-ended, I can't help but see the songs as a real and heartrending glimmer of hope. Hope for a genuine way out. If you follow Radiohead, you know just how rarely this sort of real hope is made so beautifully explicit on a record, just how rare and truly epiphanal a moment like Reckoner is, or could be. If I convinced you that you just can't take the way the song sounds as gospel for what it means, then just look at the lyrics. It's all there: a recognition of mortality that renders life inestimably valuable, an explicit understanding that we're not necessarily at fault for what tempts us--that we're only human, in other words--but even if we are imperfect, there is a beauty in that, a beauty as natural as the visual images of nature in Scotch Mist, a beauty that reminds us that we have responsibilities to each other...and that means we have to leave behind the empty lives we used to lead and learn to live in ways that uplift and fulfill each other, while we're here. Videotape, then, is a somber moment of departure made glorious in having fulfilled that responsibility, perhaps only once. But once is all that matters.
Radiohead won't tell us what the right way to live is. How un-Radiohead would THAT be! But when you are ready to break with the past and pursue something more life-affirming, Reckoner is there.
I don't know how well I could argue for this interpretation. If I'm wrong, I'm just another example of how powerful this desire for escape is, this desire that Radiohead has captured and made its own over the years, with classic album after classic album. And that's fine by me. If I'm right, I could never prove it anyway...if the album is left open, with two possible fates for listeners to choose from, then that openness destroys any notion of proof one way or the other.
Well, maybe there is one other factor that could clear up In Rainbows' mystery. It was right there in front of us from the start...the marketing strategy we're all sick of hearing about by now tells us: it's up to you. No really, it's up to you.
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