Radiohead "Videotape"
Monday, November 12, 2007
“Videotape” (mp3) is not my favorite song on In Rainbows—at this moment, that honor goes to either “Reckoner” or “Arpeggi”—but I do think, in the way it summarizes Thom Yorke’s personal connection with his own mortality, it might be the most important song on the album. Twelve years ago on The Bends, Radiohead wrote several wonderful, affecting songs about the body in various states of deterioration. Rainbows is much more metaphysical—this happens with age, and comparisons to PJ Harvey’s White Chalk are indeed instructive in this regard—and several of its songs detail the body in various states of suspension. On “Bodysnatchers,” it’s taken apart and waiting to be reassembled; on “Faust Arp,” it’s stuffed. In “Arpeggi,” it hovers in the deepest ocean, in the bottom of the sea. At one point in “All I Need,” it’s in the middle of your picture, lying in the reeds. As the album’s coda, “Videotape” takes “Need”’s secondary level of immersion—the body suspended within a medium—to a gently unsettling conclusion. Radiohead’s conceptual gimmick on Rainbows—their sui generis approach to pre-release marketing—was external to the music itself. “Videotape,” however, is the point at which Yorke’s acquiesence to technology and mortality manifests itself most clearly and maturely on (and in) record. Where in the past he has expressed pathological fears of modernity and the rapid pace of technology, now he resigns himself to disappearing completely, within the red, green and blue channels that, buried beneath a thin strip of black emulsive plastic, combine to form a video signal. This is his new android, one wholly submerged within the data that will sustain his life long after his body gives out. Of course, his submission doesn’t mean he’s completely at ease. His surroundings, from where his voice emanate, are what we see here. These are the rainbows.
Also: This thing kind of freaks me out, in a panopticon sort of way. Check it out while listening to “Videotape.”
Also Also: Please go read Amy’s essay on hauntology and the new Burial album (and David Thomas Broughton). It’s that good.
Also 3.0: Oh, never mind.
Alright, this is out of hand. First of all, I don’t think you are using the word “metaphysical” the way you think you are. The fact that you mention the manipulation of material objects
body
body states
ocean
sea
picture
reeds
medium (a physical medium at that, see Ranciere’s Future of the Image, you seem to be confusing the physicality of the medium and the function of the medium)
channels
plastic
secures that there is nothing “beyond” the physical in your discussion.
You could have talked about “Jigsaw”–about how Yorke is afraid of losing his visitor b/w “the notes” about how words are a saw’d-off shotgun, about how he then releases the trigger function in a purely lyrical formulation of the death drive. Some of these things (sound, the transmutation of words, the death drive), in some contexts, could be considered metaphysical. But they aren’t really, and that’s a longer discussion about binding oneself to the limits of a physical medium.
Like how one might bind oneself to a blog, and crown oneself king of infinite server space.
Rainbows is “about” acquiescing to the impossibility of transcendence, specifically the metaphysical variety, and the sublimating tenderness that accompanies such an acquiescence.
You use “metaphysical” the same way Rosenbaum did for the films of Bela Tarr. And it was funny to watch Tarr dismantle such a careless critic.
On another note entirely, it’s really very frustrating to watch Pitchfork come around, more than a year after the reviews of both artist, to David Thomas Broughton and Burial, when the initial reviews were likewise careless (Broughton’s less so), if standardly Pitchfork posnegative.
I think I know why this happens at Pitchfork, but I’ll keep such metaphysical speculation to myself.
Thanks Jonathan. I think the piece reads fine without my lazy incorporation of “metaphysical”, though. But of course, good catch, and fun lesson on the term as well.
As for your last two blurbs, though, I think you’re confusing me and this blog with Pitchfork re: Broughton and Burial. I’m not “coming around” on either, and this blog is very, very much a separate entity from Pitchfork. Just FYI.
You are right about your independence from Pitchfork, and I respect that. It’s just that I think your writing has been altered by your affiliation with that outlet.
I do think if you remove “metaphysics” from your piece it reads much more honestly. But I think the inclusion of the term isn’t as harmless as you’d make it out to be. Many writers, thinkers, honest people don’t like to confuse the poetry they attribute to the physical, material world with some sort of belief of a beyond. The same goes for certain kinds of religious believers, painters, church janitors.
As per the “hauntology” posts about DTB and Burial, bad theory/philosophy/ontology is “haunting” criticism, when good ol’ de-figuration would probably serve more to open up new channels of creating and discussing artworks.
To give you another example, I doubt Burial, or Malcolm as I call him, likes to be thought of as a deconstructed Derridean text. Isn’t his album more of a Cartesian Sonata? Doesn’t his music coincide with critiques of the Cartestian subject more than with deconstruction and Marxism? He is clearly influenced by Ghost in the Shell, the title of which is a variation on the Cartestian Ghost in the Machine. Take his song titles for example—“Ghost Hardware” and “Shell of Light.”
The above paragraph, I hope, only serves to illustrate the point that those who have engaged Burial (and DTB) very lovingly, for a very long time, tend to respect him as an ever-inventive vocabulary.
I’m trying to highlight that the inclusion of bad cultural theory and philosophizing will do to music what it has done to other forms of creation.
very good!