Radiohead “Videotape”

“Videotape” (mp3) is not my favorite song on In Rainbows—at this moment, that honor goes to either “Reckoner” or “Weird Fishes”—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 details 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, the space from where his voice emanates, are what we see here. These are the rainbows.