Radiohead and the Resistant Concept Album: How to Disappear Completely

1. Introduction

1 Popular music of recent decades has emphasized the individual’s isolation in modern society. Bands that address the anxieties provoked by contemporary culture are the darlings of critics, and music about alienation has, ironically, proven to have a strong market worldwide. The hero-worship that successful artists experience can spill over into their self-perception, creating most commonly either an overblown sense of their own importance or an ambivalent attitude toward their success. Some artists (such as Sting, Bono, and Peter Gabriel) embrace the opportunity to use their music as a platform to address such global issues as deforestation or third-world debt. Others (most drastically Kurt Cobain, but also the Manic Street Preachers’ Richey Edwards, Alice in Chains’ Layne Staley, and more recently Amy Winehouse) collapse under the pressure, unable to come to terms with the audience’s refusal to believe that, as the Moody Blues said, “I’m Just a Singer in a Rock and Roll Band.” Radiohead has been perceived by audiences, critics, and scholars alike as one of the most important bands in popular music today. Though the band’s seven studio albums to date have dealt extensively with aspects of alienation in a society of mass consumption, the band has also reaped the benefits of enormous success within this culture. The band repeatedly articulates an anxiety about being consumed, both literally and figuratively, yet it continues to produce goods for mass consumption. While decrying the effects of modern technology, Introduction 1 2 · R adiohead and the Resistant Concept Album Radiohead takes full advantage of its promotional abilities, reaching listeners through not only conventional CDs, but also internet downloads , peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, chatbots, and an archive of continually updated and redesigned websites. In 2007 the band shook up the music industry by releasing the album In Rainbows initially as a download for which fans could specify the amount they wanted to pay, starting at nothing at all. Radiohead did eventually release the album as an actual CD as well, thus having it both ways and possibly earning even more money along with all the publicity. Although the releases of Kid A and Amnesiac in 2000 and 2001, respectively, were not such drastic leaps in a financial sense, at the time they represented a bold lashing out against commercialism and the record industry. The goal of this book is twofold: to examine in detail Radiohead’s “experimental ” concept albums, Kid A and Amnesiac, and to investigate the band’s ambivalence and resistance toward its own success, as manifested in the vanishing subject on these two albums. In order to comprehend Radiohead’s position within and attitude toward capitalism, it is helpful to understand how contemporary theorists think about the formation of subjectivity (that is, individual consciousness and identity) in the modern capitalist system. Critical theory compares the “values” of modern society (freedom of the individual and equality for all) to the practices that often result from that system (social inequality and the subjugation of the individual by the government and/or economic forces). This critique can be expanded to include the wasting of resources that could be used to improve the environment and life in it, e.g., using technology to destroy nature rather than to conserve it. Critical theorists simultaneously comment on the modern condition of alienation and seek to combat it by working toward a more democratic and socially egalitarian society. The industrialized Western civilization is based on technological advances that purport to make life easier for humankind. Yet this system at its worst turns modern life instead into a machine dominated by governmental and economic forces, which reduces individual humans to mere drones. Capitalism, ostensibly a system of buying and selling goods, has the capacity to destroy political consciousness, turning everything into a commodity and giving every person in society a price. When everything and everyone can be bought and sold, then any motivation Introduction · 3 or tendency toward political activism is suppressed. The domination of nature (and thus of humankind) is a central aspect of Western civilization , which works toward bringing all of nature under the control of the human subject—who in the process is himself swallowed up by forces beyond his control. Theodor Adorno states: For since the overwhelming objectivity of historical movement in its present phase consists so far only in the dissolution of the subject, without yet giving rise to a new one...