One Track Mind: "No Surprises" by Radiohead
Tuesday, October 10, 2006 at 11:00AMMaybe this is too easy--this is a great song on one of the greatest albums of the 1990s. I could rattle off lists of awards, "best of" lists, and god knows what else about it, but you know that already. This album is eminently visible--it's in all our radars, a maybe-distant but still-persistant blip that we all recognize, and can reference. We know it's rock and roll, perhaps at its best, and we know that it means something.
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Rock and Roll and Rebelliousness are dialectically linked; that is, they mutually construct each other, and have for the last half of the 20th century. In the essay from which I took the name of this blog, Lester Bangs talks about how, even at his most pathetic and pandering, there was still something in Elvis Presley that exuded his danger, something that no large golden beltbuckle could hide. But that rebelliousness was always implied, or set against something else. The twin figures of the 1950s that I have in my head are and Donna Reed, and we all take it for granted that one was the norm and the other, the reaction.
Of course, anyone who lived through and/or learns about the 1950s knows that it was much more complicated than that--binary opposites are always simplifications,--but the power of the images persist, and to this day, rock and roll has always embodied that sense of fighting against staid banalities, making some noise, fucking some shit up, breaking the rules.
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I turn on the radio two years ago and I hear someone say "I won't ever fall in line/ become another victim of your conformity". I haven't turned on the radio much since then, but I think it's safe to say, given the plethora of emo-licious bands that I keep seeing on billboards that the same airs are still being put on and put forth. Punk music, whether on the margins of society or in it's most blinding spotlights, has embodied that rebellious energy, that rebelliousness for it's own sake, without any visible targets (Gang of Four, the Clash, among others excluded). Need to reject something? Reject "society", reject "conformity". These are powerful statements, and have carried many of us through our high school years of doubt and fear and whatever other childhood neuroses we had to overcome. But I've found that since I've gotten older, I've had to make a hard choice--if I am going to continue my rebelliousness (and that's a big if, with bill paying, and stable relationships, and 9 to 5 on the brain), I need to understand more. If rock and roll is rebellion against conformity, where does conformity come from? More importantly, why would someone actually choose "society", choose "conformity"? After all, you can only rebel against something if enough people have embraced it, and you can't convince them otherwise.
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"No Surprises" tackles this question, and the title gives an answer. The first verse reads like the first half of the Declaration of Independence or Martin Luther's 95 theses; a list of grievances boiled down to a single life's dread and despair:
A Heart that's full up like a landfill/ A Job that Slowly Kills youBruises that won't heal
You look so tired, happy/ Bring down the government
They don't speak for us
This is a life experiencing the full pain of 20th century capitalism, with nowhere to direct it, and nothing to understand. There are no antagonists here--it's "the government" and "they don't speak for us"--they're faceless enemies. The power of capitalism as a system of inequality, is that it roots itself in the very nature of our world, and thereby makes it more difficult to fight. As Thatcher so eloquently pointed out in the early 80s, "There is no alternative", and she meant it, because she saw, consciously or not, a world in which capitalism was inevitable and natural (whether it actually is that remains to be seen), and could not be stopped--how do you fight a mountain range, or sunlight?
One response is to flush Thatcher's philosophy down the pipe--"bring down the government", start again and try something new. But the next verse gives another route, and an answer about conformity:
I'll take the quiet life/A Handshake, some carbon-monoxide/
No Alarms and No surprises
The rest of the song details the sweet sensation of drowning in the face of the overwhelming nature of the modern world--exploited labor, world violence on a scale we've never even imagined, and more than that, the kinds of personal psychosis and pain that such a world inscribes into our souls. This is embodied in the video for the song. We see Thom Yorke's head with a pane of glass between us and him, on which is reflected...something, maybe the words of the song, maybe a stock ticker, maybe just the flicker of a TV screen parading endless horror from across the globe. We see lights, occasionally flashing, movement/no movement. He sings passively, there's no heart in it, just the open and closing of his lips. Gradually, we begin to realize that water is slowly creeping up his neck, filling up what is now obviously a tank surrounding him. It fills the entire screen, but he does not resist. Rather, he stares at us, with no expression on his face, not even resignation, he's just a body, floating and suspended. It's both beautiful and terrifying all at once, and tells us what we need to know about the choices that we can make in the face of the oppression that we live with. When, near the end of the video, the water drains away, we see him gasping like a dying fish--the water was peaceful, it was home, comfortable. And when he does sing the last verse:
Such a pretty house/ and such a pretty garden
we know that this is the only stimulus he has left. Every time I hear that verse, I well up with emotion. After you drown in...whatever, suburbia, conformity, adulthood, your job ...the world is no longer acting on you or pressing itself on you, because it's just a series of images, just pictures on a screen between you and the world, with no alarms, and no surprises.
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Why would I fight? Why would I speak out? The world looks fucked from every direction, and capitalism is so huge and so much bigger than each of us; more than that, it separates us from each other so that we will always feel alone and powerless to stop it every time it prods and shocks us into submission. Accepting the peace and quiet that I can get from conformity, from embracing suburbia (a capitalist spatial formation if there ever was one), from simply tending my pretty house and pretty garden--this route seems blessedly wonderful and enticing. So what if I have to drown? It's worth it to know that I'll never have to feel again.
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I won't pretend like the song draws pleasant conclusions. On an album about alienation, it's perhaps the most alienated song, and despite its beautiful lullaby of a melody, it doesn't paint a pretty picture of the world. Still, our only hope of change is to understand why people turn inward instead of embracing each other, and more than that, change depends on us actually embracing each other, beginning to build communities, solidarities, families on which we can both rely and strengthen. The world inside us, of images and reflections will never change unless we break the glass and reach through to take the hand of another person, never to let go.
Reader Comments (2)
Your post is on target. Keep it up.
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