The brilliant concept behind “The Eraser” by Thom Yorke
July the 10th 2006 was released The Eraser by Thom Yorke. This was his first solo album, and it was praised as one of the best of the year by a large amount of music magazines. Some of the songs of the album have serious political messages: Horrodowns Hill is the name where David Kelly was found dead in unclear circumstances. Atoms for Peace, as of the name, is the title of a speech delivered by Dwight Eisenhower.
All this context makes it alone a brilliant album. Not only the political references, but also the musical construction is relevant. Conceptualized and partially recorded by Yorke between recording sessions for the Radiohead album Kid A (2000), this electronic music album presents a variety of interesting concepts in its songs. I would really like to focus on The Eraser, the albums first track.
At first, it seems, the song develops a romantic topic: the more you try to erase me the more that I appear. This is, the more the subject of the romantic experience tries to wipe out what happened, the more it won’t desappear. The conceptual tension between appear and the erasure sure seems liks a contemporary issue. Nowadays poeple can effectively erase pictures, voicemails, texts and whatnot in order to forger or move on from a relationship. This is where the point that the song makes turns into a critical exploration of this phenomenon or set of phenomena.
Is there any form of erasure, when nothing but memory — not only convey — but construct identity and subjects. Sure, the narrative of a memory, but memory at the end. I think that the song play with this paradox. The more you try to erase, the more that it appears. It is almost oximoronic to talk about erased memories, erased poeple, erased love even. It is impossible not to think of Charlie Kaufman’s The Eternal Sushine of the Spotless Mind (2004), a siencie fiction comedy-drama where the main couple tries desperately to erase eachother from their memories but — at the end — *SPOILER ALERT* fall in love again, against all odds.
The concepts behind The Eraser are extremely interesting and could make a whole argument about memory, loss and grieve, being grieve the erasure mechanism. Desguised as a love song, the semantic exploration of memory is fundamental in this song. It even puts these concepts to discuss one another, showing the contradictory nature of them. This, to me, is brilliant and could inspire a larger investigation.
