Listening to Radiohead 500 Times in a Row
I should get this out of the way. I am not a fan of Radiohead. I don’t mean that I dislike them, I don’t; I mean they are not a band I listen to. Except for the past week, as I’ve listened to “Everything in Its Right Place,” from their album, Kid A, non-stop. So I’m not a fan of Radiohead, but I am a fan of this song and right now as I type this sentence it’s oozing out of my headphones into my mind and something, something, is happening to me.
Repetition is a worn tool of my personal musical toolbox. I create carefully curated playlists that take me to specific headspaces and listen them over and over. My “Morning Dope,” playlist is about peaceful awakening. It’s about beauty and possibility and most of all about the comfort and power of useful routines. I put my noise cancelling phones on first thing in the morning. Before coffee. Before work. Before I do anything, I begin with music. Specifically, with “Tezeta,” from Mulatu Astatke’s compilation of his music from 1969 to 1974, Éthiopiques.
This is ritual. But it is ritual with purpose. I know how this ceremony will color my morning. I’ll wander over to my desk about the time “Tezeta” fades out, followed by Bowie’s “Fame,” then the Stones’ “Beast of Burden,” then “When the Levy Breaks,” by Led Zeppelin . The rest of that playlist is equally pre-punk 70s dirge rock as I am a Goddam old man and that was my formative era. These songs are ceremonial music. They are part of my banishing ritual. I clear my inbox demons, lay out the editors’ fires I’ll have to put out, and swagger into my day.
Which is mostly about words
When it’s time for me to write, I have to ditch any tunes with lyrics. I need that part of my brain for work. But I still need the tonal ambience to help me blot out the sound of my neighbors mowing their grass, or the dog barking at UPS–all sounds other than those I’ve chosen, Music for Installations, Brian Eno’s 2018 collection of fascinating wallpaper.
Since it landed, I’ve listened to this album daily, often for hours on end. It is non-linear music, amorphic complementary tonescapes that build a headspace that’s a sonic temple. Even the first time you play Music for Installations, you’re not really listening to it. Not the way you listen to a new release from nearly any other musician. When the new Stones song dropped, we all stopped what we were doing and dug that tune, hearing the words, digging Jagger’s tonic strut, grooving on a great song. Fiona Apple’s career defining, Fetch the Boltcutters, grabbed us by the ears and shouted shocking marvels into our face. Everything about that music is up front, in your face, and impossible to avoid.
But Music for Installations–any great ambient record–is about passive listening. It’s music as a landscape. Music you walk around in. Music you forget. Halfway through my first listen, I lost focus on the composition and turned my mind to my work. It was perfect.
Because Music is Ritual.
Music is ceremony. I put Eno on deck because I have four and a half hours of writing in front of me. It’s a tool. It’s a workspace.
Listening to “Everything in its Right Place” on repeat is different. There doesn’t seem to be a purpose. I don’t know why I’m listening to it. I don’t know why it’s on repeat. It’s been playing endlessly since 9:30 this morning. It’s 2:36 now and I have no intentions of turning it off. I am possessed.
It started when I watched Michael Moore’s latest film, The Planet of the Humans, on April 21. Not all of it. I only made it a few minutes in when “Everything in its Right Place” murmured its opening chords under the film and I thought, I know that song. I figured it was Radiohead, but like I said earlier, I’m not a fan. So I had to stroll through their entire discography listening to the first fifteen seconds of every song. I’m also wildly impatient (these ritual playlists help me with that) and skipped over the opening riff of Kid A every time because I assumed the song would be deeper into the album. Finally, I found it.
Then I played it 500 times in a row.
The opening chords just get me.
I’m not a musician so I didn’t understand what Yorke had done. I know something weird is going on in the shape of the music. It’s dronish. It’s strategic. Fortunately, Ali Jameson at Zeroes and Ones explains the sound:
The intro is comprised of three chords, each chord is a simple major triad with a high C note on the top. This is called an inverted pedal, where there’s a note that drones throughout and it’s in the bass or lowest voice. The triads are C major (C E G), Db major (Db F Ab) and Eb major (Eb G Bb). With the high C note that gives us C, Db∆7 and Eb6.
The song’s covered by every kind of musician–Radiohead is a musician’s band, after all–but no one captures the feeling of being joyously haunted like Yorke and maybe that’s why this song is working for me. As I write, the U.S. morbidity rate for Coronavirus has surpassed that of the Vietnam War, at 50,000 plus. But the Vietnam war took 20 years. The deaths from Covid-19 have happened in the first five months of this year. I live balanced precariously on the leading edge of White privilege, I know that. When there are problems in the world, they’re usually just images on the news for me. I’m almost never affected. But this virulent, murderous plague is blind to privilege and knows no boundaries of habit or behavior or oppressed economic caste. It lurks everywhere, like an infestation of poisonous snakes silently racing through the grass in all directions. I have friends who are first responders. I have friends broke and terrified on Chicago’s West Side. I have friends working the Covid floor at the hospital. I know people who are sick. People who died.
The plague of locusts in Africa isn’t helping. Nor are the earthquakes, fires, near misses of alien asteroids, threat of food shortages, and tornadoes tearing through Tennessee. I’m trying to be cool. I’m trying to have fortitude. But I’m haunted by the immediate possibility of death in my neighborhood, on my street, in my house.
Yet I’m so much better off than everyone else. My job is not under threat. My cupboards are not bare. I’m not alone. In fact, there are moments during the last forty days where my life has been great. My routine hasn’t changed that much. I play the playlists. I have continuity. I’m looking over my desk right now, right in the middle of this sentence, and I it’s perfect. I’m organized.
Everything is not in its right place.
Which is maybe why this song is working for me. Which is maybe why, weeks later, I’m still putting it on repeat while I work. I’m listening to it right now. And, like I said, those opening notes, those chords, they act as a weird talisman. Listening to them every day has become a ceremony of orientation. This song sounds like someone realigning themselves to a new future. They are getting their ducks in a row. They are at the threshold of the unknown. They are on the precipice of a dark and unknowable ocean, ready to dive.
I know, I know, this is prose of the deepest purple. Perhaps too poetic by a hair, but we’re talking about the truth of music here. We’re talking about the thing it does to you. We’re talking about–I am talking about–magic.
A great song is a transformative coction. When added to the mix, everything changes. After you hear a song like that the first time, you are never the same. It carries you to a new place. A new point of view.
“Everything in it’s Right Place,” is a song about self-affirmation. It is a song about inner strength. It is a song of fortitude. It is the gentlest battle cry.
Maybe that’s why I can’t turn it off.
Thom Yorke is a Minimalist Composer
Michael Nyman coined minimalism to describe the music he and his peers–Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Barbara Benary, and Julius Eastman in America; Henryk Górecki, Arvo Pärt, and others in Europe–were developing from the weirdness of the New York Hypnotic School. You’ve heard this music, you know it. Repetitive forms undulating through a narrow channel of harmony. It is hypnotic. Enchanting in the truest employment of that word.
These musicians create sonic mandala and when you listen to them, if you are the kind of person I hope you are 1300 words deep into a manic screed about listening to Radiohead for 70 plus hours in a row, you will find yourself transported. Check out Eastman’s work, some of which is not only minimal and hypnotic but often menacing. Check out Glass’s piano etude, “Witchita Sutra Vortex,” which should bring you to tears if you are not entirely lithic. Fuck . . . surrender to that album.
Which brings us to a weird vortex of our own regarding Minimalist music, ambient music, Thom Yorke’s piano in “Everything in its Right Place,” and indeed all great music: it is a thing of the spirit. Which is a headspace many only stumble into when they’re in the well of an arc of treachery and guile, of disenchantment and disappointment. People like Yorke, on top of the world in 1999 with incredible success, sold out concerts, everything he could ever want. Yet, after a great show somewhere in the world, he goes back to his dressing room feeling like none of it matters, like everything he’s accomplished is just a swaggering golem of horse turds and Thom Yorkes himself into an ennui of titanic heft, then pecks out “Everything in its Right Place,” on his keyboard, alone, lemon sucker faced, probably crying.
And it’s fucking beautiful.
Those opening chords are cinematic. They are the soundtrack to a pixelated neo-neo-noir where the detective is walking alone into a dark virtual alley. Or out of one. Because “Everything in its Right Place” starts in the dark. It starts in shadow. It starts in the unfathomable grump of a disaffected global rock star.
Ambient and minimalist music take their underlying ologies from nature, from the symmetry of birdsong and sand dollars; from the organic accretion of cell-upon-cell that forms a stalk of bamboo. They are non-denominational, non-religious (except for Gorecki) hymns to the magnificent complexity nature achieves through endless repetition.
And nature is scary
Nature can’t be controlled. We forget this. Then nature reminds us in the language of earthquake and flood. We can’t control nature but we can control the song playing in our head. Which is, perhaps, why when you listen to one of these pieces, when you listen to the opening of “Everything in its Right Place,” even though you feel like you’re lost deep in a dark wood, the song becomes the path out of that place it put you into. For Yorke, it was a cathartic (I’m making an enormous assumption here but based on my research, I think I’m pretty fucking close) response to his sudden stature as a rock icon, to the band’s success and simultaneous listlessness, to being yanked and ganked in business and just who the fuck knows what else. It’s Thom Yorke. He could’ve been mad at avocados.
The virus leering at us from every doorknob is natural. It is relentless and inscrutable like a mute predator baring its teeth. It doesn’t care about us in the exact same way business doesn’t give shit about music theory and genius. If an artist isn’t careful, it will ravage them. It will pillage their well of note by note until everything that makes them them is delineated in a contract and the value of their fingertips recorded somewhere in an insurance company’s actuarial tables. This is the arboreal shade Yorke found himself in after that completely normal, completely successful concert. And it terrified him. And it angered him. And it pulled its lips back from its fangs and Yorke realized it was fight or die and he drew the only sword he has: beauty.
Writing that song carried him out of that dark moment. That’s what it’s doing to me. That’s what’s happening. Authors are not the only ones who enchant their audience. Listening to the narrative of a song, like reading a captivating story, evokes another world. Light shines down through the trees. The creature recedes into shadow. You can take a step without fear. Without very much, any way.
. . . . . . .
I’ve put down my headset. Five hundred spins is enough. All I hear now is the lull of my wife’s voice from the other room as she makes her five thousandth call of the day. I can hear my dog snoring at the back of my office. I can hear the branches of the enormous bush outside my window as it sways back and forth against the house in a late April thunderstorm.
I need that inverted pedal at the beginning. I need Yorke’s hypnosis. I need the odd alchemical fortitude this song affords me: the organic promise of repetition, of constants, of ritual. It’s maybe the path out of here. It’s maybe the thing that carries my spirit forward one 4:11 interval at a time.
It is what I’m shouting in my head as I trudge into this dim future.
It might be what saves me.
