Vague Music is for Dancing
When I spend too much time alone, I dive into music. In these stretches of time, a band will become an ocean. Years back, when I was a kid and used to receive Nintendo Power magazine every month, there was a new Wii game out that I wanted but never got; it was called Endless Ocean and its gameplay consisted entirely of exploring underwater worlds without purpose. No levels and no objectives, only large swaths of teeming submarine space for you to roam around in and look at. That’s how I feel about a good musical act when I get into it. And that’s how I feel about Radiohead right now.
The King of Limbs. It’s a fine album if you get to know it, but few get to know it. Thing is, there’s some BS going around that King of Limbs is one of the band’s worst albums.
Why might that be? Well, their previous album, In Rainbows, is like a prized jewel: defiant and unambiguously beautiful. The issue with The King of Limbs might be that it’s not unambiguously anything, really. It’s ambiguous.
The late philosopher Mark Fisher said that with this album the band “achieve one of Eno’s ambitions for rock – that it become vague music.” Vague, ambiguous, mysterious, mystical, slippery, aphasic. These are words that I can try to use to linguistically encircle what the album does for me, which is an abandonment of language itself. The band turns its back on one of the tools it used to hook us in the first place. But rather than a betrayal, it’s a renewal.
Remember it was Thom Yorke who sang/begged in 1997: “Please can you stop this noise? I’m trying to get some rest / from all the unborn chicken voices in my head.” That’s a good lyric. It was probably good then (I wasn’t born), and even better now that we all carry devices around in our pockets which keep the voices in our heads from progressing past the prenatal stage. And it was Thom Yorke who sang/flirted in 2007’s “Jigsaw Falling into Place”: “The walls are bending shape / They've got a Cheshire cat grin.” He’s a skilled writer, no doubt.
But in certain moments, you can sense that words just really aren’t enough. In the same song (“Jigsaw Falling into Place”) around the 2:55 mark, he just starts saying “dance” over and over and his voice fades into the void; the band takes over with something that sounds like a jangly and spinning invitation to dance. There’s always been this feeling in Radiohead that the sensory parts of the song may, at any moment, overpower the cerebral parts. If you look up any concert footage of the band, you’ll see for yourself how Thom dances. His twitchy movements are strange, alluring. You get the sense that his expression through these extralinguistic means is really the culmination of something. It could his Final Form.
The point is, on The King of Limbs, you can’t really understand what he’s saying most of the time, and you probably couldn’t explain it even if you did. It’s on this album that the sensory parts of the music eviscerate any dependence on language. The lyrics on The King of Limbs are word-painting, giving way to the real substance of the music: dots and loops.—Will Powers
