Radiohead - Optimistic

this one just came out of the swamp This song moves like a wall. It brings me back to one of my darkest times when I roamed the streets of a major South American city with misguided and a little naïve thoughts. It seems a representative song of Radiohead’s sound on Kid A – an album which I would argue is conceived as a whole more than any other and should be listened to in the original order. But then again, I know now that this may be only because it is the way I got used to listening to it. Maybe another order would be fine, but the songs on the album certainly seem to work as a whole (Amnesiac in comparison seems a lot more fragmented, albeit with great individual tracks). Together with its artwork, the bear hunts, pools of blood, mountains threateningly looming above post-apocalyptic snow plains, pockmarked by dots of fire. Das Theater des Todes, never pick up the phone, rather take the money & then run. If you want to understand the conceptual idea behind this album better, watch the so-called “blips” that can be found on Youtube and which were aired on TV as an advertisement for the album. I wish I had been a Radiohead fan already when this album was released and had been watching TV enough to come across one of their blips during advertisements one day. I imagine that it would leave a lasting impression on anyone. From the outset, I have to concede a minor flaw: Just like Radiohead themselves seem to do when playing this song live, or, for that matter, in the “Basement”-version, my performance is sped up as compared to the album version. Which is a flaw because a lot of the song’s character lies in the menace of its slow plodding and pounding, relentless and inescapable. Having transcribed the whole song meticulously, it still holds some mysteries to me: One of them is the exact fingering of the characteristic guitar lick that Johnny enters with after the first chorus. I have watched the Basement-video repeatedly and experimented with different tunings and open strings, but what I see and what I hear don’t seem to match each other. It clearly appears that the lick is played by sweep picking the strings from highest to lowest, maintaining the same finger position without use of hammer-on or pull-offs, which does not match what I hear which is the unmistakable sound of the four highest steps in a D minor scale. The second mystery is what you could call “the song’s coda”, the part that on the album version that leads over to the next track “In Limbo”; I wish I could have been there when Radiohead decided why they wanted such a coda, why they wanted it to sound like it does and when they composed it. It sounds so … unconceivable, in the sense of “impossible to conceive”. It certainly works very well and provides a smooth transition, but seems so airy, at the same time marked by a dense drum rhythm, reminiscing the song’s main riff, cut half a bar short somewhere along the way, then suddenly dying away. I don’t think there is anything optimistic about this song; sure “the best you can is good enough” has become something of a motto for me in stressful situations, but I doubt that people would really find it uplifting in the context of this song. Rather, what this song, the album it is on, and most of Radiohead’s music transmit to me is resignation. At one point in my life I have lived a life of total immersion in resignation. It feels good for a while, sometimes I still enjoy it. It may just be the cross that my generation is carrying. Resignation provides us with an illusion of power, by seemingly giving us the option of withdrawal as a way out, as a way to refuse to make a choice. But in the end, we probably realize that the grapes were just hanging too high all along. Because it’s certain that resignation has never moved anyone to a different place. Resignation is stagnation. One day, I learned how to turn resignation into anger, anger into motivation and action, and from there things went uphill. For five years I have never let resignation gain a permanent foothold again. Maybe the learning experience about absolute resignation is that it can only get better from there. It’s a sort of nothing-left-to-lose scenario. And maybe the really sweet grapes were on the other side of the hill all along. All of this being said, I still love Radiohead for the mere quality of their music. And I don’t think all Radiohead listeners are living lives of resignation. Some, as me, may come in this way. Come for the resignation, stay for the music.