Although it's certainly possible that T.S. Eliot's poetry somehow influenced Radiohead's music, I'm not trying to prove anything of the kind. Rather, I hope to illuminate some similarities between themes and aesthetics in both artists' work.
With Thom Yorke at the helm, Colin Greenwood, Johnny Greenwood, Phil Selway and Ed O'Brien met in 1980s Oxford and formed the band On a Friday, later to be known as Radiohead. Radiohead is significant largely because of the radical musical progress between their first album, Pablo Honey, which scarcely departed from traditional alternative rock trends, and their latest album, Amnesiac, awash with intricate soundscapes and nearly guitar-free. That this originally alternative rock band moved so significantly away from the rock genre and further into techno influence and electronic experimentation is important not because Radiohead was the first band to do this, but because they have remained enormously popular and mainstream despite all their experimentation. In addition to being widely popular and capable of selling out arena concerts in minutes, Radiohead is critically acclaimed, considered by some rock critics to be the last serious rock band. In this sense, they can be categorized as nobrow rather than lowbrow, because critical respect lends them a cultural legitimacy that wide popularity does not.
In the early nineties, Radiohead fans were generally either scattered local followers or members of the top 100 radio crowd. With The Bends and OK Computer, however, the band picked up a broader base of alternative rock fans, as well as older Beatles and Pink Floyd fans searching for serious current music. More recently, due to the notable DJ Shadow, Brian Eno and Aphex Twin influences in Kid A and Amnesiac, Radiohead's music has also attracted ambient techno enthusiasts who relate to the sprawling, emotional soundscapes and non-traditional beats. OK Computer reflected more Beatles and Pink Floyd influence. "Paranoid Android," for example, was modeled off of "Happiness is a Warm Gun" on the Beatles' album Revolver, and the feel of its electronic production is very similar to that of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. Earlier Radiohead, particular Pablo Honey, did not stray far from its Pixies, REM, Nirvana and U2 influence. The Bends represented a significant leap forward in the creation of Radiohead's unique sound, but did not and could not predict the direction in which their music would head scarcely five years later.
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in 1888 in St Louis, Missouri. He graduated from Harvard and in 1911, wrote several poems, including The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, to be published later in his career. In 1914 London, he met Ezra Pound, who would become a good friend and a helpful editor of his work. In 1922, Eliot published The Waste Land after suffering a nervous breakdown. Soon thereafter, his work began following more religious trends; in 1927 he was baptized and joined the Church of England. He died in 1965.
The poetry of T.S. Eliot and the music of Radiohead share some general similarities. For example, both progressed dramatically through their careers, though in different ways. Perhaps because of boredom with present trends and as a way of resolving identity problems, Radiohead has veered far from its angst-filled alternative rock roots and Eliot turned away from cynical agnosticism and towards religious fervor - a trend which I will not discuss any further, but that is nevertheless notable in understanding the body of Eliot's work. Both artists are characterized by a textured and complex style; the art is very dense. Any reader of The Waste Land would not doubt the complexity (even unintelligibility) of Eliot's verse; Radiohead's music utilizes rich soundscapes of layered guitars or, more recently, electronic sounds and piano. Radiohead's affinity for minor chords affects the prevalent somber mood of the music; words with somber connotations (the literary equivalent of minor chords) pepper Eliot's work. Both Radiohead's music and Eliot's poetry reflect a dislike for conventional style. Radiohead experiments with different beats-4/4 time is rarely used-and songs rarely follow ordinary pop-rock structures with clearly recognizable verses, choruses and catchy hooks. Eliot departs radically from rigid verse forms that were popular in the 19th century; The Waste Land, for example, follows no traditional structure.
Especially in theme, The Bends is comparable to T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men. Both deal with the emotional vacancy of humanity, of people not making real connections with each other. Both are about hollow people, or as Thom Yorke sings, "fake plastic" people. As can be noted, this song - and many others on the album - exhibit a melancholy tone, helping to reflect the dark themes. Musically and with vocals, The Bends conveys the feel that The Hollow Men achieves through words. "Shape without form, shade without colour, / Paralyzed force, gesture without motion," reads the second verse of The Hollow Men - highly reminiscent of the "broken man," the "cracked polystyrene man who just crumbles and burns" in "Fake Plastic Trees." Stylistically, The Hollow Men is certainly not vernacular, and is certainly not standardized. However, neither is it as stylistically deviant as The Waste Land or other poetry of the times - take cummings, for example. Similarly, critics hailed The Bends as a wonderful album, but not in the same way as they praised OK Computer and subsequent Radiohead albums. Although it departs somewhat from traditional rock beats and experiments with some electronica, such is not the soul of its greatness.
Radiohead's Kid A and Eliot's The Waste Land are both obscure in style and content, perhaps even unintelligible. Yorke's singing is not enunciated, and the band refused to print the lyrics along with the album. The band disclosed that this was all done deliberately. Yorke changed the lyrical style dramatically, making use of more repetition and putting less emphasis on images and concepts, more emphasis on the feeling generated by the words and the way in which he sings them. Stylistically, Kid A is schizophrenic; it's difficult to conceive of "Idioteque"'s techno-dance inspired beat being on the same album as "Motion Picture Soundtrack"'s elegiac harp or the acoustic guitar of "How to Disappear Completely". The Waste Land, too, oscillates between styles: the unrhymed and unmetered vernacular of street dialogue, parts structured by rhyme and meter, quotes in several different languages. Kid A and The Waste Land are also notable in that both utilize aesthetic tendencies in order to achieve a specific feeling, and not to communicate concrete ideas. In both cases, this feeling is one of the depression and futility that characterizes modern times. Themes of resurrection and death recur in both works. In The Waste Land, both themes are addressed throughout in diction and allusion - the first section, in fact, is titled "The Burial of the Dead" and is filled with references to death and resurrection, especially in allusion to the changing of the seasons. Additionally, whether ironic or not, the somber poem ends with a more or less positive finish: the repetition of the word "shantih," roughly translating to "the peace which passeth understanding." The ending can be seen as a resurrection of hope, and is strikingly similar to the ending of Kid A, in which the last song, "Motion Picture Soundtrack," a slow and dirge-like musing on the emptiness of modern life, fades out for approximately thirty seconds, after which it is "reborn" in a soaring and uplifting coda of sound.
Both OK Computer and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock serve to provoke an emotion, but unlike Kid A and The Waste Land, they also contain more concrete, cohesive ideas. The lyrics and carefully-conceived titles in OK Computer reflect a theme of spiritual injury, of deep dissatisfaction with modern life, stemming largely from the dehumanizing threat of technology in an increasingly material world. Both Yorke and Eliot convey ennui and distrust for materialism through enumerations of things and modern comforts that leave the speaker cold. In OK Computer's "Fitter Happier," a computer-generated voice drones about "regular exercise at the gym" and "tires that grip in the wet;" the speaker of "Let Down" links "motorways and tramlines/ starting and then stopping/ taking off and landing" with "the emptiest of feelings." This is reminiscent of Prufrock's "tea and cake and ices," of his sprinkled streets and "skirts that trail along the floor" - although OK Computer's sense of ennui springs from tiresome mobility and Prufrock's from tiresome inertia, they share similar sensibilities regarding their respectively dehumanizing modern times. This dehumanization is further developed through images comparing humans to animals. The song "Fitter Happier" likens its speaker (whose electronic voice further dehumanizes him) to "a pig in a cage on antibiotics;" the speaker of "Let Down" compares himself to a crushed insect. Likewise, the alienated Prufrock daydreams himself into being "a pair of ragged claws/ scuttling across the floors of silent seas." Both of these worlds being inhospitable almost to the point of being uninhabitable, speakers in both works daydream a better world. In OK Computer, the speaker of "Subterranean Homesick Alien" imagines extraterrestrials kidnapping him and "showing [him] the world as [he'd] like to see it"; Prufrock dreams of singing mermaids, a daydream from which he resents being awakened by human voices. Stylistically, the sense of space in OK Computer associated with electronic ambience and the juxtaposition of high and low notes, and of soaring and somber segments lends to the album a grandiose and universal quality. A similar grand universality is achieved in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, with allusions to the Bible, to Hamlet, and to the likening of Prufrock's visit to Dante's descent into hell. The grand scale of both works is given a rather ironic quality, however, in light of the themes of alienation, ennui and human smallness permeating both the poem and the album.
In conclusion, although it's dubious whether T.S. Eliot had a direct effect on Radiohead's music, certain trends reveal substantial similarities. Both created art in response to a deep cynicism towards and dissatisfaction with the direction in which modern society is headed, and both created art that appealed more to emotions than to thought. Although we cannot possibly know how Radiohead's music will progress, it can only be assumed that it will find increasingly innovative ways to inform listeners of the lonely banality of modern existence, and that in whichever new directions Radiohead chooses to embark, their loyal fans will follow them there.
HOME THE ENEMY: HOLE CHILD THE ALLY: PINK FLOYD HUMOR GOOD LITERATURE A LITTLE STORY I MADE UP QUOTE(S) OF THE DAY A BIT ABOUT ME RANDOMNESS PHOTOS LINKS GUESTBOOK CREDITS
