The Philosophy of Radiohead: Music, Technology, Soul
Mimesis
2024
Paperback
172
Reviewed by: Chiara Rubbonello
The Philosophy of Radiohead: Music, Technology, Soul is a revised version, translated into English, of the book La filosofia dei Radiohead. Musica, tecnica, anima, written by Stefano Marino and Eleonora Guzzi, and originally published in Italian in 2021. This particular work stands apart from many other books that have been written about Radiohead, which have generally dealt with the band’s history or its discography or the band’s members individual biographies. Instead, The Philosophy of Radiohead is a sort of “hybrid” work, presenting itself, on the one hand, as a musical and poetical investigation of Radiohead’s artistic path, and on the other hand as a philosophical essay on the possible connections between the main results achieved by the band and «some observations on the relationship between art, technology and society, like those offered by a wide array of thinkers that may include, among others, Martin Heidegger, Max Horkheimer, Günter Anders, Hannah Arendt, Arnold Gehlen, and […] Theodor W. Adorno» (p. 11). Although the book written by Marino and Guzzi is strictly focused on Radiohead, it is not just aimed to reach the fans of the Oxford-based band; in fact, The Philosophy of Radiohead also proves to be an interesting read for those who are not familiar with the whole oeuvre of the band but are anyway fascinated by pop-rock music and/or curious about its potential connections to contemporary society and the music industry. Although philosophical themes are consistently present in The Philosophy of Radiohead, the book is straightforward and can be easily understood, thanks to its clear language that makes it accessible to a wide range of readers, whether they are experts of philosophy or not. Though not exclusively, Marino and Guzzi make frequently reference to Adorno’s philosophy, both for his influential position in the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and for his musical interests, which make him an essential voice in a text that precisely deals with the relationship between critical philosophy and music. As explained in the book, Adorno was also a musicologist and composer who analyzed the musical landscape of his time through the lens of critical philosophy. Focusing on the relationship between music and society, Adorno sharply and critically distinguished two musical spheres: popular music and serious music. For him, all popular music exhibited a conciliatory, uncritical attitude towards the society, whereas serious music (at least in its more experimental forms, like in avant-garde music) maintained a critical relationship with it. Therefore, serious music – which Adorno especially appreciated in its more radical and more innovative expressions – was considered the only kind of music actually provided with a subversive potential and hence capable to express a real “truth content”.
However, in accepting and endorsing some of Adorno’s ideas (who can be considered, in many ways, the critical theorist par excellence), the authors of The Philosophy of Radiohead also suggest to critically rethink and reconsider them, thus using his conceptual tools while questioning some of his conclusions. Marino and Guzzi argue that both fields could benefit from the proposed connection between critical philosophy and pop-rock music: on the one hand, it offers an opportunity to rethink some of critical philosophy’s key concepts in a perhaps less radical way and certainly in a more contemporary light, relating them with some products from today’s popular culture and allowing to philosophize with Adorno and at the same time against (or beyond) him; on the other hand, it offers a fresh perspective on the music of a band like Radiohead, which, depending on the diverse perspectives of different listeners, can be sometimes seen as a “mere” artistic product – or worse, just as a source of entertainment. According to the authors, Radiohead’s music seems to controvert Adorno’s notion of popular music as a mere standardized product of the culture industry, totally uncritical and lacking any genuine truth content. It is important to note that Adorno himself did not conceive of the distinction between serious music and popular music as ontological; rather, he understood it as historical and thus believed in the dynamic and changing nature of the relationship between the two spheres, which allowed for a redefinition in different historical periods. Actually, as Stefano Marino and Eleonora Guzzi point out, our current historical period has witnessed a redefinition of the relationship between serious and popular music, as some musical groups inside the popular sphere, for example, seem to adopt a critical attitude towards the society and the music industry in which they operate.
This seems to be the case of Radiohead, which uses its artistic production to critically challenge our materialistic and alienating society. As persuasively argued in The Philosophy of Radiohead, the band’s poetic vision always includes a «critique of the deformations and even obsessions that can derive from an unscrupulous and unreasonable use of technology in our highly technologized, digitalized and also globalized world» (p. 24), evident both in the lyrics and in the musical structure and sound of Radiohead’s songs. The book points out the recurrence and centrality of several themes, in the songs of the band, that are distinctly critical of contemporary society: «each song at least in part reflects themes such as the subject’s troubles, difficulties and uncertainties in the present, the difficulty of human relationships in a digitalized and virtual world, the need for a greater closeness to and protection of nature, and so on» (p. 28). Radiohead’s songs often denounce phenomena that are characteristic of the present day, thoroughly explored by critical philosophy, such as the discomfort and alienation of contemporary individuals, their spiritual impoverishment, and the illusory nature of their free choices in a society dominated by technology and entirely devoted to consumerism.
As evidence, the authors highlight that in 2019 Radiohead’s frontman, Thom Yorke, released a solo album titled Anima, «which is focused on the feeling of anxiety and worry that afflicts individuals and grips their souls, validating more than ever the idea of a creative process and a narrative characterized by a sense of technological dystopia and, at the same time, by the desire to openly confront the challenge that technology represents, rather than flee from it» (p. 28-29). Anima and technology are two key concepts employed in the discussion developed in the book, as is already made clear from its subtitle: Music, Technology, Soul. In fact, The Philosophy of Radiohead offers a philosophically oriented exploration of the band’s artistic journey, which can be interpreted as a dialectical development of the relationship between the dimension of technology, initially perceived in the first albums as an «alienating, destabilizing and often suffocating force» (p. 13), and the soul, understood as the individual’s free and spontaneous interiority. Technology, in particular, is understood as inherently dialectical itself, as it does not include only its “dark” alienating and dehumanizing side, which makes it an agent of an «essentially and inexorably utilitarian “administered world”» (p. 45), but is also «able to gift new languages and original possibilities of expression to the human being that are better suited to, and efficient in, describing the existential malaise of our time and the discontents of our civilization » (p. 13).
The authors of The Philosophy of Radiohead describe how, in the case of Radiohead’s music, there is always a dynamic, dialectical relation with technology, which ends up being continually revisited as the band evolves artistically. In the band’s early work (especially their albums The Bends and OK Computer) a reference to technology appears mostly in the song lyrics as a threat to humans that «demand[s] the subordination of humans, making the human being an object of its domination» (p. 15), while the musical form of the songs often remains that of traditional rock, although with some notable experimentations in OK Computer. However, this form was destined to undergo «a breakthrough that, due to its truly radical nature, has few precedents in the recent history of pop-rock music» (ibidem). As highlighted in The Philosophy of Radiohead, from the album Kid A onward technology would no longer be addressed with distrust and fear, but would rather become a fundamental resource for the development of Radiohead: indeed, once the band became «aware of being unable to entirely evade the net and logic of technology that shape the world in the present age» (p. 28), it underwent «a new form of indirect and mediated emancipation that passes through technology itself, rather than manifesting itself in a more direct and immediate manner through a mere contraposition» (ibidem).
This virtuously dialectical choice effectively responds to the complexity of the phenomenon of technology: by establishing an inspiring and symbiotic relationship with it, technology becomes «the means used by the human beings to gain access to new creative languages and expressive possibilities» (p. 23), enabling the band to experiment, achieving particularly expressive and impactful results. The band seems to have realized that «a “human” message can often be more powerful and effective precisely when it is conveyed through technological means and their (real or presumed) “dehumanizing” nature» (p. 66). The critical relationship between the band’s music and society is thus simultaneously expressed on both a thematic level, i.e. the level of the contents of the lyrics, and a formal level.
This innovative use of technology confers a strong experimental character to the music of the band, which, as noted by the authors of The Philosophy of Radiohead, does not shy away from bold, sometimes avant-gardist sounds. A good example of this is especially Kid A, which, with its dark and menacing sounds, presents itself as «a sort of musical “riot act” by a band that had been “a hitherto ‘front-line’ rock act”, as well as a musical experiment that, in its own way, was quite extreme and radical at the time, guided by the goal of freeing itself from the mindset of a homogenizing, standardized culture and the system of the music business» (p. 60). In this willing for experimentation, we can hear echoes of Adorno, as the German philosopher believed that what we may generally call experimental music could generate a kind of artistic expression that conveys a form of critical truth. For Marino and Guzzi, Kid A has a style that «can at times sound difficult, hard, hostile, angular, indirect and intentionally tending towards a strong negation of every attempt at conciliation between the individual and his/her world» (p. 71). So, this style is entirely opposed to the standardized, uncritical and conciliatory style typically adopted, according to Adorno, by all popular music.
Nevertheless, The Philosophy of Radiohead does not just analyze the band’s aesthetics from a critical-philosophical perspective, but it also explores the practical relationship it has established with the market dynamics of the music industry. This relationship is significantly different from the one usually established between popular music and culture industry, and this can be easily noticed by looking at Radiohead’s discography, which appears rather restricted compared to that of other similar bands, as Radiohead has allowed itself relatively long breaks between the various albums, defying the production speed typically demanded by the culture industry. Beside the fact of partially distancing themselves from the market’s demands, the members of the band have managed to do more. According to Marino and Guzzi, the five musicians from Oxford have always been very aware «of not being able to fully flee from the power of the culture industry and show business» (p. 57), so that «the band always turned a critical eye towards these aspects of pop-rock music and, at the same time, belonged to this genre, also sharing its conception of it with the listeners. In this sense, Radiohead’s attempts to partially free itself from (or, from another perspective, to avoid fully adopting) the established rules of the culture industry and the market are well known, as well as the band’s attempts to exploit these rules in its favor on some occasions» (p. 58). According to the authors, it is fair to assert that the band has successfully followed a sort of “golden rule” originally formulated by Robert Fripp, which requires «[to be] “in the marketplace but not governed by the values of the marketplace” – which is to say working within the music industry as a sort of outsider, as a “small, mobile, independent, intelligent unit” in search for a way out from the suffocating alternative between a strict adherence to a merely consumerist aesthetics, on the one hand, and artistic marginalization, on the other» (ibidem).
Marino and Guzzi point out that, in practical terms, Radiohead has tried to distance itself from the traditional communication methods typically employed by the culture industry – for example, by distributing Kid A exclusively via the internet and adopting a “pay what you want” strategy for the album In Rainbows. On a strictly artistic level, through the critique embedded in its most successful tracks, Radiohead has managed to produce «commodities that transcend themselves or, to speak, self-transcending commodities» (p. 76), because it has managed to «[perform] a sort of aesthetic acrobatic turn, succeed in doing what Adorno himself self-consciously and paradoxically prescribed to philosophy and art in the age of their potential “liquidation”, namely to be able to repeat the Baron Münchhausen’s gesture of “pulling himself out of the bog by his pig-tail”: “nothing less is asked of the thinker today than that he [or she] should be at every moment both within things and outside them”» (p. 77).
The possibility, embodied by Radiohead’s songs, of transcending their commodification is a key point in the discussion, allowing the reflection to extend far beyond the analysis of the band’s aesthetics. Indeed, the analysis of the musical phenomenon embodied by Radiohead provided by the two authors is not (and does not aim to be) an end in itself; instead, it encourages a profound rethinking of the current possibilities for effective social critique that can reach the people through the popular arts. The Philosophy of Radiohead does more than highlighting the band’s exploration of deep themes on content, formal, and practical levels; it has the great merit of bringing to the fore the urgent need for a social critique that does not remain confined to academic and intellectual discussions, but takes shape within the popular sphere, thus reaching the masses. In the final analysis, the book argues that the popular arts – firmly condemned by thinkers like Adorno as untrue and uncritical, thus serving the perpetuation of the status quo – have, instead, the potential to engage in a critical relationship with society, using the market to their advantage to promote the spread of critique itself. The authors do not exclude, and indeed affirm, the possibility of finding other virtuous examples of popular musicians who, like Radiohead, have given voice to a free form of social criticism without losing the appreciation of the audience, taking on in their way the arduous and necessary task of turning the spotlight on the individual’s discomfort in our age.
Finally, a book like The Philosophy of Radiohead is a clear invitation to open our eyes (and especially our ears!) to pay attention to present-day issues, rather than passively, uncritically, and complacently naturalizing them. Only through collective awareness, we can embark on a radical qualitative change in our lives, leading to a society where the artificial needs, imposed by the market and fueled by ever more abundant yet less useful consumer goods, are replaced by the real needs that every human holds within themselves, whose unmet fulfillment implies a “reconciled” and submissive existence, and the renunciation of a full sense of life.
