I saw Atoms for Peace, Thom Yorke’s new band perform in Boston 2 weeks ago, and they played this.  I’ve found the song mesmerizing since first hearing the Eraser a few years ago, but I didn’t realize what it was about until reading the Wikipedia entry:

Harrowdown Hill in Longworth, Oxfordshire is notable for being the place where the body of Dr David Kelly was found in 2003. His evidence had raised questions about Saddam Hussein’s possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction — the official justification for the UK government’s decision to invade Iraq. In an interview with The Globe and Mail, Yorke said, “The government and the Ministry of Defence… were directly responsible for outing him and that put him in a position of unbearable pressure that he couldn’t deal with, and they knew they were doing it and what it would do to him… I’ve been feeling really uncomfortable about that song lately, because it was a personal tragedy, and Dr Kelly has a family who are still grieving. But I also felt that not to write it would perhaps have been worse.” In another interview, Yorke said that “Harrowdown Hill” is “the most angry song I’ve ever written in my life. I’m not gonna get into the background to it, the way I see it… And it’s not for me or for any of us to dig any of this up. So it’s a bit of an uncomfortable thing.” Yorke also notes that “‘Harrowdown Hill’ was kicking around during Hail to the Thief, but there was no way that was going to work with the band.”.

Yo La Tengo’s takeaway show from La Blogotheque.

Alex Ross wrote a piece for The Guardian about the confusing no applause rule at classical music concerts. This is the last paragraph:

People often ask whether classical music has become too serious. I sometimes wonder whether it is serious enough. Certainly, it has acquired a veneer of solemnity, but too often that veneer is a cover for business as usual. I dream of the concert hall becoming a more vital, unpredictable environment, in thrall to the wildly diverse personalities of composers and performers alike. The great paradox of modern musical life, whether in the classical or pop arena, is that we both worship our idols and, in a way, straitjacket them. We consign them to cruelly specific roles: a certain rock band is expected to loosen us up, a certain composer is expected to ennoble us. Ah, Mozart; yeah, rock and roll. But what if a rock band wants to make us think and a composer wants to make us dance? Music should be a place where our expectations are shattered.

It’s unfortunate that the arts have become so professionalized that they constrain expression and channel creativity in such predictable ways. This narrative of the iconoclastic musician has already served as a mold of its own for well over a century. Classical music and rock-and-roll both saw the romantic ethos become completely professionalized. It’s a 19th century precursor to the hippies who become investment fund managers.

Like in music, the boundary-breaking urge has become the professional norm in modern art, and it has driven a lot of contemporary visual artists away from valuing technical ability or aspiring at beauty. And the result has been that large sectors of the population see many cutting edge artists as a domesticated parody of themselves. What a lot of artists (and people who follow their every move) seem to forget is that nothing is more original or harder to imitate than genuine talent.

I can see why Ross thinks this criticism applies most profoundly to those people who’ve devoted their lives to seeing the world idiosyncratically and to describing their felt experience. But I think the point in this quote shouldn’t be limited to musicians or artists. The tension with predefined roles exists in every other human endeavor just as powerfully.

It’s beyond trite to blame society for crushing spirits and enforcing conformity. Society obviously does this, but most of us willfully internalize and impose social roles on ourselves. It’s easier than carving out an alternative, especially when we’re so embedded in the reified framework around us. Human beings are all deeply imitative, and so much of social life (and therefore private life) is pure inertia. We basically want the same things, so we just accept the congealed ideas that someone before us set in place as the contours of our world. Loosening the straitjacket is not a special right we should reserve for musicians. I like this excerpt from Ross. But there is no reason lawyers or journalists, or anyone else, should be consigned to a self-executing professional routine.

I didn’t sleep well the other night and found myself listening to classical recordings on YouTube. I’ve never listened to Phillip Glass, except maybe unintentionally through films scores, but his ‘Opening’ is incredible. The chord progression through repeated arpeggios reminds me of Bach’s Praeludium, Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, Radiohead’s Arpeggi.  The visuals aren’t really worth commenting on:

And then there’s this Tannhauser excerpt, for some reason set to video footage of what looks like an abandoned prison or insane asylum. It is a little over the top maybe, but without exaggeration, I really believe this is one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written.

From Radiohead’s live album “I Might Be Wrong”.