Exit Music (For a Film)
Radiohead
Thirteen-year-old Thom Yorke crying after watching Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 Romeo and Juliet. A nearly 30-year-old Thom Yorke with Radiohead working on OK Computer, an album that predicted a 21st century fraught with paranoia, consumerism and social alienation. Twenty-first century dystopian television shows dissecting humanity and the role of technology. Finally, 2017 – a world fraught with emotional isolation, political intolerance, rising authoritarianism and fake plastic trees.
What’s the one thing they have in common? Radiohead’s Exit Music (For a Film), a melancholic, prescient message to run away before all the bad stuff starts, to “wake, from your sleep...(because) today, we escape... before all hell breaks loose”. A glum reminder, at the start of the new year, to keep breathing, not to lose your nerve, and “sing us a song to keep us warm”. And, ultimately, a subversive slap in the face of authority and fascism – “We hope your rules and wisdom choke you.”
The melancholia of Yorke’s voice may disguise the surprisingly optimistic, rebellious message of the song (“we hope that you choke”) but 2017 has been all about reading between the lines and seeking the truth – an important lesson to remember for the new year.
Separator
Radiohead
Separator is the final track from the album The King of Limbs, which is a very short eight-song concept album about the cycle of rebirth. Separator really rounds up this theme in the end. Lyrically, it’s not exactly optimistic nor hopeless which is how I feel at the start of another year.
It is about coming to the end of an important period in your life, good or bad (It’s like I’ve fallen out of bed / From a long and vivid dream), leaving your past behind (Finally I’m free of all the weight I’ve been carrying), but a new life or a beginning is not always entirely all-welcoming and comfortable (I’m a fish now out of water), and, maybe, what is about to follow will just be a repetition of the past, and so on and on as it goes (If you think this is over, then you are wrong).
In other words, there is no reason to think that this year is going to be any different than the last one.