by Lin, Marvin
And that’s what we should be aiming at. A good piece of music — like Arvo Pärt — is like knocking a hole in the wall so that you can see out on another
place you didn’t know existed. If your consciousness is not constantly evolving somehow or other and you just keep going round the same room again and again, then you’re sort of trapped — and every good piece of music — or art or writing — stops you [from] feeling trapped. Maybe that is what religion is as well, I don’t really know. But it’s not really escapism, that’s the point.
What Thom is describing might more accurately be called transcendence: he’s not talking about “escaping from”; he’s talking about “going beyond.” While escapism can be seen as a retreat, transcendence is a different beast altogether: it advances one toward the possibility of a new way of seeing, a new way of hearing — indeed, a new consciousness of the sort that Thom so passionately describes. It provides a state of mind in which we are open fully to our senses, where our perceptions are heightened at the expense of any intellectual baggage.
While it seems counterintuitive to bypass rationality and intellect, choosing to emphasize our perceptions can be advantageous. In her 1964 essay “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag offers a critique of the over-intellectualization of the arts, claiming that art’s transcendent potential is being deflated as a result of our desire to “assimilate Art into Thought.” Instead, argues Sontag,
[W]hat is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more. Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.
By cutting back the content to increase perception — that is, leaving analysis behind and instead learning through sensory experience — we align ourselves closer to Hugo Ball’s remark that “art is not an end in itself” but “an opportunity for the true perception and criticism of the times we live in,” or Marx’s claim that “Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.” McLuhan, the non-conceptualist perceptualist, went even further with a theory of perceptual foretelling: “Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.”
In his book Noise: The Political Economy of Music, French economist Jacques Attali offers an impassioned, highly politicized treatise that extends the possibility of using musical perception as a way to not only mirror history but also to anticipate historical developments. Attali’s not claiming that artists are mystical visionaries or divine prophets; he’s saying that, because music’s organization is so inextricably linked to society’s organization, any sonic ruptures are indicative of future societal change. That is, because we can see societal organization reflected in music, any new musical organization can serve to forecast the future because music “explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities” of that organization (e.g. the mode of production). Music, therefore, acts as both a mirror and a prophecy of society: we can see where society is headed if we can hear where music is headed.
Like McLuhan’s theories on new technology, Attali’s thoughts on music are often misunderstood because they’re rooted in perception, not conception. But by understanding the history of music as a channeling of noise and violence (an argument central to his theory, but beyond the scope of this book), Attali argues that we can see/hear how the transformation of troubadours into minstrels foreshadowed the shift from feudalism to capitalism, how Mozart and Bach “reflect the bourgeoisie’s dream of harmony better than and prior to the whole of nineteenth-century political theory,” how Jimi Hendrix signified “more about the liberatory dream of the 1960s than any theory of crisis.”
In fact, Hendrix, a perceptualist if there ever was one, made a similar assessment of music: “If there is something to be changed in this world, then it can only happen through music.”
Greil Marcus did too: “If one can stop looking at the past and start listening to it, one might hear echoes of a new conversation.”
Hell, so did Thom: “Sometimes really powerful music can presage things that then happen. Like any artform, there’s that element of seeing into the future, no matter how dimly and naïvely.”
* * *
It’s not surprising that music perhaps best provides the immediacy for perceptual awareness. Not only are our ears exquisitely sensitive — we can tell if people are smiling over the phone; make spatial predictions based on volume, intensity, direction; differentiate between the waving of thick and thin paper or the pouring of hot and cold water — but music, by its very nature, is a pursuit of the senses. I wonder, then, what implications might this have regarding our perception during the act of musical transcendence? In the rare moments when the present feels intensely amplified, when we forget about our rigid schedules and dwell in a pregnant now, when even discerning between past, present, and future seems misguided, might our ears be picking up on something we can’t intellectually grasp?
If the twenty-first-century electronic society is indeed propagating principles of simultaneity, discontinuity, and pattern recognition, the standardized time of the past — based on old attributes of power, control, and repetition — seems terribly misfitting. I’m reminded of Einstein, who said that “the only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once,” that time was in fact an “illusion.” More than just positing time as a temporal dimension along the three spatial dimensions of length, width, and height (which then allows us to specify when and where an event happens), Einstein’s theory of relativity served as the basis for even crazier ontological investigations of time that would puncture our everyday conception of it, just as the railway did in the mid-1800s. From the eternalists and endurantists to the quantum physicists and pendurantists, from theories of duality and thermodynamics to loop quantum gravity and eternalism, the scientific community vigorously dismantled time over the last century, showing how the standardized, linear time — that is, railway time — upon which we’ve structured modern society is in fact just one way to perceive time, if not an entirely false way altogether.
And the scientific community wasn’t alone. While the rigid standardization of time has led to schedules, alarm clocks, and the very concept of “leisure time,” many art movements of the twentieth century sought to destroy the need for any of it, to truly fuck with our sense of time in order to propagate new perceptions residing outside its incessant ticking. In fact, temporal concerns were reflected, subverted, and critiqued throughout the arts — in the writings of Ishmael Reed, Virginia Woolf, and Kurt Vonnegut; in the artworks of the Impressionists, Fluxists, and Cubists; in the films of Jean-Luc Godard, Luis Buñuel, and David Lynch — where linear and structured time were undercut by anachronism and non-linear narratives, where spatiality was offset by temporality. As artist Richard Huelsenbeck so wonderfully put it, “time is a bourgeois construction, to turn an hour into fifty minutes is to be a Dadaist.”
Yet because an experience of music is also an experience of time, using what composer Charles Ives described as its own “transcendental language,” music has the ability to alter our perception of time without getting bogged down by logical coherency. While music has often served to perpetuate linear narratives through the arousal and channeling of desire, much of the musical innovation in the last century has evinced new temporal dispositions — from the adventurous rhythms of jazz (Albert Ayler), modern composition (Iannis Xenakis), and math rock (Don Caballero), to the cyclical expressions in electronic (Matmos), hip-hop (A Tribe Called Quest), and process music (Steve Reich); from the expansions/contractions in noise (Burning Star Core), drone (Sunn O)))), and ambient (Brian Eno), to the deconstructions/reconstructions of musique concrète (Edgard Varèse), sound collage (John Oswald), and improv (nmperign); from the “lost in time” qualit
y of psych-rock (Acid Mothers Temple), afrobeat (Fela Kuti), and trance (The KLF), to the temporal exaggerations in Krautrock (Neu!), minimalism (Terry Riley), and punk rock (The Ramones).
Together, these musics can be heard as an aggressive attack on linear time, where incendiary tempos, bizarre rhythms, narrative displacement, and teleological short-circuiting nullified impressions of forward-moving time. In an essay entitled “New Approaches to the Organization of Time,” composer Elliott Carter critiques the “linear succession” of music, suggesting that
the matter of musical time is vastly more important than the particulars or the novelty of the musical vocabulary, and that the morphological elements of any music owe their musical effect almost entirely to their specific ‘placing’ in the musical time-continuity.
The stakes of this musical collision with time is examined further in author Richard Klein’s essay “Theses on the Relationship Between Music and Time”:
A single moment is at stake here, an impulse, a tendency against the ‘universalization and affirmation’ of time, not the process as an emphatic totality or ‘progress.’ Without this impulse against time, against successivity, against its own passing, music would not be music. The temporal art par excellence thrives on its confrontation of the very thing which makes it art.
Kid A, more than any other Radiohead album, thrives on this confrontation with time. You can hear it in “Everything in Its Right Place,” where the digital sampling of Thom’s voice removes itself from the conventionally linear autograph of time and is instead cut up and randomly distributed throughout with little concern for narrative coherence. You can hear it in “Idioteque,” as Jonny plunders 1970s electronic music (Paul Lansky and Arthur Kreiger) and loops to infinity while Thom further accentuates temporal displacement through vocal repetition and lyrics cut off mid-sentence, defying our expectation of a forward trajectory and approximating the aesthetics of the sample. You can hear it in “The National Anthem,” in which the insistent bassline slices through the fabric of sequential time, imposing a cyclical hypnosis that transcends its immediate context and undercuts the typical chronology of Western aesthetics for a blurred sense of beginning, middle, and end. You can hear it in “In Limbo,” where the standard rock beat becomes elongated and exaggerated, where the polyrhythmic overlaps poke holes in the idea of synchronized rhythm to produce a gap in our sense of time. You can even hear it in “Treefingers,” where the feeling of time becomes so expansive, so dilated that its passage seems to slow time to a snail’s pace and the sounds start veering toward the qualities of space.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that time is being subverted by the very art form whose existence hinges upon it. Time, after all, is music’s biggest enemy: it wants to destroy art, to ensure that all human distinctions will be erased over time. This is why musicians will often aim for the timeless rather than the timely — they fear transition, irrelevance, extinction. It’s also why recorded music can serve as a technological way for musicians to transcend context and project themselves into the future. But if music is, indeed, both a reflection and prophecy of society, becoming increasingly preoccupied with stimulating new perceptions of time, then perhaps this temporal battle is a sign that time, like space, will also some day cease to be the “uncontrollable mystery”; perhaps it indicates a revolt against the schedules, uniformity, and linearity that followed the 1853 train crash; perhaps modern transcendence should be viewed not as an escapist retreat but as a cultural decision, in which its practitioners subconsciously seek sensations not typically experienced through the hierarchical ticking of capitalist production.
Perhaps this attack on time, then, is a political attempt to reclaim it, to democratize it. As Jeremy Rifkin states in his book Time Wars:
In a hierarchical time culture, status is often delineated in terms of how valuable a person’s time is. The time poor are made to wait, while the temporally privileged are waited upon. […] In a democratic time culture, everyone’s time is valuable and no one’s time is any more expendable than another’s.
If one of music’s main functions is to reflect social cohesion, then those musics that outwardly defy conventional categorization, that go against music’s linear narratives, that go against the traditional pulse of time, can be heard as a protest against the status quo, as a futuristic rupture of the kind that Attali described. It doesn’t matter whether or not Kid A’s political content is picked up by its audience; the sounds themselves are political. Its sonic irreverence, however dubious it may be, isn’t an indication of anarchy; it’s an aesthetic reaction against imposed patterns, cookie-cutter templates, and harmonic imperialism. It’s a sonic nod to what could be, what may be. To paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson: its weirdness was tomorrow’s reason why.
Listening to Kid A for moments of transcendence, then, provides the opportunity to feel something beyond those dictated by our power structures; to feel unrestrained, uninhibited, emancipated; to sublimate our desires for sensory ecstasy; to use aesthetics for perceptual awareness, not for conceptual distinction. To recite Thom, it’s “like knocking a hole in the wall so that you can see out on another place you didn’t know existed,” as a way to stop us from feeling “trapped.” This approach to transcendence doesn’t involve using music to escape our political situation for passive entertainment; it desires to use the resulting cognizance to enact a future that resides beyond our traditional conception of time; to not get “lost” in music, but to become more perceptually aware; to listen critically, but to remain critical of being swept away; to become more attuned to our temporal and therefore political constructions, inching us closer to fully realizing Marcel Duchamp’s astute suggestion that “[a]rt is an outlet toward regions which are not ruled by time and space.”
Neither resigned to the ear candy of most commercialized music nor relegated to the esoteric avant-garde, Kid A reminds us how time is embedded in its aesthetics, in our shifting conceptions of it, in our subjective judgments, in its politics, in the media through which we consume it. You can hear it, too: listen as Kid A subverts the static commodification of music; listen as Kid A shapes our conceptions, our tastes, and even our brains over time; listen as Kid A smears distinctions between the past and present; listen as Kid A envisages our future through its medium and through its aesthetics.
I don’t, by any means, intend to discount the intellectualization of music and advance the idea of perception as the be-all, end-all: this interpretation is just one of many impulses over the last century; impulses that have emancipated our bodies, our sexuality, our subjectivities; impulses that have questioned our morality, our values, our culture. But what we could benefit from is balance — between conceptualizing and perceptualizing, between the eye and the ear, between individualism and collectivism, between academic analysis and aesthetic transcendence, between stroking our chins and staring into the abyss, between political engagement and the knowledge that withdrawing in disgust is not the same thing as apathy.
I can’t claim to truly understand the relationship that music has with time, but I do know this: we spend much of this fleeting currency performing, listening to, and thinking about music. This, I believe, says something special about our valuation of music, how it’s beyond “escapism” and beyond a way to simply “pass the time,” no matter how ideologically indoctrinated we are or how snobby we project ourselves to be. In fact, with a fresh perspective, its purpose can be quite the opposite. As Attali observed, “For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible.” Listening to Kid A for moments of transcendence, then, is to not only hear the album itself but also to hear a rupture elongated over time, one that will hopefully forecast a future unlike the terrifying apocalypse articulated so vividly in Kid A.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to David Barker and everyone at Continuum for this amazing opportunity.
> A big thanks to friends/writers/colleagues who helped with the book: Alec Johnson, Kasey Majorowicz, Dave McHugh, Jay Sitter, Judy Berman, Elliott Sharp, Keith Rankin, Joseph Davenport, Jeff Roesgen, Scott Thompson, and Justin Spicer. Also thanks to my family and friends for their patience and support: Chris and Linna Lin, Sophie and Carlo Gulbranson, Jeff and Aleta Lin, Randy and Kris Meyers, Justin Meyers and Natalie Kern (and Denny), Elma/Lana/Nina Johnson, Perry Senjem, Mike Thompson, Dave Fishel, JoMarie Sutton, and Rachel Damiani.
I’m particularly indebted to Adriaan Pels (At Ease), Hugh Newsom/Beryl Tomay (Follow Me Around), Ranya Hatzipanayioti (The Radiohead Article Archive), Green Plastic, the Radiohead message boards, and especially Michael Weber (www.citizeninsane.eu) for the resources, help, and suggestions. And I couldn’t have done this without the support and inspiration of Chris Ruen, Erik Westra, Tony Duepner, Timothy Brennan, Gary Thomas, American hops, and the Tiny Mix Tapes staff (particularly Grant Purdum, Michael Squeo, Mark Starr, and Kyle Smith).
Special thanks to Thom Yorke, Ed O’Brien, Jonny Greenwood, Colin Greenwood, and Phil Selway of Radiohead for writing such a rich and compelling album.
And, most of all, thanks to my partner in crime Katie Lin, who indulged my insecurities and helped endlessly with the book. Wo ai ni!
Also available in the series:
1. Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes
2. Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans