Radiohead’s “House of Cards”
David and I recently did a post on the disturbing phenomenon of sex parties at Catholic colleges. Since the time of that post, I have come across the darkly beautiful music video linked to below from the alt-rock group “Radiohead.” The title of the song is “House of Cards:”
The song explores, with as much artistic depth as Generation X can muster, the interconnection of swinger’s parties, the technologization of man, and civilizational disintegration. It captures the encompassing despair of these sordid gatherings. The first line of the song, “I don’t wanna be your friend, I just wanna be your lover,” is the sort of twisted, dehumanizing compliment one might hear at a swinger’s party. The video suggests that the bursting is nigh of the bourgeois bubble of technology and suburban comfort that makes it possible for swinger’s parties to exist as sad realities of our age.
Amidst all of the dark themes in the song, the human spirit lifts above the carnage in the haunting vocals of Thom Yorke, the lead singer and songwriter for Radiohead. And the beauty of the human person shines through in the video, a beauty that even the darkest nihilism of our age cannot completely cover over. Even the thought that man is a collection of electronic data particles, which is one of the implicit themes of the video, cannot destroy our intuition of the beauty of the person. Our technological age induces us to assimilate ourselves to our machines. We are even compelled to think of ourselves as nothing more than ordered bits of electronic data. This pretense is intimately connected to our quest for loveless sexual exploration. But a finely honed artistic sense, as is expressed in this video, sees through, consciously or not, this deformed technologism.
The video is well worth viewing and the song worth listening to. The music of Radiohead is perhaps at the pinnacle of the alt-rock genre, for whatever that might be worth. It is often said that music is the condition that all art aspires to. In that spirit, I have often told people that the music of Radiohead is the condition that all of postmodernity aspires to.
Here’s an interesting interview that Thom Yorke gave to the Christian publication “Third Way” a couple of years ago. Obviously, given his genre of music, one would not expect Yorke to have much sympathy for Christianity. His religious preferences are western Buddhism and eco-radicalism. Noam Chomsky is his Promethean figure of choice. He is instinctively nihilistic, to be sure. But he remains, musically, a poet rather than a political hack. One could rightly say of him that he is a gifted artist working with the debased materials of his age.
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I share your admiration for Radiohead, and very much appreciate your take on the song/video. I would have a quibble: is the idea of man as “a collection of electronic data particles” really an “implicit theme,” or is it rather a suspended pre-supposition? After all, that is how the boy and the girl are portrayed.
Comment by Chris Altieri — January 1, 2009 @ 12:43 PM
The interview you linked to was great. I felt like the interviewer was able to ask Yorke the important questions in a non-threatening way so that you really get a glimpse into his world-view. He didn’t attack Yorke at all but simply let him speak for himself. In the end, as you say, he’s revealed as being “instinctively nihilistic” – I would say the emptiness of his world-view is exposed in a way that simply says, “Here it is.” As he said, once he achieved the fame he thought would bring him joy, there was almost nothing else to live for, and so now he only lives for the music he can produce. And you won’t get that from a Rolling Stone interview. Only a Christian would ask, “Can you put a name to the things that are nudging [inspiring] you?” But asking that question is going to get a more ‘real’ response than, “Aren’t you afraid that you might be opening yourself to demonic influences???”
I think we as Christians need to engage the culture in this way more. We need to get them to put a name to what is implicit in their world-view. They’ll end up doing the work of exposing themselves much better than if we are only thrusting accusations their way (though there is a place for external critique).
Comment by Jim Schuster — January 3, 2009 @ 5:24 PM
Chris,
I would need to know more about what you mean by “suspended pre-supposition” and how that is distinguished from “implicit theme.” I think that the producer of the video sees beauty even in the technologization of the human person, whereas I think that the video is beautiful in spite of such a vision. True artists have a way of capturing beauty even in spite of their conceptual confusions. They aren’t fully conscious of what they’re doing. Socrates realized this. He thought that he might find wisdom from the counsel of poets. He came to realize that they were conduits of something beyond themselves that they had no real conscious apprehension of. Poets, he came to realize, are not sages.
Jim,
I agree with what you’re saying. I wonder if Thom Yorke, before this interview, had ever before in his life had a conversation with a Christian — Bono notwithstanding.
Comment by hierothee — January 4, 2009 @ 5:27 PM