Radiohead’s Optimistic ... while stoned
Mar. 24th, 2023 09:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eerietom“Optimistic” from the 2000 album Kid A has always been my favorite Radiohead song. Ominous and bleak, with a götterdämmerung of a climax, it sounds as if the world were coming to an end. But last night I listened to the album for the first time while stoned. Everything was going just fine until I hit “Optimistic”, and then the universe went insane. When the song ended, I wanted to hear it again. It was like being on a roller coaster and yelling “Again!” to the operator each time the car pulled into the station—except with each successive listen, I notched up the volume. I knew eventually I’d reach a point where the sound would overload and clip, but that’s what I wanted. I ended up listening to “Optimistic” in this manner about twelve times before I decided I should move on, though I could’ve easily listened to the song all night this way. With all that volume and distortion, it became a cathartic listening experience.
Guitarist and lead singer Thom Yorke’s voice here was a real tour de force, darting back and forth between confrontational rocker and ironic choir boy. There were times (no doubt due to clipping) it sounded like he was singing into a tin can with a tidal wave of reverb added on the final syllables.
During the first thirty seconds, there is what sounds like a guitar in the left channel, very faint, similar to the instrument used in the score for Chronopolis (1982, dir. Piotr Kamler, music by Luc Ferrari). If you listen right at the beginning of the film after the first synthesized “moan”, you’ll hear it. The sound returns towards the end of “Optimistic”, at about 4:22.
I was also intrigued by the spasmodic, raspy guitar in the left channel at about 1:30, playing what sounded like 32nd notes.
In what might be described as the choruses (where Thom cries out “Whoa-oa-oaaaa!”, such as at 2:30), there is an odd metallic taong taong taong coming from the guitar in the right channel, almost like someone is banging on a garbage can. It added considerable texture to the already jangled music and noise. The choruses also have a triumphant feel, like Thom had not merely won the Lottery of the Universe, but had seized the prize by force.
At 2:57, Thom sings “I’d really like to help you, man” twice, but on the second “man”, it’s drawn out by the reverb. But the effect is even stronger on the next line, “Nervous messed up marionette, floating ’round on a prison shiiiiiip ...”. Not unlike the climax of Kate Bush’s “Get Out of My House” (The Dreaming, 1982), where she transforms into a mule to scream down the malevolent force haunting her house, it’s as if powers beyond human comprehension had been unleashed, and all hell had broken loose. As I said earlier, it’s like götterdämmerung.
Lyrically, while I’m not quite sure exactly what the song is about, it certainly conjures up frightening, terrible imagery: a primordial survival of the fittest and giant dinosaurs—how frightening would it be to have a four story high, fifty ton Brachiosaur, herbivorous or not, bellowing at you?
As I let the sound blast through me, I felt like a lone astronaut floating in deepest space, light years from any star, ultimately reduced to atoms by the force of the song. Allow me to paraphrase “The Coming of Arthur” from Lord Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1859-1885).
And I’ll finish with a little video I cobbled together by way of illustration. Crank up that volume!
(sources: Space 1999 (War Games episode), a Japanese documentary about black holes, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, and 2001: A Space Odyssey)
Guitarist and lead singer Thom Yorke’s voice here was a real tour de force, darting back and forth between confrontational rocker and ironic choir boy. There were times (no doubt due to clipping) it sounded like he was singing into a tin can with a tidal wave of reverb added on the final syllables.
During the first thirty seconds, there is what sounds like a guitar in the left channel, very faint, similar to the instrument used in the score for Chronopolis (1982, dir. Piotr Kamler, music by Luc Ferrari). If you listen right at the beginning of the film after the first synthesized “moan”, you’ll hear it. The sound returns towards the end of “Optimistic”, at about 4:22.
I was also intrigued by the spasmodic, raspy guitar in the left channel at about 1:30, playing what sounded like 32nd notes.
In what might be described as the choruses (where Thom cries out “Whoa-oa-oaaaa!”, such as at 2:30), there is an odd metallic taong taong taong coming from the guitar in the right channel, almost like someone is banging on a garbage can. It added considerable texture to the already jangled music and noise. The choruses also have a triumphant feel, like Thom had not merely won the Lottery of the Universe, but had seized the prize by force.
At 2:57, Thom sings “I’d really like to help you, man” twice, but on the second “man”, it’s drawn out by the reverb. But the effect is even stronger on the next line, “Nervous messed up marionette, floating ’round on a prison shiiiiiip ...”. Not unlike the climax of Kate Bush’s “Get Out of My House” (The Dreaming, 1982), where she transforms into a mule to scream down the malevolent force haunting her house, it’s as if powers beyond human comprehension had been unleashed, and all hell had broken loose. As I said earlier, it’s like götterdämmerung.
Lyrically, while I’m not quite sure exactly what the song is about, it certainly conjures up frightening, terrible imagery: a primordial survival of the fittest and giant dinosaurs—how frightening would it be to have a four story high, fifty ton Brachiosaur, herbivorous or not, bellowing at you?
As I let the sound blast through me, I felt like a lone astronaut floating in deepest space, light years from any star, ultimately reduced to atoms by the force of the song. Allow me to paraphrase “The Coming of Arthur” from Lord Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1859-1885).
|
Shockwave after shockwave, each mightier than the last Till last, a twelfth one, gathering all the deep And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged Roaring, and all the universe was in a flame |
And I’ll finish with a little video I cobbled together by way of illustration. Crank up that volume!
(sources: Space 1999 (War Games episode), a Japanese documentary about black holes, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, and 2001: A Space Odyssey)
