My Review: Radiohead - Street Spirit (Fade out)

 My Review 

Radiohead - Street Spirit (Fade Out)

"No one accepts chance as the cause of their success, only their failure."

NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB

Don't take a casual approach to life. Randomness leads to fatality.

(Jim Rohn)

There is a form of control over the will that often gives way under the wings of chance and fate: you cannot understand how certain things have occurred, perhaps not even why.

And you end up with sensations that you caress because, although they cause you pain, you feel they are precious.

Having lost the root, the ancient origin, you continue to live with mysteries that only apparently reveal what happened, as if a Matryoshka doll had been closed with a padlock: nothing can reveal its contents.

This occurred to a song, the one by Radiohead that closed their troubled second album The Bends.

It came as an impersonal and impetuous compactness, as cyclic exaltation in a state of trance, as the sound of blood speaking an unknown language.

Street Spirit is the beauty able to pierce because, as a sweaty song stained with pain, it pillories us: you cannot oppose sadness in its total expansion and, like a skittle, you fall into the sacred void of two hundred and fifty-four infinite seconds.

Forced to remain in the complexity of a repeated harmonic turn and catalyst of every thought. You cannot escape  from those crescendos, those guitars that, by increasing, handcuff your breath, in the same way as that voice which, like an angel with a heavy thought, exhausts you and takes away your strength.

It is the mystery that perseveres and forces the thought to feed on dispersions and a tireless trudging with the capacity to nourish an irrational need for masochism.

Like a mantra which seduces by perfection, it becomes a fraction without limits, you find yourself communicating to your unconscious that not understanding hurts more than understanding, in this rigid sound structure which makes us grieve and savour death in advance, with its melancholy like a latex glove that has stuck to the breath.

And then you become a zigzagging hallucination: each note is a pillar against which you bang your head, a labyrinth of beauty that bites your breath and cements it for eternity.

Radiohead create a narrow tube in which to fall and the direction can only be the arid zone of joy, which, defeated, leaves the flag with the inscription "Street Spirit" on the ground: from there you cannot move and nothing can fade, nothing can find its disintegration.

It is a song that gives thorns to the eyes, the ears, the upper and lower limbs, a watchful coma, conscious but without the possibility of uttering a single word.

You listen to it to die from it.

When a song is a non-place, unscented and grey-skinned, it becomes, by definition, unbearable but essential, like a drug that you have not chosen to inject yourself with, but whose effects you somehow enjoy.

However, it is not a journey that you take when you listen to it, there are no nice clothes and you experience a total absence of privileges and benefits.

It is a pop torture that invades, absorbs and dries your mental beats like those of your heart, to become the eternal incubator which will preserve you from physical ageing but leave your cells already worn out, heroic, exhausted.

I read Ben Okri's novel 'The Famished Road', from which Thom Yorke said he drew inspiration. A mighty read, full of claws and thorns, where a decadent original force finds a hiding place to rest. And this is what happens in this song, which in the end becomes a rest, not a serene one, a missing refreshment that when we wake up measures all our tiredness.

Because it can't be said otherwise: some listenings tire you out so much that you don't even have the strength to scold them.

Played in A minor, the opening arpeggio finds supporters that make it unassailable, unquestionable, and Thom's words, confused and hallucinated, complete the mystery that not only hovers but actually screams its existence.

And when the violin shows its elegant dress and the drums enter like a sweet, curmudgeonly fist, here everything comes together for eternity and beyond: you know your listening will never die.

The vocal melodies become abysses with the arrow pointing to the sky, like the only possible direction.

After their debut album, Radiohead escaped from the clichés of time and created their own cavern where Street Spirit is the deepest and most inaccessible point: there is no reason to understand its meaning, we just have to submit to it without any comment.

There is a nihilistic, heavy form, full of dust and rust in this track and it is perhaps in all of this that the most unbearable point of their artistic journey remains, the one that not only closed their second work but their veins, forever.

And it was obligatory for them, as for us, to die from it in order to resurrect with other identities, the only possible way to escape its diabolical enchantment.

Alex Dematteis 

Musicshockworld 

Salford

10th March 2022

https://music.apple.com/gb/album/street-spirit-fade-out/1097862703?i=1097863295

https://open.spotify.com/track/2QwObYJWyJTiozvs0RI7CF?si=Nwtt6m5QSb6-4JrfHs4xFg