Radiohead and Samuel Beckett

In a paper I wrote during my MA, I argued that Samuel Beckett's writing career can be described as a process of deconstructing the theatre. Though I still have work to do to fully flesh out this claim (if I ever get around to it), Beckett's work suggests this to me because his work, especially toward the end of his career, becomes more and more minimalistic.

Through their repetitions, Beckett's early plays already subvert cherished theatrical conventions with regard to the plot model which requires rising action, climax, and falling action. Conflict is also a tricky concept in Beckett's plays. As his career progressed, however, he abandons more and more theatrical conventions. His plays get increasingly shorter and he begins to dissect his characters--rather literally.

In "Happy Days," Winnie is buried in a mound , without use of her legs. So body parts are disappearing in Beckett's plays. In "Not I," only a mouth is visible on an otherwise dark stage, and in "Breath" no character appears at all. There is only a stage covered in rubbish and the sound of breathing. At the end of his career, Beckett began writing radio plays in English, his characters finally completely disembodied and no longer physically present in the space of a theatre, existing only as sound waves.

Again, I'm not able to make the case fully that Beckett is trying to deconstruct the theatre in a linear and progressive way across his career. I'm not so sure the chronology of his plays allows this argument. But certainly his career trends this direction.

So this morning Radiohead's "The King of Limbs" hit stores, and I got to Best Buy thirty minutes after they opened to buy it (I still like CDs, or I could have bought it digitally on February 18th).

When I listened to it, I immediately thought of Samuel Beckett. It's perhaps a strange thing to compare a modernist playwright to a post-modern rock band. But I see Radiohead as doing to rock music what Beckett did to the theatre. As Radiohead moves forward in time, they are seemingly deconstructing rock music.

They began innocuously enough with their 1993 post-grunge "Pablo Honey" which some have taken to be a subversion of grunge music (using as evidence the eerie similarity between "My Iron Lung" and Nirvana's "Heart Shaped Box.")

Thom York has expressed dissatisfaction with that first album and their albums since have gotten progressively more ethereal and less musically unified. Their last two albums, "In Rainbows" and now "The King of Limbs," are particularly deconstructive. One blogger even calls "The King of Limbs" Radiohead's "least accessible album to date."

In both these albums, the music has become more and more electronic, increasing the level of mediation between audience and artist. The songs are also almost completely without hooks, making it easy to get lost in the music, rather than to sing along with the songs. Finally, it often seems that the melody (where one is recognizable) and the rhythm section are in two different meters, creating a disjointed feeling, as if one can never quite catch up.

The wonderful thing about Radiohead's dissection of music is that it questions the genre and indeed music theory in general. Radiohead seems to be asking just how important our Western notions of aesthetic actually are? Can music that doesn't conform to this aesthetic succeed, especially in a genre as flippant as Rock?

What Radiohead is doing is extremely interesting, artistic, and intelligent. I hyperbolically predict that, if Radiohead continues to make albums, their music will eventually consist only of screeches, feedback, and disembodied sounds. And I'm looking forward to buying these.