by shannon palmer

A Week With Thom Yorke's "The Eraser": Day 2

26 July 2006
tell your friends... tell your friends...

Words by Hannah Clemens//Illustration by Shannon Palmer
The angriest song Thom Yorke has ever written is on this album, though you might be hard-pressed to find it. No, it’s not the menacing stalker diatribe of “Skip Divided” or the fed-up declarations of “Black Swan.” It’s the eerie, slightly drowsy slope of “Harrowdown Hill,” written about David Kelly, the U.N. weapons inspector whose death on the titular hill was ruled a suicide after an allegedly insufficient investigation. “Where’s the blood?” Yorke demands, before the song spirals out of control and he repeats, “I felt me slipping in and out of consciousness.” His outrage is clear, but unlike much of the politically-charged music released in the past year, he focused his anger to the finest possible point and “Harrowdown Hill” is effective because of that attention to detail. Thumbing his nose at our expectations yet again, Yorke chose to release “Harrowdown” as the first single from his album, rather than the decidedly more formattable (if censorship-worthy) “Black Swan.” Here Yorke resorts to the most straightforward of choruses: “this is fucked up” becomes a mantra both accurate and strangely soothing. He pleads against Nietzsche-esque mental breakdowns when he declares, “you cannot kick start a dead horse/you just cross yourself and walk away.” This defeatist message belies his devotion to causes that many consider lost, like fair trade and the fight against global warming, but Yorke doesn’t make it particularly clear what that dead horse really is. He has voiced his opinion on so many political issues, one could pretty much choose at random. Unlike some of the not-so-timeless protest music against Bush, Blair, and the war in Iraq, Yorke couples his disgust with genuinely poetic imagery of people being “crushed like biscuit crumbs” despite trying to please everyone. If music has to have serious political weight, the best we can hope for is songs like “Harrowdown Hill” and “Black Swan,” every bit as listenable as they are infuriated.

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