Radiohead - Kid A and Paul Simon - You're the One

I listened to the new albums by Paul Simon and Radiohead back-to-back on the day of their release, and have listened to both several times since.   Quite a juxtaposition.   They're as jarringly different as an alien invasion and a conversation with good friend out on the front porch.   One aims to reveal just how bad life gets when our humanity is overtaken by technology and machinery.  The other emphasizes how fulfilling live can be when love, family, and God are at the center.  They represent, respectively, rock music pushed to its most innovative extreme, and rock music at its simplest, traditional essence.  

And they both succeed brilliantly.

PAUL SIMON
FINDS COMFORT IN THE SIMPLE, SILENT THINGS

Paul Simon hasn't had an album since 1990's "The Rhythm of the Saints" (unless you count that collection of songs from his failed Broadway musical.  I don't.)  It's been a long wait.  I thought "Rhythm" took the pop-fusion brilliance of his classic album "Graceland" and refined it into a work of profound art.  Perhaps the achievement was difficult to follow.  Whatever happened, this new collection, "You're the One", finds Simon feeling considerably older, in a contemplative and unhurried mood.   The songs seem at first to be simple, almost too easy, playful, and light.  At first.

But then the second, third, and fourth listens reveal layer upon layer of subtlety, sadness, and wisdom. 

If the theme of "Graceland" was hope, and the theme of "Rhythm" was faith, the theme of this album is how all human effort and wisdom fails in the end, and we need to reach for grace.

"You're the One" is the album's most straightforward number, emphasizing that no story of heartbreak is as simple as it seems.   "Nature gives us shapeless shapes/clouds and waves and flame/but human expectation/is that love remains the same..." In romantic love, we all fail each other, he says, and it's useless to play blaming games.  He seems to point towards humility, peace, and forgiveness.

But there is another, sustaining, trustworthy love that permeates the world of these songs.  On the song simply titled "Love", Simon asserts that as we scramble and strive to know love, "all the while it's free as air/like plants the medicine is everywhere."  It seems that when human beings try to control the world and make things go their own way, love disappears and things go awry.  But this everpresent grace that surrounds us sounds like a higher love, something offered to us. 

Simon avoids getting religious in his explanation of this higher love, except to acknowledge that there is wisdom in the teaching of Buddha, Mohammed, and yes, Jesus.  Underneath all of these is something deeper.  "The oldest silence speaks the loudest/under the deep green sea."  

Age is one of the album's chief themes.   The characters here try and fail and try again.  And the answers, the truths, are never new; they're ancient, foundational, deep.

In the curious parable "The Teacher", a wise man lays down some laws in stone and wisely guides a struggling people to safety.  He might be Jesus, or Buddha, or any famous teacher.  But we are told there came a time where, enigmatically, the teacher "divided in two".   Things start to go wrong.  Differing factions of followers, each carrying an incomplete truth, begin to destroy the world.  It seems that the original, simple journey of faith and love has become an issue of control.  And the world suffers.   The lesson here might be that any well-intentioned, manmade system will in the end become a self-defeating mechanism, and we must learn the limits of reason, science, and politics.  It is a beautiful, mysterious story that ends in a prayer: "Carry me home, my teacher.  Carry me home."  Is this a yearning for a better world, beyond this one?  Or a request to go back to the beginning, before things went awry?

Silence is the center of this album.   Perhaps that is why these songs are so timid in their musicianship.  Simon sings in his usual hushed tone, but it's more gentle than ever before, as though if he sings with any more conviction he'll upset something fragile.  He advises, "You want to be a writer?  Find a quiet place, use a humble pen."  In the chaos of life's hurricane, he finds peace in the quiet rituals of family life.  "Over the bridge of time/I'm walking with my family/and the road begins to climb..." 

It shouldn't surprise us that family is crucial in Simon's new songs.  In the last decade, he must have spent a lot of time with his three children.  It has definitely affected his style.  This is the funniest, most playful album he's ever written.  There are even a few interludes where he jumps into baby-talk syllabic vocal percussion (ma ma ma ma da da da da la la la la oom-bop-a-doom!)   The song "Pigs, Sheep and Wolves" acts as a political satire, but it's also a great laugh-out-loud bedtime story.

Musically, "You're the One" is an album of brilliant, intricate percussion.  It's a perfect match for Simon's delicate vocals, which don't sound as strong as they once did.  The drums bring energy and life to the songs, giving room for mellow reflection, resonant and even frightening prophecy, and delightful humor. 

You can hear this seasoned songwriter settling back into his chair, finding new confidence, humor, even comfort, in this role as the father, the guide, the one who has been there.  "Life has taught me," he seems to say, "that the simple things stand out as vital and enduring." In the resonant hum of the album's profound closing number, he tells us, "I'm heading for a time of quiet, when my restlessness is past." And somehow it sounds appealing.

RADIOHEAD
FINDS TROUBLE IN THE NOISY CHAOS OF THINGS

If Paul Simon's album reveals the comfort of peace, quiet, and simplicity, Radiohead's new album has the same idea.   They just go about telling us in a nearly opposite fashion.

"Kid A" is, in a way, the place that Radiohead has been, um, "headed" all along. 

On "The Bends" they introduced us to an ambitious, electrifying new voice in arena-rock-and-roll.  Their cryptic, bleak lyrics prophesied the coming darkness when life is dominated by artificial intelligence, where the world is green with plastic trees, and where the arrogance and heartlessness of beauracracy has dehumanized our existence.  It was a dark and towering stack of songs. 

On 97's monumental follow-up, "OK Computer", they established that they were the new kings of rock-and-roll.  This album was at once more challenging, cohesive, and conceptual than anything in the catalog of R.E.M., perhaps the most groundbreaking rock record since U2's "The Joshua Tree".  Dwelling on similar themes, "OK Computer" told stories of aliens that shake their heads at the inanity of the human race.  People are lonely, kept apart by their own technological inventions, desperate, disillusioned, drowining in their own self-taught lies.  In the song "Airbag", a self-absorbed, helpless man cried, "Pull me out of the air crash!  Pull me out of the lake!   Because I'm your superhero!"  Packaged in elaborate, brilliant sci-fi soundscapes, the experience was more like a viewing of "Blade Runner" than listening to eleven songs.

Now comes "Kid A".   Abandoning the familiar, comfortable structures of verse/chorus/guitar-solo rock, they introduce us to free-flowing rivers of electronic instrumentals with voices that sound like their choking on wires, with verses that get clipped, run backwards, their words jumbled, and then re-played every which way. 

The first song introduces three distinct, seemingly unreleated lyrics that twist and writhe on a bed of ominous keyboards.   The second song sounds like someone thinking quietly to himself, but the thoughts are a weak, indecipherable electronic signal.  A few lines emerge from the garble, such as "We've got heads on sticks/they've got ventriloquism."  But even though it sounds important, we have to strain to hear it, and most of it is unintelligible altogether.

Next, "The National Anthem" climbs a ladder of noise until we're treated to a long cataclysm of sound that resembles three traveling circuses colliding on train tracks, or, as another pubilcation put it, "a brass band marching into a brick wall."  Only on the fourth track, "How to Disappear Completely" do we finally hear guitar chord progressions and the familiar, desperate crooning of lead singer Thom Yorke.  And it's not until track six, "Optimistic", that there's a song formulaic enough to be a single.

"Kid A" is a masterpiece of innovation, creativity, and sound mixing.  It's important because, unlike most pop and rock which is accessible to the masses, it communicates through sound rather than words.  What signals we are given point us to the fact that our own technological tools are preventing us from understanding each other.  Power is a means of survival, but in using it we trample our own goodness and destroy our own world.  In "Optimistic" (which, by the way, isn't), Yorke sings, "You can try the best you can/the best you can is good enough", but then asserts that our efforts amount only to that of "dinosaurs roaming the earth."  We may have become the "fittest", but our survival is still a shaky proposition.  Later, in the relentlessly harsh techno-dance beat of "Idiotechque", he practically shouts, "Ice age comin'! Ice age comin'!  Women and children first!"

What amazes me about Radiohead's achievement here is that this music, after repeated listens, only becomes more and more intriguing, and at times downright beautiful.  Somehow they've managed to form something profound, artful, and exciting out of the very tools that they warn will be our undoing.

What bothers me is the same thing that has always bothered me about them.  They have a very clear picture of the disease.   They have a notion that the cure will be difficult to discover, and it won't be found in acts of power or technology.  But they have nothing to offer us as hope, as a glimmer of grace in the chaos.  They obviously know beauty, because they can powerfully mourn its passing.  Perhaps if their future efforts take the time to acknowledge beauty, they might find signs of the answer, signposts toward the One whose designs for humankind have been so sorely left behind.

Perhaps, after all, it's best to listen to Radiohead first, and then find comfort in Paul Simon's work.  Love, after all, has always been, will always be, the answer.