| Radiohead – Gagging Order Lyrics | 9 years ago |
| It's abt the government's ability to silence people. The catastrophes of government abuse and ineptitude are right before our eyes but we look the other way as they hurry us along and prevent us from speaking out (thus the gagging order). The drug references are a form of self-medication or even prescribed medication designed to dull our minds (take the edge off) and get us through the day without blowing our tops. Not a complicated song really, but strangely beautiful with its ho-hum-another-day sort of rhythm. | |
| Radiohead – Videotape Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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My opinion for what its worth: I think people tend to over-symplify Radiohead's songs by trying to follow a perfectly linear thought process that would apply to a single theme or assertion, rather than the stream-of-consciousness song writing technique Yorke actually employs. This song is good example of how he takes an object and delivers an artistic manifesto of the object's worth and liabilities, in this case liabilities, which unsurprisingly is an object of technology; a familiar theme in Radiohead's work. the first stanza is about the impossibility of using a videotape, or any means of recorded snippets of a person's life to draw meaningful conclusions about them. he uses the extreme example of passing eternal judgement using such a method. at the very least it points out how our mistakes can haunt us through being recorded. the next stanza is about trying to capture the moment with a camera and missing the actual moment. By trying to record a permanent version of our happiest moments we plan to recreate the moment, missing the fullness of it in the process, which later always comes up pitifully short to the reality. the third stanza is the hardest for me to follow, but could deal with how people aren't themselves when they know they're on camera. Perhaps the band's own feelings of distortion by what the cameras capture and portray to the world about them. The 4th is pretty obvious; it's about the crutch the camera is. people find it easier to hide behind it than dealing with the pain of dealing with reality face to face. the ideas of suicide others mentioned could definitely apply here but i don't think it was what the song as a whole intended. the last could be about the false sense of security and false assurances people get by being subjected to hand-picked scenes from a videotape. you could look at it politically but it's also true of advertising and other areas. |
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