A Moon Shaped Hole in My Heart

The hole or the pool or the crater or whatever it is on the cover artwork of Radiohead's new record, 'A Moon Shaped Pool,' looks like the feeling you have in your chest and stomach when you listen to it.  The music is tense and nervous, sickly sweet and disgusting.  This is not the music of the day.  It does not make you want to fuck.  It is not uplifting like an affirmation yelped into a morning mirror as if to charge or embolden.  It is not the humdrum singalong whistling tune by which to work your day around.  This is grown-ass men making thoughtful, artistic music as commentary, warning, diatribe, bombast and spectacle.  The children will not like 'A Moon Shaped Pool,'-remove them.


When a band composes music filled with minor chords and dark lyrics and dissonant sounds people tend to characterize it as depressing or even suicidal.  They mock what they don't understand.  The music affects them darkly.  It is not what they want or expect from their music.  An aesthete by contrast appreciates being moved at all costs.  If art bothers, confuses, invigorates in any direction or spurs something inner, some sort of inertia by means of the five senses, it is successful in its endeavor. Art moves and 'A Moon Shaped Pool,' is high art indeed. 


If you are an aesthete you will appreciate the opening track, 'Burn the Witch.'  It is an apt allusion to any witch hunt.  It is not necessarily about immigration, illegal or otherwise, in the United States, but the general sense you get, of gathering around the bar or the office and complaining about others while avoiding eye contact, or responsibility for your own personal witch hunt, is apt.  You live in a time of witch hunts, with a drumming, forward beat, jaunty in its momentum, blithe even.  There is no time to think, only to burn the witch. 


'Dreamers,' the second track is a dull warning about how impotent dreams are.  You can spend your life dreaming the world is somehow bright and cheery, the way the music of major chords and bright lyrics portray life.  However, if you view the world in such a way you have constricted your view to a narrow glimpse of images projected onto a wall, perhaps in your own mad cave, for the purpose of believing something that is simply not true. 'Dreamers' reminds you that life can be beautiful and sublime but only if viewed while awake, confronting the darkness with eyes wide open.


'Decks Dark,' asks if you have had enough of your former partner, (perhaps.)  Are you over him who exposes the truth?  Are you ready to go back to the cave or do you want to know it all?  Certainly you can choose enlightenment but if you don't, the foray to knowledge and life will be just a laugh, and certainly the decks will be dark. 
It's not as if Radiohead is so serious or so self involved as to believe their art, their music, can change the world, wake people, open you.  Still, they offer ideas with mood and intensity that spirit you forward, tumbling into the abyss to arrive wherever you may, maybe even a moon shaped pool. 
On 'Desert Island Disk' you are offered a respite from the weight of murky light.  Yorke tells you he feels light.  (You are sure he means it both ways.)  The song is all positivity.  If there is a Radiohead song you will want to include on your desert island disk it will be the hopeful one, the one that assures you no matter how much understanding you arrive at, no matter how much isolation it brings you from those who would run and hide from the light as if the suffocation would not give way to a higher plane, you know the truth.  "Different types of love are possible."
It is possible this collection of songs dating back into the 90s are culled together for far more personal reasons.  They may just be Yorke's epitaph punctuating the end of his own long term relationship.  Perhaps the full stop period is an ending that still tastes like bad medicine.  Perhaps you have experienced your own 'Ful Stop,' a partner who betrayed trust and threw it all away.  She put the full stop on your relationship and Yorke has a revelation for her, "the truth will mess you up."
When love turns cold in the heart of someone with 'Glass Eyes,' it can only sound as exquisite as this when Radiohead composes it, (with the help of an accomplished string section.)  You are familiar with this setting, the dark, angry, complicated lyrics with the candied falsetto floating over the top of it all.  In many ways it does not matter to you what the singer croons.  On the other hand you know the message will sink in and take you later by surprise.  You can't help recalling that former partner with the glass eyes.  All the warmth you once knew with her turned icy cold.  Icy fucking cold.


'Identikit,' continues the post mortem.  It is a bitterly dissonant song musically full of confusion but with a melody you recognize at once.  It is the melody of grief, of the aftermath.  Broken hearts do make it rain and the tears you shed are personal and for your kind.  In so many ways 'A Moon Shaped Pool,' conjures the pain social media seems to add to breakups.  'Identikit,' may be the acidic answer to the pain of seeing and hearing.  You would rather see your former lover as just another anyone, a common patchwork identikit of anyone, anyone at all, not someone special who knew, who knew...
L'est you ever think Radiohead is in anything short of all that came before, 'The Numbers,' proves their discography is the culmination of all that came before.  It feels like the continuation of the Beatles and Led Zeppelin and Neil Young.  The Numbers is pure message.  The future is inside us.  We are of the earth.  Open on all channels.  One day at a time.  We call upon the people.  People have the power.  The numbers don't decide.  There's much more.  You listen and you fall in love with hope and truth all over again because amidst all this heartbreak you know, everything out there is in here.  Wonder.
'Present Tense,' is a staggering attempt at empathy.  Yorke puts himself in her shoes and identifies through the pain with how lost one can be when confronted with so much growth. 


On 'Tinker Tailor Solder Sailor Rich Man Poor Man Beggar Man Thief,' you feel like tagging her.  She is it.  You've said your peace.  The pain comes and goes, ebbs and flows, and if you are suspicious, if you are paranoid, you must be it.  You can't help but want to tag her again to rid yourself of this pain. 
'True Love Waits,' may have been about chastity rings when it was conceived 20+ years ago but here, where it belongs on a Moon Shaped Pool, it becomes the simple cry it is.  It is a promise that can't be kept of course, and a plea.  "Don't leave."  You can't help but feel this way in the wake as the water crests you under.  You can know the end was inevitable.  You can be at peace with the outcome but you will still have those moments when you remember how good it was or more importantly how good it could have been, how good it still could be if somehow it all came back together in a perfect way, (because it would take a perfect way after all this, right?)  "Don't leave," Yorke intones.  "Don't leave.  The burden of loss and sadness in unmistakable.  Love hurts.  And maybe true love is a juvenile emotion.  It seems that way when you try so hard, when your heart is as pure as the chastity of a young supplicant, When you have no control and can't keep what you love.  "Don't leave," you plead,
'A Moon Shaped Pool' is not easily defined.  It is not this kind of record or that kind of record.  It is a long way from the sets of stellar pop songs The Bends and Pablo Honey were.  It is not quite OK Computer, Kid A or Amnesiac in their knowable conceptual themes.  It is more, really.  It is all of those things and In Rainbows too, but with greater maturity and perhaps even complexity, (you think.)  By the way, Street Spirit would fit like a jigsaw puzzle on this record.


As for the album art, the moon shaped pool is actually a face, a specter or apparition, appearing in an aftermath of confusion.  Maybe it's Yorke's face separated out by so many shades leaving only his right eye and what looks like a sprawling nose and a puff of smoke coming from his mouth.  Like so much of Radiohead's music this collection represents a person alive and at odds with his environment, (therapy) thereby achieving an uncommon, prescient harmony. 

american idolatry

for the first several years of american idol i disdained the show on principle. it was not the idea of a talent show that bothered me. it was the idea that the masses would hold sway and somehow stamp a winner with some sort of seal of the masses as if the masses could possibly be right about anything much less something that involves taste.

i harbored a certain internal struggle over the whole thing. weekly at work in staff meetings i would listen to my boss and most if not all of my colleagues talk about these young singers i knew not one iota about. names like: kelly, justin, ruben, clay, fantasia and william and bo, were bandied about as my peers expressed their tastes and formed a club of inane troglodytes with nary a clue about music or sophistication or complexity, to say nothing of art.

one day a woman i worked with who was in her 50s came into the conference room and announced her devotion to american idol contestant bo bice. i had seen the guy on a talk show the night before. bice had pranced out onto the set of letterman or some night time talkie, in bare feet, confirming all of my suspicions that the american idols were a musical cast of neanderthals hell bent on taking every sniff of a 5-year-old trend from the clubs of west hollywood or the pages of la weekly or the airwaves of 'morning becomes eclectic,' to the streets of omaha and montgomery and cheyenne in some kind of bastard, milquetoast form. bare feet? seriously, bare feet? was this to make him seem an artist? was it to grant him cache with the uber-chic? was bare feet his street cred with the hippie crowd?

this woman i worked with raved on about how handsome this moron was, as if he might come through the conference room door at any moment to discover her singing his praises at which point he would glide up onto our conference room table and wiggle his bare and glistening toes in her adoring grill bestowing unknown blessings from a tribe of backwards, bare-footed, black holes of talent, buffoons bent on beating america over the head with the cheap, the mundane, the unoriginal and finally the unbearable. blech!?!

in these early years of american idol i did catch glimpses of these fabricated pop stars on the e channel, at awards shows, on conan or craig or at halftime of the pro bowl. i saw ruben and was non-plussed. for me he was just another r&b singer doing what all r&b singers seem to do, (save for the good few,) croon in soulful voices about love: lost love, hott love, love gone bad, cheap love, psychotic love, sexual love, angry love, love triangles, self love or taboo love. i saw kelly clarkson and thought she was very listenable even if i would never buy her record. i figured with an entire nation to audition it made sense the show, with its boffo ratings, had come up with some talent.

still, i could only mock these budding stars. i imagined their parents in orlando suburbs braggin to their friends about their child's success over a triple play sampler and cokes in the bar at chili's. i thought of their brooding siblings angrily traipsing out onto the set of tyra or jerry or ellen to tell their monstrous stories of stolen fame and siblings gone wacko. i saw malls full of children ipodding their way around hot topic to the tunes of clay, confusion brewing just beneath their artesian teen spirit. over beers with friends i coolly predicted the number of years before the idols i knew would dissipate from the public consciousness. (fantasia, two years tops. carrie underwood, five years. bo bice, six months.) bice was extra despicable because he seemed to be selling the genre of music i preferred but on closer inspection he was no better than and no worse than the crap-acts of the day such as creed or nickelback.

season five was my first year watching idol. i did not watch every episode or anything but i saw enough and even rooted for taylor hicks. hicks, the eventual winner of season five, looked like he was 40 and conveyed a genuine sense of joy when he sang on american idol. part of me thought his childlike behavior was phony but that part gave way to the part that believed and so i came to root for hicks to win the contest. well, that is until i noticed katharine mcphee. this girl sang like nobody's business and was super cute and so i switched my allegiance. other contestants included elliot yamin who seemed like a nice guy and who sang well. kelly pickler was good for a country singer. ace young was an interesting singer, too, but chris daughtry became the breakout star of the season. he has since sold millions of records to adoring fans of bland, electrified, 4/4, blues-based rock music with weak lyrics and zero imagination or originality. daughtry was every bit as bad as bo bice, even if he did seem a nice enough fellow when he was on the show. eh, two steps forward and one step backward for my american idol sensibility.

thanks to daughtry, (and his boring rendition of u2's 'sunday, bloody sunday,') i tuned into the following season sparingly. not even sanjaya captured my imagination, (though i could not figure out how his sister did not make it onto the show as well as another girl i had seen early on who was an opera singer and who confessed to being in trouble for even auditioning. Whatever happened to that girl?) the eventual winner was jordin sparks who is apparently having a great beginning to her career. blake lewis had a certain jamiroquai thing going on and seemed like someone who would have a career but by all accounts that has stalled.

i returned for season 7 and watched regularly. finally, the formula had penetrated my gruff exterior and i became yet another sycophant, glued to my television most tuesdays and wednesdays. jason castro sang buckley's version of hallelujah. brooke white betrayed all the conventions of the show and was not punished for doing so. michael johns was somehow despatched super early. (i thought he would be the winner for sure.) i gained a non-pervy, old-man crush on syesha mercado and near the end of the season cast my first ever vote on her behalf. i liked carly smithson and ramiele malubay as well, and had to admit david archuleta sang well, even if i despised his songs, his look, and his fans. as for the winner, david cook, he is a good singer with a nice sense of what he is doing. last week he appeared on season 8 and as usual, he was self-deprecating and humble in his success. his musical style is altogether palatable as well. i would not be surprised if he evolved into someone whose music i would pay for.

(michael johns)

and so i have come full circle. this season i do not think i have missed more than one episode. like everyone i know i fully expect adam lambert to win if only because he is like a seasoned pop star already. he sings like a cross between ronnie james dio and freddie mercury. his choices have been consistent with his broadway background in as much as they have been theatrical and inventive.

i'm sold. i am an avid viewer of american idol now. in part, it may be because there has been a shift in the show. it seems to me more coldplay and jeff buckley and chris cornell songs are making it into the show. i think one day a nuanced singer in the style of a tom waits or even bob dylan, (in other words, someone who does not necessarily sing so sweet you can get a cavity from listening to it,) could advance within the a.i. structure.

in a way it actually seems like america is evolving as seen through the prism that is american idol. the singers have not only gotten better they have become more interesting, more artistic and more polished.

some of my friends think i've gone looney. they think by watching american idol i betray leonard cohen and thom yorke and dylan and dengue fever and cordrazine. i think as the show and the talent therein evolve and improve it is just silly to remain opposed to the kids of american idol just for the sake of being opposed to them, just to remain somehow ultra-cool or sophisticated. a talent show is a talent show after all. it is as good as the talent therein and as evidenced by lambert, the contenders nowadays are as good and better than the established talents of the day, (if not the artists.)

(adam lambert)