True Love Wastes

by Occult Fan

Radiohead is well-known for their anti-corporate stance along with their deep psycho-social awareness and their perma-critique on mind-control/hive-consciousness/consumer zombiestas, and, especially with Thom, a love for the environment. One would be amok! amok! amok! to think otterwoise.

So, the new album is out, this one is a humdinger. It’s exactly what we’ve come to expect in a way. This is the proper next evolution of sound which we’ve expected to come from them. In fact, to me, this seems a synthesis of the advances made on both OKComputer (to which I am listening this very moment), Hail to the Thief, and In Rainbows, all at once.

It also seems to speak to the ‘Wish You Were Here’ a la Floydian Conceptions Ltd as per the record management/hierarchy/heartless controllers loathing aspect, as symbolized in but one piece of art for that album released in 1975 by the artwork on the vinyl itself, with the space-man hand shaking hands with the mechanical/robotic-man’s hand… so one is the space-rocker, and the other is the mechanical bureaucrat. I wonder who the ‘kicking, squealing, Gucci-little-piggies’ are?

But get THIS. So it’s like, a big deal that ‘True Love Waits’ has finally been made in to a studio version, and I’m going to riff on this notion of living and creative versus dead and mechanical. Because as attitudes towards life in a sort of ‘polarity’, they garner VERY DIFFERENT RESULTS.

So upward spiral can be said to be the space-rocker, obviously the ‘good guy’ in all of this, and kin or akin or both to your dear author, of course, which goes without nary a mention, we still realize that the pure heart and the scream of the golden core of the brightest forests singing the song of nature’s good and raging excitement and ‘itness’… everything worth living for, in this dimension… and in many other ways, in other aspects, in other dimensions as well…

That said.

This is what happens with True Love Waits. Double think this one, for it’s not just a love song, but it’s also a meta-awareness of the situation and love and creation itself. See, this was a ‘fan fave’, so sayeth GQ in their latest ‘hot on top of things’ article, but they’re fuckin’ right to target this issue, for, and the article is quite readable, it is pointed out how this take feels almost… ‘jilted’… ‘sketchy’… ‘creepy’ (one might write a song titled as such).

So here’s the diggity. We know that natural love and excited relationships which are healthy are natural, they are easy, on their own terms, and they should, ideally, dissipate or change when the need cometh, should it prove to cometh.

So the recording industry is like, nah, we gon be sketchy stalker types and get all up in yr business and make yoo do shit and hold you against yr will and stalk you til you comply with our demands. We’ll even interfere with your friends and your loved ones until your comply. We’re the recording industry/unstable ex-lover. I mean, these are loose tropes, but you get the important gist.

So that’s basically what this is about – this was a ‘live’, free-flowing, sweet, loving, free and ‘innocent’ (wash your feet/dress like your niece) which IN ITS OWN CONTEXT is quirky and sweet and also being played live, it is pure, and just ‘in the moment’ and ‘for the sake of its own self’ – taoistically… PERFECT.

So they’re taking something that was recorded live, that was a live moment, that is a piece of the egregore that IS Radiohead via the three-way ‘artist/art/art-appreciator’ triangle-feedback loop that is the pyramid of the experience of art which makes art exciting and ‘a thing’ in our reality.

That said, this song can now be seen in the closing track of 2016’s ‘A Moon Shaped Pool’ as a sort of… stalker elegy made in to Johnny the Homicidal Maniac-fan-person type sketchy… dis/un-ease to the whole damn sentiment. Where it once was pure and sweet, it is now forced and craven.

So this is not only a critique on the recording industry like some sketchy Dexter locked up in a cabin in the woods with strange Truman show aliens watching and controlling it form a higher dimension… wait… what?, and not only is it a critique of not letting go when you should (we hope… that you choke… that you choke… that you choke. We hope. That you choke. That you choke.)

We hope. That you choke. That you choke.

THAT said.

The basic idea is not only is it those two sentiments mentioned but it is also a sentiment on the nature of the interactions we have with one another right now as a society, cut off largely from one another, more shaking of mechanical hands than physical ones, so there’s that too, perhaps, but whatever, that wasn’t even what my point was, I lost the other point for now, but that really does get to the core of what my concern of expressing was – that the creation of this ‘once-live-and-pure’ memories is now being turned in to something torturous and wretched and perhaps there’s something both obvious to be seen in that and as-yet-to-be-discussed’ deep and not-so-obvious left in this.

 

I’m sure there is much, much left to say, in fact, it’s damn obvious.