Some Songs Considered

“Rabbit in Your Headlights” – UNKLE w/ Thom Yorke
(Words/music: Josh Davis and Thom Yorke, available on Psyence Fiction, Mo Wax 1998)

In the late 1990s, MTV branded certain videos as “buzz clips.”  These were videos from new artists gathering steam or, in a few cases, videos so provocative that people were, well, buzzing about them.  UNKLE, the collaboration between DJ Shadow and Mo’ Wax’s James Lavelle, earned a surprising amount of MTV hype almost exclusively due to their video for “Rabbit in Your Headlights.”  To this day, it is impossible to listen to this song without thinking of the grumbling man getting hit by cars or the surprising supernatural ending.  MTV went beyond “buzz clip” status by effectively banning the video and only playing it during late hours and with a disclaimer.  This, of course, made these off-hour occasions event viewing and elevated the clip to “did you see that” status. 

Now, if this were a decade later, the name “Thom Yorke” would have shot “Rabbit in Your Headlights” up the trending topics and Hype Machine charts.  In 1998, Yorke was at best a secondary draw; this was right around OK Computer’s rise to acclaim, but the video made far more people in the States take note of UNKLE.  It’s an interesting comparison – a visually stunning (and, to some, philosophically provoking) clip put “Rabbit in Your Headlights” into the homes of a surprisingly wide audience.  Maybe it was the slower pace that buzz disseminated then (think about how quickly the buzz bands turn over these days), or maybe it’s just an exceptional piece of film, but this image will always come to mind when I think of UNKLE. 

More on UNKLE: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm

“Harrowdown Hill” – Thom Yorke
(Words/music: Thom Yorke, available on The Eraser, XL Recordings 2006)

In interviews around the time The Eraser came out, Thom Yorke alternately acknowledged, denied, and distanced himself from the inspiration for “Harrowdown Hill.”  I’m not as interested in pinning down the subject as I am by Yorke’s statement about the song’s evolution.  “It’s one of those really odd things where I wrote half the lyrics before considering what I was writing about.  It happened over a long period of time.  By osmosis, these things were going on and they ended up in the tune.”  I’m not really interested in Yorke acknowledging or distancing himself from David Kelly, a British chemical weapons expert found dead in a mysterious manner, because that’s not what the song is “about.”  If Kelly was the inspiration for the song, Yorke moved it beyond a factual report of the situation and tapped into the underlying emotions.

Yorke’s lyrics with Radiohead touched on ideas of paranoia, detachment, and recognition of a dark undercurrent, yet he called “Harrowdown Hill” the “most angry song I’ve ever written in my life.” His anger, in this case, comes from exasperation.  The “we think the same things at the same time / we just can’t do anything about it” comes from the same place as the Orwellian visions in Radiohead’s songs, but Yorke seems more focused on the inability to act against these forces rather than the things he detests.  If Yorke felt incredulous before at the things he saw in society, he’s rendered speechless by the methods used to perpetuate the cycle.  In that sense, it’s no wonder Yorke wants to distance himself from the song’s origins, lest he go back down that rabbit hole of frustration and anger again.

More on Thom Yorke: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm