SOUNDTRACK: RADIOHEAD-“Paperbag Writer” (2004).
I had recently read a review of Radiohead’s Kid A by Nick Hornby. he really did not like the album at all. He bemoaned their lack of musicality and, I gather, catchiness. The bass line in “Is Chicago” reminded me a tad of this song and I thought it would have been a funny dig at him to include this modern Radiohead song that is almost a Beatles song but in fact nothing like a Beatles song.
Washes of strings and jittery quiet percussion open the song as Thom Yorke quietly mumble/sings:
Blow into this paperbag,
Go home, stop grinning at everyone.
It was nice when it lasted,
But now it’s gone.
After about a minute a bass comes in. A series of two notes followed by the one main melodic moment of the song–a bass line that ascends a scale. The song follows this pattern–strings, clicks and this bassline.
There’s a middle instrumental section which is just the strings and clicks.
Then Yorke returns, muttering “Blow in to this paper bag,”
The end of the song is pretty much all this bassline, now modified to not include the melody part just a repeated Morse code kind of sequence.
It’s not always easy to know what Radiohead are playing at. But the title of this song is strangely funny.
[READ: September 10, 2019] “Issues”
It’s hard to read a story about a man who hits a woman. Even if he feels badly about it. Even if the woman doesn’t seem all that perturbed by it. Even if he does get his comeuppance.
The story begins with Steven Reeves and his wife Marjorie driving to a party. This observation about them was interesting: “They were extremely young, Steven Reeves was twenty-eight, Marjorie Reeves a year younger.” Twenty-eight is “extremely” young?
As the story opens, Marjorie confesses that she had an affair with George Nicholson, the man of the house they are going to right now. She doesn’t confess that the affair went on for a while–until they got tired of it.
I liked that the women in their neighborhood didn’t care for Marjorie. They thought she was a bimbo who wouldn’t stay married to him for long and that his second wife would be the “right” wife.
I liked a bunch of the story after this. How Steven is at a total loss for words and fears that
he perhaps could not say another word; that something (work fatigue, shock, disappointment over what Marjorie had admitted) was at that moment causing him to detach form reality, to begin to slide away from the moment he was in… and not speak for a long, long time–months–and then only with the aid of drugs be able to merely speak in simple utterances that would seem cryptic.
To avoid that he said the first thing that came into his mind: “ground clutter” something he’d heard on the weather forecast earlier.
While they are sitting in silence, a raccoon crossed the road and was run over by a pick-up truck. The occupants whooped when they hit it.
That’s when he hit her–in the nose. And that’s when I stopped enjoying this story.
Although I do admit that I enjoyed her response. After he hit her, he asks if she is sorry for what she did. She says, “I’m sorry about being married to you, which I will remedy as soon as I can.”
The comeuppance is nice as well. But still.
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