The many colors of Radiohead’s latest album, In Rainbows, are brilliant. In rainbows is coloring music format and sound. Until its cd release date, the album is available in a pay-whatever-you-want downloadable MP3. What’s more is the music and lyrics are a veritable pot of gold.
In Rainbows echoes of The Bends but with greater sophistication. Unlike many of their recent albums, In Rainbows also
offers some catchy beats and more melodic, symphonic sounds. There’s not a bad song on the album. Lyrically, Yorke is hard to follow. He ranges from body entrapment to the “pearly gates” (Videotape).
Videotape spins the Christian notion of having to account for your life to God when you reach heaven. Yorke uses this theme to reflect on both good and bad encounters in his own life, ending with “the most perfect day I’ve ever seen.” The lyrics are riddled with postmodern let-downs…”always ending up where I started,” “I’m trapped in this body and can’t get out,”hit the bottom then escape.” Yet, there is the dancing hope of “light”— on your back, in the 21st century, and so on.
Plunge into the color and explore the meanings and I think you’ll find in the rainbows a philosophy of pop culture—hopeful and disillusioned, earthy and metaphysical, conflicted and beautiful.