The first half of “2+2=5,” the first song on Radiohead’s 2003 album Hail to the Thief, is a tight coil. Thom Yorke sings alongside a tense drum-machine beat like a sped-up, arrhythmic heart; a guitar line that sounds like a kettle right before it’s about to boil barely holds it all together. The lyrics threaten: “You can scream and you can shout / It’s too late now.” The vocals tease: Yorke drags out the syllables of almost every word, like he knows something you don’t, like he knows something is coming, like he’s purposely building the tension.
Then the song turns — on you.
Suddenly Yorke is screaming:
YOU HAVE NOT BEEN
PAYING ATTENTION
He yells it over and over and over, and forced out of his mouth, the words “paying attention” slip in and out of sounding like “penetration,” a terrifying juxtaposition for any woman. Under the vocals, the guitar grinds and grinds and grinds, screeching like it’s just never going to stop, and then it does, as Yorke screams “PAIN - A - TEN - SHUN” (or is it “PE - NE - TRAY - SHUN”?).
But the song is not over. For its last minute, Yorke sings manically, like his head is spinning around, and the guitar turns into a dentist’s drill, whirring then stopping, whirring then stopping, whirring then stopping, finally, abruptly, for good.
The song is pure adrenaline. Unlike in other Radiohead songs, where adrenaline helps to hone separate musical pieces in one singular and precise direction, the adrenaline in “2+2=5” blows it all open, making room for three distinct movements in just three minutes. This song is, as its title implies, greater than the sum of its parts.
I don’t think I blinked once the first time I heard it. I must’ve been 12. It terrified me. I closed out of the browser and walked away from the computer, shaken.
For months after that, I would listen to other Radiohead songs and actively avoid “2+2.” I would see the video thumbnail, and my heart would race. I was afraid I’d accidentally click on it. I was afraid I’d feel, again, the terror the song had made me feel.
Eventually, weeks later, I worked up the courage to listen to it again. This time, I knew what was coming. I knew to expect the tension in my gut, knew that I’d feel a pressure in my lungs as though air was being forced into them, knew that I’d feel like someone had grabbed me by the shoulders and was keeping me there, frozen still, even as I tried to struggle against them. I listened, still petrified. I listened again. And the more I listened, the more my fear became exhilaration.
In retrospect, it seems obvious. What I had been cowering from were the parts of myself I recognized in the song, parts that I had not yet synthesized into my own self-perception. I was also teasing. I could also turn on a dime. I could also be that whirring drill.
I had gotten used to the longing guitar anthems on 1995’s The Bends, which gave me the sense that my sorrow could be turned into force. “2+2=5” made me feel the same way, but about my rage, an emotion that up until then had only made me feel weak, because I knew only how to point it toward myself. When you’re a boy and you’re angry, people are either afraid of you, or they respect you. When you’re a girl and you’re angry, people either laugh at you, or they call you crazy. When people laughed at me or called me crazy, it only made me more angry. Now, suddenly, listening to Thom Yorke do things like repeat “I will eat you alive” as a matter-of-fact mantra at the end of “Where I End and You Begin,” I realized anger could be sharpened and pointed externally, at something other than me. I realized I had it in me to do that. I could use my rage — at the very least to cut through its persistent dismissal by everyone around me.
A few years ago, I went to a day-long meditation retreat with Zen priest Ed Brown at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in Muir Beach, California. During one of the Dharma talks, he said anger is always a signpost for a different emotion to come later. I agreed at the time.
Anger is always my first reaction to having something denied to me. That “something” usually falls into one of two categories:
My expectations for how something should be or turn out
My perception of reality, which I usually call “the truth”
The first category can hold all sorts of somethings, both political and personal. I am angry, for example, that thousands of people die every year because this country’s ruling class denies us our human right to healthcare. I am also angry that my parents are in their sixties and probably can’t retire for another ten years because they lost twenty years’ worth of retirement contributions when the International Monetary Fund forced Argentina to restructure its debt, eventually resulting in irreparable economic collapse and forcing my parents to uproot their lives, those of my siblings, and mine to move to the United States.
The second category usually holds only personal somethings, like the time I got angry with a friend when she told me she was moving in with a boyfriend with whom she had, six months earlier, said she couldn’t see herself for any extended amount of time. I thought she was lying to herself about the facts of the situation and their implications; I wanted her to see the truth. (I am reminded here of a line from William Stafford’s “A Ritual to Read to Each Other:” “I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty / to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.”)
The first kind of anger is almost always productive. I try to avoid getting angry in the second way, though it’s not always possible. I often think of myself as a bloodhound for the truth and cannot stand it when other people, especially people I love, don’t do the same. This can make me a challenging person to have any sort of relationship with. One time, someone told me they thought any guy would have to be “very resolute” to want to be with me. That’s probably true.
I would have never figured out any of these things about myself had I not leaned into the fear “2+2=5” induced in me. After I got through that first song again, I listened to the whole album. Hail is a relentless, lacerating record. It demands your full attention. It is impossible to listen to while doing anything else. Just when you think it’s about to get exhausting, a silence interrupts a mess of digital noise, or a droning song gives way to one with a sultry beat, or the drums come crashing down on your head, and you’re delighted, or horrified, or both in equal measure and at the same time.
When your eyes are held that wide open by anything for any length of time, it would be a waste not to point them toward yourself, too. When I did, I found that fear could actually show me the door to something very good, and that if I moved in that direction, fear could also turn into the strength I needed to push that door open.
More on that next week.
This is the first part of a three-part series on Radiohead. You can read the second and third parts at the links below: