When it comes to marrying politics and music, Radiohead have always been good value for your money. Unlike their near contemporaries Blur, whose chart-pop whims combined with middle-of-the-road politics, Radiohead have never strayed far from right-on radical causes, just as their music has rarely deviated from the tastefully progressive. Some might say there is something insipid, humorless, even slightly sinister about their trademark mix of whiter-than-white ethics and try-hard experimentalism. But when we consider the band’s career as a whole, it’s difficult not to applaud the zeal and longevity of their left-field stance in life and art across the last few decades.
In looking for the origins of Radiohead’s political trajectory, we can identify two distinct forms of conservatism—one old, one new—against which their project has continually defined itself. The first is good old stuffy English traditionalism. The band formed over 30 years ago at Abingdon School, an elite private institution in the heart of the English countryside (think Hogwarts but without the charm and eccentricity). These roots in privilege have haunted the band members ever since and given them a common point of rebellion and antithesis. "I've had a very expensive education," Thom Yorke commented in 2001 NME interview, "and it took me years to come to terms with that. A long, long, long time."
The other source of the band’s radicalism is, of course, the 1980s indie scene. While Radiohead are for many people the quintessential nineties band, we should remember that they were born into the polarized climate of late-eighties alt-rock, where opposition to the pro-market neoliberalism of Reagan and Thatcher was de rigueur. As the neoliberal empire has expanded over the last 30 years, Radiohead have developed in parallel, to become perhaps the most notable living reminder of post-punk’s default stance of opposition toward Western conservatism and big business.
As with the songs, however, Radiohead’s fusion of art and politics took a while to get off the ground. Pablo Honey, 1993's mixed-bag of occasional brilliance and utter dross, did little more than mimic grunge’s nihilistic impressionism. The band were labelled shallow sellouts by certain sections of the indie fraternity at the time, and listening to bargain-bin millenarian lyrics like, "It's like the world is gonna end so soon/And why should I believe myself?" (from PH opening track "You"), you can see why. There was little to suggest at this stage that Radiohead would develop into anything more socially interesting than Pearl Jam.
But with the celebrated reinvention that was 1995's The Bends, the band evolved grunge’s basic formula—anti-corporatism wrapped in a corporate package—in intriguing ways. The Bends featured plenty of U2-lite moments, but at other times the borderline soft-rock was juxtaposed with more subversive presences. Just as Jonny Greenwood’s orchestral, acidic guitar lines snaked through tracks like "Bones," "Just," and "Iron Lung," so too Thom Yorke’s lyrics gave the album a thread of socio-political sophistication not present on earlier releases. While the Austin Powers pantomime of Britpop was in full swing, Yorke’s stark lyrical pessimism stood out as an ethical USP. A stray line like, "I wish it was the sixties, I wish I could be happy" (from "The Bends") condenses the melancholy underlying nineties liberalism in a perfect aside.
Elsewhere on The Bends, Yorke began to develop the distinctive lyrical voice that he has more or less retained in the band’s subsequent output. To be clear, this was something deeper and more socially mindful than a good deal of nineties indie, not to mention the stadium rock with which Radiohead would soon be bracketed commercially. Moving away from the navel-gazing of grunge, Yorke’s lyrical world amounted to a provocative, unsettling vision of Western capitalism swamped by millennial dread. Between the imagistic fragments in "Fake Plastic Trees" and the nightmarish swell of lines like, "You bite through the big wall, the big wall bites back" (from "Sulk"), listeners could begin to piece together a vivid dystopia that recalled the apocalyptic modernism of T. S. Eliot, Kafka, and J. G. Ballard.
But while The Bends didn’t push this blueprint much beyond Dark Side of the Moon-style lament, 1997's OK Computer saw Yorke’s critique of the late-capitalist wasteland attain to new levels of clarity. With the gothic artwork of Stanley Donwood now acting as a sympathetic visual analogue, and with the album’s runaway success placing Radiohead at the heart of late-nineties cultural discourse, the half-world conjured in Yorke’s lyrics came to epitomize the outro of the twentieth century for countless malcontents across the planet. Indeed, among other things OK Computer was a perfectly realized global-capitalist horror film: a cinematic masterpiece in which airplanes crashed, yuppies networked, and the specter of the next world war loomed, while the sound of a beautifully warped Spaghetti Western soundtrack crackled ominously in the background.
And so the stage was set for Radiohead to become something like an unofficial international opposition party for the next decade or so. Lyrically, 2000's Kid A and 2001's Amnesiac deepened the hallucinatory portrayal of a drowned world lying beneath the day-glo optimism of the millennium boom years, while the last traces of stylistic traditionalism left over from the Bends era were banished. Having worked their way into a position of supreme artistic confidence (Kid A’s glances at Autechre and Squarepusher marking the start of the band’s "we-call-the-shots" phase), band members became increasingly strident in their overt political gestures.
What had once been only implicit in lyrics and aesthetic now became startlingly explicit. The Kid A tour of 2000-2001 was undertaken wholly without corporate sponsorship. Yorke's endorsement, on the Radiohead website and in interviews, of Naomi Klein’s No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies gave a huge publicity boost to Klein's critique of consumer capitalism, which in many ways ended up being the focal point of the then-emergent anti-globalization movement against global capitalism. As 9/11 made the so-called paranoia of OK Computer seem like cautious realism, the political zeitgeist seemed to coalesce briefly around the Radiohead worldview. By the time the explicitly anti-BushHail to the Thief dropped in 2003, the band seemed to have pulled off a miraculous feat, producing a statement-record that reflected widespread opposition to global capitalism and its leaders while also being, on the whole, pretty good musically.
In the midst of all this, Yorke established a niche as a kind of anti-Bono. Left and liberal parties in the West underwent a weak phase throughout the early 2000s, such that vocal mainstream opposition to the conservative economics and hawkish foreign policy of Blair and Bush was limited to a few lone cultural voices. If members of the American Democratic or British Labour parties could rarely be seen on anti-Iraq War demos, then Yorke certainly could, and he brought with him statements of pronounced political anger. Perhaps most famously, in an MTV interview of May 2003 in the wake of Iraq, Yorke ranted that, "The people in charge, globally, are maniacs." This would be joined later that year by a description of Bush and Blair as "liars," and in 2006 by a post on the official Radiohead website calling for Blair’s immediate resignation.
Of course, there are limits to Yorke’s approach, and to the notion of Radiohead as a great political band. Making a few pointed public statements and upping ticket prices to account for the lack of sponsors hardly amounts to a meaningful revolutionary praxis. Moreover, following their high-watermark of political engagement throughout the aughts, both Yorke and Radiohead have been relatively ideologically restrained in recent years. The decision in 2007 to make In Rainbows a pay-what-you-like download was laudably prescient, and recent A Moon Shaped Pool single "Burn to the Witch"—variously interpreted as an attack on Donald Trump, the scapegoating of immigrants amid the global debate over nativism, and/or the call-out culture of social media—looks like an interventionist revival of sorts.
Yet Yorke has been noticeably reluctant since the mid-aughts to make the leap from making ad-hoc public statements in favor of environmentalism, pacifism, and anti-racism to actual involvement in organized politics. With Bernie Sanders in the States and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK beginning to offer concrete alternatives to the capitalist status quo, Radiohead run the risk, in their lack of support (thus far) for these figures, of appearing as merely another band of self-important celebrity spokesmen. Viewed harshly, Yorke and co. are wealthy English white guys who might occasionally recruit politics as an artistic catalyst, but who are unwilling or unable to divert time and energy to real political activism beyond an impassioned soundbite or appearance at a climate-change concert.
Will Radiohead now actively renew their political commitments? Though largely focused on human relationships, A Moon Shaped Pool suggests maybe—propelled by "Burn the Witch" and global-warming warning "The Numbers"—butonly time will tell. But in the broad sweep of retrospection, they should always be given credit for the way in which they stood out circa 1997-2006, as one of the few pop-cultural presences with the bravery and awareness to sing and speak of a world falling headlong into barbarism. At the end of that period, on his best and most politically-minded solo creation "Harrowdown Hill," Yorke’s elegy for the Iraq Years climaxed beautifully with the refrain: "We think the same things at the same time/We just can’t do anything about it." That may have been true back in 2006, but this is 2016, and there is plenty to do—if only we can find common cause, and someone to amplify it.