please slide against the wall, that i may be king (AGREE / DISAGREE)

Thespark.com offers a Personality Test which, like the more famous Meyers-Briggs, rates people along four binary traits to come up with sixteen possible diagnoses. Submissive Introverted Abstract Thinker (SIAT), for example, is my category and Radiohead's. The diagnoses come with cute names: the SIAT is the "Mastermind", the Dr. Evil or Dr. Frankenstein type that hides in backrooms planning to remake the world. The Meyers-Briggs itself, with its own binary traits to combine, classifies me as a "Counselor", a quite different label more in keeping with my teaching job (in part because the Meyers-Briggs puts me on the touchier-feelier end of the Thinker/Feeler spectrum). But there's just enough Dr. Evil in me to understand the label's origin.

Abstract thought, as opposed to concrete thought, is an unusual preference. Does the TV news show a blaze at a 49th street warehouse, or an examination of the town's fire code? Do we see bodies from a double-homicide 650 miles away, or graphs from a multiple-regression study of crime in the viewers' own area? Reliance on logic over emotion, meanwhile, must be freaky: you'd never know which shoe to buy, no matter how often someone yelled "Just do it!"

If our Abstract Thinker type is also Introverted, we start to guess that maybe he's a little too comfortable with himself, that his own thoughts seem too damn satisfactory to him. So, Thespark reasons, if he's generally Submissive, it's not because he trusts all those Concrete Feelers. Like the Unabomber or the inventor of New Coke, he's probably lurking, awaiting the moment to show us all.

We knew Radiohead were Submissive Introverts from their debut Pablo Honey, when they announced to the world "I'm a creep/ I'm a weirdo/ What the hell am I doing here?", and when the difference between the MTV-censored "You're so very special" and the album's "You're so fuucking special" was the difference between a wimp and a timebomb. Abstraction came to the fore on the Bends, full of sad generalities about fading out, dark stars, and unspecified cases of "You do it to yourself". Submissive Introverted Abstract Feelers are just Dreamers, diagnoses Thespark, harmless in their little worlds; but Radiohead started seeming bloodless and cold from the moment they started putting their best poems ("Fitter Happier", "Pull/Pulk Revolving Doors") in the voices of computers.

i replay my defeats for pleasure, to savor my enemy's delivery (AGREE / DISAGREE)

Their fourth album Kid A was a distant, ghostly retreat from verses, choruses, and hooks. Their fifth album, and then their sixth album, were each promoted as returns to pop form, but each was a tad icier than the one before. That's the practical joke of a Thinker, who expects the jokee, unwrapping her weird new purchase, to exclaim "Oh! Ha-ha! How clever!". A Feeling band would expect their fans, taken for suckers, to hear not the album, but only what the album wasn't.

Yet as Radiohead have failed to sell a million copies for three albums in a row, they remain eagerly discussed, the cover models of every glossy music mag. They pull/pulk the revolving doors to the skulls of the unwilling. A master plan indeed.

i find it easiest to reach out and touch someone with a cattle prod (AGREE / DISAGREE)

The diametric opposite to my and Radiohead's personality type is the Dominant Extroverted Concrete Feeler. Thespark.com terms this type the Activist.

I took this test in summer 2000, when I had already accepted a job as an activist: a community organizer for ACORN, who train poor neighborhoods to protect themselves from government and corporate predators. As you'd guess from my having the exact opposite of the correct personality, I was not a good community organizer, and was deeply unhappy even while trying to be an okay one. I probably _was_ okay, or could have been: I speak well, I listen well, I could get people talking about their wishes for their neighborhood. But I lacked the force and urgency: even the people who paid me the membership fee to join seemed to miss ACORN's point that, as members, they should be active. I meant to say "Our knowledge is at your neighborhood's service", but they heard "Give us money".

Radiohead's equivalent moment was their breakthrough third album. OK Computer was built on a love of language, and a hatred of the people who have stolen its power. Yorke meant to be clear: in the guerilla typography and liner notes, in a website full of Reasons for Temporary Lulls in Productive Thinking, in the name of their fan club (W.A.S.T.E). Read Thomas Pynchon as he first imagines W.A.S.T.E. -- the conspiracy perhaps named We Await Silent Tristero's Empire, who communicate their secret plans through openly labeled WASTE baskets throughout public buildings -- and read of

"not an act of treason, possibly not an act of defiance. But it was a calculated withdrawal, from the life of the Republic and its machinery. Whatever else was being denied to them -- out of hate, indifference to the power of their votes, loopholes, or simple ignorance -- this withdrawal was their own, unpublicized, private."

But most of all, Yorke meant to be clear in OK Computer's songs. He lilted (or spat out) truths, hallucinations, and accusations. He stole the rhythms of enemy propaganda: we can sign their names ourselves. "Clear Channel: Open up your skull, we'll be there climbing up the walls". "Shell Oil: This is what you get when you mess with us". "Prada: The ability to laugh at weakness". "McDonald's: A job that slowly kills you". "Virginia Slims: We hope that you choke, baby".

For 1997, it could almost seem prescient: "T-Mobil: Where the hell you going at a thousand miles per second?" Or "The Atkins Low-Carb Meal Plan: A pig, in a cage, on antibiotics". Prescient or -- if you missed every cue about dominance and submission, about who may scream on every billboard and who are left to mutter like street-corner lunatics -- a dim rehash of Gary Numan. "Technology is bad", the critics heard, as Yorke sang about people. "Bad listeners are bad", Yorke must have concluded: his lyrics lost their focus after. His withdrawal was his own, unpublicized, private.

i never ship off a new product unless i'm sure that, by version 3.0, it will work (ABORT / RETRY / SCORE)

When Kid A emerged -- halfway bare of OK Computer's triple-guitar dischord, laden instead with glassy synthesized instrumentals and basslines as repetitive as jackhammers -- some very smart people declared it a flawless work of genius. As these very smart people are very smart, I freely admit they may be right. To me, though, Kid A is an erratic and lyrically meaningless patchwork with three brilliant songs, one of them (the guitar-driven "Optimistic") the album's most conventional. Nor do I see why Kid A should have been otherwise. Radiohead, a band that had driven Nirvana's squall and sneer in the direction of U2's big-sound anthems, were essentially rookies without their guitars: talented but with unfamiliar tools.

Follow-up Amnesiac I'm much fonder of, but I admit it's a wild mishegoss. Without warning it jumps from the cranky dance of a mallet-wielding sewer rat, to the cries of a drowning piano. Then, as abruptly, to the dance rhythm of computers shuffling cards. Classical guitar seizes a crystalline minute, then leaves without a trace. A Dixie funeral band plays a wake for a man who we don't quite believe was ever alive, but probably wouldn't leave now if he had been.

sometimes i listen just to hear myself think (END SCRIPT / CONTINUE)

Hail to the Thief, like its immediate predecessors, is in love with sound. But it's no longer an infatuation: Radiohead make confident judgments what their sounds can and cannot do. For one thing Thom Yorke's voice, harrowed but impossibly pure, no longer drifts in and out like the distracted hallucination of a schizophrenic with too much on his mind. His voice here is almost constant, and frequently doubled in harmony, a strong tenor anchoring his ghostlier falsettos.

For another thing, Radiohead show a firm new command of rhythm, even of dance. Computers play imaginary castanets in tight patterns, and boil over like carefully sequenced beaker water. A pianist's left hand draws a gently rolling rhythm ("Sail to the Moon"), a strong sinister pulse ("a Punchup at a Wedding"), or the nudging wag of a single urgent finger (several songs). The melodic backdrop of "Backdrifts" is painted across a chart's upper frequences with a wavering light-pen, but it wavers to the beat, and the drum machine (and wind machine and tea-kettle) help it keep its place. "We Suck Young Blood" spaces out contemptuous handclaps to mark its foie-gras brass; "Wolf at the Door"'s brass is dragged along by Yorke's low throaty taunting.

"Where I End and You Begin" drives along on old-fashioned bass guitar and singsong vocals, and "There There"'s drums have the tribal pull of the Congo's imaginary ancient metalworkers; my point is, there's always a pulse. When the next song starts, there's still a pulse, and one that makes sense. Radiohead have learned not to smash a mood.

in the beginning was the word, but in the end shall be only logo (CONNECT / REMAIN OFFLINE)

Yorke loves the sound of words like his band loves the sound of machines: Thief's cover is even decorated in scrawled words. Every song gets two titles, even though we listeners will use the first listed, because Yorke wants our tongues to feel out the more abstract alternatives: "Brush the Cobwebs out of the Sky", "Softly Open Our Mouths in the Cold", "No no no no no no no no". &"The Sky is Falling in", "Little Man Being Erased", "the Boney King of Nowhere".

The album's alternate title is the Gloaming. The thesaurus would suggest, instead, the Twilight. The thesaurus doesn't care how weak and fluttery that sounds: like twitter and twirl, tweak and twitch, twist and twit and such House of Drunk As Lords surnames as Twomley and Terwilliger. "The Gloaming" has the weight of "gloom", and "glum", and the menace of "glower". It remembers that a "glamour" used to be "a kind of haze in the air, causing things to appear different from what they really are".

a boogeyman who likes aerobics and crosswords will picket for well-lit closets (ACCEPT / CANCEL)

Although Thief has easily my 2nd-favorite set of Radiohead lyrics, they double less straightforwardly as weapons. Radiohead promised on Kid A to show us "How to Disappear Completely", and often Yorke is populating his own little stageplays, invisible inside his head (which looks disturbingly like the head of American Idol's Clay Aiken, but that's another matter). "Two and two always equal five", "dinosaurs roam the earth", "the sky turns green", and maybe the sky isn't falling in. Meeting people is easy, and building them from letters on a page is easier. Solipcists and narcissists are the most creative people in the world, because they build the world from scratch around them.

we are not the same as you (CLASP HANDS / CROSS FINGERS)

But his stageplays are just a relaxation before dinner, when "I will eat you alive, and there'll be no more lies". Because the enemies are multiplying, a direct line of command from "Nike: We suck young blood" and "Tommie Hilfiger: Something for the rag and bone man", through "George Bush: Hail to the thief", to "the International Monetary Fund: Anytime, anytime, we can wipe you out". It's not quite true yet that "All evidence has been buried, all tapes have been erased", but the Freedom of Information Act's been newly gutted. A legion of government-employed data collectors have been laid off from monitoring the environment and the police and the price of health-care. It's time to start making new evidence.

"Maybe you'll be president but know right from wrong": it's in the most wistfully pretty song on the album, but it's as good a plan as any, and surely one of us should try it. We should probably run for city council first.

Hail to the Thief, unlike OK Computer, is being recognized as political and subversive. It's probably less so, though, because Yorke's post-Computer retreat made a new context. Thief follows one album of Yorke hiding behind aimless lyrical cut'n'paste, then one more of him or his narrator being privately menaced and menacing, personally spooked and spooky. True, he's no longer cowering with fear here, but cowering and fear are major themes.

Thief is in many ways Radiohead's most beautiful album (Yorke's angelic harmonies, the piano, the whirring, the rhythmic rise and falls), and it's their most empathetic. Tongue-tied, overpowered, and on closing track "Wolf at the Door" even threatened by the bills and debts that keep us from protesting the wrong idea in front of the wrong people: Yorke is writing of other people's fears, not just his own.

But even in his sympathy he asks, why are any of us forced to do jobs we despise, jobs that make us do harm, jobs that make us not like ourselves? Because we let the power slip away. Because "yesterday's headlines [are] blown by the wind". Because "YOU HAVE NOT BEEN PAYING ATTENTION". Because yesterday Yorke woke up sucking a lemon, and now it's time for him and us to stop.

image is nothing : thirst is everything (TAPWATER / LYE)

We are the gloaming. We are the gloaming. We are the gloaming.

Recommended: Yes