Wednesday, June 5, 2024

Daily Jam - How to Disappear Completely

Maybe all of the old dystopian fears and nightmares came true. Maybe there was something far more prophetic in those old tomes we read and studied in 9th and 10th grade than we ever believed, Huxley and Orwell tapping into some future feedback, foreshadowing everything. Or maybe it’s all just some kind of Philip K. Dick fever dream gone completely off the rails. Maybe I’m full of shit. It doesn’t matter. Things have gone askew.

This life is a hallucination, “strobe lights and blown speakers.”

And we are the tiny beings scurrying about and hiding within it.

And I keep coming back to Radiohead’s “How to Disappear Completely,” the beautiful , show stopping ballad from the band’s seminal 2000 album Kid A. The light acoustic strum and the growing string and orchestral arrangements of Jonny Greenwood bring things to place of nervous placidity following the abrupt and chaotic end of the song preceding it, the throbbing and oozing “The National Anthem.” But the calm is false, overcome by desperation and denial. And then it all dissolves into ghosts.

Is that where we’re at these days? Fear and chaos followed by a kind of dreadful, eerie stillness? Technology and fatty foodstuffs keeping our wits dull and our bodies and minds sated, while the pigs steal away with everything?

I just don’t know, but about once a week I consider deleting all of my accounts and vanishing in the woods. Is there still a way out? Still a way back? Or has “the moment already passed?”

“I’m not here. This isn’t happening. I’m not here…I’m not here.”

Listen below, our Daily Jam.


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