Against this backdrop, a revitalization of Hail to the Thief makes lots of sense. The misalignment that’s hard to ignore—the 2 plus 2 equaling 5, if you will—is of course the band’s knotty response to the ongoing Palestinian genocide, which has marred their public perception as of late. It all came to a head after an incident at an Australian Thom Yorke solo show in October of last year; Yorke reacted to an audience member/protestor demanding he “condemn the Israeli genocide of Gaza” by exiting the stage. He returned to play “Karma Police,” and six months later made a Notes app statement on social media that one could read as either surprisingly supportive of Palestine (he calls the situation a “humanitarian catastrophe”), disappointingly mealymouthed re: Palestine (he cannot help but condemn Hamas a couple paragraphs later), or, perhaps most accurately, just deeply unhappy about using social media statements as vectors for any kind of political praxis at all. No one left this situation satisfied, as is generally the case with anything involving a Notes app screenshot.
Still, it feels impossible to write about a newly released live version of Hail to the Thief without wondering how artists once able to conjure imagery so evocative of the horrors of lopsided military annihilation—“Hey, we can wipe you out anytime,” or, “I will lay me down/In a bunker underground/I won’t let this happen to my children”—could end up in such an ambiguous political position during a “catastrophe” that feels less and less ambiguous each day.
“Conscience does make cowards of us all,” as Hamlet once said, talking about the doubts that arise when you overthink things. Which, funny enough, is not something that seems to have happened in the making of Hail to the Thief! About 80% of the album was recorded in just two weeks (OK Computer, in comparison, took nearly a year, and Kid A/Amnesiac even longer than that), with as many elements captured live in the studio as possible In a 2003 interview with Yahoo! Music, Yorke said, “I was writing stuff that I wouldn’t normally write lyrically, ’cause I really didn’t have time to think about it”; in a Rolling Stone interview from the same year, Yorke was asked to explain the opening lines of the album (“Are you such a dreamer/To put the world to rights”) to which he responded, “I don’t know where those words came from.”
So when Yorke writes in this new live album’s press release that he “barely recognized” the band on the live recordings, I don’t think he’s exaggerating. The bitterness and rage captured in the studio and expanded upon in these live performances isn’t carefully crafted after all—it’s instinctive, unconscious. This is not a carefully worded political statement, but an energy gathered from the band’s surroundings and channeled into dense, difficult, exhilarating sound. The timing even reflects this: Though billed as an Iraq War protest album, Hail to the Thief was written, recorded, and even performed live months before the surprise invasion of Baghdad began. “I think it’s a death knell for any piece of work to be described as ‘political’ and then be cornered forevermore having to contextualize that,” Yorke said recently. His perpetual discomfort with external attempts to define the abstraction in his songwriting is baked right into “Myxomatosis: “I sat in the cupboard and wrote it down in neat… But it got edited, fucked up/Strangled, beaten up.” I can see why he feels so tongue-tied, even after all these years.
It’s not very satisfying to think of Radiohead as a conduit rather than a changemaker, especially right now. People say “don’t shoot the messenger” because the messenger often delivers you a message that makes you want to shoot something. I don’t want to let them off the hook so easy—look at my consciousness, making a coward of me!—but Hail to the Thief (Live Recordings 2003-2009) does feel like a particularly authentic musical expression of what the band truly is, and maybe always has been: not a band making protest music with a particular call to action, just a band checking the barometers and pointing out how fucked we already are. There is much dissatisfaction in confronting absolute doom, and maybe that’s the point. “Your alarm bells, they should be ringing,” Yorke yelps on “The Gloaming,” whose live version is underscored throughout by a diced-up sample of one of the lyrics: funny, ha ha, funny, how. By the end, the sample gets triggered over and over again. The laughs become mere syllables. The repetition feels sinister, then senseless, then sinister all over again.
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