| It meant to make us
sick: how could it be otherwise? Its sweetness was not cloying but
aggressive and overwhelming. The album had been setting us up for
this all along, and “Pyramid Song” had almost explicitly
warned us that something like this was going to happen: that somewhere
along the line the conflict between feeling something and feeling
everything at once would become too much, and something would have
to give. What we hadn’t known was that we were the ones who were
expendable. Amnesiac was going to do what it had to do, no
matter what the human cost. It was even going to make it feel good
as it victimized us, holding our mouths open and drizzling sugar-thick
melodies down our throats while subjecting our minds’ eyes to
a barrage of images that were not images at all but vague feelings
of threat and resolute resistance whose own futility was nowhere stated
more loudly than in its own insistence that it would prevail. The
song pulsed or swelled like an imaginary sea creature from somebody
else’s bad dream brought somehow into the world of real things
and then dropped off at our doors. We were in love with our own ruin.
It felt so good. Somebody was out to get us. Only their English songwriter
accomplices seemed to know who that somebody was. We had to trust
them. We had no choice. |
