But it’s not the music or the beat that places “I Might Be Wrong” at the dead center of Amnesiac. It’s not the weight of it. It’s the shifts in tone that do it -- the spasms within the meanings of words and phrases that make “I Might Be Wrong” an absolutely killer single and and perfect repository for Amnesiac’s suicidal leanings. It’s the actor-like way in which Yorke gives each line its own reading, rising from sleepy, disinterested resignation to very intensely focused bitter anger as though it were the most natural thing in the world. It’s the calm but crazed focus on how a thing changes when you say it twice. It’s frightening, is what it is. “I used to think,” he sings, his intonation suggesting pained reverie; “I used to think,” he repeats, drawing out the word “think” for emphasis. Emphasis? Why? Here’s why: he means “I used to think, but now I’m certain.” “Think about the good times and never look back,” he says at another point, repeating “never look back” with an almost inaudible but unavoidably felt shift in meaning: the first iteration’s a suggestion, the second practically character assassination. As commentary to Yorke’s ever-deepening monologue, which is almost certainly addressed to someone, the music thickens and distorts; instruments are added, faded in quietly, so that when we turn away from the narrator’s increasingly discomfiting low-key tirade, we find that our once-comforting scrambly-guitarscape has become a bubbling lava pit. When, near the end of things and possibly near the album’s interior End of Things, he sings “Let’s go down the waterfall/Have ourselves a good time, it’s nothing at all/nothing at all/nothing at all,” anybody who’s been paying attention knows that we’re somewhere very near the mouth of hell. How’d we get here? We were always headed here. All the signposts are still visible -- the repetitive crab-walking guitar, the wild-eyed keening man by the side of the road. They are not receding, but we can’t retrace our steps. We listen as Yorke repeats himself again and again, pointing us toward the things we saw and didn’t worry about: when we’ve heard them two or three times, we recognize them for the stumbling-blocks that they are, but by then it’s too late. When we heard them first, we couldn’t have known. More so, even, than “Pyramid Song,” “I Might Be Wrong” is cinematic in its sweep. |
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