Monday 14 December 2015

May pretty horses comes to you as you sleep


Excerpt below :- 

This song is about feeling powerless. Note all the quotes in the song. It is someone repeating mantras of sanity over and over “we don’t really want a monster taking over” “over my dead body” and yet that’s exactly what happened.

This stuff was written back in the buildup to war, when there where marches in the streets and people shouting, all of which didn’t do a damn thing.

 
George Bellows - River Front 1 (1915)

Thom Yorke (who was very much involved in that shouting) is writing about how powerless it made him and all of us feel to know that there was not a damn thing you could do to stop it, even though he knew how crazy it was.

The urge to go to sleep is not just the goverments’ desire to make you forget, but also your own, to avoid the guilt of letting this happen.


 
 George Bellows - Edith Cavell (1918) 

I think the “tiptoe around, tie him down” thing is about the realization that the sort of peacenik thinking that we had become accustomed to, the leaders actually paying attention to the populace, isn’t going to work with these people.

 George Bellows - Steaming Streets (1908)

Radiohead have actually said in interviews that this album isn’t about the war or Bush and Blair but about how powerless they felt in the whole mess, so I think this is justified.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_to_Sleep

Directed by Alex Rutterford, the CGI-animated video shows a full-blossom red rose swaying in the wind, and proceeds to show Yorke sitting on a park bench singing the song while around him men and women in business suits walk by rapidly.

In the middle of the video, the buildings, in classical architecture style, spontaneously crumble into pieces and moments later reassemble themselves, only to have become modern in style. The shot returns to the rose shown in the beginning, which is now closed in a bud.


 George Bellows - Central Park (1905)

-beyondthispunkt/firdaus-9898

I felt this resonates the helpless feeling in me now.

Reflecting back at Malaysia’s street rallies Bersih 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, people’s power shouting march, the demonstration, the call for change, the call for eradicating corruption, what does that mean now?

I remembered back in my student days reading Nyanyi Sunyi Seorang Bisu (Lonely singing by a Mute) by Pramoedya Ananta Toer.

We are nothing. We are helpless. 

May pretty horses comes to you as you sleep.