‘Dollars and Cents’: Radiohead’s quiet political anthem
Following their seminal album OK Computer‘s unanimous critical acclaim in 1997, Radiohead hit a creative crossroads. Failing to feel enthused by the shower of awards and plaudits their third LP pulled like a flattery magnet during Britpop’s hangover, the pressure that their new mainstream stature brought became too great to bear. Accepting he’d alienate half his fan base, frontman and songwriter Thom Yorke avoided the guitar like the plague and opted to immerse himself in experimental jazz, psychedelic krautrock, and the skewed electronica pumped out of Warp Records.
This inspired swerve away from anything resembling rock proved fruitful, as when embarking on the follow-up Kid A sessions in ’99 with longtime co-producer Nigel Godrich, such an abundance of material was recorded that the band toyed with the idea of a double album. Along with future canonical cuts like ‘Pyramid Song’ and ‘Knives Out’, another shelved piece that saw its inclusion on ’01’s Kid A spiritual companion Amnesiac was the haunting ‘Dollars and Cents’.
Edited down from an 11-minute jam inspired by Cologne experimentalists Can‘s approach of paring down their lengthy studio takes, ‘Dollars and Cents’ engulfs in a skitterish sonic expanse of Phil Selway’s flickering hi-hats and twisting string arrangements, scoring one of the album’s most haunting and menacing moments. Hovering all over Yorke’s lyrical examinations of atomised alienation was Canadian political analyst Naomi Klein’s critical examination of the corporate world’s stranglehold on an increasingly deregulated, hyper-consumerist hellscape.
Published days after the widespread protests challenging the World Trade Organisation’s Seattle conference in 1999, No Logo was dropped amid a febrile climate of pre-millennial anxiety surrounding globalisation’s rapacious trample upon workers’ rights, civil liberties and environmental protections.
Exploring the advertising shift away from corporate selling of products to ‘lifestyles’, the neoliberal demand to maximise profits and outsource manufacturing to countries unburdened with safety legislation or minimum wages, the lack of factory and physical presence afforded the corporate giants the resources needed to swell into the gargantuan, wealth-extracting monsters they’ve become, and we’re all collectively more miserable as a result.
Among Klein’s many newfound, alter-globalised fanbase was Radiohead. Already touching on themes of political inertia and social malaise on OK Computer, the band were so struck by No Logo‘s incisive treatise they nearly named their awaited record after the book before settling on Kid A. Klein’s warning over corporate overreach hit guitarist Ed O’Brien starkly during a visit to India. Witnessing children in a village watching ‘Lucky’ played on MTV, the initial joy was punctured by the deflated blow following the placement of a Nike advert straight after, illustrating Radiohead’s music was just another piece of product fodder on global capital’s grim conveyer belt.
“The lyrics are gibberish, but they come out of ideas I’ve been fighting with for ages about how people are basically just pixels on a screen, unknowingly serving this higher power which is manipulative and destructive, but we’re powerless because we can’t name it,” Yorke told Mojo in 2001. “At the time, the whole global marketplace thing was a major preoccupation of mine. I was reading a lot of stuff about it, and it really became a massive part of my writer’s block. It sounds daft now, but I couldn’t see the point in writing about personal feelings when there were other, far more fundamentally important things to talk about.”
Klein’s cautionary warning has only ever grown more prescient. When the global billionaire class is enmeshing themselves into the current American political administration, the ruthless corporate power grab has made gains even No Logo couldn’t have predicted. Way ago, before throwing on-stage tantrums at the sight of a Palestinian flag, Yorke was crafting the global awakening to the queasy corporate death grip its most politically fierce and poetic soundtrack.
