MARK JUDGE: Radiohead Within the Forest Dark.

The clearest connection between Radiohead and Dante was Rachel Owen. Owen, who died from cancer in 2016, was an artist and medieval scholar who wrote her doctoral dissertation on Dante. Owen was also Thom Yorke’s partner for twenty-three years. The two met as art students at Exeter University and had two children together before separating in 2015. In his book Radiohead: Life in a Glasshouse, British journalist John Aizlewood notes that the composition of “In Limbo” off the band’s 2000 masterpiece Kid A was partly inspired by “the Dante’s Inferno audiotape Rachel Owen played in the car as she studied for her PhD at… University of London.” When Kid A was launched, fans went to the Radiohead website to find this quotation:

now must thou cast off all sloth…. for sitting on down or under blankets none comes to fame, and without it he that consumes his life leaves no trace of himself on earth, as smoke in air or foam on the water.
rise, therefore,
conquer thy distress with the soul, which conquers in every battle
if it does not sink with its body’s weight. there is a longer stair which must be climbed. 

This is a quote from the Inferno (XXIV, 46-55). While the press and people like Colbert have emphasized Radiohead’s activism around issues like climate change and the band’s explorations of living in the postmodern age of technology, celebrity, and mass culture, the band itself has offered a wider vision of their art. In 2003 they released Hail to the Thief, an album whose title seems an indictment of the recent election of George W. Bush. Of course, Thom Yorke was not a fan of President Bush, but in an interview he argued that the album had a deeper reach:

If the motivation for naming our album had been based solely on the U.S. election, I’d find that to be pretty shallow. To me, it’s about forces that aren’t necessarily human, forces that are creating this climate of fear. While making this record, I became obsessed with how certain people are able to inflict incredible pain on others while believing they’re doing the right thing. They’re taking people’s souls from them before they’re even dead. My girlfriend—she’s a Dante expert—told me that was Dante’s theory about traitors and authority. I was just overcome with all this fear and darkness. And that fear is the ‘thief.’

The above quote has striking relevance when considered in light of the recent grisly turn the sexual revolution has taken. One can be liberal or even a conservative accepting of gay marriage and minding one’s own business and still see something demonic in the surgical mutilation of teenagers undergoing questionable sex reassignment surgery –—as well as the “drag shows” that are put on for children. Reread Yorke’s words: “I became obsessed with how certain people are able to inflict incredible pain on others while believing they’re doing the right thing. They’re taking people’s souls from them before they’re even dead.”

Read the whole thing.