link to video
This is one of my favorite videos and songs of all times. For some reason, it makes me cry….well, not really, but still, it’s a touching song, a masterpiece. It is supposed to be inspired by the novel The Famished Road. I’ve never read that book, but I guess I will have to now.
This is what Thom Yorke says about the song:
Street Spirit is our purest song, but I didn’t write it. It wrote itself. We were just its messengers; its biological catalysts. Its core is a complete mystery to me, and, you know, I wouldn’t ever try to write something that hopeless. All of our saddest songs have somewhere in them at least a glimmer of resolve. Street Spirit has no resolve. It is the dark tunnel without the light at the end. It represents all tragic emotion that is so hurtful that the sound of that melody is its only definition. We all have a way of dealing with that song. It’s called detachment. Especially me; I detach my emotional radar from that song, or I couldn’t play it. I’d crack. I’d break down on stage. That’s why its lyrics are just a bunch of mini-stories or visual images as opposed to a cohesive explanation of its meaning. I used images set to the music that I thought would convey the emotional entirety of the lyric and music working together. That’s what’s meant by ‘all these things are one to swallow whole’. I meant the emotional entirety, because I didn’t have it in me to articulate the emotion. I’d crack…
do you prefer the acoustic version?
On a similar subject: Thom Yorke, Radiohead - Speed Painting
