“Applying the Sherlock Holmes Rule to the Radiohead Song ‘Nude’”

They say truth is stranger than fiction… lately I’m beginning to wonder after meeting some people who seem simpler than the book Green Eggs and Ham. But this is nonetheless a tenet of the great Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes tales, with the title character in one story saying something about how for the greatest details and most elaborate stories we must go to life itself, which is created with a greater imagination than any man could ever muster. 

I guess I’m sort of a weird Radiohead fan because I seem to be the only one who doesn’t extol In Rainbows (2007) as the messianic savior of humanity. In fact, I vastly prefer Hail to the Thief (2003), which is a robust rock LP complete with a dizzying variety of style. Still, In Rainbows did harvest “Nude” [1], which I’m implicitly arguing as furnishing a lyrical interface that’s on par with classic literature. 

The way it intersects with the Doyle work is that it takes on the theme of idea vs. reality. The song centers itself on this one stark, haunting mantra: “Don’t get any big ideas / They’re not going to happen”, bolstered later by the darkly indignant quip of “You’ll go to He** / For what your dirty mind is thinking”. 

It never hit me before that I’d actually have objective proof that Thom Yorke knows what the He** he’s talking about, then, but I think I’ve stumbled upon it, finally. The basic malady Yorke is illustrating goes something along the lines of a subject who’s imagining his own future success. At this point in his mind, the success is a “story,” or is “fiction,” and so in order to materialize into reality, it would have to take on some element of elaboration or refinement that it currently doesn’t have. What’s more, it has no vehicle for procuring such elaboration or refinement, since, in this case, the ingenuous inspiration is gone and the only thing extant in the subject’s mind is ambition, which, as we’ve noted, “makes you look pretty ugly”. 

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[1] As it happens, “Nude” was written way back in the ’90s and shelved for over 10 years, whereas as far as I know all the Hail to the Thief tracks were rendered epochally and with expedited fervor. 

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