james’ opinion

Pyramid Song comes from Radiohead’s “experimental” Kid A/Amnesiac era, which for my money is still the most exciting period of what has turned out to be a very exciting career indeed. Pyramid Song is a dark, slow, heavy thing, like the shape of a whale moving beneath the waves. The rotating piano chords never quite resolve, monolithic and immutable, moving in a rhythm that’s obscure without feeling unnatural; until, halfway through, Phil Selway’s loose swing-time drumming reveals it to have been in common time all along. (This is a trick Radiohead later developed further with the 2006 version of Videotape, but that’s another story.) Wavering strings and snatches of half-heard conversation hover over the mix from time to time like bits of decaying memory— “all the figures I used to see”, sings Thom. There’s a feeling of continual movement and fluctuation, a sense of transcendence, of transition, of passing. Appropriate, considering the song’s lyrical theme: the title is a reference to the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

I appreciate that the lyrics (not to mention music video) reference water— rowboats, rivers, swimming black-eyed angels— because to me there is something weirdly aquatic about this song. Not aquatic like bubbles and snorkels, but like sunken ruins, silent ocean depths. In fact, to me (and at least one other person I know) Pyramid Song sounds like drowning. Or what I imagine the sensation of drowning to be like, after the panic’s gone and you stop struggling and the black-eyed angels appear swimming beside you to take you off to heaven in their little rowboat.

So, yes, characteristically of the band, it’s dark, but in a way most of Radiohead’s work isn’t. Pyramid Song has nothing of the frantic paranoia and bitter swagger that defines most of the band’s darkest moments. (Compare the same album’s Knives Out, with its line “if you’d been a dog / they would’ve drowned you at birth”: for my money the nastiest lyric Thom Yorke ever put on a record.) Most of these songs are about being trapped in some way, in a bunker or a payroll or pretty house with a pretty garden, but Pyramid Song, to me, is about freedom. This is a poem of acceptance, absolution, release. The sweeping drama of the strings in the song’s closing moments signals the end of some final conflict, and then: calm. For all the drama of the music and lyrics, it is this resolute sense of calm that I find so life-affirming: “There was nothing to fear / nothing to doubt.”

Since Pyramid Song is my favourite work by my favourite band, I suppose I might have to claim that it is the best song of all time. I do so only very cautiously, with full knowledge of everyone’s fondness for Paranoid Android.