Videotape by Radiohead

I have listened to many Radiohead songs but do not consider myself an expert in their history or lore. “OK Computer” (1997) and “In Rainbows” (2007) have become my mainstay Radiohead albums among a number of gems from other albums and EPs. Although I am not a Radiohead “expert”, their music has stuck with me for 20+ years. I’ve tried to analyse and assimilate the ideas in their music to my experience at different points in my life but for whatever reason I felt the urge to write down my thoughts on the final track “Videotape” from “In Rainbows” today — about 18 years after its release.

“Videotape” with it’s haunting piano refrain always captivated me. The song has a complex composition yet simple execution. Using the addition of layers to build its tortured crescendo. It’s a melancholy sounding song to be sure. The lyrics, which I intend to analyse in this post, push this sense of melancholy to a fever-pitch of loss and disassociation. The beautiful rawness of the music speaks to a present (or future?) tragedy.

When this song was written, at a guess, in the years 2004-2007, social network technologies like Facebook will have been available to the wider public for only a few months. Thus, taking cognisance of my vantage point in 2025, I do not think the form and virality of social media with us today would have informed the concept behind “Videotape”. This makes “Videotape” all the more beautiful. Apropos the life-world many individuals inhabit this song was prophetic. Radiohead noticed the direction the likes of social media was heading and foretell a future where the very thing that it means to be human would be altered. Or, rather, improverished. A core theme in this song is loss and a willful choosing of said loss.

As many other Radiohead songs, “Videotape” explores the human condition in the context of modernity. A special focus is placed on how technology interacts with our projections of ourselves but also our most intimate constructions of ourselves. This self that self-perceives also perceives the other through a technologically mediated experience.

When I’m at the pearly gates… Mephistopheles is just beneath and he’s reaching up to grab me

The opening line is an unmistakable reference to the Faustian bargain. The “pearly gates” is a sarcastic reference to heaven or utopia. This heaven is the utopia that many Internet technologists of the past 25+ years have been working feverishly to realise. Maximising convenience and enabling humans to “be in touch” despite the constraints of time and distance. As we struggle toward and appear to reach this “heaven”, the devil always pulls us out of it. The paradisal fruits turn to ash in our mouths. Detective Rust, in season one of “True Detective”, warns his partner about the fatal problem in prosperity Gospel prevelant in parts of America at the time: you are speeding toward a red light. Why is it that we are set up to fail so spectacularly? Because humans are capable of incredible acts of self-delusion when presented with the right incentives. Is this too pessimistic an idea? I don’t think so. Self-delusion has spurred people on to great acts of heroism and bravery, but it also makes us susceptible to bullshit. And like Faust, we are, and have been experiencing the fruits of the bargain we accepted based on the bullshit we were sold and bought into. Based on the promise of experiencing heaven.

This is one for the good days and I have it all here in red, blue, green…

…but we will be able to watch it prefectly reproduced, in “red, blue, green”. Every pixel on a screen creates a color by adjusting the strength of the colors red, blue and green (more commonly RGB) to emit light of a specific color value. This is the thing you ultimately see on your screen. This line is dripping in sarcasm. “I have it all”… what you have is nothing. You do not even have the ability to experience your life first-hand. You merely have an obssession with— and addiction to the technology that will mediate all of your experience and experiences of memory. We have departed from the deeply imperfect human way of remembering, ultimately rendered in narrative, to the inhuman “remembering” done for us by a machine. You have no need of sapiential storytelling, listening or learning. Don’t worry, I can just Google/ChatGPT it. It’s faster and more accurate. This is one of the other themes related to the unique process of loss at play here: a kind of hollowing.

You are my centre when I spin away out of control on videotape

The whirlwind of confusion and distortion brought by web 2.5 technologies will cause us to lose control in an increasingly public fashion. It will be “on videotape” for all to see and dissect with ever increasing precision and detail. But I think the more insidious aspect here is the “you”… Which “you” are we even talking about? Technology has replaced the need for us to engage in human (i.e. flawed) activities like experiencing our lives and memories, but what has it wrought upon the other? How can we know or like others when we cannot know or like ourselves in any intimate way? This “you” of the other is another casualty (or sacrifice) to the new gods. Whose tyranny will be unlike anything we have ever seen in history. Erroding the very substance of interpersonal connection.

This is my way of saying goodbye ‘cause I can’t do it face to face

We have lost intimate connection to ourselves and contact with the other. How does such a life conclude? The way in which we approach the finality of our own demise is by doing the only thing we know. Even at the event of my death I will live on through my prized digital artifacts, that likely no-one will care to revisit or enage with. This is a peek through door of “The Whale” where the shame and humiliation of what little of ourselves remains is on full display.

No matter what happens now… today has been the most perfect day I’ve ever seen

The most “perfect day”. This is the real kicker. Not only are we subject to the vortex of modern technologically that tears away at the essence of humanity, we like it. We choose it. We desire it. The inhumanity loaded into the word “perfect” in this sentence is palpable. Humans are not perfect. Humans are imperfect by virtue of our humanity. And yet, through technology, we now seemingly have the ability to attain perfection. This brings the ideas in “Videotape” closer to something of a “Blackmirror” episode than anything else. The genius of Radiohead is making “Blackmirror”-like content in 2007, 4 years before the release of the series. There is a lot of modern literature that explores similar ideas but “Videotape” was, for me, an early iteration that turned out to be scarily accurate in many respects. A critique and foreshadowing of the trends that technoligically mediated interactions would contrive — Big Brother and Leviathan incarnate.

Now, one critique that I could raise to the ideas explored in “Videotape” is that technologically mediated experience, when taken most broadly, must include psychotechnologies such as mathematics and spoken language (grammar and syntax). Why pick on the crudeness of one technology (“red, blue, green”) when there are others that also filter and mediate the rawness of human experience. I think this is worth considering, but that ultimately “Videotape” is not trying to say other forms of technology may also mediate expierence but rather that this one form happens manifest in these particular perversions and mutations and that we were standing in front of the oncoming sandstorm of technologically mediated interaction that will envelop us — and it has. It will impoverish us, but we’ll let it. Because we choose it. Because we like it.