The Music of 9/11 Clairvoyance (Radiohead at Suffolk Downs)

[FourthBase]

Am I the only one who is completely unfamiliar with Radiohead? Never heard them until I listened to the tracks above. I like the beat and texture of "National Anthem" but don't like anything about "Idioteque."

Really, I'm just bragging about how uncool I am. I pretty much ignored popular music after 1980 or so.

Those two songs are not really representative, or not their best work at least, in my opinion.

Listen to The Bends and OK Computer albums right now.
Right this minute. Do it now!

If you don't want to listen to two entire albums, listen to these songs:

(rock)

Just
My Iron Lung

Airbag
Paranoid Android

(softer rock)

Nice Dreams
Street Spirit

Lucky
The Tourist

...but really, listen to both whole albums. But at the absolute bare minimum listen to Paranoid Android. Right now, lol! It's the Bohemian Rhapsody of the 90's. You have to be familiar with it.

Here, just listen, try to ignore the cartoon video if you can:

[FourthBase]

The artwork for the OK Computer cover and booklet is interesting, since every page seems to include an airplane reference.







(The video for Paranoid Android does have a brief scene where an amateur pilot is placed behind the controls of an aviation vehicle approaching a city skyline...and then lands on the roof of one of two square high-rises, FWIW.)

I don't recall there being any relevant imagery for Kid A or Amnesiac, but I'll have to check...

Another page from OK Computer booklet:



To be fair, if an event had happened at a train station it would have been possible to argue that OK Computer foresaw that, too. (Then again, it did happen at a train station, the one right at the WTC.)



Is this one airplane-y or am I misinterpreting that as a cockpit?



Not airplane-y, but I had never noticed the inverted pentagram and "against demons" thing before:



This one is plane-y in the sense that it has a photo of the sky from a plane's POV and also the word "plane" on it:



As for Amnesiac, these are from the booklet supposedly but I don't personally remember them. At that point in my life I was putting CDs in folios and trashing the case.









The Amnesiac cover and tour artwork featured a crying devil in various forms. One form is blocky and perpendicular and if you squint hard you can kind of see it as a symbol of twin towers, and maybe the constellations (are those actual constellations?) are like paper airplanes. Another devil has arrows for pupils that look plane-ish.







Weirdly, everybody online seems to want to refer to those figures as "minotaurs" rather than the devils they obviously are.

As for Kid A, nothing interesting except for the first appearance of the band's demonic bear logo, which the artist later combined in one canvas with a swimming-pool-of-blood image that was printed on the CD itself. Nothing clairvoyant here, except for maybe the bear's pupils look twin-tower-ish and the pool if turned 90° could look trajectory-into-a-tower-ish.

[FourthBase]

Lo and behold, I am far from the first person to suggest that Radiohead predicted 9/11. Chuck Klosterman devoted 6 pages to the theory (more like a notion) in his book Killing Yourself to Live, pp. 83-89 if anyone has it or wants to read it on Google Books. (One page is missing there.)

https://books.google.com/books/about/Ki ... 1UYp-6438C

Unfortunately, Klosterman only focuses on Kid A, and his theorizing is...writerly. You can tell he's not really taking the idea seriously, it's basically just a writing prompt to him.

An excerpt:

https://vassifer.blogs.com/alexinnyc/20 ... s_the.html

The first song on Kid A paints the Manhattan skyline at 8:00 A.M. on Tuesday morning; the song is titled "Everything in Its Right Place." People woke up that day "sucking on a lemon," because that's what life normally feels like on the Manhattan subway; the city is a beautiful, sour, sarcastic place. We soon move onto song two, which is the title track. It is the sound of woozy, ephemeral normalcy. It is the sound of Jonny Greenwood playing an Ondes Martenot, an instrument best remembered for its use in the Star Trek theme song. You can imagine humans walking to work, riding elevators, getting off the C train and the 3 train, and thinking about a future that will be a lot like the present, only better. The term KID A is Yorke's moniker for the first cloned human, which he (only half jokingly) suspects may already exist. The consciously misguided message is this: Science is the answer. Technology solves everything, because technology is invulnerable. And this is what almost everyone in America thought around 8:30 A.M. But something happens three and a half minutes into "Kid A". It suddenly doesn't feel right, and you don't exactly know why. This is followed by track three, "The National Anthem"

This is when the first plane slams into the north tower at 470 mph.

"The National Anthem" sounds a bit like a Morphine song. It's a completley different direction from the first two songs on KID A, and it's confusing; it's chaotic. "What's going on?," the lyrics ask. "What's going on?" It gets crazier and crazier, until the second plane hits the second tower (at 9:03 A.M. in reality and at 3:42 in the song). For a moment, things are somber. But then it gets more anarchic. (Reader's Note: You might want to consider playing KID A right about now, since I'm not always so good at explaining shit like this). Which leads into track four, "How to Disappear Completely." This is the point where it feels like the world is possibly ending. People try to convince themselves that they are not there. People keep repeating: "This isn't happening". People are "floating" (read: falling) to the earth. We are told of strobe lights and blown speakers; there are fireworks and hurricanes. This is a song about being burned alive and jumping out of windows, and this is a song about having to watch those things happen. And it's followed by an instrumental piece without melody ("Treefingers"), because what can you say when skyscrapers collapse? All you can do is stare at them with your hand over your mouth.

Time passes. It's afternoon. KID A's side two, if you have it on vinyl. Action is replaced by thought. The song is "Optimistic, " a word that becomes more meaningful in its absence. It has lyrics about Ground Zero ("vultures circle the dead"), and it offers a glimpse into how Al Qaeda members think Americans perceive international diplomacy ("the big fish eat the little ones, the big fish eat the little ones/Not my problem, give me some"). Track seven, "In Limbo" is about how the United States has been shaken out of its fantasy, with "nowhere to hide," finding only "trap doors that open, I spiral down"......

He catches a bunch of the same lyrics I did above, but he also does a lot of creative reading-into/beyond the lyrics. Like I said, it's not really a theory. Just his excuse to pretend to be profound. I am not impressed with Klosterman.

The blogger himself does make a big deal out of one of the images I posted above from the Kid A booklet, the one that sure looks like a fiery explosion in a pair of skyscrapers. He seems to be barking up the right tree.

There's not much else online that implicates Radiohead in any kind of Illuminati type theories. One blog called Occult Media Deception does a longass, mediocre impression of Vigilant Citizen where he identifies Yorke as an MKUltra songbird. To be honest, it's not a completely unconvincing idea. Radiohead is way, way weirder and darker and more demonic than I remember. I guess I'm one of those fans who didn't process half the lyrics. More references to murder, vampirism, and cannibalism than I remember. Not going to post the copypasta blog, but here's the link.

http://occultmediadeception.blogspot.co ... 0.html?m=1

Nothing about Radiohead from Vigilant Citizen himself, except for a picture of Yorke hiding an eye a la Vigilant Citizen's extremely annoying theory that any photo of a celebrity with only one eye showing is proof of being an Illuminati asset. To be fair, Yorke is looking through an OK sign, which is a plausible symbol for 666. But still, I generally hate the one eye shit. Does not constitute evidence of anything to me, unless it's really, really obviously an occult symbol with a butterfly or a pyramid or something.

Then there's a retarded poster some fundies drew up that uses Yorke's face to present 8 symptoms of satanism or some nonsense. I mean, they might not be wrong, but it's still fucking dumb. And the internet loved mocking it. It's what dominates the results for a search of Radiohead + Satan.

But as you see above, Radiohead chose a devil for much of their Amnesiac artwork, including the cover. And there's an interesting story behind that song Street Spirit that I recommended to Elvis above.

https://songmeanings.com/m/songs/view/581/

'Street Spirit' is our purest song, but I didn't write it.... It wrote itself. We were just its messengers... Its biological catylysts. It's core is a complete mystery to me... and (pause) 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... (pause) I'd crack.... Our fans are braver than I to let that song penetrate them, or maybe they don't realize what they're listening to.. They don't realize that 'Street Spirit' is about staring the fucking devil right in the eyes... and knowing, no matter what the hell you do, he'll get the last laugh...and it's real...and true. The devil really will get the last laugh in all cases without exception, and if I let myself think about that to long, I'd crack. I can't believe we have fans that can deal emotionally with that song... That's why I'm convinced that they don't know what it's about. It's why we play it towards the end of our sets. It drains me, and it shakes me, and hurts like hell everytime I play it, looking out at thousands of people cheering and smiling, oblivious to the tragedy of it's meaning, like when you're going to have your dog put down and it's wagging it's tail on the way there. That's what they all look like, and it breaks my heart.

I wish that song hadn't picked us as its catalysts, and so I don't claim it. It asks too much. (very long pause). I didn't write that song.

Of course, there's some fucking moron in those comments who's like, forget what the songwriter himself says, it's not really about the devil. Moron, lol.

Here are the lyrics:

Rows of houses, all bearing down on me
I can feel their blue hands touching me
All these things into position
All these things are one to swallow whole
And fade out again and fade out

This machine will, will not communicate
These thoughts and the strain I am under
Be a world child, form a circle
Before we all go under
And fade out again and fade out again

Cracked eggs, dead birds
Scream as they fight for life
I can feel death, can see its beady eyes
All these things into position
All these things are one to swallow whole
And fade out again and fade out again

Immerse your soul in love
IMMERSE YOUR SOUL IN LOVE

Again, I never processed the lyrics.
Had no idea they were supposed to be that dark.
Just thought it was a beautiful, haunting song.

So, how many other songs did Yorke write that were far darker than realized by all the fans wagging their tails about to be put down?

[FourthBase]

Long story short, this thread already seems to be the most substantial "Radiohead Predicted 9/11" theory on the internet, by far.

[Laodicean]

Never Forget.

We forgot.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Lpw3yMCWro

[FourthBase]

Last time I saw that, many moons ago, I was ignorant about the lyrics. Just another quirky music video directed by the whimsical creative genius Michel Gondry. Ah, but wait, it's about cannibalism. Not so whimsical, that. Now I'll never see the game Operation without thinking of Marina Abramovic. I guess the band didn't like how Gondry colored the video with references to his own breakup. What did they want instead, a faithful reenactment of the Donner Party? (50 bucks says John Podesta loves the fuck out of that song.)

But yes, we forgot. Remind me what we forgot. Did we forget about 9/11 itself or did we forget about life before 9/11? Both? Are we continually forgetting about life after 9/11, like our brains have had a vacuum switched on to suck up memories outside of a narrow window? Could it be a preemptive comment about how all the foreshadowing of 9/11 would soon be forgotten, if it were ever detected in the first place? Or could it be about the amnesia of suppressed memories of ritualistic abuse? Or is it just a fashionably nihilistic throwaway title?

[FourthBase]

Long story short, this thread already seems to be the most substantial "Radiohead Predicted 9/11" theory on the internet, by far.

Narrator: He forgot Reddit exists.

But nah, this thread still already takes the cake.

I did find some interesting things on there.

First, there's a piece of art by the artist Radiohead used the most, Stanley Donwood, titled "Trade Center", created in 2000.



If those were rectangles instead of triangles, my asshole would be puckering right now. As it is, there's still a city skyline on fire.

Then there's this publicity photo shot while Radiohead was in NYC for the Liberty State Park shows. I realize how irresistible the towers were to any photographer, so it's far from unlikely that they would be in the background. That goes for almost all "eerie" depictions of the WTC in pop culture: It's not eerie, it's just that they're camera-candy. Most of the time. Like this photo, probably. Still, FWIW...



Here's the Reddit thread where I got that photo from, wherein the OP and another commenter note that OK Computer and Amnesiac are also potentially predictive not just Kid A. (Grrr, stupid Klosterman.)

https://www.reddit.com/r/radiohead/comm ... ead_bw_in/

1
blackbirdpie6y
fantastic picture, and the gigs in Liberty State Park sound very special also. out of interest, have any of you heard the conspiracy theory about Thom clairvoyantly predicting the 9/11 attacks? It's very sketchy and more something mildly interesting to ponder over, but if you look through the artwork for amnesiac, which was released a couple of months before, there is a recurring theme of two buildings on fire, collapsing. Adds a whole other spooky element to the songs... shudder

4
DavidAppletreeI'm not here. This isn't happening.6y
...this artwork from OK Computer is what has always freaked me out ---looks to me like 2 planes going into 2 buildings with briefcases flying, etc. and lyrics to "Lucky" about being pulled out of an air crash, etc. and "standing on the edge" - i always think of folks standing on the edge, not knowing whether to jump out or be burned alive... i had nightmares of that scenario (as well as being in a plane as it was about to hit, and then i'd wake up...) - for years after 9/11..... i lived about a mile away from all that. many don't realize it took them 3 months to put out the fires and all of lower manhattan (including my neighborhood) was pretty much engulfed in a cloud of "9/11 smoke" for those three months.... will never forget the smell. so anyway, i'm extremely emotionally tied to radiohead's music, especially as it was the soundtrack for my life before, during, and after 9/11.... it's helped me deal with it better than most other things....

Then there's this tenuous but mildly intriguing interpretation of OK Computer's cover.



Then there's this list of dates from the Amnesiac booklet meant to simulate a library book. This is only a cropped section, there are actually 24 dates. 24 out of 365 ain't terrible, though. Just a 6.5% chance of randomly including 9/11 as a date...I think...I am not so good at math, that'll need verification. (I have not checked to see if any of the other dates correspond to a major catastrophe a la that Nic Cage movie, nor will I, lol.)



But far and away the most enticing find is this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/com ... =post_body

What/who is Michael K?
u/unpatriot3y
So a few months ago i found this site describing the theory that Radiohead predicted 9/11. Although it sounds bullshit, i found this comment describing something like a project called "michael k", that used to send people creepy emails months before 9/11, who were eerily prophetic of the happening. Here it is:
"I knew Radiohead were assets of the secret state from the beginning.

But actually, no. What's more interesting to note and it may be an expansion of this, is Thom Yorke's late 90's obsession with 'Michael K', a supposed author who, like a sister project, 'Luther Blissett', is most likely a collaborative project. (With Blissett, this is explicit, with K, it is tricky). One of the more notable outcrops of K-dom came in 2000 when a long-winded series of emails circulated from 'Michael K' which, among other things, were very het up about oil adventures of America abroad. the author/character in the emails (aka the kmails) is using tantra and drugs to communicate or channel 'the gaiascript' which he says is becoming political. These crazy, cranky emails were pretty disturbing at time and pretty far out at all others (as well as being viciously and hilariously compelling). A bootleg compilation of them came out a few years later, but my name and Thom's (amongst many other culture-heads known and obscure) were in the recipients-list for many of them.

THEY were VERY eerily prophetic of 911 and Michael K, towards the end of the sequence (at which time, the US is hung up on the recounts) is telling us that the 'gaiascript' which has been with him has moved, guided by him, to Texas.

The book is very rare as is all of the Michael K stuff and this is what makes it compelling and slightly sinister. I know TY is a big fan because I asked him about it at a signing. This is the first time this stuff has been pointed out to me but I offer that connection in the hope someboy knows a little more.

As I understand it, 'Michael K' first appeared as a print-era spectre in the early 90's and is well-known in other orbits including that of The KLF."

I used Google to search for it, and found some strange websites, like "'http://www.xdollarx.com/" or "http://www.wix.com/xdollarx/authography", but nothing concrete. Anyone out there with any information about this?

What in the fffff...?

Has anyone heard of these Michael K emails before? Someone here must have. Would our own Luther Blissett have heard of Michael K? If that's where Yorke got his clues, aside from some extrasensory "tapping in" business, then that would be splendid, because then I wouldn't have to worry (much) about the improbable scenario where Radiohead is an Illuminati puppet show, and in fact Yorke would feel like just a member of the tinfoil family. Ah, but those emails are said to be from 2000. And OK Computer came out in 1997. So...nope. It's still either that Radiohead is tapped in like a consciousness frequency or tapped in like a complicit Freemason.

Searching the forum for "Michael K" now, and...
Nothing.

One of the irrelevant results did suggest a possible last name for this Michael K: Ultra, maybe?

How did we not hear about this?
How is there so little substance about it online?
Is it just an urban legend?

EDIT: Using both Google and DuckDuckGo, I can't find jack shit about these emails, other than the one blog comment and the two Reddit threads quoting that same blog comment. Starting to smell like a retroactive LARP. Can anyone confirm/disconfirm?

Until I see evidence to the contrary, I'm going to assuming that the "Michael K" shit is a joke based on the game "Kingdom of Loathing", which features "kmails" and "gaia" something-or-other. Should have been tipped off by the reference to KLF, ugh. Fucking discordians, funny but aggravating. Dammit, I thought that was a real lead.

[coffin_dodger]

Could it be a preemptive comment about how all the foreshadowing of 9/11 would soon be forgotten, if it were ever detected in the first place?

Time moves forward, but to balance that forward movement in our binary reality, time also simultaneously slips back - a bleed from the then future, back to the now past. To become a moment that can only be seen in context with the luxury of hindsight. The march of time forward is excrutiatingly exact - and correspondingly, the bleedback of time is anything but.

It may also be that un-natural events (those conceived and executed by minds, as opposed to Nature herself) are more prone to detection by other minds at the point of landing (in the now) of the bleedback from the future event.

It may be that the synchronicity 'received' in the past now, from the bleedback of the then future, can be misinterpreted. i.e. it becomes a balancing opposite, after all, it is travelling backwards - the fear and terror of 9/11 becoming an elation experienced at the Radiohead gig.

[Mask]

[FourthBase]

Touché, lol.

But then again...sounds like a gaslight-y after-the-fact disclaimer, like, "Don't hold us accountable for the precognitive 9/11 vibes we've been bathing you in the last four years", "You're just imagining things", "Accidents will happen"?

[FourthBase]

As much as I love their peak output, I haven't paid attention to anything Radiohead's done since 2003. This is an interesting song and video.



Supposedly it's about authoritarianism and witch hunts, etc. Inspired by right wing politicians, etc. But the wiki entry mentions this:

The lyrics direct the listener to "abandon all reason / avoid all eye contact / do not react / shoot the messengers / burn the witch".[12] Yorke said the lyrics were inspired by the News of the World newspaper publishing the names and addresses of sex offenders in 2000.[16]

As for the video, is that master of ceremonies supposed to be a Freemason or a Knight Templar? And if the conservative Christians are supposed to be the ones persecuting the occultists, then who's in the Eyes Wide Open masks and antler horns encircling the tied up woman and pointing swords at her? Are the occultists being sacrificed by...other occultists? Or, instead of a warning about a community of squares punishing occultists, is the video actually representing a community of occultists getting revenge on the squares? My ability to interpret esoteric shit is feeble. Anyone wanna give it a go?

[FourthBase]

I can't get over how Donwood et al. want everyone to refer to the figure in the Amnesiac art as a "minotaur" rather than the devil it obviously is. I realize there is overlap, but if you show the art to 100 people, perhaps having to point out the horns on the cruder figure from the album cover, 99 or 100 are going to say, "Oh that's obviously a devil", right? (Except for the thing in the bottom center, what in the fuck is that?)



Here's Donwood explaining the dev...er, minotaur on the cover:

https://www.nme.com/blogs/nme-blogs/sta ... ers-766325

And the minotaur? “It’s a horrible creature that I felt sorry for because it knew nothing but how to be a monster. So I wanted this little creature to be in tears.”

So...sympathy for the devil?

I've already mentioned how the exaggerated rectangularity of the arms gives off a two-buildings-ish vibe, in which case the tears could represent a falling action, a la the building itself or the jumpers. Funny thing when you turn that image upside down...



...the building-ish vibe becomes a little clearer, and those teardrops look a little bit more like pointy things flying into those unusually rectangular arm crooks. "Reign down", indeed.

[Laodicean]

Well, I have not forgotten about you, FourthBase. Joyous to see you active on this board again, genuinely. Love this thread.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCwBMPEnMDI

Immerse your soul in love.

[Harvey]

The main two visual references are to a cherished British childrens television program called Trumpton (Trump Town) although Trump was still months away from his victory when this was made, it could be argued this was an intentional reference to his campaign:





and of course the 1973 original of The Wicker Man





The song was released as a promo for Moon Shaped Pool, months after David Cameron's career had run aground on Brexit and while PigGate was still mildly amusing. Note the name of the pub, The Speared Boar.

It seems as though the song was written some 10 years prior to it's release in 2016, though at the time many presumed it was in response to the refugee crisis. The video is riffing on something else though. Claims of a Witch Hunt were rife from among MP's at the time, many of whom had recently been accused of participation in paedophile rings, if we recall. They lashed out at their accusers, frequently using the term 'witch hunt' to describe the desire for justice of their victims. In that light, the song had a potentially right wing reactionary feel when it emerged.

Few noted at the time how the sudden resurgence in claims of high profile paedophilia (Savile et al having eclipsed accusations against former MP's for years) coincided with the Hatton Garden Heist of 2015 when some old school lags famously raided a large number of hyper secure safety deposit boxes. Perfect hidey hole for a memory card, a stack of photos or a video tape, all of which may have switched ownership during this time.

Anyway, much more going on than meets the eye in that video.

[Harvey]

I'd like to begin with this image by Gerhardt Richter, closer to the present than 9/11, his painting, September. It emerges from a body of work in part dedicated to erasure, or perhaps elision. The image derives a certain eloquence because of the intersection with Gerhardt's entire body of work.

September.jpg

Closer to the past than 9/11 there's this painting by Alex Gray entitled Gaia, from 1989. SLAD kindly posted it in my Visual Artists thread. I hadn't seen it until then.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=12&v=bDiX8zDv4Ak

That was in 1989.

Gaia is depicted as a web of connections, very much akin to a 'field' in this picture and comparison drawn (deliberately I think) to a gravitational field. The field lines radiate from another smaller image or idea of the world depicting a view of the Americas.

Arranged inside this field is a binary vision of earthly paradise on the left and fiery hell on the right. The references to 9/11 might seem heavy handed, had it not been made 12 years before.


I posted my own experience of this once before, possibly in another of your threads FB, but certainly in response to similar musings. This was a private commission, finished in 2000 I think (Edit: although checking contemporaneous events, it appears more likely it was finished mid to late 1999) and later used in 2002 as a cover for Interzone magazine, minus the explosion, which was considered too likely to offend.