Fake Plastic Trees / Really Juicy Steaks
On Radiohead, scepticism and optimism at Labour's promise, and the changing relationship between the real and the fake
Thom Yorke, frontman and lead singer of Radiohead, walks into a bar. It’s autumn 1995, in Oxford, where the members of Radiohead grew up. They have just returned from a worldwide tour, playing songs from the album The Bends, released that spring. The barman pours Thom his drink and they get chatting. The conversation turns to politics: will Tony Blair and his rebranded Labour Party storm to victory when the election finally comes? Will they transform the country for the better? The barman hopes so. Thom is very sceptical. Blair and his crowd, he says, are offering nothing new.
I have been thinking of this story – its tossup of courageous optimism and world-weary doubt; the fact that Radiohead released their first albums under the ministry of John Major, as an instance of art’s tendency to outstrip the culture that produces it – since Rishi Sunak called a general election. At the moment I find myself alternating between the perspectives of Thom Yorke, and the barman (a man I met during my own years living in Oxford, where I’d periodically see Thom Yorke running in the park and buying cookies in the covered market). We’ll see. I’m not going to write about the general election, you’ll be pleased to know. Instead I want to think about a song from The Bends, a song Radiohead played throughout that tour in the summer of 95. ‘Fake Plastic Trees’ isn’t about Tony Blair and Keir Starmer, though it is a lament for crushed hopes and cancelled futures. The song describes the doomed struggle to be authentic in a world of rubbish, and it’s this aspect I’m going to concentrate on – continuing the theme from last time, about the weird juxtapositions of the fake and the real that characterise our digital culture.
‘Fake Plastic Trees’ begins with an image both surreal and banal: ‘a green plastic watering can / for a fake Chinese rubber plant’. If you construct a story from the lyrics, these bits of plastic belong to a couple who live together ‘in a town full of rubber plans / to get rid of itself’. The man ‘used to do surgery / for girls in the eighties’, but now he’s ‘a broken man / a cracked polystyrene man’. Like everything in their lives – the naff ornaments, the polystyrene, the prosthesis – the relationship has a plastic-like inauthenticity. ‘She looks like the real thing’, goes the final verse, maybe from the man’s perspective, ‘she tastes like the real thing / my fake plastic love’. A yearningly beautiful melody, sung in Thom Yorke’s fragile falsetto (the recording breakthrough came after he attended a Jeff Buckley gig) combines with Jonny Greenwood’s explosive guitar to turn the song into a desperate cry for some path – ‘I can’t help the feeling / I could blow through the ceiling’ – to a more authentic existence.
The watering can and the rubber plant go together. (Maybe they have ‘not to be sold separately’ printed on them in tiny letters, like the cans you buy, separately every time, from late-night newsagents.) But this is dumb: you don’t need to water a rubber plant, because it’s not alive. These are commodities, zoned off both from one another and from a genuine ecology in which existence is a symbiotic chain – in which plants do need water. The plant and watering can are made from plastic, the most environmentally damaging material ever developed; they’re part of an ever-growing mass of artificial things whose production (as Thom Yorke kept saying in the 90s) had long since started to degrade the world’s natural abundance.
As a teenager I used to read about Radiohead on an amazing website called Green Plastic, which still exists in a simplified, memorial form. (A heresy: the internet was better – more democratic, more creative, more hopeful – before the social media zombies came along.) Fans could post their own interpretations of particular songs, and it’s interesting looking over some of the analyses of ‘Fake Plastic Trees’. Back in the day, the story of the couple’s doomed attempt at true connection was what stood out for most listeners: someone called John says the song is about the perils of submitting to ‘the superficial values of modern living’. And Shareef posts, neatly, that the song is about the pain of fitting into society’s quasi-plastic ‘molds’.
Plus ça change, maybe. Society still has modern molds. But from the perspective of someone whose adult life has been lived in the tens and twenties (I was three when The Bends came out), the song evokes an economic world which is quite remote. This is a time of material abundance, of economic growth and cheap money, in an era of triumphant western hegemony. It had its discontents, of course: plenty of British towns which deindustrialised under Thatcher weren’t so much planning ‘to get rid of themselves’ in the 1990s as reeling from having their hearts ripped out. But the principal struggle in this era was not material. There were many reasons for feeling sad: but it wasn’t because you couldn’t buy the things you wanted, it was because the things you bought were made of plastic. It was easy to be rich but hard to be real.
I first became aware of YouTube Shorts – the looping, addictive clips of under a minute which YouTube rolled out in 2020, whose creators often duplicate them straight from TikTok – during the pandemic. I was bored out of my mind and looking for new things to cook. I stumbled on ‘food content’ and for a few weeks I was completely hypnotised. In the archetypal food video (that is, the archetype personalised for me by the algorithm, and so not really an archetype at all) an American man talks breathlessly over a clip of him cooking a steak: he gets a cast-iron pan ‘ripping hot’ before adding ‘neutral oil’; he sears both sides of his ribeye; he adds herbs and garlic and ‘cold unsalted butter’ and bastes the steak with a spoon; then, after letting it rest, he scrapes the knife over the top so that we can hear the satisfying roughness of the crispy crust; and then he slices into it, showing the ‘wall-to-wall pink’ of the ‘perfect medium rare’. And to prove how juicy it is, he shoves the slice of pink steak right up into the camera, holding it in front of our faces. Then the video repeats, forever.
When I got a grip on myself I started to think about the weirdness of these shorts, about how I felt after the anaesthetizing hit from the close-up sight of the pink flesh, the sound of the knife pulled over the crust, wore off: a lonely, slightly hungry sense of deprivation. It worried me that the American creators seemed totally oblivious to the environmental impact of constantly eating steak (though, as the algorithm had correctly worked out, I was part of the problem). But it also occurred to me that the close-up access of these videos was strangely characteristic of the economic order we had long since endured.
I first voted in 2010; I was 18. My entire adult life has been lived under conditions of recession, stagnation and minimal growth, with a long, steady decline in living standards. Meanwhile the smartphone has insinuated itself into every aspect of life, and though it has long since ceased to support any genuine innovations, it continues to obsessively update its basic functions. The slices of dripping steak held up the camera possessed a quality of resolution, detail and colour that would have been unthinkable in the days of 1995. And social media platforms enable a kind of access to such images that evade any intermediaries: the creators posted directly from their own kitchens. If the green plastic watering characterises the socio-economics of the 1990s – an era where it was easy to have things, but the things were fake – then maybe the close-up steak is the image of daily life in the western world after 2008: the age of the iPhone on one hand, and material immiseration on the other; you can look at more and more, closer and in higher resolution; but you have less and less.
Byung-Chul Han, phenomenologist of technology, says that the digital revolution has ushered us away from possession, into a world of Non-Things (his book’s title) which are ‘indiscreet, intrusive and over-expressive’. Han is thinking here of electronic ‘gadgets’, the smartphones themselves. But it’s telling that this move away from possession should have coincided, in the west, with a period of economic decline, in which material things are hard to come by. And maybe an obstacle to reversing that decline, or even perceiving it, is the frighteningly seductive appeal of the access the gadgets give us, the access for which Han says (quoting social theorist Jeremy Rifkin) we have sacrificed genuine possession. The steak is a real steak, from a real cow, and the camera that films it is of such uncannily high quality that the brain almost believes it’s encountering real food. But this is the problem: for all that you can stare, salivating, at the steak, you can’t consume it. The images don’t fill you up because, despite the trick played on your brain, you don’t own any of the objects in them. This points to a paradox of digital life in the age of the awesome camera: we are ever more detached from the world of material reality, of things you can touch and eat, but it becomes harder to remember that detachment because of the resolution, the quasi-reality, of the things we stare and scroll through. ‘There is no physical contact with reality’, says Han; but what replaces physical reality is not so much the fantastical as what Han calls ‘the hyper-real’.
So between 1995 and 2020, the world of ‘Fake Plastic Trees’ and the digital sphere of YouTube shorts, the relationship between the fake and the real changes. The fakery moves from the thing possessed – the green plastic watering can – to the possessing. Since I first voted in 2010 I have listened to many political offers calculated to satisfy our desires, but remarkably few of them have involved material improvement to our lives. Like the barman in Oxford, I’m wondering what to do with a hope that people’s lives could get materially – not technologically, or symbolically – better.