Titre alternatif : The Lukewarm
Première chanson de l’album Hail To The Thief, c’est une entrée en matière bien électrisante. Lors de la tournée de 2003, enchaînée directement après There There, 2+2=5 débutait la set list... de manière très énergique !
Selon Colin, elle est parfaitement dans l’esprit de ce que tout le monde attendait du groupe à cette époque : facile à appréhender, une mélodie, de la guitare, pas trop longue...
Q : « What makes Hail To The Thief easier to embrace ? »
Colin : « Well, the first song, ’2+2=5’, is three and a half minutes long, it’s got three strong melodies in it and loud guitar halfway through, a few long choruses and guitar solos - I mean, isn’t that what everyone’s been saying they wanted from us in the last three years ? »
(BANG Magazine, july 2003)
Dans les deux premières minutes de cette chanson, un backing de la voix de Thom Yorke, qui s’élève sur la ligne « You can scream and shout », donne le premier frisson avant que le tout n’explose de manière frénétique avec le ’because’ énervé qui lance un tempo qui l’est encore plus. Drôle d’équation mathématique que celle choisie pour le titre... Très Orwellien, mais aussi très contestataire contre un système totalitaire que déteste Thom et toute la bande !
Commentaires de quelques paroles de la chanson :
- ’
2+2=5’ est une loi mathématique (foireuse) que l’on retrouve citée à plusieurs reprises dans le roman « 1984 » de Georges Orwell :
Le héros Winston lutte pour la liberté dans un monde archi contrôlé, écrit dans son journal que :
la véritable liberté c’est de pouvoir dire que ’2+2=4’. Si cette loi est acceptée, alors le reste suivra
Mais lorsque le personnage d’O’Brien, à la fin du roman, parvient à faire dire à Winston sous la torture que deux et deux font cinq, il réalise le rêve des dictateurs des États absolus : que le mensonge et leur vérité deviennent la réalité.
Radiohead n’a pas explicitement relié cette chanson au roman d’Orwell, mais utilise la formule de la même façon que l’auteur, pour démontrer que des mensonges arrivent à être admis par la plupart des gens.
Au niveau des thèmes, Yorke reste dans la veine Big Brother, perte d’identité et d’indépendance mais y ajoute des cibles plus précises, comme la Guerre en Irak et la présidence de Bush (d’où le titre de l’album).
’All hail to the thief’ : C’est de là que vient le titre de l’album.
Les paroles peuvent sembler être un brûlot contestataire contre le monde et la manière dont il fonctionne, mais Thom rappelle que la chose est à prendre au second degré. Il s’agit d’une des premières chansons travaillée pour le nouvel opus, le premier jour, et Nigel leur a un peu imposé une situation d’urgence qui a forcé Thom a écrire les paroles très vite.
Musikexpress juillet 2003 :
Thom, interrogé à propos du titre « Hail To The Thief » :
“The phrase is part of ’2+2=5’, of course, but when I wrote that song I had another, earlier president in mind about whom I had just heard a radio program. He was called a “thief”, too. At that time I wasn’t aware that something like that had been going on at Bush’s election, too. Honestly, I didn’t.”
’I swat em like flies but / Like flies the burgers / Keep coming back’
Selon Thom, c’est la première fois qu’il met tant de syllabes dans une phrase, ce qui la rend beaucoup plus difficile à chanter. Thom a vraiment innové niveau diction sur cet album. La chanson ’A wolf at The Door’ est un vrai exercice à elle seule également, avec son flow de paroles fou !
Go and tell the king that the sky is falling in’ Ces paroles sont extraites, de l’aveu même de Thom de l’histoire que son frère et lui aimaient entendre avant de dormir lorsqu’ils étaient petits : « Chicken Licken ».
’2+2=5’ contains the line ’Go and tell the king that the sky is falling in’. It’s from Yorke and his brother Andrew’s favourite bedtime story, Chicken Licken. In it, an acorn falls on a bird’s head, making it think the sky is coming down and inspiring it to tell the king. En route, the bird attracts a following of concerned poultry. Eventually, a fox says he will show the birds where the king is. He leads them into his den where he and the fox family rip their gizzards out. The end. « At the end there’s just a few feathers and that’s it, » says Yorke. « Goosey loosey and Drakey lakey get what’s coming. I love that idea of there being no intention of a happy ending. » Yorke laughs to himself and it’s a sound worth sticking around for ; richly nerdy, full of stifled glee. « And the worst thing is, they don’t get to tell the king that the sky is falling in, » he says, after recovering. « That could be happening everyday of our lives, the ones with the news are getting knocked on the head. » (Q Magazine, july 2003)
Genèse de la chanson :
- Les paroles de la chanson étaient déjà en gestation à l’époque de Kid A (2000-2001), puisque sur la page « Little Crocodiles ! » du site www.radiohead.com, on trouvait une longue suite de phrases, dont certaines serviront pour les paroles de Optimistic, et d’autres pour 2+2=5, notamment « you will not put the world to rights » :
flies are buzzing round my head
flies are buzzing round my head
picking up every last crumb
the big fish eat the little ones
the big fish eat the little ones
not my problem give me some.
not my problem give me some.
you can try the best you can try the best you can
money for the generals.
how could you be so naive ?
digging deep into your pockets
the will of allah
the word of god
you can try the best you can try the best you can
the best you can is good enough.
why dont you stop beating yourself up ?
this one isnt jesus
turn that hippy bullshit off.
i find it difficult to be optimistic.
id really like to help you but
its just not convenient
call me back
some other time.
burnt spaghetti wires
i am an optimist
the best you can
is good enough
this will not save you
will not put the world to rights
will not solve your
marriage
this wont be on sky tv
i dont believe you you you mean it
the best you can is good this wont tell you what you need to knowoptimistic foolish
arseholes tell you what you want to know
this one drops a payload
this wont cure your loneliness
this wont bring the disappeared
fodder for the animals
living on animal farm
you can try the best you can you can try the best yo can the best you can is
flies are swarming round my face.
flies are swarming round my face.
not now man i got problems of my own.
howd i ever get into this mess ?
unless ofcourse youre trying to hide something.
the flies buzz around me
picking up evry last crumb
when will you ever get out of bed ? the optimist will drink and drive
the really nervous wont survive
optimistic auto-suggestion.
hello
hellomade no difference at all
nothing has changed at all
this is the new cold war
same as the cold old warthe names have changed the innocent
the innocent have been used to thicken the soupy
the soupy can be used to feed the troops from tin cansfood is food and sex is sex
ivehadmy fill i want to defect.
dinosaurs roam the earth
shot by monks
diplomatic answers to diplomatic questions.the murdered will come back to life
tthe blind will cut you with a carving knife
the evidence is there too see
if you turned a blind eye now
your not even human
whats your real motivation ? cnsequences ff your actions.
red ants black ants no idea what your doing
viruses mutating
mind constipation
turn that hippy bullshit off.
cogs sarcy cogs swrking round
- Un embryon de la chanson pouvait être lu en haut d’une page d’un carnet de note de Thom Yorke, visible un moment sur le site radiohead.com
- En Mars 2002, le 30, pour être précis, des versions sûrement « empruntées » illégalement des premiers enregistrements avaient filtré sur le net, et celle de 2+2=5 était quelque peu différente de celle qui paraîtra finalement plus tard. Les quelques mots prononcés par Thom dans l’intro (et non chantés) n’étaient pas encore là, et il manquait également quelques arrangements à la fin.
- On a découvert la chanson en live à San Sebastian, en Espagne, le 31 juillet 2002, avant de la retrouver sur Hail To The Thief, en mai 2003.
Voici une des premières versions live (celle ci date du 07 août 2002 à Salamanque) :
Radiohead - 2 + 2 = 5 (Live in Salamanca par cedric_cmoi
- Pendant la tournée 2002, les paroles du second couplet étaient quelque peu différentes :
I’ll lay down some tracks
and wait for a train
january has april’s showers
and two and two always make up five
- C’est la première chanson que le groupe a enregistrée, en septembre 2002, à Ocean Way, comme on peut le voir dans un court extrait de radiohead.tv.
New Zeland Herald, 1 juin 2003 :
Phil : “It was the first thing we recorded. You can hear Jonny plugging his guitar in. It was like, ’right here go’. It’s brash and colourful and short, like our stay in LA, actually.”
A propos de l’enregistrement, Thom a confessé quelques années plus tard qu’ils sont allés assez vite, sous l’impulsion de Nigel Godrich :
Thom : « ’2+2=5’ is good, but as Nigel says, I wish I had another go at that one. We wanted to do things quickly, and I think the songs suffered. It was part of the experiment. Every record is part of the experiment. » (Spin, july 2006)
- Tout le monde semble cependant satisfait :
Thom et Phil dans le CD officiel d’interview (lors de la sortie de Hail To The Thief, Avril 2003) :
Thom :“That was quite a funny one, really, in the sense that I can’t really remember doing it. It was the first day in the studio. We went to Ocean Way in L.A., which was a... Nigel Godrich, it was his idea, he’s the man who operates the faders. And he had worked there with Beck, I went along to see him when he was working with Beck there. I really liked the place and the way the place sounded as well, it was really fat. Anyway, so there we were on the first day, we’ve plugged all the gear in, and we needed to sort of test, really. And that was it. And we hadn’t eaten all morning, and we were all pretty wired. That’s about as much as I remember about it. We were sort of doing a track a day, but that one actually only took a couple of hours. And then we kind of didn’t really listen to it again until the end of the session. And everybody just thought it was... I mean I was like ’well, that’s just throwaway’. But it actually ended up being something, that was really kind of handy, because it was a really good...flipping, sort of like... for us it was just like ’uuuhhhhhhhh’... you know, getting out a lot of frustration, really. There was something about it, that stuck. We really liked it. But our normal ?? selves would have not considered that in the running, really. I don’t think realistically. If it hadn’t been for the fact, that it was a test. Really would’ve just thrown it out on the grounds it was too silly.
It was interesting, ’cause the playlisting and the way that record was put together and stuff was... we tried this thing where basically we did like the initial 2 week session. And then we were like in our studio, and the whole record only took 7 weeks to track. And then it was a few weeks to mix after that. But a lot of that time Ed and Phil went away with the tracks and were like trying to piece them together way, way before we’d finished them. Because we sort of really needed to know what we’re doing. It seemed like a really good way of finding out. It was actually like ’well, it’s gonna roughly look like this’. So we had a pretty good idea how the whole thing was gonna look 3 weeks in. And ’2+2’ was so obviously a sort of statement of intent, but equally in true Radiohead style totally misleading.”
Phil : “Each opening track on an album always seems to be the opposite of the overall atmosphere of the last record. So ’2+2’, I mean, that really fulfills that for us, I think. And you know, the album is grounded so much more in the performance between the 5 of us this time, then on Kid A and Amnesiac. The fact that you’re there, and you’re starting up with this guitar just like cranking up at the beginning of it. For us it’s a very unselfconscious way of working, and I think that comes across especially in ’2+2’, really.”
- Un jeu de maxis 2+2=5 est sorti pour soutenir la promotion de la chanson.
- Commentaires du groupe dans le NME du 10 mai 2003 :
2+2=5 (THE LUKEWARM) - A brutal rock song, reminiscent at times of Jeff Buckley’s post – ‘Grace’ material. A ‘can’t you see what’s happening in the world ?’ sort of song.
Thom Yorke : “ Sort of, but not entirely serious. That song’s pretty throwaway, really. It’s got guitars in it – we did it in a hurry, because it was a test. Nigel (Godrich, producer) wouldn’t let us eat anything until we’d done it. It was four in the afternoon, and we were all starving. I didn’t have any of the words, so I had to write them all down quickly.”
Jonny Greenwood : “It was the first thing we recorded, on the first day.” Thom : “It was the most number of syllables I’ve tried to get into a line, ever : ‘Swat ‘em like flies but the buggers keep coming back’.
NME : Tell us about those subtitles.
Thom : “I was having trouble with titles. ‘Hail To The Thief’ was also called ‘The Gloaming’ and I wanted to subtitle that, so I decided to carry on. I have this big list that I carry around and they come from there. And from kids’ programmes because I was watching a few of those. Mostly Bagpuss. I like Bagpuss.”
- XFM, printemps 2003 :
Thom : “The lukewarm is something from Dante. If I remember this rightly, it’s the least nasty bit of hell, just as you walk through the door there’re the ‘Lukewarm’. And the lukewarm hang around and they were never really bothered about, they didn’t believe in anything particularly. They were like, ‘Oh, you know, whatever, there’s nothing I can do about it. No, no, no’. And it’s quite a curious thing that Dante presents you with. All of a sudden you have these people and you think, ‘Well, they haven’t really done anything wrong, they just didn’t do anything’. And so he judges them and puts them there which, I think, is actually a really good way of explaining ‘2+2=5’.”
- Vers 2003, une page du site officiel qui avait pour nom ’BUGUG’ jouait sur les paroles :
http://www.radiohead.com/page1.html .
et voici un message que l’on a pu épisodiquement à la même époque lire en ouverture du site officiel :
