Politics & Power Quote by Thom Yorke

Yorke is describing protest as a kind of low-budget distribution hack: if the gatekeepers won’t carry your message, smuggle it in through the chorus. The line lands because it refuses the romantic fantasy that political change comes from pristine arguments delivered to an attentive public. Instead, he sketches a media ecosystem where “mainstream” isn’t just inaccessible, it’s illegible. That’s a harsher claim: even when people have access, they may not have the literacy - the codes, the cynicism, the attention span - to parse what mainstream outlets are really doing.

The phrase “loosely political” is the tell. Yorke isn’t advocating for didactic anthems or lyric pamphlets. He’s pointing to something more adaptive: ambiguity that travels. A slogan-heavy song can be quarantined as “political music” and safely ignored; a lyric that gestures, hints, nags at the edge of the personal can slip into playlists, car rides, bars, bedrooms. The politics rides shotgun with mood.

“Absorb some of it and spit it back out” sounds crude on purpose. It frames culture as digestion: people take in fragments, rephrase them, meme them, repeat them at work, at school, online. That’s not a noble model of civic discourse; it’s a realistic one. In the late-90s/2000s Radiohead context - Iraq, surveillance, corporate media consolidation, the rise of algorithmic feeds - Yorke is basically arguing that the song is a delivery system for suspicion. Not a manifesto, a contaminant: just enough to make the listener’s own language wobble.