At one point during the movie Clueless, Cher (Alicia Silverstone) is riding in the car with Josh (Paul Rudd), while Fake Plastic Trees plays on the tape deck, much to the young lady’s disgust. Waahhh, wahhh, wahhh, she says. Complaint Rock. She’s not entirely wrong, I suppose. With today’s selection, Radiohead dished out a heaping helping of bummer, a really rather morbid lament that might properly be called a dirge. It certainly sounds a lot more like the Smiths than the Go-Gos, or, say, a lot more like Randy Newman than Justin Bieber, put it that way. You might even say it verges on lugubrious. I wouldn’t, I think it’s simply melancholy, which isn’t the same thing, but all right. Fair enough. Let’s stipulate to that. Let’s also agree that It’s perfectly understandable if, from where you sit, that’s not at all a good thing. Some folks feel popular entertainment isn’t supposed to bring you down, it’s supposed to lift you up, and give you a moment when you can forget your troubles. If you really wanted to feel sad, helpless, downtrodden, and unappreciated, you’d just go back to work, where that stuff is always on tap, right? You get paid to feel like crap. You aren’t about to volunteer in your spare time, OK? I get it. But I’m an oddball. I just love a depressive and borderline hopeless tune when it’s done just right (what better describes Eleanor Rigby?), plus I’m a complainer, and think everybody should be complaining. Complaint Rock rules!
According to Songfacts, composer Thom Yorke was initially inspired to write Fake Plastic Trees upon first walking around London’s Canary Wharf development, the grounds of which supposedly make liberal use of artificial foliage. This makes no sense, because the Canary Wharf landscaping does no such thing, as near as I can tell from looking into it. Quite the opposite. Yorke has also offered, enigmatically, that the song was “the product of a joke that wasn’t really a joke, a very lonely, drunken evening and, well, a breakdown of sorts”. Whatever its roots, what emerged was what might be called a meditation on the futility of artifice, or, more prosaically, a statement that if what’s real proves elusive, or unsatisfactory, good luck finding joy in the synthetic alternatives:
A green plastic watering can
For a fake Chinese rubber plant
In the fake plastic earth
That she bought from a rubber man
In a town full of rubber plans
To get rid of itself
The lyrics go on to portray a plastic surgeon who performed cosmetic work for girls in the Eighties (plastic surgery for plastic people!), but appears to have packed it in because “gravity always wins”. Then there’s the general emptiness of romantic relationships, which disappoint either because we live in a superficial world full of superficial people who may as well be sex dolls, (if read through a poetic lens), or because the narrator really is making do with a plastic sex doll, take your pick:
She looks like the real thing
She tastes like the real thing
My fake plastic love
But I can’t help the feeling
I could blow through the ceiling
If I just turn and run
…all of which, inevitably, wears him out. Everyone in the song, as we’re told over and over, is worn to a frazzle.
If that doesn’t resonate, or if it would, but you’d rather it didn’t, I won’t fault you. We can still be friends. You’ll bear with me, I hope, when I feel the need for this sort of thing. It gives me comfort, maybe because it reminds me I’m not the only one.
By the by, Cher’s dismissiveness in Clueless is meant to be a comment on her, not the song.
the needlefish 