Soundtracked

Rabbit In Your Headlights

** Image ID #2070351 Unavailable **
This week's theme: One Hit Wonders

It's almost funny to me in the course of thinking about One Hit Wonders for "The Soundtrack of Your Life"  how many great songs I've sorta forgotten about...and today I'm gonna stretch the definition of a 1HW to include a song that wasn't a commercial success, but it's still noteworthy nonetheless. And what makes it difficult to illustrate my point is that there isn't an official YouTube video available for some reason (I'm guessing copyright violations and licensing have something to do with that).

UNKLE was pretty much a collaboration project headed up by DJ Shadow   and featured guest appearances by Mike D of the Beastie Boys and Richard Ashcroft from The Verve. Radiohead's Thom Yorke performed on "Rabbit In Your Headlights"...a bleak, moody piece that included movie samples and lyrics that suggested a coming to grips with the decline associated with mental illness and the alienation that unfortunately all too often comes with it.

I say that because it's a repressed fear of mine...that someday I will succumb completely to brain degradation as my own diagnoses take over. Perhaps without even knowing it, I'll slowly begin to lose control over my faculties...Alzheimer's, dementia, etc., combined with what I already know (severe depressive disorder, generalized anxiety) on top of several known and unreported concussions. And usually the only way to know a lot of this is when it's too late to do anything about it. I'd be lying if I said I didn't think about what all of that could lead to eventually and that it's not scary...it's in the back of my mind but quite often does it bubble up into my front conscience.

And that's where the original video for this song comes in. It depicts a mentally unstable man walking in traffic through a London tunnel. To my knowledge, I believe it won an MTV Video Music Award for "Breakthrough Video"...while also managing to get banned from airplay by the same channel for its graphic, violent, and disturbing imagery. The man is struck several times by cars, only to get up and carry on each time, becoming more and more agitated until the song's climax...which is by far the most powerful bit of cinematography I have personally witnessed in any music video. Luckily, there is an unedited version still in circulation on Vimeo, which you can watch here  ...but I'm warning you: it could be construed as very unsettling, especially if you're, ya know, not into watching a clearly disturbed and ill man get hit and run over by vehicles multiple times. I swear though, the ending...there really are almost no words to describe it other than powerful and amazing.

For the sake of our Soundtracker Playlist  , I'll include the best version I could come up with on YouTube...

"Fat bloody fingers are sucking your soul away..."
Lyrics.  

I also came across this, which is a beautiful live rehearsal version by Thom Yorke for his Atoms For Peace supergroup side project (you can see Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers walking around in the background...you'll know it's him because I don't think he knows how to do anything music-related unless he's shirtless). The only drawback to this clip is Yorke constantly rubbing his face near the end...I'm watching this, thinking how wonderful an alternative it is to the original, and then I'm like "Gawd, stop picking at your nose! This is on YouTube! It's got over 70k views! Couldn't you just do it over again after you've had a good sneeze or something?!"

But seriously, I do love this song...as dreary and detached as it is and in spite of the looming scariness in my head (for my head) accompanying the original video. It's worth the look.