This is a little one. I’ve been searching for the right one for you, sweet love, but while I wait for it I’ll offer you this. Because we talked about it in your car. Because we both love Radiohead. Because this title honors my favorite song in Hamilton, which has taught me so much about music and language, just as you have. So for now, this is slightly right.

All of rock music, kinesthetically and aesthetically and ethically. Right here. In this little one. In three lines delivered only once within one song, “My Iron Lung,” the title track on an EP that is, at best, the seventh-most significant studio release by this astonishing band. All of rock music. That’s an incredible verse, maybe my favorite single verse in rock history, and I say that as an established Dylan scholar. Thom has some ear, I’d say.

Suck, suck your teenage thumb
Toilet trained and dumb
When the power runs out…we’ll just hum

I owe you so much for the ways you inspire me, and one of the most precious to me is how you inspire me to think musically and learn musically. I am finding my ear, falteringly but fast-growing, with your loving help. My ear for language, for poetry, I have nurtured longer and with greater confidence. And yes, I believe (despite Bob’s dismissals) that popular music lyrics can be poetry. To wit:

We start with the short, phonetically spikey word “suck,” repeated twice, hinting at multiple meanings. It’s an abrupt-sounding wording, hissed out, with a guttural schwa in the middle, ending with a hard stop on the “k,” sounding like the insult it might be when first heard, sounding like the slangy, clipped, clipping (of the listener’s autonomy), homophobic (in our society), obscene and adult exhortation for listeners to debase themselves by taking something in that might close their connection to breath and sustenance even if merely for an instant…but the repetition opens us back up to more meanings, both because as insulting exhortation it’s never repeated in practice and because the invitation is to suck something surprisingly homely, surprisingly self-nurturing, surprisingly infantilizing—“your teenage thumb.” Listeners are invited, within this arty-rock song, to comfort themselves, to connect to the body, to physicalize their need.

“Teenage thumb” and “toilet trained” are the only multiword phrases in these three lines…all other non-syntactical words are standalone objects, transitive verbs, or pronouns. These compound descriptions come to us immediately back to back, enjambed across two lines, thickening their importance in this verse. Together, they clinch for us the kinesthetic/aesthetic/ethic dimensions of rock music here…it is visceral music, rooted historically in dancing, in the lower regions of the body, in the groin (a rich irony, an “irony lung” perhaps, hee hee, when delivered by one of the most notoriously heady acts in commercially successful rock history); and it is insistent music marked by frequent repetition and often-frustrating earworms, music that habituates itself in the body like thumb sucking, like learning over time to control one’s elimination of waste; and it is resistant music, music of ennui and of rebellion and of a tumultuous relationship to generational elders obsessed with decorum who scrutinize our sucking and monitor our shitting.

And for all of these reasons, kinesthetics and aesthetics and ethics, it is music that has been, of course, for its entire history, no less so even after the arrival of an extraordinarily empathetic and incisive observer like Thom Yorke on the writing scene, dismissed as “dumb.” But to be intellectually dumb is not the only way to be dumb, for “dumb” is a word as layered as “suck.” Here, in this verse about rock music’s qualities, in this song about angst and the need for connection even when one feels paralyzed, listeners might indeed be unable to speak, let alone belt out their favorite ditties with a spirit of release. Struck dumb by the thumb, the rhyme scheme suggests. Silenced by the very things we look to for succor. A creepy image. And the phoneme of this rhyme locks the thumb in our dumbstruck mouths, for the monosyllabic finish of both words depends not on any precise articulation but on the mere tongue-heavy vibration, indeed the thrumming, of the “mmmmm” locked in at the top of the throat as we close our mouths to make this sound.

Listeners are sketched now, brilliantly, breathtakingly (hee hee again, lung, get it? Wink wink; see, this author’s pretty dumb, too, when it comes to jokes), as brats cocooned, swaddled in rock’s aggressive wall of noise, raging uselessly at the machine. But listeners need that machine they rage against, too, just as teens buying Elvis and Beatles records like my mom did depended on the commercial apparatus that sustained the corporations—and that’s a “power” that, inevitably, in its effort to preserve itself, someday in the very apocalyptic revolution that rock portends and demands, “runs out.” What will happen then? Thom, as performatively magnificently as Leslie Odom Jr., knows how to make us wait for it, makes us live with him in that tiny extra half-beat of silence before he reveals the spectacular genius of a clincher: “we’ll just hum.”

So many rich dimensions coalesce with this final phrase. The sudden shift to “we” after the opening word’s emphatic second-person command to listeners captures the questions of authenticity that have always complicated rock music: Do musicians genuinely identify with listeners’ concerns, or is the suggestion of “we” a cynical commercial act? Might the narrator here mean that the band he’s fronting can continue to perform without amplification—the amplification of wattage? Of the iron lung that ensures continued breathing? Of mass marketing that removes them from the bar stage? If Radiohead plays in the forest and no one’s there to hear them, is it music? And “hum”…ending on hum, drawing out the “mmmm” in this third rhyme with that special Yorkian whine…for me, poetic perfection. All the themes of the verse, of the treatment of rock offered here, all these resound and redound here in this one word. It’s the hum of electricity of course, physical (“power”) and emotional (the charge of relational connection that can be sustained by humming even when articulation won’t work, like when you don’t know the words and so you hum) and social (hum as a metonym for multiple, interdependent elements working together, as in an engine). It’s the possibility of caring for self, making the only sound one can when the juice has been drained. It’s the halting, uncertain effort to, with hope but often without solace, speak into the air (that phrase is the title of the one philosophy of communication book, by John Durham Peters, that I would recommend to you and to any person who never thought they’d read such a book) and find the communion that rock music purports to provide—that’s the kind of dwindling but still striving “hum” we’re left with, as an end rhyme, when we are rendered “dumb” with our “thumb.” That’s a clincher worth waiting for.

Ok, it wasn’t so little. But when I hum like I did here, and in some sense among all the different, complex ways I hum, I am always humming for you.