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Rating: You live in the trash. Literally.
You are the same substance you use to pack, destroy, and create.
Who do you sleep with at night? What do you buy, what do you sell, what do you steal?
You confuse the warmth of skin with the cold of plastic, with the fragility of glass.
And if a rift of reality appeared in the plastic sky above your head, would you know when to look up?
Yorke wrote it in a rush, perhaps drunk, later finding many of the words he used amusing. However, after some time, the stress of recording and interpreting it was such that numerous times he burst into tears without knowing why.
As if some sort of subliminal message hit him straight in the brain without warning.
The power of music is also this. Even when it kicks you, you appreciate the spontaneity it has towards you.
With calm and suffering anticipation, the moment arrives when sweetly Fake Plastic Trees asks you for what you don't want to be asked for.
It's bitter, but you love it anyway. Just like you love those who harm you.
Tracklist and Lyrics
01 Fake Plastic Trees (04:52)
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
It wears her out, it wears her out
It wears her out, it wears her out
She lives with a broken man
A cracked polystyrene man
Who just crumbles and burns
He used to do surgery
For girls in the eighties
But gravity always wins
And it wears him out, it wears him out
It wears him out, it wears him out
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
And it wears me out, it wears me out
It wears me out, it wears me out
And if I could be who you wanted
If I could be who you wanted
All the time, all the time
02 India Rubber (03:26)
Did it all for you to say
You never wanted me that way
Now the dogs have had their meat
I think I'll go plug in the mains
I tumble like a clown
Before your baying hounds
I supplicate myself
Into your hands
When you spare a make-up smile
I'm instantly your biggest fan
How I was to know that
You practised it beforehand?
I tumble like a clown
Before your baying hounds
I supplicate myself
Into your hands
03 How Can You Be Sure? (04:21)
Seen all good things and bad
Running down the hill
All so battered and brought to the ground
I am hungry again, I am drunk again
All the money I owe to my friends
When I'm like this
How can you be smiling, singing
How can you be sure?
How can you be sure?
If you walk out the door
Will I see you again?
If so much of me lies in your eyes
I am hungry again, I am drunk again
All the money I owe to my friends
When I'm like this
How can you be smiling, singing
How can you be sure I don't want you?
How can you be sure I don't want you?
How can you be sure I don't want you?
How can you be sure I don't want you?
I don't want you, I don't want you anymore
I don't want you, I don't want you anymore
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Other reviews
By n3o
"Fake Plastic Trees, with its three sustained and crystalline organ chords, reminded her of her Christmas: melancholic, cold, decadent but not for that less happy, alive, lived."
"Today, a little over twenty years later, what remains is the melancholy linked to that period and the oppressive cold of that winter of 2004 that’s still in my bones and easily resurfaces every time I play this song."
