Analysis Of Radiohead's A Moon Shaped Pool

To fully understand the meaning of Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool entirety, along with identifying the appeals to emotion presented, one must first understand who Radiohead’s intended audience is. The difficulty in identifying their target audience is the fact that with each new song­––and frequently within a singular song­––the audience changes and with that, its emotional value. Since the albums main themes revolve around the loss of love, a relationship, and to an extent (as will be discussed soon) a will to live, it is clear that some fallacies of argument as described by Walton are bound to occur; for example, the album’s first track, “Burn the Witch,” seems to be an persuasive argument directed at himself in an effort to convince himself

By asking us to relate to his plight and to understand his perspective, Yorke is using what Walton describes as popular rhetoric, “an argument designed to persuade a specific target audience… [It’s] objective is to build a personal bond with this audience, to establish a personal link between the arguer and the recipient of his message” (Walton 106). The message of the song continues in a subtle way that requires deeper analysis: the final two-and-a-half minutes of the track are a repetition of the phrase “Half of my life” slowed down and reversed (“Daydreaming,” Radiohead, 2016). This, once again, is an emotional appeal that calls upon the methods of popular rhetoric; its fallacy is that the lyrics violate rule four of the negative rules of persuasion dialogue by appealing to “external sources of proof without backing up [his] argument properly” (Walton 17). Yorke only presents his perspective of the situation in “Daydreaming,” he fails to present evidence to persuade us to take his side in this argument, and only presents an emotional case for his listeners to buy