Some works scream. Others whisper. “Apes Ma” and “Fitter Happier” do both in a frequency that bypasses the conscious brain. What remains is a residue. A shape. A hush at the end of language. An old lover kisses slow, dayglo blue scorpions.

Some songs are not songs. They are bookmarks. Strange interruptions. Psychic cul-de-sacs. They don’t follow the rules, no melody to hum, no chorus to chant. They arrive like intrusive thoughts. They linger like ghosts.

Two such artefacts, “Apes Ma” by Captain Beefheart and “Fitter Happier” by Radiohead, serve as natural bookends in the story of disintegration. They aren’t merely tracks. They’re transmissions from the void. Apes Ma and Fitter Stronger are two sides of the same coin, flipped a generation apart, but the same nonetheless.

Contents

“Apes Ma” – Captain Beefheart (1980)

Just over a minute long. Just barely music. “Apes Ma” closes Doc at the Radar Station with a breathy, cracked whisper. Don Van Vliet (aka Captain Beefheart) seems to channel something ancient and unknowable. The track feels like a field recording from a decaying consciousness.

“Apes Ma is asleep. He has been for a long time.”

The voice is hushed but intrusive, eerie but intimate. It bypasses the rational brain. This is language fragmenting, not due to chaos but age. Memory. Dissolution. Apes Ma isn’t a farewell, it’s a ritual. A croak from the ruins of self-awareness.

“Fitter Happier” – Radiohead (1997)

Placed mid-way through OK Computer, “Fitter Happier” is a robot reading out a self-help checklist:

“Fitter, happier, more productive…”

It sounds like an automated voice note from the end of the world. Delivered by Apple’s text-to-speech software, it catalogues a life optimised into absence. No rebellion. No spark. Just surveillance-era compliance masked as self-care.

There’s a flicker of sadness buried within:

“Still cries at a good film. Still kisses with saliva.”

But it’s a faint heartbeat beneath an otherwise flatlined track. If “Apes Ma” is the echo of something lost, “Fitter Happier” is the instruction manual for surrender.

Two Tracks as Psychic Markers

Despite being separated by nearly two decades, the similarities are striking:

• Both tracks distil essence rather than develop ideas.
• Both deny melody or traditional song form.
• Both are about humanity but not from it, delivered by whispers and machines.

“Apes Ma” is the last gasp of myth. “Fitter Happier” is the sterile plan for post-human survival. The voice in one is breaking; the voice in the other is already broken.

These are not end-of-world songs. They’re post-end. They sit on the other side of collapse, and simply narrate what’s left: the echo and the log file.

Dream Logic and the End of Language

There’s something Beckett-like in both pieces. Apes Ma might be muttered by Hamm at the end of Endgame. Fitter Happier might be Lucky’s monologue rewritten by a Silicon Valley UX team. Language doesn’t build here, it loops, disintegrates, fails.

They leave the listener with dissonance, not resolution. And that may be their point: a refusal to close the door, to let the light in. Instead, they turn your ear toward the dark.

Conclusion: Bookmarks to Oblivion

Songs like these don’t exist to be replayed. They exist to be remembered, uneasily. They sit in albums like mould in the corner of a room, growing, rotting, warning.

They are not nihilistic. They are post-meaning. Which is different.

Apes Ma and Fitter Stronger are two sides of the same coin, flipped a generation apart, but the same nonetheless. They show us the slow dissolve of humanity, not in flames, but in static. In hum. In whatever remains when narrative has stopped making sense.

Reference Catalogue: Works that Echo the Void

Why This All Resonates with “Apes Ma” and “Fitter Happier”

• Alienation from the human form — whether by machine, entropy, or dream
• Anti-narrative — stories that collapse under their own absurdity or abstraction
• Disembodiment — either the soul is gone (Fitter Happier) or it never existed (Apes Ma)
• Entropy over cataclysm — the end isn’t fire; it’s dust, repetition, emptiness
• Post-language — when words are no longer enough, and all that’s left is gesture, breath, code

Songs — Soundtracks to Disintegration

• Godspeed You! Black Emperor – “The Dead Flag Blues”
  Spoken word over decaying strings. Feels like Apes Ma given orchestral weight.
• Laurie Anderson – “O Superman”
  Robotic comfort that becomes discomfort. A prototype for Fitter Happier.
• David Bowie – “Blackstar”
  Death’s art project. Loss, legacy, the unknowable. Bowie’s Apes Ma.
• Bon Iver – “Holocene”
  Ego disappears quietly. Not dystopia—something smaller, sadder, truer.
• Penderecki – “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima”
  Classical music as psychic destruction.

Poems — Where Words Collapse Beautifully

• T.S. Eliot – The Hollow Men
  “This is the way the world ends…” Feels like Fitter Happier before the MacBook.
• Samuel Beckett – What is the Word
  Post-stroke language. Fragment. Failure. Feels found, not written.
• Paul Celan – Todesfuge
  A scream of history. Language at the brink of vanishing.
• Anne Sexton – The Starry Night
  Madness, surrender, beauty. Death as invitation.

Dystopian Literature — Post-collapse, Post-self, Post-meaning

• J.G. Ballard – The Atrocity Exhibition, High-Rise, Crash, Running Free, Memories of the Space Age
  Psychotic collage. Dream logic. Heat-death melancholy. Feels like a Beefheart album on Thorazine—then rewound and played at half-speed in a burned-out Hilton lobby.
• George R. Stewart – Earth Abides
  Slow decay, not fire. A deeply human end.
• Anna Kavan – Ice
  Hallucinatory, surreal, devastating. The apocalypse as a dream.
• Beckett – Endgame
  Two men in a room. Language crumbling. The void is doing a slow dance.
• McCarthy – The Road
  Ashes, not flames. Survival as a burden. Memory as wound.
• Kurt Vonnegut – Galápagos, Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five
  Black-comic apocalypse. Intelligence as a failed experiment. Meaning as cosmic joke. Vonnegut winks while the world burns.

Dystopian Film and Visual Media — The Road to Blood Meridian

• Stalker (Tarkovsky)
  Silence. Stillness. Spiritual dread. The Zone is Apes Ma with moss.
• Threads (BBC, 1984)
  Bureaucratic collapse. No music. No message. Just after.
• La Jetée (1962)
  Time as frozen grief. The moment before language dissolves.
• Begotten (1990)
  Death god. Earth mother. No words. No comfort. Just texture and terror.

Visual Art — Art That Echoes the Void

• Zdzisław Beksiński
  Fossilised cities. Faceless figures. Dreamt decay. The world after us.
• Francis Bacon
  Distorted flesh. Screams in form. Identity slipping.
• Francis Goya
  Even the gods themselves can go mad.
• Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggion
  Because the real monsters are the people.