When I outlined my lukewarm-at-best feelings about Radiohead, I did so with some trepidation, afraid that their legions of cult-like fans (or, really, just Catherine) would rip me to shreds, but since Carrie Brownstein seems to agree, I'll just consider myself in good company.
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Lukewarm on Radiohead
05 Dec 2007 08:48 am
Comments (23)
I couldn't have said it better nitpicker. I feel betrayed.
Radiohead has kept legions of otherwise normal 20-somethings from becoming EMO twerps. It's the methadone of music, and you should be thankful for the better world they've created for you.
When I listen to Radiohead I feel like I've just heard the sonic version of Don Delillo's White Noise. It's eerie, cold, and foreboding. There is a blankness I find difficult to move beyond.
Has she actually read White Noise? It's one of the funniest books I've ever read.
I feel as though you're not giving Radiohead enough credit for things like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1ASzwriBOw
Here's what I don't get: Why do people who don't care for Radiohead always feel the need to write about it? I've been trying to understand it since all the critics imploded over Kid A. Do these same people blow a gasket over Beck or Deerhunter or My Morning Jacket (the Eagles of our time)? So why Radiohead? Is it because all the cool kids are into it? They also loved Buffalo 66, which doesn't make it challenging, just bad. I find it especially odd to see Carrie Brownstein finding them impenetrable and off-putting. I love Sleater-Kinney, but Corin Tucker's voice takes some SERIOUS getting-used-to. Just goes to show how subjective all of this is. (Yes, I love Radiohead. If I didn't I'd be blogging about it.)
I guess I can understand why you're ambivalent about Radiohead, Matt; you care about lyrics, which have never been Thom Yorke's forte ("Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon" isn't exactly poetry). But that someone like Brownstein, who wrote some of the best guitar lines of the '90s, can't appreciate the drum programming on "Airbag", or the synth atmospherics on "How to Disappear Completely", or at the very least Jonny Greenwood's guitar work on "Just", is just astounding.
My new found luv is Shiina Ringo, who's a fairly huge star in Japan (something like 4-5 #1 albums there), but more or less totally unknown in the rest of the world, to their huge loss.
It's basically impossible to sum her up in less than several hundred words (see here and here, for example) since at one point or another she's touched upon more or less half of the musical styles of the last 50 years, but a trip to You Tube, searching for "Shiina Ringo" or "Tokyo Jihen" (her current band) is well worth anyone's time.
Her 2003 album Karuki Zamen Kuri no Hana (which translates to "Swimming Pool Chlorine, Semen, Chestnut Blossom", or more loosely to "Smells like Semen, Semen, Smells like Semen") in particular is a nearly perfect album from start to finish. At first listen it can seem almost impossibly dense, like she's trying to throw every idea she ever had into a single song, but it really pays off huge rewards if you're patient. Anyway, the relevance to this post is that the only part which puts me off is the first song, which has a pretty significant nod to Radiohead. Ugh. I just totally don't get that band.
Why do people who don't care for Radiohead always feel the need to write about it?
Because people who do care for Radiohead love to yammer about them being the bestest band ever, when they're just Coldplay with feedback.
It is acceptable to have maybe one Radiohead stan among one's entire group of friends. If you have several then you need to start meeting new people.
If you are at the point where it starts seeming like everyone considers Radiohead stanism an essential part of being human then you are probably beyond hope. This is not a majority viewpoint among any respectable group of people.
Radiohead.
OK, now I seen enough. What else can you show me?
Why do people who don't care for Radiohead always feel the need to write about it?
Because, if there were people who didn't care for Radiohead and didn't write about it, you'd never know, would you?
(Obligatory positioning: I like Radiohead well enough, I guess, but their output often strikes me as uneven in a way that's hard to define. If they released half as many albums I'd probably like them twice as much, so long as their judgment on what to keep mirrored my own. Which it probably wouldn't. So never mind.)
What I don't understand is the strange phenomenon of the excluded middle on the internet. It appears that everybody on the internet either a) genuinely dislikes Radiohead, or at least doesn't particularly care for any of their work; or b) thinks they're the greatest band of all time!!!1!
What about the opinion that The Bends and OK Computer were great albums, but that their later work has failed to live up to that? This, as far as I can tell from people I know in the real world, and from reading music reviews, seems to be the consensus position. And yet it is always completely absent from these discussions.
appreciate the drum programming on "Airbag", or the synth atmospherics on "How to Disappear Completely", or at the very least Jonny Greenwood's guitar work on "Just"
I know a lot of people who claim to listen to music this way, but I don't get it. Why should technical complexity, or even inventiveness per se, determine merit? My admiration for how good someone is at the guitar is pretty independent of what I think of the music being played.
I wish Radiohead would just stop trying to blow me away.
Why should technical complexity, or even inventiveness per se, determine merit?
It shouldn't. The guitar work in "Just" is great not because Greenwood is a killer guitarist (though he certainly is), but because he wrote a really interesting, catchy lead part. If that shouldn't be a consideration in listening to music, I don't know what should.
And I agree that most people don't actually think about the individual instruments as they listen to music; breaking it down that way is certainly reductive, but it's the only real way to have a coherent discussion about music.
On the plus side, Carrie Brownstein's column finally made me go discover Sleater-Kinney, which turns out to have been a really rockin' band. Why did I never listen to them before? Maybe because all the girls I knew in college who liked them were dating guys who wouldn't shut up about how great Radiohead was...
"What about the opinion that The Bends and OK Computer were great albums, but that their later work has failed to live up to that? This, as far as I can tell from people I know in the real world, and from reading music reviews, seems to be the consensus position."
Hear, hear. IMO, Hail to the Thief is a great 10 song album that unfortunately has 14 songs, Kid A was a clever but mostly failed experiment, and Amnesiac plays like rejected outtakes from the Kid A session. I'll get around to downloading In Rainbows eventually, but based on the snippets I've heard I'm not in any hurry.
I think Radiohead get a great deal of deserved credit for their willingness to experiment and for refusing to settle for conventional songwriting. Some people obviously enjoy the results of that experimentation. And I'm glad that all their dicking around eventually gave birth to a few great songs-- notably There, There. But for mine own part, their work since OK Computer has rarely gone anywhere that interests me.
Hmm. Radiohead is music to listen to on headphones, or on speakers well positioned enough that they fill your whole sonic space. In a dark room. Their Kid A period stuff is influenced by Aphex Twin and that kind of fine-grained electronica, so the experience (for most people who like them, I think) is not of, like, "this song ROCKS!" but kind of an intellectualized feeling of being transported into another world, one with a stark, technological, decaying beauty.
I like Sleater-Kinney too, but I don't really think that headphones would add much to the experience -- it's about rocking out with a lot of passion & politics & engagement with life. So it doesn't surprise me in the slightest that Brownstein isn't into Radiohead.
I can't really back up this next claim but I have the feeling that people who spend their lives in the uptight, constantly politically engaged, professional-class world of D.C. might tend not to be well primed to appreciate Radiohead.
Radiohead was a great (GREAT) live act. I'm not sure if that is still the case, but many of the die hard fans grew up in the mid '90s when there was a ton of crap music out there and not that many revelatory big live shows. I haven't seen them live since their first hiatus (was a big fan, but have lost track of the new music scene), but maybe other folks can comment on whether the Starbucks crowd takes away from some of that energy...
Irony wouldn't ya know it, these feelings, if not descriptions, were always the way I felt about Sleater-Kinney.
I thought everything from The Bends to Amnesiac were great, the first two in the bunch obviously for very different reasons from the latter two albums, but once they came back and tried to synthesize the two approaches on Hail to the Thief and In Rainbows they came up short. Now their music isn't inventive and atmospheric like Kid A, and it also doesn't have the great tunes of OK Computer.
Matt, you are completely correct in your non-love. Keep that flag waving so the rest of our small number can salute it.
Comments closed December 19, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
Matthew,
This only shows that everyone--no matter how intelligent--can have a blind spot and two smart people can share the same one.
Posted by nitpicker | December 5, 2007 9:00 AM