"Lyrics that would not be out of place on a Jewel record"

And sure the lyrics could be found on a Jewel record. The lyrics are impressionistic, not poems, not naturalistic accounts or narratives. Think of the nursery rhyme clips and folk sayings (we all go to heaven in a little row boat, sleepy Jack, you and whose army, I'm a reasonable man, this is what you get when you mess with us, get off my case, who's in the bunker, women and children first, this just feels like spinning plates, etc etc). There's no attempt at original writing as far as the words go -- they are suggestive of things, scraps we've picked up over our lives, perhaps each having a different reptile-brain resonance for any one of us (as listeners, we've heard these things from childhood onward, and the context for us as individuals is crucial, which I suspect is one of the reasons why Radiohead records polarize people so much).

Consequently, Sasha's also onto something with the lullabies stuff. Although some of them are maybe particularly dark lullabies. Amnesiac is perhaps the most comfortless lullaby ever recorded, come to think of it.

This round table should be a lot of fun.

And I'll probably change my mind on a whole bunch of shit before it's over.

"Putting [Radiohead] up the cultural scale anywhere near the Beatles or Missy or the Mountain Goats or Led Zeppelin or Pharrell Williams is suspect."

Whoa. No offense, J0hn -- but can we safely say that the Mountain Goats are further up the cultural scale than Radiohead and on par with the other acts named? This seems a little silly to me, even though you are a perfectly nice guy and I've enjoyed your music. Methinks it diminishes Sasha's argument.

Where does the idea come from that Lennon was into innovative sounds? Post-Beatles he slated all the sonic nonsense that George Martin added to the songs, plus he put out a pretty straight album of rock and roll covers, and, after punk and all, his last album is as conservative as anything ever released (Cliff Richard included). You know what John Lennon would've been listening to? Morrissey and They Might Be Giants.

Does anyone else think Marzorati taking the "oh you critics and your tortured, unpaid artist fetish" road is an easy (and kinda condescending) out? It's just so obvious, and also, I was under the assumption that the "monetary struggle =legitimacy's only inroad" fallacy for artists was debunked the second America hit 6% unemployment rates.

"That the "system" can be bent to your purposes. It's not easy. It's not fun. It takes will and work and ingenuity. But without a single or a video or the cover of Rolling Stone, Kid A—that, you know, mid-brow thing that failed to take into account anything that has really happened in the past 30 years—debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard charts."

Here, it just seems as though he's justifying what seems to me as Radiohead's political waffling/ inability to back that shit up.

when he shows up for his shows I hear he's kind of cool live, too

I have only ever missed one show, ever, because the roads were iced over and the car had no headlights and the sun had gone down! I wish somebody could get him to take that part back, it makes me sound undependable when in fact I think my batting average in the dependability dept. is higher than the average in my, um, avocation.

i just took the mountain goats ref. to be an affectionate ilx tip of the that, although i'm sure most people reading were like, "whaaaaa?"

But back to Radiohead -- I think what's interesting about their recent music (and I admit I haven't bothered to track down the new one yet) is that they have continued on the one hand to inhabit the niche of world-beating-intellectually-respectable-rock-band, almost by default because no one else has seemed up to the job, but at the same time they have either refused or failed to meet the musical requirements of that particular post. No Joshua Tree, no Synchronicity, no Automatic for the People, no anthems or prom songs. It's like there's almost a disconnect at this point between the role they play in pop culture (a role they've been elected to, whether they want it or not) and the actual music they're making. I tend toward the skeptics' side in the Radiohead wars, but I have to admit I can't think of anyone else who's ever been in quite their position. I also think their significance, whatever it's been, is on the wane. Which probably doesn't mean much to them, and maybe one of these days they'll finally make their masterpiece.

Their anthem was "Creep" -- in some respects, they went through that phase first. ;-)

Love,

Your mom

Well, yeah. And even though I'm a sucker for the guitar snags on "Creep" like anyone, I'm not advocating more anthems. It's just interesting that their standing as thinking-person's-major-label-rock-band has increased while their actual music has wandered off into the ether. I think it says as much about the audience's need for such a band to exist as it does about the band.

But I feel disconnected in the matter of how many non-critic people actually like Radiohead.

(Smiley faces removed at request of others. Might be reinstated later.)

And no offense Melissa, but is Radiohead actually dark? I can think of a lot of adjectives for them, but that one doesn't spring readily to mind.

I feel like his whole argument today was stellar, and far more layered than the other guy's

They sell more records than the Strokes and less than J. Lo. But their stature is even somewhat apart from their sales. They do need a certain amount of commercial success, because they're basically occupying the Populist Intellectual niche (again, whether they want to or not), and commercial success=populist, no matter what the music sounds like. They're in a direct line that has included Springsteen, the Police, Talking Heads, U2, R.E.M. and maybe even Nirvana -- "artistic" rock'n'rollers writing about "serious" things and still managing to pack stadiums. Jon Pareles Rock, in other words.

there ya go, amg-man.

didn't you see their bleak uncomfortable art movie about themselves?
It wasn't "their" movie, it was Grant Gee's. His direction. His vision. Did you really think a Radiohead movie would be about tour debauchery anyway?

plus, if you go to their web-site you have to click on a picture of a fish or something to get info about the band.
Once again, do you have a point?

sasha made perfect sense. he's my new hero you know.
Sasha only makes sense if you completely accept the box he has created for the band, for all music even, to exist in. He has constructed this elaborately rigid map to make his point that upon closer inspection just makes no fucking sense. It's entirely missing any idea of it being a continuum.
He's trying to accuse them of rockism, basically, by being an even more egregious rockist.

So I got a chance to look at Day 2 of this Slate discussion, and there are a thousand places to interject, but I'll just choose one:

It's odd that Sasha says this:

Melancholy music can be confident and immediate: Who could hear 10 seconds of Nick Drake's "Pink Moon" and not be transported? Radiohead songs, in general, don't pack that kind of punch. I think doubt is their engine, really, and that's an odd place to start a pop record. Not necessarily wrong, but it's hard to make compelling.

In this short paragraph, he (subconsciously? definitely bizarrely) conjures up abrupt suggestions of many of the most recent Radiohead songs... eg/ pack ("Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box") that kind of punch ("A Drunken Punch Up at a Wedding"). Or doubt: "nothing to fear / Nothing to doubt" ("Pyramid Song"). Or Not necessarily wrong: "I Might Be Wrong". Suggesting he might be more invested emotionally in this music than he claims to be? Certainly his subconscious seems to be nagging him ;-)

I think doubt and melancholy can be perfectly appropriate bedfellows, anyway, even if they're not the life and soul, like Missy. And it seems Sasha is just trying to shoehorn his argument. I mean, what's with the accusations of intellectualism, the assertion that only critics like the band, and the conflation into middlebrow? This seems lazy. And it tries to have the cake, eat it, then spin the plates it came on too. What's with the middlebrow hate? I know I have a hard enough time aspiring to middlebrow in the first place; highbrow certainly seems elusive most of the time. People don't fit into easy boxes. Music critics are also fans. And they're all over the fucking shop in terms of brow -- slopebrow, monobrow, ridgebrow, low, middle, high, whatevah the fuck these distinctions really mean.

What strikes me is this: the agonising over Radiohead seems to emanate more loudly from their aloof detractors than from their so-called rockist middlebrow intellectual fans.

All I know is that Amnesiac chilled me to the bone, stopped me in my tracks. Hail to the Thief hasn't sliced through my small intestine in the same way, but it's still a very emotional record. And Melissa's right -- it doesn't set itself up in opposition to chart pop. "All the Things She Said" does some very similar things in a not all that different way. Let's lose the false dichotomies first, or we'll never be able to talk about this.

(Ha, x-post with Matos seems to come to the opposite conclusion, maybe only "seems")

None of which means much if you just like the way they sound. Or if Amnesiac puts you to sleep (back in the case you go).

This bit bothered me because a. I doubt that would be the case (it was Yoko who was the experimentalist) and b. I don't understand why it should matter to anyone in 2003. Why are the Beatles still used as a cultural barometer? I'd expect an old school Rolling Stone writer to care but not SFJ.

no it doesn't! amateurist, yr attitude seems to be, "if ain't historical or tablature-based, it ain't worth reading."

y'know j0hn, coming from a post-Dylan folk-revival alt-country singer songwriter type like yrself, that means a whole lot.

I'm not so much defending Marzorati's entire analysis, just responding positively to that shamanistic thing he mentions, and I tried to elaborate on in my first post. The "sensational" part comes after this, and I don't think he's saying Radiohead are the olny band playing sensational music right now, it's more specific to one song. Here:

Put another way, he, like his band mates, are in the business of beauty, not truth. When "Sit Down. Stand Up" quickens, turns on a dime, then explodes into furious broken bass chords and electro-beats and monkish chants of "The raindrops, the raindrops," I'm hearing something I've never heard before, something, quite literally, sensational.

"Beauty not truth". Now, I personally think that's pretty much hyperbolic for this particular song, but I can grasp the bigger concept about Radiohead's music in general, and this made me nod my head (jn agreement, not impending sleep, heh). Not that they're the only band/artists out there touching beauty, of damn course.

I probably got confused in there somewhere. Happens a lot.

Oh, and SFJ just scored points (as far as I'm concerned) with his return to, and appreciation of, Amnesiac.

More importantly, I call that a clear TKO for SFJ. GM was flailing.

Yeah, I mean, I really, really like what I've heard of Hail to the Thief -- the four tracks on the Capitol website -- but it's still refreshing to read someone who doesn't proceed with the automatic assumption of Radiohead's greatness. Do you think SFJ is being offensive because he's "trying to occupy [the band's] headspace" (a claim I don't think holds up, anyway) or is it just because he's dared to criticize your favorite band?

(i don't like httt very much)

If it makes any difference, it should be noted that I don't really agree with GM either, and think he's saying a lot of nothing in very flowery ways.

No, they aren't.

BAM!! Is the sound of Sasha and the rolling heads
I am serious about loving this carnage.

I love the comment about Radiohead's "failures" in the top 40.

And it's my impression, listening to them, that there is nothing at all wrong with their rhythm section.

But enough nitpicking. Now that I've obediently charged at all the red flags, I agree with Melissa that the first author is ascribing an agenda for Radiohead which does not, in my hearing of their music, actually exist, then blaming them for failing to come up to his standards for them. He is clearly biased toward some other kind of music, and it would be a nice courtesy if he had stopped to tell us precisely what his bias is.

i now will make a blt, pdq

Actually, this I don't get. In the end, define 'serious.' I think he's right that there was a lot of extreme hype and attention around Echo there for a few years in the early eighties (check some of the press then if you don't believe me), and a reaction to that is understandable, in the same way that reacting to the mantle of Radiohead-as-saviour is very understandable. But I can't quite see how this could be extended to a full-on 'nobody ever took Echo seriously' claim, either on its own or in tandem with a similar claim about Radiohead. This, too, seems disingenuous...

Thom Yorke has said so himself. The "Thief" isn't the American president, it's some nebulous force which steals life and thought. Hence the subtitle, "The Gloaming," which is about the approach of night.

I was listening to last night's interview with Yorke and he said that they chose Hail to the Thief because there's such a nonsensical element about it, but he also said he hesitated to call it that because he knew he'd have to do hundreds of interviews explaining himself.

(To clarify -- saying somebody's 'saving music' when nobody listens to them at all, when all they're doing is saving an individual listener in whatever way, shape or fashion)

ned, i'm willing to accept that "echo and the bunnymen" might just be sfj's shorthand for "english middlebrow art rock" in which case, yeah, its a fairly imperfect analogy.

as for the title not being political it is obv a play on the 'hail to the chief' song which...perhaps in the uk it means something other than the presidential theme music but i doubt it. so at the very least they are invoking american politics with the title. so yes, disingenuous. also ty's comment about political songs being 'shallow' or whatever is k-stupid. yes they are often shallow but not by definition.

i don't like this death of the author stuff. if you like something i think it's honorable to want to know and appreciate what the author(s) intended by it. especially since the 'public persona' or whatever that you're so interested in is partly mediated by/through radiohead's own pronouncements about their music. it is not entirely some nebulous authorless construct. so dismissing their comments and intentions out of hand seems to defeat the purpose of even sfj's style of "criticism."

x-pst

i just saw some darger stuff at the chi. cultural center this saturday. it disturbed me and not in a constructive way.

i don't think i could have a book on darger in my house, even from the library; it's the type of stuff museum trustees get nervous over and, again, not in the good way.

(I don't hold this rule for all critics, just ones who foist their bands on the rest of us, please don't, thanks, m'kay?!?)

I think it was something like :

They were very close to becoming Bush, at one point, a derivative English version of Seattle's sonic- and corporate youth-inspired so-called revolution, only without the cute singer. Although Yorke did dye his hair that awful Rossdale orange at one point.

Realizing this potentially silly and pointless dead end, they pulled their head into their shell for a moment, crawled away from "Creep" and contemplated for a while. This shellshocked navel gazing would prove to stand them in good stead eventually. So, they stayed on track, and forged ahead with yet more memorable, percussive, painful, and melancholic rock music on The Bends, managing to largely avoid the grunge clichés from across the Pond, as if they were part of some weird parallel universe.

Then came OK Computer. Either it was a fluke, or they happened to capture the nervy dissipating energy of a conflicted late millennial technocracy and translated some very subdued, subconscious pre-millennial anxieties into a distorted dialect of rock -- yes, rock -- but also (significantly) into a glimpse of what rock music could or might become. Or, like I say, it was a fluke.

Hence the anticipation for Kid A. It was never gonna measure up to the whole "important" thing, the whole "millennial" thing, the whole "experimental" thing. It was really none of those, anyway. It was the sounds of a band raised by stone wolves trying to find new ways to make music without becoming bored. It was actually kind of great. Who gives a fuck about "important"? It wasn't really that groundbreaking for a band who a) had already delivered OK Computer and who b) were already music geeks listening to Autechre, Aphex Twin, etc, anyway. Fuck, it had some great moments and a little filler, but 'twas a fine album when all's said and done.

Then came Amnesiac, apparently recorded around the same time as Kid A. This gloomy, edgy masterpiece managed to divide listeners (I mean critics, joe public, and everyone else who cared) even more. Now, this is subjective, but few records have captured the sheer harrowing precipitous emptiness of our late 20th / early 21st Century lives. The aching knowledge that we can never do enough to help the truly desperately needy, that we are limited in our ability to counter the evils perpetrated by governments in our collective name, that very real consumerworld individual pressures genuinely preclude action due to the necessary plate spinning and the need to watch for the flashing knives out and to listen to those deeply tolling mo(u)rning bells. All that, and our close relationships can sometimes implode or just wink out like dead stars. Fuck, no wonder there's more than a little hostility vented toward these self-absorbed Limey fops. Kill the messenger, indeed. Heh. But let's continue.

Everyone argued (as they always do), and some people got sick and tired of this mantle of importance draped over those skinny English shoulders. Probably Radiohead themselves got sick and tired of it, too. But they were savvy enough to exploit it, which is why many more who had come this far finally let go of the kite string. Enough. This was becoming pretentious. Lazy critics had been making Pink Floyd jokes for a while, and maybe they were right all along. But it was a feedback loop. Some critics accuse. Others defend. Media exposure in all the rock journals reaches critical mass (literally). Defenders start to capitulate like a sand dune crumbling into the relentless tide.

Yes, this music was very English. Very white, too, which of course isn't the same thing. But the image of Radiohead became tangled with the image of Radiohead's fans which in turn became tangled with the image of sophomoric critics chasing their postmodern tails up their own assholes. And yet very little of this related to the actual music, the often rock sometimes folk occasionally prog variously jazz neo orchestral chamber pop pseudo electro music.

In Radiohead's case, context has almost swallowed the actual music thanks to the hungry hydra-headed meeja monster. Which is a shame, because the music leaking from Camp Radiohead has been some of the most compelling and engaging in the last ten years (as well as some of the silliest and most tongue-protrudingly ga-ga... heh, "Radio Ga Ga"). Note the simple phrase "some of the most". This does not exclude Missy Elliot (this Missy, yeah) or Prefuse 73 or Tom Waits or Jay Z or Out Hud or Mountain Goats or the Yeah Yeah Yeahs or that Avalanches record (a while back) or Grandaddy or tATu or Low or Common or [insert ten years worth of good music right here, micro-arguments more than welcome if not necessarily relevant to the discussion].

I don't know why I'm posting this, really. If you love Radiohead's music, fine. If you hate it, fine. But the vast majority of listeners (casual to obsessive) fall in the middle of those extremes, and all the pontification and endless endless verbiage (which I'm now guilty of perpetuating) seems to conveniently ignore the fact that random Kid A likes a couple songs from The Bends plus parts of OK Computer, while random Kid B hates Amnesiac with a passion, is indifferent to Pablo Honey (isn't everyone?), but digs what she's downloaded off of Hail to the Thief. And so on.

Fuck, all these burdens. Surely it wasn't meant to be this complicated?

And while we're at it (or while I'm at it), can we just totally destroy this notion that hip-hop is somehow "innovative?" Maybe some time ago it was, but faster time to market /= innovative. Hip-hop is just as full of followers as other forms of music, maybe even more so! (tonight in a cab the cabbie turns off some really awesome sounding maaaaybe-Indian music tape [not sure what it was] to put on the hip-hop station - so how the FUCK is hip-hop the sound of the oppressed if this guy's using it to curry favor with two white people who may tip him well?)

I dunno, I guess its one of those things that come with living in a big city, but I honestly can't listen to hip-hop anymore. I don't mind listening to it in the middle of nowhere on a road trip or something, but in a BIG URBAN CENTER (not to mention its birthplace) it just seems redundant and boring. Like people just going through the motions.

is this a joke? its just another (oh yes!) rock record. beyond the fact that it was released close to the end of the mileniumn you're gonna have to explain how it does have that nervous energy you talk abt.

it was a fluke. the thing with selling records is you have to make the 'right' record and release it at the 'right' time and this is what happened here.

v similar to oasis, blur in '94 or grunge in '91. its a lottery.

Do you mean that hip-hop as a style is not itself innovative, or that there are no innovative hip-hop acts? In either case, I would have to disagree. I think there is a tendency towards experimentalism and sonic inventiveness in commercial hip-hop that tends to outstrip the same tendency in commercial rock. Rock as a style seems to be more backward-looking, more weighted down by the existence of a canon - an accepted body of wisdom about what is good - and more conservative. It is still more of an anomaly for a hip-hop act to try to mimic a retro sound than it is for a rock band to pull the same move. However, this is just a generalization, and like any generalization, there are many exceptions to it. There are plenty of hip-hop acts that are not particularly innovative, just as there are plenty of rock bands that are. And just because rock has a longer tradition behind it doesn't mean that it has to be conservative or timid or retrograde. After all, one of the signature developments in late 20th century art and culture has been a tendency to engage with history and the notion of genre and convention - a lot of this type of activity falls under the moniker of "postmodernism". So it is entirely possible that the retro tendencies in rock - the willingness to put on an "outdated" style and take it for a spin - is in a sense more attuned to the contemporary zeitgeist - and thus more "modern" - than hip-hop's relentless forward-looking drive.

radiohead fans melodramatic shockah

I'm not saying either. Of course there's aspects of hip-hop as a style that have been innovative and will continute to be, and of course there's been innovative hip-hop acts. I'm just saying that the genre, in and of itself, shouldn't be used as the high-water-mark of innovation. I dunno, I just get really sick of seeing it parroted as the be-all and end-all. It's not. As a genre, it has just as many "conservative or timid or retrograde" elements as any other, perhaps even moreso if you take into account the hip-hop obsessions of "being old school" and "being real." For some reason (and I'm not really sure I want to speculate as to why), many critics around here (and in general) seem to want to give it a free pass while dissing rock as somehow un-innovative because it has a longer tradition - as if that matters! Yeah there's a lot of boring, bland rock - so that means hip-hop by default can't be boring or bland either? I don't think so.

*runs, hides*

Hey I think Missy is the Edgard Varese of hiphop. Her lyrics might not be profound, but she's interpreting sounds around her, though not in an express fashion, as is Tim.

Radiohead is just interpreting my own lethargy

ps. I like rock music

http://www.egr.msu.edu/~bohl/candyland.jpg

Fuckers! My boilerplate story-so-far-isms were s'posed to kill this thread. Why'd everyone have to spoil it?

(Melissa, you're welcome)

(Julio -- how could what I said about OK Computer be a joke if it was a classic piece of fence-sitting? -- ie/ I offered two options but didn't say which one I thought it actually was.)

Mind you, though I'm no Radiohead fan, I thought his saying that they don't reflect anything that's happened in the last 30 years in music was a bit harsh. I mean, Warp Records was just 10 years ago!

(i'm willing to give you warp before 1992 and after 1996.)

Tell me Warp wanted to sound like Derrick May, Carl Craig, Brian Eno, Cabaret Voltaire, or jeez, anyone at all who was on the Warp Influences CD maybe, and I'll agree with you. But Pink Floyd? Only in the "vague amorphous noises and--ooh--lack of adherence to song form" sense that has become such, you know, handy dismissive rockcrit shorthand.

Melissa W OTM. I am tired of reading, writing, and thinking about Radiohead. This new album is an excuse for too many writers to pull out all stops and wank on their own distended rock critic bellies, and it's making me ill.

Woman I can hardly express
My mixed emotions at muh ma fuckin thoughtlessness
After all I'm forever in yo' debt
And biotch I will try ta express
My inner feelings an' thankfulness
For showing me da meaning o' success

Woman I know ya dig'
The little child inside o' da nig
Please remember muh ma fuckin life iz in yo' hands
And biotch hold me close ta yo' heart
However distant don' keep us apart
After all it iz written in da stars

I love ya, jaa, jaa
Now an' forever
I love ya, jaa, jaa
Now an' forever
I love ya, jaa, jaa
Now an' forever
I love ya, jaa, jaa
all ye damn hood ratz..

Imagine nahh possessions
I wonder if ya can
No need fo' greed or hunger
A brotherhood o' nig
Imagine all da peeps
Sharing all da world...

You may say I'm uh dreamer
But I'm not da only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And da world will be as one

peep this shit