"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")

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.

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