If you were born at the right time, in the right place, with a suitably brooding disposition, you got to grow up with this band. Pablo Honey was the first album I ever bought, age 10. This was Israel and "Creep" had gotten big after being featured in a racy television commercial for Castro, the clothing company. It is not a very good record. Two years later, "The Bends" came out, and gave the first real hint of the band's trajectory. "OK Computer", which came out when I was fourteen, was the soundtrack to my teenage years: angry, lonely, smart, scared, confused. (Fitter, happier..) I carried the liner notes in my backpack. In my senior year of high school, "Kid A" came out, and I found out the band had been listening to the same music I had been (Warp Records, Aphex Twin, Autechre). "Amnesiac" was mostly forgettable, but by the time "Hail to the Thief" and "In Rainbows" came out, I had -- like the band -- broken out of the self-serious and humorless teenage shell, and could appreciate things like irony and fun and craft.
Do adolescents today have this kind of relationship with bands? That thing Morrissey captured so well in "Rubber Ring": "But don't forget the songs / That made you cry / And the songs that saved your life / Yes, you're older now And you're a clever swine / But they were the only ones who ever stood by you". The pop music landscape just seems so much broader now, so much more diverse, and it moves so much faster, that it is hard for me to imagine children and young adults having the same kind of abiding, intense association with a particular act. It's probably a good thing!
> Do adolescents today have this kind of relationship with bands?
The big difference is that CDs would cost $15 a pop. $15 being the perfect price point for me, as an incomeless preteen, to get just one CD for my birthday and maybe one in my Christmas stocking. And then I'd be stuck with those CDs for a year. Or stuck with the one CD I had loaded in my portable player during school or family road trip or furniture store excursion.
I was stuck with Radiohead for a long time. I remember I'd get so tired of listening to a CD that I would pull the headphone jack a millimeter out of the slot. It had the effect of muting the bass frequencies and sound terrible, but it sounded different. Breathed new life into my meager CD collection when I discovered that lifehack one day in sex ed.
I happily upgraded out of the CD era as quickly as I could, but I can look back and appreciate how well it forced me to get to know the few artists I had in my collection. Though it also came with a certain destitution of choice.
Oh no no no! Why does this get repeated over and over?
Amnesiac is gold! It's really a more mature version of Kid A. Evolved. In my opinion Kid A was the v1 product and Amnesiac was v2. Much more balanced and much fewer "bugs" and issues. There's not a single weak track on Amnesiac, whereas there are quite a few on Kid A.
To be honest I find Amnesiac is one of their best albums.
Yeah, Amnesiac is a great example of an album that defines which fans like different aspects of the band. I love this album, but I can see why some people would dislike it. The album takes a road that is not very common. Kid A was a big change for them, but some of the ablum's influence was already seen in other artists, like Aphex Twin, etc. Amnesiac is an evolution of a rock band. And usually when you break schemes is hard to please everyone.
This times 1000000000!!! I don't even like kid a that much but find amnesiac to at least have proper son structure. Pyramid song is the perfect haunting melody. You and whose army is a great take on 1940s lounge music with out the optimism. Amnesiac is probably my favorite radio head album
The "regular" Amnesiac album is a bit sleepy (get it?) but the Amnesiac College EP with songs like Fast Track, Trans-Atlantic Drawl and Kinetic is not to be missed!
This may be a bit pretentious... But if you're not listening to their smaller EPs you're missing out! (Airbag: How am I driving, is easily one of the best)
I've also always been confused by the apathy toward Amnesiac. Many of my favorite Radiohead songs are on it and it seemed just as interesting, if not more, than Kid A.
I've always found that I love the individual songs on Amnesiac as songs, but as an album, it's not as cohesive or gorgeous as Kid A. I can't back that up with anything but subjective perspective, but it's my feeling.
I don't know. This is by no means a "back in my day" complaint, but I miss the concept of a giant, stadium filling band deciding to throw caution to the wind and releasing something effectively "unsellable" to the public at large.
The Smashing Pumpkins did it with Adore, and Radiohead did it with Kid A (although Radiohead succeeded sending that album to the top of the charts by having at least one radio-friendly song on there). Some other bands I'm forgetting now.
The only "giant" artists I can of who are flirting with experimentation are... Kanye? Maybe Drake.
Certainly Kendrick Lamar, for example. To Pimp a Butterfly has a few radio-friendly song, but overall, it's an incredibly dark and experimental album, back to jazzy and soul roots of hip-hop — and don't forget the whole concept thing.
To Pimp a Butterfly is an excellent example of a good album. I find it difficult to listen to most of the individual tracks, but the thing as a whole is incredible.
My _hope_ is that kids today still listen to music which moves them and that it just is not the music pushed down their throats by the hyper-effective marketing machineries developed over the years by the ... what is it now ...big 3? or big 4?
I hope they get moved by mostly indy music not known by me ;)
That's I hope what the long tail idea was good for as well.
When you have a very small audience for something, most of it is terrible because the few gems don't have the financial or cultural support to reach their full potential.
When you have a huge audience for something, most of it is terrible because the lowest common denominator is often about the 'least disliked' instead of the best. Too many opinions find an average.
What's right in the middle – enough support both creative and financial, not too much popular pressure to be average – that's where you get the most excellence.
In other words, being extremely popular or extremely obscure tends to make things bad to mediocre. Of course there are exceptions, but it's something to think about when you're trying to be successful creatively.
Indie music went through this transition over the last 10 years. There are good things now and there were good things then, but I think there were a lot more great things in the middle as appreciation was growing but didn't quite have mass appeal.
>Do adolescents today have this kind of relationship with bands?
Last semester one of my students in a college public speaking class gave an informative speech about a rapper (I can't remember who it was. it was someone who I had heard of but hasn't gotten a ton of mainstream success) and he mentioned that he felt like he grew up with this rapper.
Yes, the popular ones. But I don't think that's any different than how it used to be.
And if anything, it's far easier now to find all kinds of obscure artists playing in obscure genres. We don't have to rely on a label deciding whether or not a band is sellable to a large enough audience.
It's a double edged sword. There were always small labels that catered to very specific audiences. Nowadays, with so much noise, its more difficult for an 'eclectic' artist to find their audience.
I think Maquiladora was the first track that made me think Radiohead wasn't (or wasn't going to be) just another 'good rock band'. Then when OK Computer came out, I was sure of it.
I grew up in a similar way. My departure point was somewhere between okc and kid a. I can't stand most their music now. A still like the first 5 EPs but even Pablo honey is a hard listen at times. Funny, really.
Same here, I started listening to them after The Bends was released. Nowadays I can still appreciate The Bends and Hail to the Thief. The rest is just too much... Wailing I guess. They are still a good band, but I guess that I have outgrown them.
Another example of the genius of Radiohead comes from the fact that in the early days, Jonny Greenwood, Radiohead's brilliant guitarist, used to write software to generate sounds the band would use in their music versus using standard DAWs.
"So when I started on Max I felt like I’d got past all that, and didn’t have to use someone else’s idea of what a delay, or a reverb, or a sequencer should do, or should sound like – I could start from the ground, and think in terms of sound and maths. It was like coming off the rails. Before there was all this padding between the computer and me. Now there was a blank screen as a starting point….." - Greenwood [0]
This is slightly misleading. Max MSP is a visual programming tool. It does allow low-level sound gen and processing, but it's not what most people normally mean by 'write software'.
"For anyone with a nostalgic attachment to the notion that rock music is a medium for meaningful artistic expression capable of shaping the wider culture, the British band Radiohead is either a beacon of hope or the last bearer of the torch"
This is quite pretentious - I don't view them as either, and I care about artisticness in rock.
There are plenty of artists out in the wild experimenting with new genres of rock, and creating new movements (albeit most haven't reached popular culture excepting maybe the emergence of chiptune production techniques in popular music, including in rock, but other genres such as hip hop as well).
Music isn't about influencing popular culture necessarily -that is incidental. Any attachment to such a notion is vapid.
I'm fascinated because I should like Radiohead, because they do the kinds of things I'd usually be interested in - experiments with Max, and so on. And clearly a lot of people like them.
But I just can't stand the music. To me, it sounds like the artistic equivalent of wet grey cardboard.
I wish I could hear what people are hearing. But whatever it is, it's just not there for me.
Edit: To add, I've long suspected that there's a weird imprinting process in music. You literally imprint on the music and bands that affect you emotionally when puberty hits. To outsiders it looks like a generational thing, but in fact it's more physiological - your idea of "good music" literally gets burned into your brain, and triggers a more generic set of "this is good music" neural pathways that everyone shares.
The subjectivity of taste fascinates me. I can totally understand someone hating Radiohead. I'm very sensitive to vocals, and I'm not really sure why I can get past Thom Yorke's voice, where it's kept me from listening to many other artists or bands that I really want to like.
Noel Gallagher says it well, granted, he's no longer a working man, but he hails from the section of society I am talking about. And he's pretty eloquent in his put downs;
1. In case anyone doesn't know who Noel Gallagher is, he's an attention grabbing narcissist who broke up his own rubbish derivative band that pretended to represent a part of society that doesn't actually exist.
2. Did you just try and make a credible argument by referencing Noel Gallagher spitting incoherent crap at a music tabloid?
> 1. In your opinion so I'm not going to deconstruct.
> 2. Yes. His Bon mots are brilliant. And they all have a grain of truth. In this instance he mocks the fawning nature of the relationship the music/art/radio6/radio4/Guardian newspaper have with Radiohead which is really perceptive.
I mean, come on, they recorded the album in Provence. How bourgeois can you get?
So they are to be scoffed at because too many people like them for the wrong reasons?
That attitude reminds me a bit of those people who will dismiss everyone they see with a macbook as a whimsical hipster who is easily persuaded by shiny shiny.
I actually find the politics of popular music fascinating.
I'm not scoffing at Radiohead (alright, I am a bit) but pointing out the cultural/socio-political context of the band. Which is a position borne of privilege and the self-confidence you get from attending public school.
They are the hedge fund managers of the music world.
I don't actually care whether you like the music or not, that's not the point of my argument, fwiw I adore 'The Bends' - their best.
Do adolescents today have this kind of relationship with bands? That thing Morrissey captured so well in "Rubber Ring": "But don't forget the songs / That made you cry / And the songs that saved your life / Yes, you're older now And you're a clever swine / But they were the only ones who ever stood by you". The pop music landscape just seems so much broader now, so much more diverse, and it moves so much faster, that it is hard for me to imagine children and young adults having the same kind of abiding, intense association with a particular act. It's probably a good thing!