In a Room with Radiohead
the-tls.co.uk
the-tls.co.uk
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?
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
Is it? there's a lot of homogeneity in the very few genres that are popular nowadays.
Also, the Bends was their most solid album (joking; it's not up to debate, although i miss that sometimes)
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.
"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]
[0]: https://cycling74.com/2014/01/02/mini-interview-jonny-greenw...
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 never understood why people liked Radiohead, aside from it perhaps being the hipster band to like for a while five or ten years ago.
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.
EDIT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1apGEJVrIpE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxVpnYgbtA0
http://consequenceofsound.net/2015/11/noel-gallagher-mocks-r...
2. Did you just try and make a credible argument by referencing Noel Gallagher spitting incoherent crap at a music tabloid?
> 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?
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'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.
Is that supposed to be a good thing?