Radiohead can do anything, oh yes they can?

Kid A did not impress me, Soft Machine and King Crimson have made similar stuff in the early seventies. I used to love those groups but somehow progrock has become a bête noire for me.

A week ago I purchased Amnesiac and I am still not sure what to make of it. The first track I liked was Knives out where the sadness in Yorke's voice really hit me. Of course Pyramid Song is great as well. The progressive stuff I have to listen to again. But the big problem with Radiohead I guess is Yorke's voice. It really touches me in the beginning but after listening to one whole album or several times to one song, it really gets annoying.

I do not really hate Radiohead but I hate all the fuss about them. They are a group like all other groups. They will not save rock music. On the contrary I think maybe rock has saved Thom Yorke's life (remember that Lou Reed song?).

Not so much to the song itself, but the fact that it was being played on primetime MTV next to the... uuhh... whatever was popular back then which has thankfully slipped my mind.

-- anthony (anthonyeasto...), July 16th, 2001.

I will quote you on this, you realize.

xpost.

for real.

Talk about missing the point.

me, too! and they're fans as well...
they all seem to lack it.
mostly you get a 'radiohead's gawd, and there's no way around it' sorta thing, which gets really old, really quick.

If someone like David Byrne or Mark Mothersbaugh had written a song with the chorus: "I'm a reasonable man, get off my case," methinks it would be regarded as witty/homorous/whatever. Plenty of examples of the same type of thing.

In general, though, the humor is in bizarre turns of phrase: "her hitler hairdo is making me feel ill" is damn funny. Not all humor involves punchlines. I'm not saying they're the next Jonathan Richman, I'm just sayin.

The main point I was making is that their rampant and admirable experimentalism might be also applied to exploring emotional tones beyond the already exhaustively explored nuances of alienation etc, and that being wildly successful and acclaimed for over 10 years might have, you know, cheered them up to the extent that they might feel able to musically explore different the lighter side of life without compromising their artistic integrity.

"However, the kind of emotional palette you seem to be talking about, a simple personal misery, they moved past years ago."

The recent material still sounds fairly downbeat and glum to me, sorry! Thing is, Thom has talked in interviews about wanting to celebrate both the “highs and lows” of everyday life, and I don’t really hear much celebration of the former, despite their having becoming the most acclaimed band on the planet.

"Does having millions of fans ease an existential or spiritual conflict?"

And millions in the bank don't forget - well, err, sorry but yes, I genuinely imagine it would bolster the ego somewhat, reconcile you to the world to certain degree, and generally take some of the edge off your existential angst – who knows, it might even nudge you towards the occasional joyful moment which you might then occasionally reflect in your music, rather than remaining emotionally monochromatic. Even if they weren't feeling on top of the world, they might want to try writing something joyful just for the hell of it, just for the sake of experimenting.

Re the supposedly funny/humorous aspects to Radiohead's music/lyrics - I must confess bafflement. I love comedy, and indeed the darker the better eg Monkey Dust and Peep Show, but the supposed 'humour' in their work is clearly too subtle for me insofar as it doesn’t make me laugh. That is what humour is supposed to do, right?

FWIW just in case anyone interprets this as random hating, I should make it clear Radiohead are easily my favourite band, and that I just wanted to voice an honest criticism.

I'd like to suggest that the fact that they don't have scantily-clad girls singing in unison on their refrains doesn't mean that they don't do pop songs anymore but I'm afraid you'd hit me.

How many bands really sing about being happy and joyful anyway?

There There
Drunken Punchup At A Wedding
Go To Sleep
We Suck Young Blood
The Gloaming
I Will
Myxomatosis

Maybe you should offer the band your consulting services.

To echo what Melissa said - surely no one who's seen them live in more recent years (since the Kid A/Amnesiac era, anyway)could mistake them for miserable bastards.

wtf

Bananarama >>>>>> Radiohead anyday

Maybe it's just that all their success hasn't gone to their head (or as Meeting People is Easy shows, their success only served to make them uncomfortable). Maybe they really believe in their anti-corporatist/capitalist/consumerism rhetoric and don't find acquiring huge sums of money to be as fulfilling as it's made out to be. At least they're consistent. I really wish that people would stop harping on this point in this discussion; it's perfectly reasonable to me that success hasn't/shouldn't changed their artistic direction. Whether they should expand an "emotional palette" for other reasons (stagnation, variety, so Stylus popists can hack away at them in the Singles Jukebox) is at least a coherent argument, but it seems totally ridiculous to me to ask an artist to "be happier" and change their direction solely because they've achieved a high level of success. It would be baffling to ask, say, Bergman or Herzog to "lighten up, you're the toast of the town, pitch us a romantic comedy". Some artists simply work better with darker material (and I'm not a "radiohead's gawd, and there's no way around it" fan, I haven't even listened to anything before Kid A or b-sides in probably a year, so don't accuse me of pretension when I'm throwing around words like Artist) and if you don't appreciate it there's really no reason to keep annoying yourself.

I mean, are all artists supposed to cover the entire emotional spectrum? I'm getting different expectations from different people here - what do you think this new direction should look like? Drop the political bits and go back to The Bends, but janglier and with a catchy chorus? I don't understand what you're trying to say with "joyful" - it seems crass to me, to go out and write something specifically (what do you really mean by joyful? I just don't understand) for the novelty, to take a completely opposite tack from the rest of their career. I know I keep repeating myself. Maybe they have tried different material and it hasn't worked out for them. Must their records be a complete mirror of their emotions? I know it's abstract and probably impossible to answer, but what do you think you'd get out of it? What would they say? Do you want a love song? A song free from irony about how everything is going to be alright?

I also don't understand this emotional monochromaticism. Are we just talking subject material here? A general feeling like depression? I'll admit there is a lyrical tendency towards despair, alienation, fear, and weakness - but musically (and I don't mean strictly tonally) there's a pretty wide range of feeling. Yeah, there's claustrophobia (Climbing Up The Walls), grunge-angst (Just), emotional distance (Morning Bell), paranoid fear and anger (A Wolf At the Door), but there are also moments of humor (the lightly bitter humor of Sulk, the boozy whimsicality of Life in a Glass House, the absurdity of We Suck Young Blood) and beauty (Pyramid Song). So much of their material is multivalent in feeling if not literal lyrical meaning, it's really a disservice and critical laziness to just call it depressing and walk away without really trying to get more out of the songs. I mean, isn't that what really appreciating music is? Digging deeper than the surface-level impression to derive a greater meaning? If that's not what you get from this group, fine (I'm not picking on anyone specific here), but plenty of people do get a lot more out of it (as someone upthread said about life-affirming Hitchcock or Shostakovitch).

As for the humor... well, no, it isn't really ha-ha humor but gallows irony and absurdity (Thom on Let Down: I was pissed in a club, and I suddenly had the funniest thought I'd had for ages - what if all the people who were drinking were hanging from the bottles... if the bottles were hung from the ceiling with string, and the floor caved in, and the only thing that kept everyone up was the bottles?), at least within the music itself. Those lyrics shouldn't all be taken seriously all the time. Outside the music, you get stuff like the ridiculous alternate titles from HTTT, Ed's never-departing onstage smile, Thom's put-on Byrnian seizuring during their performances, and the weirdness of their website. Admittedly there's more humor both in and out of the music nowadays; remember, only HTTT is at all recent, the Kid A sessions were 98-99 and they were in a much darker mood back then - I'm confident the next album will in fact be a bit more "joyous" and playful relative to their material from seven-ten years ago, as they're a lot more comfortable in their skin as musicians and (I hope) well-rounded human beings.

-- Nigel (sellout...), February 21st, 2006."

if they would like, i would gladly offer my undivided attention to them;)

as always, it seems, w/ RH, there's just no middle ground.
i guess i'll just remain in the dark concerning they're gawd-like status amongst folks...and not really care until given reason to...

Ed O'Brien solo album reportedly on the way. Here's an excerpt to whet your appetite:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TG-Od2-OTdg

ed o'brien solo album is mostly just ok, but 'olympik' is giving me serious zooropa vibes.