Radiohead - Pablo Honey POLL

Ah yes, typical behaviour for ILM.

having a pretty good time syncing up "ripcord" to that video

that would be by far their best pablo honey-era video!

honestly i think it pairs better with "blow out", especially if the instrumental breakdown is synced with the part where puke starts flying

Ah yes, typical behaviour for ILM.

― Le Baton Rose (Turrican), Wednesday, 5 June 2019 02:15 (eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ha! Well, yeah... that I couldn't possibly argue. The video to 'Pop is Dead' being some kind of nadir on that front.

(xx-post)

lmao thank god it's on vimeo https://vimeo.com/193801646

someone make a poll out of this video

Christ. I mean, where would you begin? The whole thing is a front-to-back embarrassment. I'd be willing to bet that Thom Yorke is far, far, far more embarrassed of that video than any song on this album.

somehow jonny manages to look really cool in that video. he is a machine

It’s blowing my mind how the “pop is dead” band went to make an album like OKC 4 years later.

I would like you all to know that Thom scripted every frame of that video himself. Storyboards and everything.

At first, they were really just making the videos they wanted to make. “Pop Is Dead” is literally a treatment that Thom wrote, down to every frame—we had the entire Radiohead fan club carrying him across the Oxford Downs in a glass coffin. I was doing a terrible job, but I wasn’t really concerned because we would just go off and make something. In the early ’90s, we probably thought those videos were all right, but looking back at them now, we all just want to die."

https://pitchfork.com/features/ok-computer-at-20/10036-this-is-what-you-get-an-oral-history-of-radioheads-karma-police-video/

"Stupid Car" is probably my favorite track of early-days Radiohead, at this point.

is there even a b side to this

I think what you mean to say is...

In the defence of Pop is Dead (said no one over), I think it has some cool guitar work by Jonny in it; a couple of riffs that almost sound proto-the-end-bit-of-Paranoid Anroid.

I've never thought about it that way before, but I very much hear what you're talking about. I think Greenwood's guitar playing is always worth listening to (I feel the same way about his brother's bass playing) but most of all I enjoy hearing how the three guitarists play off each other, and there's plenty of that in evidence on this album.

as overplayed as it is, Creep is really a good song!

Without going back and listening to this again, I'm going with my 1993 assessmen:
Creep is totally buzz bin worthy. The rest is somewhere between boring and actively bad (I'm remember being particularly annoyed by "anyone can play guitar").
I had lots of albums back then where I only really enjoyed one song (blind melon, spacehog, neds atomic dustbin), and this was one of them.

It sucks that your 1993 self somehow managed to overlook 'You', 'Stop Whispering', 'Ripcord', 'Lurgee' and 'Blow Out' ... perhaps you should give it another try!

Been thinking about you, your records are here
Your eyes are on my wall, your teeth are over there
But I'm still no one, and you're now a star
What do you care?
Been thinking about you, and there's no rest
Should I still love you, still see you in bed
But I'm playing with myself?
What do you care when the other men are far, far better?

thom doesn't sing that question mark

i never really got the jeff buckley comparison with thom. i've also never listened to this album which opens with a jeff buckley song, complete with the word 'fire' sung in a sexy growl and helium jim morrison screams

I've just realised that 'Vegetable' does a similar trick to 'Everything In Its Right Place' meter-wise: 1 x 4/4 + 1 x 2/4 + 1 x 4/4 = 10 beats.

they dedicated the bends to jeff iirc xp

I'm indifferent to a lot of this record these days, but I still enjoy the three-song stretch of "How Do You"/"Stop Whispering"/"Thinking About You" way more than anything the band has done post-Kid A.

― Herman Woke (cryptosicko), Monday, June 3, 2019 5:55 PM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i love post-kid A radiohead but agree that this three-song stretch is best. i'm voting for "stop whispering" because it is a good mumbled cover of Authority Song.

(yeah, we all know that John Mellencamp made other albums before this)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwVQRx1IGac

How 'bout this one? My mate and I would always do the "uhm. this is a song called...this is a song called Yes I Am" in a Thom Yorke voice before we practiced playing basically any song together.

realized the closest analogue to the REM-backed alt-Mellencamp of 'Stop Whispering' is any Clap Your Hands Say Yeah song, and that means that any Clap Your Hands Say Yeah song is my vote for best song on Pablo Honey

Nah, I disagree. 'Stop Whispering' is a good song that people have often falsely believed is shite, whereas Clap Your Hands Say Yeah are legitimately shite and always were.

I appreciate that this poll convinced me to finally listen to the whole album, and it's not all bad. but the Ripcord-Vegetable-Prove Yourself run hasn't gotten better with repetition. I would have voted 'blow out' if the ending wasn't so on the nose and bad.

Aeroplane do I mean what I mean?
Oh it's inevitable, inevitable, oh aeroplane
A thousand miles an hour
On politics and power
That she don't understand
No ripcord, no ripcord
No ripcord, no ripcord

thom yorke is canceled btw

To be fair, Yorke's lyrics have always been one of the lesser parts of the Radiohead experience, even on their most well-regarded works. It's always been a feature of the band that most have been willing to overlook. For example: "he used to do surgery for girls in the '80s/but gravity always wins" - great fake tits reference there, Thomas!

The ending section to 'Blow Out' is the best part, IMO!

always thought he was talking about someone's face

his lyrics are especially bad on this record, he actually developed a lyrical voice on the bends

I agree that he got better at it, but still...

xxp it's not terrible. it should probably stop at 3:40

the way it drags on and kinda fades out also doesn't read as a 'blow out'

his lyrics are still pretty inconsistent on The Bends but a big step up from Pablo Honey, and from OK Computer onwards his lyrics are generally good to great. not sure what there is complain about with them

yep

i agree

There's the occasional pearl, but just as often they're unremarkable (sometimes purposefully so) and sometimes a little silly when looked at cold.

you're gonna have to expand on that

Yorke's approach to writing lyrics on Kid A and Amnesiac is well documented and pretty much common knowledge - I don't have to expand on that at all, they're basically there to vaguely push buttons and not shake the tree*. Personally, I think "jumped into the river, what did I see/black clad angels swam with me" to be a really silly lyric when read cold off paper, basically sixth-form poetry nonsense, although I appreciate that the person who once wrote "These are the brake lights bruising the dark, making impressionistic arcs in time with your cigarette" might not see this.

*'Agadoo' - Black Lace.

ayo, you're a huge piece of shit for bringing a lyric i wrote into this

a huge piece of shit

please get your dumb ass banned and join your intellectual equals on the steve hoffman boards

Well, we are talking about the topic of lyrics here, and you did ask me to expand. What better way of understanding what a person sees as a yardstick for a great lyric than an example of what they've created themselves? By the way, being a critic and being unable to take it quite as well as you give it is not a good look.

what the fuck is wrong with you

that wasn't criticism, you've never written something that qualifies as "criticism" in your entire fucking life, that was a jibe at something i wrote

FUCK OFF TURRICAN

However you perceive it, the same thing applies.

(x-post)

If you feel that you’ve been misunderstood during this one particular incident, you are failing to remember the last trillion times you’ve been a fucking prick. You don’t get the benefit of the doubt anymore because everyone saw through your disingenuous bullshit the 10th time you puked it out