RAdiohead

(xp) Oxford actually.

potatoiohead, potahtoiohead

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you're fucking amazing just because I don't reply to every point doesn't mean I'm not taking it in. there's always a lot to process xps

on a subject I'm much more comfortable talking in broad strokes about - sorry if any present company passed through oxbridge but ime people from those hellholes tend to be worse on this and other issues than the average person. few if any other institutions have produced and nurtured so many world-historical monsters and low-to-mid-level wankers over the years

also this band is boring everyone should listen to something else

nodding vigorously to the last two posts

there's a typo in the thread title

should be Radiohead, without the capital A in RAdiohead

mods

Please change thread title to "R.J.Dio-head"

when greenwood "accidentally" liked that transphobic tweet, he had a pretty good opportunity to clarify that he supports trans rights. he did not, in fact, say that he supports trans rights.

^^^

there is a place for analysis of what needs and desires are driving someone's behaviour but the persons social and political positionalities are the most relevant factors here - locking it all away in someone's inaccessible subjective experience not only centres them and their feelings but it just makes the obvious perpetually up for debate - did he really mean it? isn't he a good person at heart? how do you know he doesn't secretly mean well when he hurts you?

great post thank you

i was the biggest radiohead fan for years and years, high school through my mid twenties. i go back now and there are a few undeniably great songs but whatever it is i found so compelling about them before now rings very empty to me!

maybe because rock and "alternative" was so four-square by 1997 that swiping a few ideas from Bitches Brew made them appear godlike, if you're of a certain age.

also this band is boring everyone should listen to something else

― Left, Friday, November 17, 2023 4:57 PM

fantastic rec, big co-sign

the kinks album is great! mind you ray davies would go on to write one of the most famous and influential expressions of pop-culture transphobia of all time, in addition to writing racist and anti-semitic songs. great songwriter though.

the eddie cochran song is great too... since he died at 21 he doesn't have much of a legacy of saying and doing shitty things, i guess.

i mean maybe radiohead are boring and maybe being from oxbridge makes someone more likely to parrot upper-class imperialist bullshit. idk. people change. stuff that was buried resurfaces. john cleese started out parodying upper-class twits and at some point became an upper-class twit himself.

in 1995 radiohead had this great b-side called "bishop's robes" where thom sings about the institutional abuse he suffered as a child, "children taught to kill", the way he's still terrified of someone dressed in bishop's robes. he probably doesn't mean it the way i, as someone who was raised catholic, hear it, but he might, you know? he might. it's a cycle. abuse is a cycle, and places like oxbridge perpetuate that cycle.

all of the shit i've had to unlearn, and i guess liking radiohead is one of those things. it would be easy for me to be embarrassed about my past in that sense. casey plett has this story where one of her characters remembers owning a tucker max book. remember him? i mean, when i was in my 20s i loved frank zappa _to bits_. absolutely one of the most vile, grossly misogynist people i can think of, and i just completely failed to recognize that.

today i recognize it. i still listen to his music sometimes. idk. i try to live in the present, but the past sometimes exists inside the present, y'know? a lot of people grew up as children absolutely adoring hogwarts. that came after my time. people nowadays point out the problems with rowling's writing, and yeah, there are problems, big ones, beyond the transphobia. if someone started reading those books when they were 11, though... it's almost like trying to explain to an 11 year old that the book they fell in love with is awful.

it's important to talk about the problems with those books, maybe, because there's so much overlap. all of these forms of bigotry, they tend to overlap and intersect. there's an underlying mindset, and rowling's writing may well have promoted that mindset from the beginning. i don't know. i saw a couple of the movies i think? with radiohead's music, i just have decades of personal history, personal emotional attachment. i'm not going to judge myself for developing an emotional attachment to radiohead any more than i'm going to judge myself for developing an emotional attachment to frank zappa, for god's sake. i made a lot of mistakes when i was younger, like listening to frank zappa and not wearing dresses enough and hating myself. i'm still learning and working to... make better decisions.

radiohead's music being kind of boring, radiohead's politics being, for the most part, the sort of milquetoast "progressive" politics that manifests mostly as complaining that they don't play public enemy on the radio enough... it's not the sort of stuff that has relevance to me personally. it might to others.

in 1995 radiohead had this great b-side called "bishop's robes"

i really should watch "the demon headmaster", though. i didn't know there was a 2019 remake. is the remake any good? or should i stick to the original?

soapboxing on cleese for a moment- ultimately he slots quite nicely into a long tradition of british satire that both mocks and reaffirms the pretentions and prejudices of the upper classes - private eye is a good contemporary example - it can be easy to mistake for this stuff for a scathing indictment of the establishment and the class system (I certainly did in the past) but now I see it more in line with the culture of ritualised bullying and abuse within the institutions that produce our elites - as well as with the more general sense of pessimism and nihilism that pervades contemporary british culture, towards both the status quo and (the possibility / desirability of) social change

I'm not sure how relevant this is to radiohead although I definitely see plenty of the latter tendency in them

no need to be ashamed of being a fan though I get it - I used to be a fan of a rapper/producer who turned out to be far worse than radiohead. it's tough when that fandom has been part of the construction of your identity - I see it as an invitation to interrogate that part of my identity - at least some of it was always projection and fanfiction on the part of myself and other fans. there may still be salvageable things there that don't need (or are better off without) the objects of my projection

it is worth interrogating, i think... for me, music was a lot of the way i coped with decades of crippling gender dysphoria... for something like that radiohead's lyrics being vague to the point of being essentially meaningless actually helped me connect emotionally to the songs. like the impression i got about how thom yorke wrote lyrics in the "kid a" era is that he would write stuff and then he'd take out bits until what was left was something that didn't really make any rational sense, just singing "yesterday i woke up sucking a lemon, there are two colours in my head, what, what was that you tried to say". it sounds meaningful because it _used_ to mean something, originally, it's not just word salad. it's more like when you remember fragments from a dream but don't remember what they meant. i like that approach a lot. if you read the draft online of those lyrics there's more context to where it makes sense, which does make it a lot more boring imo. the more specific their lyrics are the less they interest me. like doing a song about how tony blair sucks isn't something i could connect with emotionally the way i could connect emotionally with "everything in its right place" or "morning bell". _kid a_ was really quite striking, back when it came out.

if i'm gonna torture a metaphor about it, i guess it'd be like... there's this experience some of us have, where... when i was going through things but not ready to directly address things yet, i would try and talk to people about things, not openly, but vaguely, in a veiled manner, to kind of protect myself, and there were people who seemed supportive, who kind of helped me deal with things during that time. but then when it came time for me to come out they turned out to be super transphobic. it was really unexpected and disappointing. maybe they weren't actually that supportive in the first place and i just read stuff into them that wasn't there, or maybe they just changed for the worse, or maybe some of both. it just sucks to deal with, is all.

i don't have the emotional connection to music that i used to, and i guess that's an improvement, that i can express myself emotionally in more healthy ways. listening to music now, a lot of times it's like trying to hang out with an ex who i like but who i had a really fucked up long-term relationship with. like this is someone i was naked around. a lot. fine, they don't care, it doesn't mean anything to them, but it's still weird and challenging for me to deal with.

new album is really sleepy

i'm annoyed they got my hopes up a little with "bending hectic"

that & "teleharmonic" are the highlights but i don't care about the rest at all

Yeah feeling the same. Really disappointing after reading that glowing review in the Guardian: "imaginative and viscerally thrilling". Right, I'm still searching for those moments

Finally caved and listened to the leak. It’s odd some of the reviews I’ve read don’t really talk about much about Teleharmonic and I Quit as those are the ones I liked a lot on first listen. Teleharmonic might be the best song from them as The Smile so far, will relisten when it gets officially released on Friday to make up my mind.

The album is...not good. Filed a review in which I straight-up asked, "Why does this band exist?" There's one song — "Friend of a Friend," I think — that reminded me of Elton John, which is never a good thing, ever.

is it so they don't have to play Radiohead songs anymore / as often?

yeah... honestly i bailed on this schitt at "bending hectic." total one listen yawnfest. i'll relisten to the new songs+see what i think. but overall a very mighty meh to the smile.

(i still support the idea of bringing back atoms for peace, supplemented by frusciante. maybe bring ed along for a laugh.)

"bending hectic" is beautiful imo but yeah, everything else I've heard from the Smile has been zzzz

I feel that this music contains all the same characteristics of my favourite Radiohead tracks— excellent drum recording, fun production addendums, Greenwood’s love of finding the relationships between mediant-related chords and writing the most economic arrangement solutions to the problems that these chords create, the gorgeous timbre of Thom’s voice (and a gentle blind eye turned toward the lyrical content). It has a quotidian quality that exists in opposition to Radiohead’s widescreen canon-aspirations and I like that for me and my ears, I think I’m going to listen to this album a lot.

Great post

the issue for me is that radiohead used to be able to weave all their interesting ideas into compelling songs and they don't manage that here much.

off topic but imagine being stuck with the name Radiohead when your music is like that

the issue for me is that radiohead used to be able to weave all their interesting ideas into compelling songs and they don't manage that here much.

They haven't managed that since Hail to the Thief. I can't remember how a single song on In Rainbows, The King of Limbs or A Moon Shaped Pool goes.

Now that's just a mind-bending statement, at least as far as IR and AMSP go

Hell even for TKOL!

Separator (and Staircase) are some of their best tracks of all time.

But yeah not remembering even a single song of In Rainbows sounds to me like there has to be some minerals missing in your diet.

lol moka,

Not to pile on, but in rainbows main deficit imo is how bloody stock-standard and by the numbers everything is! You don’t get the surprises in it that the previous albums had, for better and for worse. Everything is weaved together with such polish, there’s no “wtf, that’s a bit of a change of pace ain’t it Radiohead?” Moments like how the first two tracks of kid A + nearly all of amnesiac/httt hit you with on their first listen. Part of that can be attributed to career trajectory creating expectations that of course 15 steps child choir will be followed by body snatches classic-rock number followed by nudes bassy spacey mood, all finished with videotapes doomy-gloomy-tech-march. But most of it is down to the fact that there’s not a single wasted moment on in rainbows. Amplified by coming from httt, all the tracks on in rainbows are extremely economical in communicating their theme, sound, world.

That might all mean nothing, so to condense: every song on in rainbows is masterfully weaved into a compelling product, almost too polished to be consumed without feeling sick, unless you’re willing to abandon the shame of eating a variety pack of 10 macarons.

in rainbows is polished, concise, and coherent sure, but that doesn't mean anything on it is 'stock-standard and by the numbers' and it definitely doesn't mean there isn't any stylistic variety.

Oh I can totally understand not liking their music or feeling it’s less challenging or impactful than what came before it..Yeah, they mellowed out, and why not? They earned it… they’re almost in their 60s now… I’d argue they kept doing some pretty good music all things considered -but saying you can’t remember a single song HTTT onwards is wild to me.

Of course I’m biased, I remember even their most non-descript b-sides… hey, I’m not big on In Rainbows myself, but it’s filled with some of their “hook-iest” songs. I’ll meet halfways and concede TKOL or AMSP being mostly formless and “vibe-y”…

have to agree; "weird fishes" was instantly memorable for me. on first listen, i couldn't wait to finish the album and go straight back to it. maybe their best song?

It’s Radiohead being Radiohead in their most stock-standard, by the numbers form. As differentiated from Radiohead being a stock-standard by the numbers band on in rainbows (this is not what I’m saying). Not a value-judgement, sometimes that’s exactly what wets my appetite

There’s better descriptive terms for in rainbows though. Stock-standard Radiohead by no means explains the whole album, and yeah maybe it’s a bit too reductive to put it like that.

most of in rainbows is still covering new ground for them so i'm really not sure where the idea that it's 'by numbers' comes from. it's not like they're just rehashing ok computer or something

to me it felt like streamlining everything they had gotten right up until then.

to some extent, but there's this warm, tasteful, soul-influenced vibe throughout the album that was then new for them. like, what sounds like "reckoner" or "house of cards", or "nude" on previous albums?

Yeah Austin putting it more succinctly. It’s by no means a rehash of their previous stuff, but Reckoner and House of Cards are in There There imo, Nude is in a mix of How To Disappear Completely and The Tourist. I just think In rainbows they polished everything up to that point into a beautiful product, without rehashing, and also without losing their identity.

To clarify, I don’t think reckoner is just a redo of There There with a fresh coat of paint, but I do think the elements on in rainbows can be found in their previous discography in a way you couldn’t say of their previous albums. Except maybe hail to the thief, but that has no way near the polish nor quality that in rainbows has

I generally think of Radiohead’s oeuvre as a bunch of dudes leaning back further and further into their relaxing chaise chairs and taking it easier and easier, me

in rainbows is probably their chillest album though, there's definitely elements of that to tkol and amsp but parts of them are denser and murkier idk

i talk about the soul influence on in rainbows but "reckoner" was actually yorke trying to imitate rhcp iirc

remembering that completely explains how the final "reckoner" somehow emerged out of the early "reckoner" that eventually became "feeling pulled apart by horses"

Yup Teleharmonic rules

FGTI OTM, and this is why so much of their output from IR onwards doesn't move me much. There's a lack of tension across so much of it. I think this is partially due to their desire to abandon "traditional" song structures in favor of vibier, more hypnotic approaches. But a lot of those jammier, vibier (sorry for using that word twice) tracks feel like they don't go anywhere, and they were *so good* at song structure, using it to build tension and release, and IMO it was the balance between that and their experimentalism that made them magic to my ears.

yep

I mean sure, I maintain that their best songs (#1 “Paranoid Android” with a bullet) are from their ambitious prog era, but my own quotidian listening needs have been better met by post-IR material.