Radiohead (Music Notes)

There is no form of artistic media more subjective than music, which is why I often don’t enjoy getting into arguments about it. While I am passionate about the music I like I don’t try and convert others because for the most part this is a futile endeavor. While some music tries to have a message and some music tries to take the art form to its creative limits, there exists a large contingent that just wants something to dance to. I have absolutely no problem with that. Let me repeat: I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO PROBLEM WITH THAT. I wish I was one of those people who liked absolutely everything, but alas I have different tastes. That doesn’t mean I have no interest in anything else. My first “Music Notes” was on Weezer, a band which I have alternately loved, hated and felt indifference towards over their career. My second was on Arcade Fire, a band I love but admittedly is a bit too much at times.

Now, for my next trick, I have decided to write on what has undoubtedly become my favorite band: Radiohead. Here is a band that has been met with almost universal adulation with every record since the late 90’s, seen as deities of sorts amongst their fans. Their fourth record Kid A was named the best record of the 2000’s by Rolling Stone, with many other groups or publications agreeing. Radiohead is not only one of the best bands going, but also the boldest and most influential. In their journey across the musical spectrum they have inspired countless bands to reach to the next level until there is nothing left. Radiohead will always be seen as important because they are never satisfied and are always looking for new ways to explore what can be done with the medium.

Radiohead began in Oxfordshire while attending Abingdon School, where they called themselves On a Friday. Thom Yorke, Phil Selway, Ed O’Brien, Colin Greenwood and his younger brother Jonny would practice in the school’s music room every Friday, hence the band’s name. All but Jonny went on to attend University, but their popularity as a band continued to grow. After many live performances they were signed by EMI, and their name was changed to Radiohead.

Their rise is not exactly the stuff of Hollywood scripts, devoid of the usual sex, drugs, rock n’ roll storyline. They formed a band while teenagers, kept at it and eventually made it big. How often do you read about stuff like that? As I mentioned before, all but one of them has a university degree. As far as life stories are concerned, these guys are boring as death. Thankfully, this does not carry over to their music.

That said, their first album Pablo Honey is a thoroughly decent alt-rock album, however it never truly separates from the pack. The obvious exception is “Creep”, the song which to this day remains their biggest hit. It is undoubtedly a great song, though it also needs to see a psychiatrist as soon as possible. It addresses the universal adolescent themes of inadequacy and alienation whilst still being a solid rock song. The pre-chorus skee-runk from the guitar of Jonny Greenwood remains one of the band’s most famous moments.

clip-Radiohead - Creep
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“Creep” was not an instant success, but instead spread slowly. It began to catch fire when it first became a huge hit in… Israel. Well, as Israel goes so goes the world, and soon “Creep” became a worldwide smash.  The effects of this sudden fame on the band have been well-documented, and the Radiohead began to fall apart at the seams. To them, the song became an entirely separate entity, something bigger than the band itself, and they wanted nothing to do with that. People knew what “Creep” was but not Radiohead, and Yorke in particular was afraid that they were going to be defined by that song alone. They grew bored of being forced to go onstage and play the same songs night after night, and they felt an urge to get back in the studio.

It is this side of Radiohead I have never been a fan of, because as a band they never really run away from press. A second, f-bomb-less version of “Creep” was released for U.S. radio play, so it is clear to me they wanted to be successful. What band doesn’t? They’ve never been afraid of going on television, necessarily, and as time as gone on Radiohead and Yorke have backed off the Kurt Cobain image.

What I don’t doubt is the band’s boredom with the song after the endless touring, and there came a point where they stopped performing “Creep” live. While it’s the only truly notable song on Pablo Honey, because of both its quality and success, when compared with their subsequent work it seems a bit more straightforward. There are other decent songs on Pablo Honey, such as “Anyone Can Play Guitar”, but “Creep” is as impeccable a piece of mid-90’s wrist-cutting pop as you’ll find.

(By the way, the music video for “Anyone Can Play Guitar” is so 90’s it’s embarrassing.)

Radiohead - Anyone Can Play Guitar

Oskar Mel | Myspace Video

Hungry to make something new, Radiohead went back into the studio and came out with The Bends the first in a string of great albums that would end, well, never. This is not a complex album but it is alt-rock at its finest, with songs that are not only addictive but resonant, while still remaining accessible. For those looking for a way into the music of Radiohead, I highly recommend starting here. In a 49-minute package you get the radio-friendly likes of songs such as “High and Dry”, the sweeping beauty of “Fake Plastic Trees”, and the haunting “Street Spirit (Fade Out)”.

The title The Bends refers to a condition which can arise in scuba divers when they emerge from a great depth too quickly. I’ll leave it to you to figure out the symbolism, but the album contains a few songs which address the sudden fame which was bestowed upon them post-“Creep”. The title track “The Bends” is one of these, but it is much more obvious in “My Iron Lung”, which alternately praises and condemns “Creep” throughout. (Compare “We are grateful for our iron lung” with “This is our new song/Just like the last one/A total waste of time”.)

Radiohead - High and Dry
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Radiohead - Fake Plastic Trees
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The Bends hinted at a greatness that one could not have foreseen Pablo Honey, and no one was prepared for what was to come. In 1997, Radiohead would release OK Computer, which empirically is likely their best album. Not a false note is hit here, and there is only one true trip into the avant garde (“Fitter Happier”). With this album Yorke at long last distinguished himself as a lyricist who no longer speaks only about his own personal struggles but instead speaks to a greater truth. At times Yorke’s lyrics can be downright bizarre, something which would become more clear in Kid A, but more on that later. Oh, much more.

After the great-in-its-own-right “Airbag” opens the album, we then are treated to the 6 and a half minute magnum opus “Paranoid Android”, a Douglas Adams-referencing, tempo-changin’ masterpiece of musicianship. On paper, the song itself is a laundry list of bad decisions: introduce musical idea, make u-turn, get really loud, bring it back down, then end with a loud, bone-crunching outro. However, it works spectacularly, and it is often called one of the band’s best songs. The band sees it as more of a joke song, often laughing about the feeling that they got away with something.

A song as far-reaching and ambitious as “Paranoid Android” has the potential to overshadow even the best of albums, but the material on OK Computer is so universally great that just about every song can stand on its own. Thematically, the album touches on the themes of technology and the alienation that can result. Images arrive in the head of people sitting in rooms by themselves, sitting at their computers, becoming slaves to the greater technological power. Does that sound like pretentious babble? It is, but just listen to the album and see what I mean.

Square in the middle of the album comes “Karma Police”, the ultimate anthem of middle-class passive-agression. Other highlights include the joyously skeevy “Climbing Up the Walls”, the clanging “Electioneering”, the borderline-suicidal song “Lucky” and, well, just about everything. If you want to hear what great art-rock sounds like, listen to OK Computer.

Oh, ladies and gentlemen all of this was just a warm-up for what was to come. Also, in a way it wasn’t, because for their next album, Kid A, Radiohead decided to essentially start over from scratch. They threw away everything they had done yet, along with everything they knew about how to make music. Each member had to redefine their role in the band, but all in the interest of creating their most unique work yet.

Kid A opens with “Everything In Its Right Place”, which is an ironic title if there ever was one. Immediately one is thrown into something that feels… off, as if you are emerging from a bunker after a world-ending fire. The song, like others on the album, is a haunting lullaby of sorts, with Yorke crooning about sucking on lemons and whatnot. The lyrics on the second track, “Kid A”, are mostly indecipherable due to the heavy voice alteration. After these two songs get under your skin, the bassline begins for “The National Anthem”.

This is the song where you begin to question just what in God’s name you have gotten yourself into. It begins simply enough, then Thom Yorke comes in and sings ambiguously about “everyone around here” being “so near” and “having the fear” and so on. Then things are taken up a notch when the saxophone comes in, and before long the song sounds like a high school marching band crashing into a wall. (It has also been aptly described to me as “Duke Ellington going through a cheese grater”.) “The National Anthem” is one of those songs you cringe at the first time, then with each listen its brilliance comes to the surface. So goes the rest of Kid A.

“The National Anthem” is a great song, but to this day I debate the necessity of the absolute chaos that is its second half. To me the song almost sounds better live, where they forgo the insanity and play around with what they have onstage. It sounds equally chaotic, but in its own way, and it almost holds more power than the “jazz band on acid” feel of the studio version. I’ll listen to either gladly, but I think there’s a reason they have only brought out the band during a few live performances (one of them on SNL). Nonetheless, “The National Anthem” is a song symbolic of the Radiohead that began with Kid A: The Radiohead that held nothing back.

Yorke’s lyrics throughout Kid A are purposely ambiguous, allowing the listener to make of it what they wish. Few can deny that the album seems to be chronicling some apocalyptic disaster, and the songs seem to move through the stages of grief. “How to Disappear Completely” is undoubtedly a man in denial (“I’m not here/this isn’t happening”), all the way to acceptance, which can be found in “Morning Bell”, which sounds like a parent putting their child to sleep, telling them everything will be alright, even though they know otherwise. “Optimistic” undoubtedly wins the Ironic Title Award™, evoking depression at the edge of sanity. “Idioteque” chugs along like a machine that cannot be stopped, unless it crashes, and the album closes with “Motion Picture Soundtrack”, funeral music if it ever existed.

For a band that had established itself as one of the best art-rock groups going, it was a shocking decision to tear it all down in favor of a more radical approach. Kid A finds Radiohead in a disturbing place, but the music itself is all the better for it. Where OK Computer influenced bands to get started, Kid A encouraged bands to do whatever they wanted. On paper it’s commercial suicide, but instead Radiohead created an album which took their wildest electronic and avant garde dreams and combined them in a classic single-disc package.

Kid A was almost universally chosen as one of the best albums of its decade not simply because of its quality (which is high), but of the place in holds in recent rock history. It’s a milestone of creativity in a land of rock music which has been dire of late. Kid A came out in 2000, and the rock charts in years previous had been rife with complete crap bands such as Creed and Limp Bizkit, and Kid A came along and proved that, in fact, Radiohead did not do it all for the nookie. Kid A was a massive gamble, yet out of nowhere it topped the Billboard album charts, and won a Grammy for Best Alternative Album. As a result, everyone else just looked lazy, and they took that cookie and stuck it up their yeah.

One year after Kid A was released, we were given Amnesiac, featuring material from the same sessions. However, the results are not as magical as the first time around. The mystery and surprise of Kid A wears off a bit here, and where Kid A was a more approachable form of experimental music, Amnesiac can go more into the abrasive. There are still several great songs to be found here, but for the first time since Pablo Honey Radiohead made an album with music that was disposable.

After the mysteriously titled but still quite good “Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box” opens the record, we are given the great “Pyramid Song”, a slow burn of a track with a time signature I’m convinced they made up. After this comes “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors” which doesn’t really work in the way the band intended. Kid A and most of Amnesiac was able to avoid experimentalism for experimentalism’s sake, but this song is the lone exception.

The first half of Amnesiac, “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors” excluded, is great simply because it expands the band’s journey into new territory while bringing back into something more guitar-driven. However, it is still not as revelatory or wholly resonant as Kid A. It was met with much critical acclaim, but not many would point to it as Radiohead’s best work. However, it did give us “Knives Out”, and thus a terrifically odd music video by Spike Jonze.

radiohead - knives out from amnesiac on Vimeo.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of the Kid A/Amnesiac era is that Radiohead was able to perform these songs live. Upon listening to the albums one would think this is work that is condemned to live exclusively in studio form, but alas they not only perform them live but bring the house down every time. Radiohead has become known as one of the best live bands going, and that’s because they go all out to try and give the audience as authentic an experience as possible without pre-recorded bullhooey.

After plunging into the depths of what is possible with music in Kid A and Amnesiac, Radiohead was bound to come back to sanity around at some point. Their sixth album Hail to the Thief was advertised as a return to alt-rock form, but the end result is endlessly more complex. If anything, Hail to the Thief digs even deeper, and combines the strangeness of their previous two albums with a The Bends-like beauty.

Many, due to the title, saw Hail to the Thief as a criticism of the Bush administration, but those people are thinking in terms far narrower than what Radiohead thinks in. They were criticizing government, but one of a much more Orwellian nature. In fact, the opening track “2+2=5” even references Nineteen Eighty-Four, beginning with Yorke bemoaning the state of things before bursting into angry chants, indicting an inattentive public of being the cause of the world’s problems (“You have not been paying attention”). Right off the bat he is not yelling at George Bush or anyone in particular, but at the listener.

Next comes “Sit Down. Stand Up.”, a song which spends most of its time simply reciting the orders to sit down and stand up over and over again. It comes off as an unknown power ordering us to perform even the most mundane tasks, as if we live in a society comparable to the one we see in the famous Mac computer Super Bowl commercial.

The album comes to a head with “There There”, a cycling, hypnotic piece of work which, in my opinion, stands as one of the band’s crowning achievements. We are met with a percussive rhythm and a subtle bassline beneath the surface, and Yorke sings in his usual unspecific but trademark style. Also in trademark Radiohead style, the slow build to an energetic and grand conclusion.

Now I know you’re pretending you didn’t watch that “Thom Yorke meets Fantastic Mr. Fox” video, so I’ll give you a slightly less distracting video of the live performance:

Hail to the Thief will always be one of my favorite records they’ve done. While it would be ill-advised to call it a concept album, it certainly addresses the issue of inept and invasive government without naming names. The album ends with a shocking little number entitled “A Wolf at the Door”, in which everything seems to be falling apart in the worst possible way. Hail to the Thief is, quite possibly, their most wholly pessimistic record, and boy oh boy is that saying something.

After Hail to the Thief Radiohead decided to take a hiatus, and during this time Thom Yorke snuck up on the world like the sneaky devil he is and released his solo album The Eraser. Universally recognized as “very good”, this album would have fit in just perfectly in the early 2000’s Radiohead oeuvre. However, Yorke was right to release it separately, as the band had moved past its little exploratory period to make Hail to the Thief. As a whole, The Eraser gives us a few great songs amidst a few other good ones, but it doesn’t quite measure up to the work Yorke produces with the rest of his band behind him.

Radiohead’s most recent album was given to us in 2007, and its title was In Rainbows. This album brought them to the forefront of the music scene, both popular and otherwise, not necessarily because of its content but because of its release: People would download the album from the Radiohead website at whatever price they wished. The music industry threw a collective hissy-fit, but in the process seemed behind the times. Radiohead has never complained about illegal downloading simply because they believe it’s not something that will be escaped. Here is guitarist Ed O’Brien on the matter:

As a result of all this hubbub, In Rainbows became a number one album around the world. It was well-received critically and by audiences, and it made Radiohead look like the band of the future. In a world where the music industry is dying, Radiohead found a way around the collapse and put out an album on their own terms.

Ignoring all this, In Rainbows is still a darn great album, even though you may not notice it at first. Stylistically, it sounds as if Radiohead took no great risks, but that is not true at all. In fact, Radiohead takes a risk simply because for the first time in a while they seem to be having fun with their music. In Rainbows is the rare Radiohead album that doesn’t make you lose all faith in humanity, and they pull that off just as well as despair. The album opens with “15 Step”, which is just a good listen.

In Rainbows is solid songwriting, front to back, and there’s nothing to complain about anywhere, be it the album’s one hard-rocker “Bodysnatchers”, the soft drive of “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi”, the clangy but gentle “Reckoner”, or the hypnotic “Jigsaw Falling Into Place”. I’ve spat out a lot of pretentious drivel about their past albums, but In Rainbows doesn’t have the aspirations of Kid A or OK Computer, but merely exists as a great collection of 10 songs. Works just fine for me.

On the endless list of “Most Influential Bands”, Radiohead is undoubtedly near the top, particularly of late. You ask most alt-rock bands of the last 10 years they will list them as an influence. For instance, there is a great deal of Thom Yorke in the performance of Chris Martin of Coldplay, a band I affectionately refer to as “Radiohead on Prozac”. Most professional musicians have put Radiohead towards the top of their “favorite artists” lists, and they remain a personal favorite of many, whether they like it or not.

There is no other musical group I can think of that has explored the medium of music so thoroughly. They started at the surface, dove deeper and deeper and came out intact and wildly successful. Not only did they change the SOUND of their music, but with In Rainbows they revolutionized the way music is promoted and released. They adapted to their environment rather than rebel against it, and in the process released great album after great album. Most bands find out what they’re good at and stick with it well past the expiration date. Radiohead grows bored with complacency, and they’re always looking for new ways to provide their listeners with something they’ve never heard before.