radiohead killed the rock star
- Filed under: art, history, music, philosophy, social issues
- Date: Oct 16,2007
Fictional scene: Sterile room. Circle of chairs. People of all walks of life. A goateed, dark-headed man stands. “Hi, my name is Brad Andrews. I’m a Radiohead addict.”
Well, I guess fawning over Radiohead is what you do if you are in the blogosphere and you want people to think you are cool. The thing is, I actually do like Radiohead.
I remember going to a session in Nashville and asking the piano player what he was listening to and expecting something like, “Bill Evans, man…” but what crawled out his mouth sounded like a thrashcore group, “I’m listening to Radiohead. Kid A, The Bends? Dude, you gotta hear this stuff…” And within the week, I was an evangelist…
So to continue the fawning, I direct you to a great article that I resonated with written by Steven Rybicki of The CCM Patrol on the enigma that is Radiohead:
Rock & Roll & Radiohead
Where the industry-evading anti-rock stars fit in the rock ‘n roll canon.by Steven Rybicki
With all of the Drudge-sanctioned coverage of the release of In Rainbows, you may have noticed something: Radiohead is one of those “IMPORTANT†bands. Now, we live in an era that has digested and forgotten what it means to experience “important†music. We have neither the attention span nor the sense of history to appreciate art and some critics are more pessimistic than others. On the right, Alan Bloom lamented, with great hysteria in The Closing of the American Mind, the advent and development of jazz, R&B, and Rock & Roll. On the left, intellectual titan Theodor Adorno, in his essay “The Culture Industry,†strenuously argued there hadn’t been an admirable piece of music produced since the work of Haydn (and Adorno reserved intense vitriol for Beethoven). But I digress.
In case you haven’t plugged in to their work, let me offer a synopsis of their corpus. Radiohead started as one of many Brit-rock bands during a flurry of rock activity in the UK during the early ‘90s. Their first record is remembered by the uninitiated for a single called “Creep,†which became a staple on alternative radio, MTV’s 120 Minutes, and made it onto the soundtrack for the movie Clueless.
Their sophomore release, The Bends, coincided with the early-‘90s Britpop invasion of Blur, Elastica, Pulp, and, of course, Oasis. Thom Yorke’s furtive vocals, however, distinguished Radiohead’s jangle from the cocksure swagger of Oasis’ one-two punch of Noel and Liam (on their debut, Definitely Maybe). And while Oasis perfected soaring and accessible ’90s arena rock, The Bends hinted at the obscure road-less-taken path that Radiohead took in subsequent years.
Enter one of the touchstones of the ‘90s: Radiohead’s 1997 album, OK Computer. It’s hard to overemphasize its impact. It ranks alongside Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral, My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, Nirvana’s Nevermind, and P.J. Harvey’s To Bring You My Love as the most important records of that decade. Sonically adventurous and drenched in reverb that recalled the psychedelic dabbling of Pink Floyd, Radiohead crafted a record that heralded the arrival of post-rock (later typified by acts like Explosions in the Sky and Godspeed You Black Emperor).
