Official RADIOHEAD thread

[modage]

But they are an example of a band who I personally feel are much better on tour than they are on albums. I can name quite a few bands where the opposite is true.

IF this is true, its only true of their more recent albums (esp Kid A and Amnesiac) where the studio versions are so cold and labored over.

[Stefen]

HTTT is the best Radiohead album to make love to. Maybe that's why I don't dig it and haven't heard it much.

[hedwig]

I can't wait until some of you guys start having kids.

"Come in here and sit down.  I want to play you something.  It's called OK Computer and it's by a band called Radiohead.  It's important that you hear it but whatever you think of it means nothing because I didn't meet your mother until after In Rainbows came out.  Sorry."

"I spent years of my life raising you and this is the thanks I get.  You put Kid A over Amnesiac?!  GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY HOUSE!"

haha that's right. and i will name my kids thom, jonny, colin, ed, and phil. regardless of gender. i'll cause each of them deep emotional trauma by singing Go to Sleep as a bedtime song, and wake them at dawn with a morning bell. their bedrooms will have stanley donwood wallpaper and decorated with fake plastic trees. we will live in a glass house.

[Sunrise]

and i will name my kids thom, jonny, colin, ed, and phil. regardless of gender. i'll cause each of them deep emotional trauma by singing Go to Sleep as a bedtime song, and wake them at dawn with a morning bell. their bedrooms will have stanley donwood wallpaper and decorated with fake plastic trees. we will live in a glass house.

Actually singing Morning Bell to them might provide the most trauma...maybe you can sing that while ringing the bell.

HTTT is the best Radiohead album to make love to. Maybe that's why I don't dig it and haven't heard it much.

...and wtf? I can't figure you out, Stefen.

[Pozer]

I can't wait until some of you guys start having kids.

"Come in here and sit down.  I want to play you something.  It's called OK Computer and it's by a band called Radiohead.  It's important that you hear it but whatever you think of it means nothing because I didn't meet your mother until after In Rainbows came out.  Sorry."

"I spent years of my life raising you and this is the thanks I get.  You put Kid A over Amnesiac?!  GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY HOUSE!"

haha that's right. and i will name my kids thom, jonny, colin, ed, and phil. regardless of gender. i'll cause each of them deep emotional trauma by singing Go to Sleep as a bedtime song, and wake them at dawn with a morning bell. their bedrooms will have stanley donwood wallpaper and decorated with fake plastic trees. we will live in a glass house.

and if a wolf should arrive at your door, keep your coke babies safe cuz those creep animals are bodysnatchers and they suck young blood.  tell your faithless wonderboys there there, keep 'em high and dry and packed like sardines in a crushed tin box.  make sure to bring out your reckoner to keep count of em and remember that 2 + 2 = 5.  get your knives out and call the karma police.

[Stefen]

Ok, that's enough.

[Pubrick]

Ok COMPUTER, that's enough.

see, anyone can play guitar this game.

[Stefen]

YOU can't play the game with an album from your last tier. It's called cheating and it's against the rules.

[72teeth]

yeah. creep.

[hedwig]

yeah. creep.

Game over.

cue the exit music.

[cron]

at pubrick's request, here's what i have to say about Hail to the thief.

stylistically, that album is radiohead's most ambitious, their broadest. kid a might've been the most difficult to achieve but its concept is straight and clear. and because people like cohesive stuff , they put down hail to the thief. it's also the most polychromatic radiohead album, even if the new one's title actually is 'in rainbows'.  the wordplay in the title is a fine indication on what the album's  about. it was and basically still is, the only relevant pop album that talked at its time about the iraq occupation and bush  in a contemporary manner and a bizarre scope. think about how the rest of their catalogue ages and hail to the thief stands like frozen in time, it's different. its like an invitation to get mad about the evil stuff you cannot control.

about in rainbows,   i think it's funny that some of you already knew most of the tracklist , makes me feel irresponsible. but i deliberately avoided listening any new songs  to be amazed by the new recorded stuff (kind of like avoiding the thread and trailers for there will be blood), and amazed i was. stunned, cos most of the album is a side of radiohead everyone took for granted after they made lovely pop songs like high and dry or no suprises. and they're still talking about spooky shit , like flesh eating worms and collapsing infrastructure and a taped death , but it's the romanticist part that i had forgotten about them. 

[tpfkabi]

the lyrics of HTTT don't really address Iraq very much unless i've missed something.
2+2=5 and Stand Up Sit Down obviously.
now sure We Suck Young Blood is directly about that, but maybe more commercialism/Hollywood. maybe both. oh, i guess Sail to the Moon some too..........and I Will, although that song is from pre-Kid A era - but who knows when Thom finished the lyrics..........ok more than i thought.

i didn't listen to much new stuff either and i'm glad.

[Neil]

think about how the rest of their catalogue ages and hail to the thief stands like frozen in time, it's different.

brilliant, i couldn't agree with this more, although to me kid a may have came out yesterday, and OK computer, is still "holy shit do the fucking splits" to me, i feel like hail to the thief is actually frozen...i personally love the cd, the gloaming owns, but i agree it's like although i know every song, there is still some foreign aspect to it, i don't know, you're so right, possibly the best description of something radiohead has done that I've ever read

Is com-lag songs that didn't make the cd httt?  If so, then that means that cd spawned one of my favorite songs ever. Gagging order. mmmmm

[MacGuffin]

Radiohead Experiment Proves You Have The Power, In Bigger Than The Sound
Did music fans shoot themselves in the foot with all their online quibbling about In Rainbows?
By James Montgomery; MTV

It's been one week since the world changed. Do you feel any different? Me neither. This is sort of a bummer.

Just in case you weren't aware, it was roughly 185 hours ago that Radiohead nuked the entire record industry with the online release of their In Rainbows album, and strangely, though some predicted that the sun would be shrouded in black dust and the seas would boil, the post-apocalyptic wasteland in which I'm living today doesn't seem any different than the one I was living in last Tuesday (note: this could also be because I live in Brooklyn).

In fact, things are pretty much exactly the same as they were before In Rainbows hit the Net (though I now have a somewhat-underwhelming-yet-really-beautiful-in-parts-and-ultimately-solid new Radiohead album on my iPod). Major labels did not crumble, the Internet did not explode and people still bought the new Kid Rock album. Rainbows didn't sound the death knell of an industry, nor did it herald a bold new era of commerce. It was, for all intents and purposes, just another album.

Of course it seems pretty funny writing all this now. But last week, people were genuinely freaked out by what might happen in Rainbows' wake. The CEO of Terra Firma Capital (the company that now owns EMI, which, in turn, owns Radiohead's former home, Capitol Records) wrote a widely leaked memo that detailed how the company would refocus its "business models" to reflect the post-Rainbows world. After the album was released, I wrote a story about problems fans were having with the audio quality of the download (and possible ulterior motives of the band's management) and received e-mails from employees at both Universal and Warner Music Group telling me how much they enjoyed the article. Clearly, people were paying attention. And they were worried.

But did nothing change in the days since In Rainbows' release? Well, not necessarily. If anything, its reception has shone a big, bright light on two rather interesting aspects about us as "consumers" of music: 1) We've got a rather bizarre sense of entitlement, especially since we usually do nothing to actually deserve said sense; and 2) If given the chance, we will nitpick and complain about anything in the world.

Both points can be rather accurately summed up by our reaction to the news that In Rainbows would be released as MP3s encoded at 160 kilobits per second. For most, the move was greeted with a rather unceremonious "Eh," though to some, it was akin to Hulk Hogan's heel turn at Bash at the Beach '96. Seems that after a decade of telling us to say our prayers and eat our vitamins, Radiohead might have dressed in all black and gone Hollywood on us (note: roughly 78 percent of you have no idea what I'm talking about right now).

After all, 160 kbps was a far cry from 320 kbps — the "industry standard" among file-sharers (though, that idea seems rather ridiculous) — and it seemed like Radiohead duped us all by making the announcement after we had already plunked down money to download the album (even though, you know, a reported one-third of us didn't). We were paying for a lesser-quality version of the album, even though we probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference on our tiny iPod headphones. And this was not right.

That point resonated across blogs and 'boards for days, even managing to somehow drown the actual release of the album (and all the amazing, ballsy aspects that went along with it). The whole thing was a prime example of how, when given the chance, we'll take any opportunity to absolutely bury anyone for anything. Perhaps a commenter on Idolator put it best: "If this thread isn't indicative of the entitlement of early 21st-century culture, I don't know what is."

And it's sort of a shame, because people in the industry — including those major-label bastards in their ivory towers — were watching. And the end result of all our squabbling seems to only reinforce their point of view that every artist needs a major to help guide them. But then again, it's also not, because it also showed those same industry suits just how incredibly pissy and insufferable we can be when we really set our minds to it. We've actually got the power to kill careers if we decide to (see Pitchfork's "chimpanzee peeing in his own mouth" review of Jet's Shine On for further proof of this point). We only need to get our sh-- together long enough to do it.

But of course, all this is entirely debatable. After all, for all our moaning, a reported 1.2 million of us still downloaded In Rainbows, and at an average price of around $8, that means Radiohead made somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 kabillion in roughly 24 hours (I am not good at math). The rich got richer. The machine chugged on. And the rest of us are still sitting here watching a video of a monkey peeing in his mouth.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

[cron]

another thing i like about in rainbows  is that it has clearly showed how incompetent rock journalism is. it's almost an oxymoron. the best reviews and opinions about the thing, i've read at art-oriented blogs and such. it's cool that everyone still wants to have an opinion about the 'gimmick' , but they should remember to keep their opinions interesting, especially if they're journalists. talking about the album itself every once in a while might be a good start , james montgomery.


this century is doomed.