Official RADIOHEAD thread

[Pozer]

uh, Neil, my point was he could be contributing to better movies is all. the kids hating it line was a joke and had nothing to do with what you went off on.

missing points, one post at a time, ay Neil.

[socketlevel]

oh so fucking ridiculous, although i do love bill hicks. even though that clip has ZERO context with thom yorke.

Strange, when i see a trailer for twilight, all i see is a commercial for a two hour commercial about diet coke.

and even if you're right, it does Thom yorke a disservice to align himself with mediocrity. This is almost, and i mean a c#&t hair away, from the straw that writes him off the artist list in my books.  I felt the same way when maynard from TOOL did that bullshit underworld OST.  It's like they're not gone, but another cash grab song on a bullshit soundtrack will ruin it entirely. And like bill says, i don't care if they shit mona lisas after that.

at least when rage against the machine was on the godzilla soundtrack they stuck it to the man.

"Coca-Cola was back in our veins in Saigon
And Rambo too, we got a dope pair of Nikes on
Godzilla pure motherfuckin' filler
Get your eyes off the real killer"

that might be a cop-out, and immature in and of itself.... but that's how you put a song on a soundtrack laughing. possibly you're quick to think York is laughing so you don't think less of him, like turning crappy into cool. when truthfully all it probably is, is a re-introduction of the thom york brand to the new flock of 14 year old girls (who represent the strongest music buying demographic).  seems calculated no? maybe not, but a more realistic scenario then him laughing at the whole situation in my eyes.  he's got an agent crunching numbers, like everyone else.

[RegularKarate]

sweet Christ, this is a fifteen-year-old boy conversation if I've ever seen one.

He owed somebody a favor... a friend was in charge of putting this thing together and Thom agreed without giving a shit... he's got better things to worry about... like making good music.

[Fernando]

I heard pta forced him to it so he loses street cred and jonny greenwood is hailed as the true radiohead god..

[Neil]

my bad. let me know when i can sit at the grown up table. 

socketlevel.  By your logic, or at least what i get from your post is, thom yorke saw the film and said "YES I WANT IN." that would be him complying with mediocrity. however, it's a decent song.  so he just wrote a good tune.  so, i'm not sure where we disagree other than that.  plus, good for him if he can get his brand out to the 14 yr old girls. I'd love for you indie core fucks (not you socket; they know who they are, but you may be one) to tell me why this is so heart breaking to you. I don't think he's laughing. I just think, that putting a song on a (best selling) soundtrack has nothing to do with anything.  sure the film may have product placements in it, and it might suck, but does that make thom yorke's song shit?  what i'm going to do, is Be a big boy, and if i like the song, it will exist outside of some fucking silly movie, and i'll listen to it. and know that i have zero fucking room (or the guts) to comment on what "he should be doing" as an artist or individual. whatever his feeling are. he has nothing to prove to me (for sure) and i doubt he gives a fuck what you think

RK is using a kevin smith joke regardless if i care to believe "he knows a guy" or not.

sweet Christ, this is a fifteen-year-old boy conversation if I've ever seen one.

you gonna shit on what we do too? or what?  I'm really shocked you brought age comes into your critism, or rather as the point of your criticism. never get that anymore. Ethically, if he "owed someone a favor" then he did the right thing.


not to mention you missed the entire point of what my last post was about. IT WAS THE GREATEST SELLING SOUNDTRACK LAST YEAR (or whenever) THAT DOESN'T SOUND LIKE MEDIOCRITY, IT SOUNDS LIKE BUSINESS.  I would 100% would contribute to this, because it does not hinder other artistic endevours whatsoever.  Only kids who think they know what certain artists should do are the ones opening their mouths.

worst decision dude's made yet. he dont need money for bills and could certainly find more credible films to contribute his material to. take a note from Jonny, Yorke!
oh well, i hope the Twilight kids hate it. 

uh, Neil, my point was he could be contributing to better movies is all. the kids hating it line was a joke and had nothing to do with what you went off on.

missing points, one post at a time, ay Neil.

sorry didn't realize you had so much clarity in those posts, had to read them twice. both lines.

oh well though. no one takes what i say seroiously, i'll just go back to viewing, and let the adults talk it out.  sorry that there was no soap opera exit.  My arms are too busy flailing against the giant.

[Alexandro]

shit floats.

[RegularKarate]

Neil, if I could understand half of what you say, I'd think you didn't get that I was kinda on your side.

My point was that the "He's a SELLOUT, MAN!" is such a played-out argument.  I mean there's obviously exceptions (when it's more in-your-face like a commercial or something), but this sort of bickering about something as insignificant as putting a song on the soundtrack for a shitty movie... I'd expect to hear it from kids who just downloaded their first Bad Religion album and don't get that Bill Hicks was just "sorta funny" and had no God-like qualities after all.

and where did Kevin Smith play into this?

[New Feeling]

...and don't get that Bill Hicks was just "sorta funny" and had no God-like qualities after all.

I agree with the rest of your post but I'd say Bill Hicks' qualities were more Christ-like, and at his best he was as funny as anyone has ever been.

Please no Bill Hicks backlash now or ever!  Thank you

[socketlevel]

sweet Christ, this is a fifteen-year-old boy conversation if I've ever seen one.

really? i think this is probably the most important conversation we could have about artists. there was a time when people cared about who they aligned themselves with. where do you draw the artistic line exactly? or maybe that's not something that's important to people anymore. are we to just accept everything we're given? maybe I'm just living in a time when it mattered.

how could you say being a sellout is played out... rebelling against the status quo has been the basis of so much great art. you're robbing the meaning out of so much great stuff by saying that. what just because kids have called things sellouts it makes it immature?


*****************

Neil i think it's more like this: tom writes a song, it's a beautiful song, and his agent pimps said song out.  maybe tom is older now and doesn't give a shit about the business, he's gotten soft in his old age. so he signs a piece of paper and accepts some money.  that's it. i don't know all the ins and outs of the music industry, but that seems most logical.

all the 14 year old girl stuff i mention isn't in his head while he's writing it, it's in the money men's heads that he has working for him.  even if he passively ends up where we find him (on a bullshit OST) i don't really care, you stand by the decisions you make. I hold you accountable even if these bad choices are done as some fleeting passive footnote in life. now i painted it a little more malicious than that, so i retract that tone, but even my more hostile version is more realistic then him laughing at the irony of his actions, like you suggested.

I'm not attacking how good the song is, I'm looking down on the artist. also, i don't give a shit if he cares what the fuck i think. actually, i care more about what you think about it then him.  he's a fictional person living in an imagined world in my head, much like we are to him.  So i don't start to think whether or not he agrees with me. you and i are the people that come to this site to discuss stuff. so we have the dialog, and the relationship that matters while discussing it. I take what you say seriously, i'm secure enough to not need a website whipping boy/girl (though i can't speak for everyone else).

also, and this is important, tom york isn't necessarily smarter than you and i. so fuck him, we are capable of calling him out on his shit decisions.  we can do this, despite him not being part of the conversation. i really don't like that you ended on what he thinks of my opinion, because frankly, i don't fucking care about his opinion.

i don't consider myself an indie core fuck, lol or even know the meaning (like I'm 95% sure i do).  i guess that's for you to decide though ultimately. i just call it as i see it. i might be wrong... who knows. i just think you need to hardline this kind of thing that bill hicks talks about, peeing line in the sand if-you're-not-with-us-you're-against-us kinda thing.  sure this is a grey area, it's not coke, but then again fuck it, he had a choice.  and if he slightly hesitated before he put that song in the album, and I'm sure he did, he should have just fucking played it safe and balked.

[ᾦɐļᵲʊʂ]

Bill Hicks is awesome.

[RegularKarate]

I didn't say "being a sellout" is played out.  I said that arguing about whether or not someone is a sell-out based on something as insignificant as this is played out.
You don't get to be as big as Radiohead is without having made moves like this in the past.  Moves you probably didn't realize were made.  You only noticed this because of how much you dislike Twilight.  It's like when someone only refuses to eat cute animals. 

I don't care though, really... I wasn't calling you childish, I was just surprised the discussion lasted as long as it did.

And Bill Hicks was a good comic and everything, but he's waaaaaaayyyyyy overrated.  People deify him when he wasn't nearly as good a standup as people build him up to have been.  Sure, he got loud about things a lot of people believed in, but put a lot of stock into angry over funny.

Louis CK is a hundred times better Bill Hicks than Hicks was.  And he's a sellout.

[ᾦɐļᵲʊʂ]

How do you quantify a "better" comic?  Louis CK is hilarious, yeah.  But his jokes occur in his own realm of comedy.  He barely nudges at shit that Bill Hicks was so deeply possessed to scream about.  

Bill Hicks is arguably not even really a stand-up comic, than more of a spoken word type figure.  I mean, he's funny sometimes, but most of the time, he's just angry and says incredibly pointed things.  It's not like a "We're-all-too-afraid-to-say-it" type stuff, but it is provocative and insightful.  There's no need to call him overrated or compare him to other comics at all or to compare any comic to another, since the presentation of comedy and thoughts varies widely person to person.

Either someone is funny to you or they're not.


Also, Thom Yorke is a sellout for helping to aid to the Twilight phenomenon because not long ago Radiohead was selling albums for the price that the audience could name, and now he's lending talent to help give funding to a mindless chain of movies that will only fade out once the popularity fades out and is based on a string of novels that have the same power.  There is little to no artistic merit to them, and he is fueling that fire.

Not to say that making money is antithetical to being an arist, which is a flawed notion because it has a built-in suicide pact, but at the end of the day, Thom Yorke is contributing to crap to make money that he clearly (well, this is disputable since I don't personally know him) doesn't need.  I only assume that since their shows are so much money, they have tons of merchandise and allow their fans to pay whatever price they want for their albums.  Thom is giving the power of his celebrity and status to empower a franchise and to me, that defines sellout.  Whether that's necessarily "good" or "bad" is debatable.

[RegularKarate]

I won't debate the Bill Hicks issue here (this is the radiohead thread), but as far as Radiohead being Sellouts, you're making a bunch of assumptions to back an opinion that won't affect anything.  Are you going to stop buying radiohead's music because the story you made up in your head about why they are on the New Moon soundtrack makes you upset?

It doesn't matter.  Call them sellouts.

[children with angels]

Walrus, to paraphrase you on your angle on Hicks, how do you quantify a "better" film? Or a film that it would be okay to lend a song to?

Presumably it isn't just the fact that Yorke has a song on a film soundtrack at all that gets you riled up - no one was complaining when he had a song on Scanner Darkly, for example. So this is a value judgement about the film (incidentally, a film you haven't seen). I'm just interested in how you draw "the artistic line", as Socketlevel referred to it earlier, so cleanly for films (but not for comics). Is it because this is a big-budget genre movie that it is unacceptable? If so, would it be okay if Yorke instead had a song on the soundtrack of a big-budget genre movie that you LIKED - say (for argument's sake) Wall-E or District 9? Is it the fact that this is a franchise? In which case, would it be as bad if he had a song on the OST of a franchise you liked - say, The Dark Knight...?

I'm guessing this is a problem because you don't like the Twilight series/films and think that the movies have no artistic value, which is of course your opinion. That's a fair enough judgment as far as it can explain why it might taint Yorke in your eyes (because someone you like is now associated with something you don't). But if there are no more hard-and-fast rules than personal opinions about artistic merit to explain who's a sell-out and who isn't, then what does the term even mean?

This isn't an attack - it's just an interesting topic, which came to me when I read and contrasted your relativist comment on artistic value regarding Hicks followed by your hardline intrinsic-value stance on Twilight.

[ᾦɐļᵲʊʂ]

Walrus, to paraphrase you on your angle on Hicks, how do you quantify a "better" film? Or a film that it would be okay to lend a song to?

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description "a better film"; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.