The New Yorker on Radiohead

[DudeAsInCool]

Sasha Frere-Jones, the music critic for the New Yorker, takes a look at the endurance of RadioHead and reasseses their popularity:

Radiohead doesn’t sell as many records as some other major rock groups, like Coldplay or U2, but it has hundreds of thousands of fans in the United States, who have stuck by the band for fourteen years—even though the spacious, colorfully ambient music that the group has been making lately is unlike the traditional guitar rock it débuted with. Last year, Spin voted Radiohead’s 1997 album, “OK Computer,” the No. 1 album of the past twenty years, and this month readers of NME, the influential British weekly, voted it the fourth-best album of all time, behind Oasis’s “Definitely Maybe” and two Beatles albums. “OK Computer” is this generation’s “Dark Side of the Moon”—complex and catchy songs surrounded by wobbly, atmospheric music that suggests that the band is up to more than fans will ever figure out, even if they listen to the album every day. I seem to know about a hundred of these fans, and they constantly urge me to give the band a chance. Until recently, I hadn’t seen much point in doing so.

The lead singer and main songwriter, Thom Yorke, has essentially three singing styles: a tired snarl, a reedy drone, and a light falsetto. His performances rarely get far before the words dissolve into a moan. On early Radiohead albums, Yorke’s lyrics were sombre expressions of juvenile anomie: cars are dangerous, robots are no fun, plastic surgeons do sad, thankless work. After that, his lyrics became shorter and more oblique, often ending in sentence fragments that were repeated again and again, as if such persistence would give the words greater meaning. (“I will eat you alive,” he groans fifteen times in “Where I End and You Begin,” from 2003.) While Yorke sings, the band makes a wide, soupy sound that seems both a product of and an invitation to stoned passivity.

Read More at The New Yorker