"OK Computer": Classic Or Dud?

If God ever spoke to me through my stereo, I'd hopefully wonder if it was George Clinton before returning it to the shop.

too lazy to search for the In Rainbows thread but: http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/news/144559-radiohead-pony-up-extra-for-video-contest-victors

I mean really, these guys are way too nice.

"... Is my stereo George Clinton? I'd better return it."

Fair enough. I think I enjoyed (note past tense) it more as an album than I have anything else by them. That said, my affection / enthusiasm for it has now waned considerably. But I expect that with Radiohead anyway.

The songs in In Rainbows have held up remarkably well for me. This gets said about a lot of albums, but for me, the songs on In Rainbows really revealed themselves over time, and I still find fresh nuances that I didn't hear before. Swaping the MP3 version for the better sound quality of the physical disc made a big difference, in that regard.

As I said above, I like the individual songs a lot. Put them together as an album, however, and they somehow half-cohere into something less than the sum of its parts.

Unnatural how?

for the most part the chord progressions seem labored over and smack of a studied effort rather than being a natural expression of thought or innate melodic sense. there's this weird sort of showmanship in the writing that reminds me of the calculating obsession of gearheads, as well as the self-conscious bombast of musicians who feel they need to prove themselves with odd time signatures and by forcing the music into unexpected directions so as to not be accused of being run-of-the-mill. The whole album just reeks of effort. And I don't mean to say that effort itself is a bad thing. I just don't want to notice the effort. I notice it nearly every second of this album, with just a couple of exceptions.

The one thing that struck me about "Paranoid Android" the first time I heard it was how effortlessly all of its disparate parts hung together; one thing flowed directly into the next without a hitch or false step, zooming through a semi-proggy musical soundscape without really making a big deal out of it until the crescendo into the slow section. If you found that "labored over" and "a studied effort", I don't think I'll ever understand where you're coming from on this album.

Dan OTM about RH albums failing to cohere. When they DO cohere, as on Kid A, the songs aren't very interesting.

I don't think that captures the spirit of what I actually said, considering that the statement right before I started complaining about In Rainbows was "all of their albums from The Bends through Hail To The Thief are fantastic"...

Right....which is where we part company.

I'm fasincated that people are talking about the coherency of their albums. That's an interesting topic. I don't really think of them that way, the coherency...

I've only got 9 days left before I see them live and I'll be so happy.

xpost

I mean, you just complimented and insulted Kid A in the same breath. That's crazy stuff. But it sure is interesting.

But you're right though...I can't parse Kid A. I can't break it apart in my head. "Idioteque" nearly manages it, but still can't break it apart into separate songs, but I can do that with OK Computer.

If you found that "labored over" and "a studied effort", I don't think I'll ever understand where you're coming from on this album.

yeah, probably not. I don't hear it in the way you do at all.

I think the problem I have with Radiohead somehow has to do with the tastefulness with which they are invariable presented and present themselves. There never seems to be any sense of humour or play or even curiosity outside a certain brand of sophisticated stadium rock. Their position as latterday representatives of the great rock canon is maybe somewhat attributable to their apparent steadfast refusal to embrace all but the most tasteful of references. The pain in their music is the pain of Ian Curtis, Kurt Cobain, Nick Drake. Heavy, humourless boy pain. It's never Joe Meek, Karen Carpenter, Dusty Springfield. Sorry if this is a daft criticism, I can only say why I don't really care about them, it's just that their pathos feels so abstracted and heavy, the pain of someone who reads too much Benjamin and doesn't get the jokes. It never winks at its own histrionics.

Thom Yorke's lyrics are so extreme in their portentousness, they feel completely unlike anything I can relate to. "Exit Music (for a film)" is a rare exception, unlike the doom laden dystopias of "Karma Police" or "Fake Plastic Trees", it feels like the real world; small actions seem to matter and there's a genuine tenderness to the urgency ("breathe, keep breathing"). It works because it implies a bigger world through the daft swelling strings but maintains an intimacy you rarely get with his voice close against the mic.

Did that make any sense whatsoever?

It's not a daft criticism. It's just that there's room for both kinds of pain and emotion in music.

I don't think it makes any sense. I don't see how you can criticize them for being stadium rock in funny clothes if you are then going to compare them to Ian Curtis and Nick Drake (or hell, even Kurt Cobain, who only really became "stadium rock" because of a right-place/right-time bubble); in fact, the only way that criticism is even halfway tenable is if you pretend that most of the music they produced between OK Computer and In Rainbows never happened.

Also, holding up "Karma Police" as an example of how they have no sense of humor doesn't make any sense whatsoever to me.

I think they have a very overt sense of humor. Whether or not that's taken on board is up to a listener, I think.

Xpost with Dan, unsurprisingly.

I also don't think of "Fake Plastic Trees" when I think of lyrics that are "extreme in their portentousness" or "doom-laden dystopias" but I listened to a LOT of industrial.

"gravity always wins" -- extremely dry humor, given the subject

Well it's a personal thing. I'm not really criticising them as much as stating my reasons for not really being interested in them. It just feels to me like the world of their music is emotionally remote from me largely due to it seemingly coming from a closed set of references, that is their music, for me, never exists in relation to the real world, but to a pre-negotiated rock history, I would argue that the "coldness" referred to by so many posters upthread is as much a product of this as it is of the production.

Ned, I know that explaining jokes makes them not funny, but could you point me to this sense of humour because I genuinely don't see it. This (as with everything else I've said) might be a product of how radiohead are framed for me, being 10 when it came out, the whole thing passed over my head so I have come to them as pre-cannonised rock monsters (similarly Drake and Cobain, hence my particular perspective), and it is pretty debatable how much of my impression of them is a result of a failure to overcome the initial ways they were presented to me through my own experience of actually listening to the music.

"karma police, arrest this girl, her Hitler hairdo is making me feel ill".

I think the gloom may be in thom's singing rather than his lyrics cause i always think his lyrics are more than often sardonic rather than woe-is-me gloom.

Who's in bunker?
Who's in bunker?
Women and children first
And the children first
And the children
I'll laugh until my head comes off
I'll swallow till I burst
Until I burst

Karma police, arrest this man, he talks in maths
He buzzes like a fridge, hes like a detuned radio
Karma police, arrest this girl, her hitler hairdo, is making me feel ill
And we have crashed her party
This is what you get, this is what you get
This is what you get, when you mess with us

Karma police, Ive given all I can, its not enough
Ive given all I can, but were still on the payroll
This is what you get, this is what you get
This is what you get, when you mess with us
And for a minute there, I lost myself, I lost myself
And for a minute there, I lost myself, I lost myself

For a minute there, I lost myself, I lost myself

I find most of this song incredibly sardonic; seriously, imagine someone saying "Arrest this girl, her Hitler hairdo is making me ill!" That's not really a straight-faced comment to make!

(xpost: HA Roz OTM)

The music between OK Computer and In Rainbows is still geared predominantly towards a mainstream stadium audience.

I suppose you could read like that. It just feels a bit unintentional to me.

The music between OK Computer and In Rainbows is still geared predominantly towards a mainstream stadium audience

Might just be me but I kinda find it hard to believe they all sat down together one day and said, "Let's gear our music predominantly towards a mainstream stadium audience."

I'm not saying that, Ned. I have a meeting to go to now but will try to explain later.

(xp)

Some of the lyrics ARE dark and depressing ("Idioteque" being a good example) but contrast that with "yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon"/"there are two colors in my hair" (uh, waht) or "You can try the best you can/The best you can is good enough" (lol fakeout). Everybody imposes their own perception upon art but there are certain artists who invite monochromaticism from their critics/audience; Radiohead is definitely one of those artists.

Also their music has been geared towards a mainstream audience since day one! hi dere they did "CREEP"

oh sorry missed the word "stadium"...

I've never seen them in concert so I can't really speak to that other than point out that they were playing stadiums at the time, ergo anything they were going to do would be de facto for a stadium audience.

Radiohead are a band that those of us who are not overly in love with, feel a need to rationalise our feelings. For whatever reason.

To my mind, and Dan can back me up here I'm sure, their music often at that stage felt like Depeche Mode's after 1988 or so when it came to being 'stadium-friendly' -- in that while Depeche more obviously rely on anthemic singles, both bands in their calmer, quieter modes recorded and released songs that seem like the total antithesis of mass-audience rabble rousers, quite literally in terms of sound as much as anything else. Close, 'across the room,' intimate -- consider "Dream On" in Depeche's case, and that was a lead single! That many of these songs were then performed in concert in cavernous stadiums is, as Dan notes, a measure of the bands' popularity rather than some sort of specific sonic intent.

I love to read but the last week's discussion is too long even for me. Anyway, someone upthread said they saw Radiohead this week and it was the best of their life - I have to say that their Toronto show was fantastic as well. I have never been further away from a band (except for SARStock) in my life but I enjoyed the show immensely. Even their few recent albums which I never got into really came to life in the outdoor arena setting. I've seen them 4 times before and they never disappoint, but my boyfriend never had and he was absolutely mesmerized. Yaydiohead!

I think Dan's line about "Creep" kind of nails my point, only from the opposite direction, I suspect. R'head probably never did sit down and say "let's make a stadium rock album" because they didn't need to. They also (I assume) never sat down and said "let's make a genuinely freaky experimental album that alienates our fanbase", ergo the material from Kid A through HTTT kind of IS stadium rock in funny clothes' stadium-rock isn't just Bryan Adams and Foreigner, it's also Led Zep, Pink Floyd, Depeche Mode (as Ned illustrates).

My objection to the stadium rock point wasn't because I really don't think that Radiohead can be considered stadium rock; it was because that was then followed up by comparing them to Jeff Beck and Joy Division! It's a little bit like "uh pick a rhetorical line or at least flesh out what you're trying to say a bit more". If the point was "Radiohead is the Joy Division of stadium rock", I can see that as a coherent, cogent argument.

Are New Order stadium rock? Had JD continued, NO never existed, JD done two more albums and then split, would they be able to reunite now and sell-out arenas?

I think that hints at what I was originally trying to get at. I never said I wanted to knock radiohead down, (although I do resent them being pushed in my face so much as a "great band") I just cannot relate to them at all because I feel like their world view is always filtered through a very self concious way of how a "great band" is supposed to behave (by behave I don't mean their demeanour or publicity I mean behave through music and following up OKC with KidA).

I just don't feel like they live in my world, I feel like they live in a very constructed world made of all the "right" touchstones.

i mean xp

I feel like they live in a very constructed world made of all the "right" touchstones

What, and we don't?

I don't want to anyway

I think I pretty much agree; I don't 'get' R'head like many do, and that causes problems because they're a very useful shorthand for a lot of people, a very assumed like. If you're 'into music' without a caveat of opera or country or something very specific and genre-focused, i.e. 'rock' 'indie' 'pop' whatever mainstream, the you MUST think R'head are THE BEST at what they do, and that what they do is also THE BEST thing TO do.

It's not exciting, even their keraazyness seems so obvious

Thanks for making Radiohead sound like Coldplay, guys.

I feel like their world view is always filtered through a very self concious way of how a "great band" is supposed to behave (by behave I don't mean their demeanour or publicity I mean behave through music and following up OKC with KidA).

This, btw, is kind of a classic example of hating a band because of its fans.

It so isn't btw

Yes it is. That is the critical and fan reaction to Kid A parrotted back almost to a T.

I think the problem I have with Radiohead somehow has to do with ... tastefulness... The pain in their music is ... heavy, humourless boy pain. ...<T>heir pathos feels so abstracted and heavy... It never winks at its own histrionics.

-- i know, right?

I just cannot relate to them at all because I feel like their world view is always filtered through a very self concious way of how a "great band" is supposed to behave... I just don't feel like they live in my world, I feel like they live in a very constructed world made of all the "right" touchstones.

-- I know, right?

I feel like their world view