Radiohead LP9 Anticipation, Fangirling and random Cheesecake Thread (Do not read if you hate Radiohead or us)

Wow, I completely forgot I owned a Studio album.

It's kind of an A Certain Ratio feel, too, the funk bassline and the atmospheric Factory guitars. Except, well, knowing RH, it's probably not, it's RHCP and GTA. *weeps*

GAH, just to upset me further, I just read that TY's wife's ~favourite band~ is RHCP. And that just made me o_0, like... HOW. Just the taste gap, how anyone could consider that band as a favourite. But then I told myself a nice little story that TY doesn't actually like Flea's bass playing, he just has him in the band to impress his missus, and I could get myself back to a reality I could deal with again.

Why, what happened on that other forum?

(It's weird, though, I don't hear All I Need / ROYGBIV at all, probably because one is Minor and the other Major)

Nothing really happened on the other forum I just get annoyed by the amount of trolls and negative, unfounded opinions some people have in there. They don't really vibe with me most of the time.

Mmm talking about In Rainbows I get where some of the 'all i need/roygbiv" accusations come from but even moreso I find 'La Ritournelle' as the direct basis for 'Reckoner'.

Also Kashmir's "surfing the warm industry" reminds me a lot of 'jigsaw falling into place". Thet have the same acoustic-rock guitar approach to the main melody, the motorik beat, the deadpan vocal delivery on the verses. Check it out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-441uxB7Zw

And in case you haven't heard ritournelle yet:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fUPHfn3J6Q

They have the same lush and vibrant vibe, the loose drums (although reckoner’s are way superior to the ones on ritournelle imho) and the similarities on the jazzy chord progression make for enough similarities to pair both songs in familiar territories.

Eh, what? That's so bizarre, I've found it really friendly and sweet and quite accepting. While atease, holy shit, is atease a cesspit of trolls and negative, unfounded opinions. Also, fucking stalkers, which drove me off in the end, but YMMV.

Just reading through the thread. The talk about Thom Yorke getting down to U2 just made me think of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEj8CZJqlpE

Skip to 0:40

Speaking about RHCP, Reckoner definitely has a Frusciante thing going on in the main guitar melody.

So for me: Ritournelle + Frusciante = Reckoner.

Eh, what? That's so bizarre, I've found it really friendly and sweet and quite accepting. While atease, holy shit, is atease a cesspit of trolls and negative, unfounded opinions. Also, fucking stalkers, which drove me off in the end, but YMMV.

― White Chocolate Cheesecake

Wait what forum are you talking about? I was speaking about atease as the godforsaken forum. I only thought cheesecake was a denomination for stans.

So to clarify I vow to never post again on atease because of all the negativity and trolls in there.

Also I wouldn't be surprised if Thom or Johnny own A Certain Ratio records. I think they played some ESG and Liquid Liquid on one of their webcasts or radio interviews, so they must definitely be acquainted with them.

Oh! No, sorry, we were talking at cross purposes! I'm never posting on atease again, no way, fuck that shit. The actual cheesecakers left and went something else.

I hear the arpeggios at the very beginning of the Kashmir song, but the rest of it is nothing like.

OK, I can also hear the similarity in La Ritournelle, but I don't think it's direct, I think it's more like they're both ripping off paying homage to the same source? It's gonna drive me insane what it really is now, but it's like some kind of French soundtrack thing.

They (well, Thom) always admit that they're shameless magpies and borrowers and outright thieves. I've read him claiming several times admitting that he's not that great a songwriter, he's just a really good sense of what to rip off and how. I think he's fairly open about it.

Jonny always says that they try to copy things and fail.

As someone who works on Advertising I can tell you that there really isn't anything new under the sun. The most efficient and "creative" people I've met in the industry are all about 'remixing' off other's people work. Yorke has it right, you've got to know what to rip-off and how. If you throw a specific Scando-balearic song and another specific Trip Hop song in a mix it will stop sounding like ay of those and it transforms into something 'new'.

Would really recommend you to watch the 'everything is a remix' series on youtube.

Oh yeah, I've been a songwriter, I've been in a band, I know how it works. Some of the most successful tracks I've ever written, I tried to rip something off, failed completely, and yet came up with something completely different and surprising.

The funniest things, are when you don't even know it, and you realise you must have ripped something off completely subconsciously.

OH SHIT THEY'RE ON TO US!!!

::waves at cheesecakers::

(I really need to get a new screen name, I'm bored of this one already. I wonder if it's safe to go back to KDT again.)

I've no idea what you're talking about Karen.

Wait, really? I'm utterly confused now.

Cheesecake is slang for Radiohead fan fiction, specifically PR0N, y'know, SLASH. That's the whole joke.

Oh god, it's like meeting your own great grandchildren or something. After getting *thrown off* the official Radiohead forum for hosting and defending the slash on Pop Music Fan Fiction back in the mid 90s (that was the reason, IIRC, ignore what Thable Thom said, he's a liar) it's just really heartening to see that it's reached some kind of legitimacy and acceptance in the fan community. To the point where it even has its own name and subculture.

Oh. Oh. Wait... what? radiohead porn fiction? And it's called 'cheesecake'? Whoa TIL.

Now I'm interested to know if any of the Radiohead members are aware of this and what they think of it.

I'm not signed up for that. Later!

No one's gonna write it in this thread.

Oh, I don't know about that! (...sighed Jonny as his delicate fingers reached down inside the waistband of Thom's red trousers.)

Moka, RH (or their ppl, I don't know who banned me) were v v ANTI fanfic, at least back in the late 90s. I don't know if that's changed, I wouldn't bring it up, but they were aware of its existence.)

Were they really? They didn't have an official forum until 1999, and they were extremely lackadaisical about it. To my knowledge no one other than the dude who threatened Thom's baby with rape has ever even been banned. Maybe the forum you were on wasn't actually official.

This was like 97 or 98! I know because it was before I moved back to the UK and I got here in 98. I'm fairly certain it was official because they used to post on it (their names were in a different colour but it was really easy to fake if you knew HTML - that's how basic it was.)

Thable Thom managed to turn himself blue a couple of times and caused quite some confusion, despite clearly stating he was a "cloan" and an "imajinery frend"

What you're talking about sounds like the official forum they have now, which started in September '99. As far as I know (and I've been on the official forum since then), there was no precursor to it and it was the first one they posted on regularly. Before that they just used to troll IRC. And there was slash on the forum from the beginning and no mod structure to speak of other than one tech guy to make sure it wasn't broken.

And in '99 they were red, not blue!

It was 98 at the latest. I don't remember what the colours were but I was posting on it from my parents house in Upstate NY. I may not remember last week, but I remember posting on that forum.

Maybe it was some sort of EMI or Parlophone official board that wasn't located on Radiohead.com? That's all I can think of.

It was definitely linked from Radiohead.com because I wouldn't have found it any other way.

There were a couple of other boards - there was, like emusic and there was the White Chocolate Farm - but I am positive it was an official board and they were posting on it. I'm not 100% certain on this, but I seem to recall it was Phil that was grossed out by it, though that could be my memory playing tricks on me.

It was over that Entertain Me site I used to do - there were two artists who objected to it, and one was Graham Coxon and the other was Radiohead. Like, this was something that used to provide me with frequent enough legal worries that I kept track of who was amenable (and whose management would actually work with us) and who was not.

Maybe it was someone in EMI who objected, because as far as I know no one has ever gotten any trouble from Radiohead or any of the people who actually speak for them or their wishes. One of my earliest memories of that board was someone posting her fanfiction for me to read, which is how I discovered there was even such thing as fanfiction.

When I was getting threatened with legal writs, I wasn't exactly checking if it was a band member's name or an EMI bod on the cease and desist emails.

Actually, I might make sense that it was someone at EMI, since it was both Blur and RH that caused the most hassle (though it's weird because the Dandy Warhols, who were also on the same label, were hugely cool about it all.) But I honestly thought it came from specific members of the band. It was a long time ago, they may have changed their attitudes.

In the end, we just changed all the names and the bands became "Slur" and "Radioshack" and no one could say anything after that.

This is gonna bug me now, it's like 1 in the morning and I can't sleep, all these old memories stirred up in my head.

I'm trying to remember if I even started Entertain Me in 95 or 96, but it was on Geocities (LOL prehistory of the web) before I got mine own server space, it never even had its own domain. It was first! *stamps feet* It was before fanfiction.net, it was before fandomination - we were only beaten to publishing by the lovely blue planet of There by a few months, but they wouldn't host dirty stuff and we would, so I win.

Forever!

So there.

(feeling quite defensive now, can you tell?)

There are very few accomplishments in my life that I'm really proud of, but founding E-Me and getting it discussed in, like, Rolling Stone, and getting music fan fiction and slash into the discourse like that, that's one of the things that I really want to point my finger to and say "I did that, that was me."

Of all the little tiny scratches in the markings of pop culture history, FFS, let me be proud of just that damn one.

This is so completely not about Radioshack at all any more. Humph.

It might be on web.archive.org if you can remember the exact url.

Radioshack?

Christ, I am lost in the past. I need to sleep, but there's just too much static in my head, I hate this.

Bits of the Escape site are on the Wayback Machine, but the earlier stuff, the Geocities stuff, that's just gone. I'm fucked if I can remember the zip code or however it was divvied up, they had the most confusing addressing system of all time.

Maybe you can find really old fansites that still link to it to get the exact address? I wish google still had their 2001 index up, I used that to find so many old websites. But it takes some commitment and a lot of waybacking.

It's probably all for the best. Some of the authors went on to become proper published novelists, they'd be embarrassed if their juvenilia came out like that. ;-)

I've obviously still got most of the stuff that I wrote, but obv that was only a fraction of it. Irony being, "Radioshack" weren't even that popular a slash combo. Not like "Slur" and "Sirhan Sirhan" and even Sloan - I can't even remember what Sloan's fake name was any more. LOL 90s.

Everyone has backed away slowly from this thread but us now, oh the hilarity.

God my life is pathetic now. ;_;

'90s fansite minutiae is pretty boring unless you were there, to be fair. x-post

I dunno, I'm sorry to be so defensive over "but this was a THING! this HAPPENED!" but I've avoided RH official fandom and RH as people for, like, 15 years now or whatever because of that encounter. It's weird how you can work up things in your head to be so much more of a bigger deal than they ever were to the other side.

Are you saying they're OK with fan fiction now? Or, well, forever?

I do just distinctly remember Phil being like "ew, gross" about it.

But then again even bands were split down the middle, like half of Blur were ok with it and obv Graham being a total freak.

If I don't sleep soon my head will explode and I'll start hallucinating. :-(

Yeah, I don't know. They leave it alon. I do remember a few overly enthusiastic types mentioning the slash to them on the message boards years ago and they just joked about it? I think the internet has changed so much in the past 15 years or so though that most fanfic is left alone as an inevitable side effect of fandom on the internet. I mean, I have to say that neither cheesecake nor slash has ever been my primary focus in fandom at all, just a nice distraction every once in a while, but I do know the people who have run various archives and such and none of them have ever gotten any trouble for it as far as I know.