Thursday, Sep 4, 2008
Most of Radiohead's new album is pretentious jive. But by fighting their fans' expectations, the dork-rock gods continue to do important things with music -- even if those things aren't musical.
Jun 18, 2003 | There's a great scene in the movie "SLC Punk" that, if you want it to, can describe the entire arc of Radiohead, from shoulda-been one-hit wonder Britpop band to their current status (self-granted or otherwise) as the Most Important Band in the World. Two preteen geeks are hanging out one day after school in a basement den, deep in some moldy suburban home cut thick with cheesy paneling and the detritus of lonely and awkward youth: a game of Risk, stacks of comic books and Rush tapes.
As the two friends talk D&D and Risk, finally, one of them declares that he has found a new sound, and it has told him, like a thunderclap from the heavens, that so much of what they've been into all along has rendered them nearly unfit for pleasure, barely alive, unless you count life as an eternal sucker as living. With that, he pops the new tape in -- why, it's punk rock, of course -- and begins carousing around the basement den, air guitar in hand as his buddy looks on in horror. When the sales pitch has ended, the friend stands up, and says matter-of-factly: "Now, what do you wanna go mess around with stuff like that for? I mean, you've got a good D&D character going and everything!"
Because for all their hip cachet and the lip service to experimentalism, darling, you know it's true: Radiohead are the rock 'n' roll equivalent of the 12-sided die. They're so square they have a square to spare.
Over the past few weeks -- as you will for many more to come -- you have been hearing ad nauseam about all the things that Radiohead are: representatives of a new generation of radicalism, an epic rock band of the like not seen since Pink Floyd, and the face of rock's future. Well, here's one thing they are not: cool. Scratch the surface of the group's iPod mystique and you will find a dorkology that would make even the most hideously pony-tailed Rush fan blush. And yeah, "Hail to the Thief," the group's new album, is the apex of all that.
Despite that, the new record is a shoo-in for an alarmingly high Billboard chart showing, in part because, these days, Radiohead are the go-to guys for pop gravitas. Like Pink Floyd before them -- it cannot be underestimated how the band has poached and then revised the Floyd formula for taking middle-class angst and launching it straight into the cosmos -- Radiohead have become masters of radio dread, the ultimate existentialist rock stars.
Anyone who's followed the band even casually will know that this is nothing new; even the band's first hit, "Creep," flailed around in its self-hatred, feeling guilty for even having a hook at all. But what's new in all this is the sense that each new Radiohead album is issued as a state-of-affairs for all of the broken computer children of the world.
That all started three years ago with "Kid A" -- the band's long-awaited follow-up to 1997's "OK Computer." Hyped to high heaven as the virtual reinvention of rock itself, "Kid A," more than being an actually great record, was a message record. Sonically bold and ambitious even beyond its own means (which is saying something -- for all their future shock Radiohead are the very definition of a hard-working band), the album was meant to harness the band's ever growing audience into making a statement to the world of commerce that, well, smart things can be popular too.
Miraculously, it worked. "Kid A," you may recall, darted onto the Billboard charts at No. 1 -- no small feat, in this day and age, for a British rock band enamored of experimental electronic egghead music and for a record with no real singles to speak of. Whether you liked Radiohead or not -- I've always considered myself an impartial admirer of the band -- watching "Kid A" have its way with the world was a thrill indeed. It was like seeing Ryuichi Sakamoto on Top of the Pops. You had the feeling that its very popularity was an act of insurgence. It felt good.
And it changed everything for the band. The "Kid A" affair inked a deal in blood between Radiohead and their fans that had mostly to do with the promise implicit in the sound of the album: Radiohead would no longer act like one of yesterday's rock bands. No more songs about girls. Not so much with the guitars. And keep up all the Pink Floyd stuff, but be accessible -- not so much in terms of the tunes, but more in the sense of, you know, updating your Web site frequently. More than anything else, be the voice of Internet generation: Be smart, be civil, be self-effacing and definitely, definitely be a little weird.
For the most part, the group was happy to oblige -- it's what Radiohead had been doing anyway, at least since "OK Computer" and arguably even before. In return, the band was granted a sense of Importance that has its only modern correlatives in bands like U2 or R.E.M. -- bands who similarly melded the personal and political and had at least a passing power of radicalization over anyone who came into their paths.
Most bands who are bestowed with this honor eventually rebel against this status, of course -- nobody really ever wants to be the conscience of their generation -- and to that end, "Hail to the Thief" is a half-step back toward the door. There are guitars, drums and even a few girls. But if Radiohead are to renege on their covenant of Importance, they need to take a few parting shots on the way out, and "Hail to the Thief" all but comes with a sticker that reads, "Hi, we're Radiohead, and we are still STICKING IT TO THE MAN!"
Like Moby, the band has worked overtime to subvert the typical jive that comes with rock 'n' roll superstardom: They go out of their way to be nice to fans and they intentionally get haircuts that make them look like a high school fencing team from Germany, circa 1974. Radiohead have strived to become rock 'n' roll eunuchs, desexualized and only as threatening as a nervy information-systems tech; they have exploited the anti-intellectualism that has been part of rock since forever and fashioned out of it something that, in the pop marketplace, is the closest we have to those two guys on the chess team that actually thought they were cooler than everyone else.
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