Slate's begun talking about Radiohead's new album, so I guess I'd better put my two cents in before everyone starts doing so. I'm not going to talk about the music on the new record, however, because I haven't heard it (a fact, I've found, that more reviewers and writers neglect to mention than you'd perhaps be comfortable realizing). I'm actually very happy that the Slate roundtable, at least intitially, focuses primarily on the music, rather than any political over/undertones that might be found in the record, because I don't think I could bear it otherwise.
Radiohead is obviously one of the most intensely loved, listened-to, studied bands in recent rock history. To find bands that rival the attention they command and aren't named Nirvana you'd basically have to go back in time to the Big Five: the Beatles, the Stones, the Who, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd. They're also a band that I love, and love a lot. I bought Pablo Honey for "Creep" way back when, but didn't "get into" the band until months after OK Computer came out, when my then-girlfriend-now-wife finally convinced me to listen to it. It's not unreasonable to infer that her suggestion had at least a little to do with why she underwent the girlfriend-to-wife transition. It was all I listened to (and I'm basically including conversation and ambient noise in the not-listened-to category) for three weeks. God, it was so good. So ambitious, so honest, so open, so touching, so raw, so moving. I resented myself for not having gotten on the bandwagon sooner and resented everyone else for building the bandwagon to begin with.
Since then it's like there's been a war going on in my heart over Radiohead. I constantly feel the need to defend them against what I perceive to be their enemies: The hipsters who snap up their concert tickets because Radiohead concerts are the social event of the season; reverse-pretentialists who insist that the still-wonderful-but-inferior The Bends is "better" than OK Computer because it "rocks harder" (similar arguments are often made about Floyd and the Beatles: Like would-be Woody Allen cognoscenti, people claim to prefer their "earlier, funnier stuff"); artistes who argue for the still-compelling but contrary Kid A. The funny thing is that I've deep affection for many bands who have similar legions of fans of dubious provenance: David Bowie, nine inch nails, and yes, Beatles/Zeppelin/Nirvana. But there's something about Radiohead that lights a fire inside me, a fire that burns pure and wants to keep the band burning the same.
Article comments
— go to most recent comments1 - Sarah e.g.
Sean, you wrote the article I've been wanting to read for more than a year now. You have my deepest gratitude.
I'm solidly in the middle of the Radiohead demographic, a left-leaning 21 year old college student.
I loved Radiohead like I loved no other band. When I discovered them, when I heard OK Computer for the first time, I felt like I had finally found my way home after years of wandering. But since September 11, every petty little jab by Yorke and company felt like the twist of a knife. (I don't read interviews or seek out their opinions, either; they just found their own way to me.) Now whenever a Radiohead song comes on, I feel faintly sick, and skip ahead. Political snarkiness (of all persuasions) is ill-suited to Radiohead, and is wearying to me. As much as it pains me, I won't be buying 'Hail to the Thief.' I wouldn't be able to listen to it.
2 - visualsimplicity
I completely agree with you. I am getting some what tired of musicians trying to save the world with their music. It's just so Bono-esque that it sickens me sometimes. I mean it's nice to have songs of substance but sometimes I suppose I want a sort of separation of church and state, in this case, a separation between enjoyable music and the constant barrage of politics.
3 - James Russell
You know, having actually heard the album (being one of those people who downloaded the supposed rough mixes off the Net a few months ago), I must say I don't recall there being much on it that was explicitly political. Then again, I don't listen to Radiohead for their politics...
4 - Jen Raj
Being the triple unlikley female musician libertarian/rightwinger I just find all of this a tad annoying, not for what is said but.. jeez.. stick to the music people and leave the politics to the talking heads. Perhaps it annoys me more because I tend to disagree with the politics espoused by artists in general, but when I am at a concert, or listening to a cd I would much prefer to listen to the music than hear the lead singer spouting off on something I can get a much more concise synopsis of in the daily paper of choice... But then the musician in my peeps up and says... but some music from the vietnam war era is incredibly compelling musically. I think though if I were in that time period, I'd feel the same.. I'd enjoy the music but much prefer the true politicing be left to the people I choose to ignore.
5 - Amber
I'm 21. I'm a girl. I'm not a Republican. But I don't want to be villified for not thinking Bush is a mass-murderer/thief/criminal - as the popular idea seems to be.
You don't want to get me started on artists/celebrities mouthing off about politics. Trust me.
Radiohead is my #4 favorite band of all time. I'll buy the record I'm sure. I always have. I like em. But I don't have to agree with em.
6 - Doctor Slack
If James Russell is right, all the sounding off about bands + politics = evil would seem out of place re: this CD. I'm not going to go out of my way to get "Hail to the Thief," mind you -- Radiohead kind of lost me with "Amnesiac" -- but I'm not about to avoid it or vent spleen on it either.
Of course, I'm actually among those who think Bush is a thief/criminal/(minor so far)mass murderer,* so even if it was political in that sense it wouldn't necessarily bother me. Frankly, I'm far more disturbed by musicians who pretend the world around them just isn't happening than those who acknowledge it. Whether you agree with those politics is another matter -- I didn't agree with, say, Lauryn Hill's or Rage Against the Machine's politics, but that doesn't mean I'll avoid listening to either.
* Actually a fairly unpopular idea in North America currently, though no doubt it will be popular for a while to pretend it's unpopular so one can seem all courageous 'n edgy 'n rebellious 'n stuff for shilling to the popular viewpoint (see also "neocon spin games;" "liberal media myths;" "politically incorrect;" "bullshit").
7 - Joachim
I, too, was initially disappointed by the title. Not only is it cheap politics, it's cheap politics from three years ago. How passe! I think it cheapens their music, and years from now might seem horribly dated. Ultimately, it's bad taste on the part of Radiohead.
That being said, I think those of us who disagree with the crude political outbursts of our favorite artists have two choices. We can boycott, like Sarah e.g. above. While I think there's a place for that, I'm afraid I can't reject a fresh offering from Radiohead out of political spite. They're too good musically for this connoisseur to pass up. I prefer to shake my head as if at someone's obnoxious spoiled child. Poor Thom, he might regret this in a few years' time. Shame about him publically supporting all those horrible Islamo-fascists just because a Republican was leading the fight. Didn't he hear about those mass graves for children?
I think we should forgive our rock stars their political incontinence. That's not what we pay them for. We pay them for their inspired art. I'll buy their new album and give it a hearty listen despite the title, or any insipient politics therein. It's the music that matters. If the music is inspiring, I'll probably listen to it a lot, like I do with the Bends, OKC, and Kid A. If it doesn't, it'll collect dust like Pablo Honey and Amnesiac.
I hope for their sake the music is good. The album title doesn't give me much hope. If the music sucks, it only seals Radiohead's irrelevance, and they'll go the way of Billy Corgan. That's okay, there's more where they came from.
Unfortunately for him, people who agree with Thom Yorke politically are not in power, so the only way for these people to influence events is through messy demonstrations and equally messy album titles just like this one. I take heart in this fact. If the music on this album is good enough, and I'm still fascinated by it seventeen months from now, I look forward to playing it on the way to the voting booth where I'll proudly pull the lever for Bush/Cheney, humming a Radiohead tune. If not, I might have to settle for Coldplay.
8 - Sarah e,g,
Great post, Joachim (and everyone else--I love this thread). I'd like to clarify, though, that I'm not suggesting a boycott, in that my decision not to purchase 'Hail to the Thief' is not intended as any form of coercion. I'm simply not buying an album that I know I won't be able to listen to without irritation. That's just the way I am. I know there are others who are able to forget all the extraneous stuff and actually enjoy the music for what it is---and I'm happy for them, and actually quite envious.
9 - Doctor Slack
"Ultimately, it's bad taste on the part of Radiohead."
Hmmm. You know, I can't help but speculate about whether you'd be saying this had the album come out during Clinton's presidency. Guess we'll never know.
But hey, pull that lever. Pull it proudly, and above all don't think about things like this or this or this while you do it. If Radiohead keeps your mind off troubling things, so much the better: what's important here is the trifecta.
10 - Bill Sherman
Gee, rock music & bad taste. Who'd have thunk it?
11 - Sean T. Collins
Doc Slack: First of all, praise Bob. Second of all, yes--I, for one, would be saying this had the album come out during Clinton's presidency. As a Clinton-Gore voter ('96 and '00--too young in '92, whaddya want from me?) I was soooo tired of the mindless vitriol about Hillary, Monica, the whole mess. That's the point I was trying to make with the line about how an '97 album entitled Impeach the President--And Her Husband would have been just as lame and infuriating.
What bothers me about Radiohead's politics--which, it should be added, are apparently far more visible in the clumsy title than they are in any of the album's inscrutable lyrics--is that, for me, 9/11 changed a lot. As loathsome as I find many Republican policies, they really just don't hold a candle to chemical warfare, mass graves for children, 200,000 disappeared citizens, babies starving to death while palace after palace is built, turning a major world religion into a death cult, etc. ad nauseum.
Hell, I LIKE politics in music, from Marvin Gaye to Neil Young to U2 to Public Enemy. It's just disturbing to me how myopic Radiohead's politics have become, in my opinion. I'm not looking for them to turn into Toby Keith or Lee Greenwood. I just figure they can get at least as much anomie-soaked mileage out of actual dictatorships and mass murderers as they can out of John Ashcroft. I'm personally disappointed and hurt, is what I'm saying, because this band I felt so connected to apparently would not feel the same way about me. I'm not mad or disgusted or feeling selfrighteous--not much, at least--I'm just bummed.
12 - Sean H.
The tunes off the new one I've heard to date aren't exactly breaking new ground and not replacing older ones either. I still like them and I'm still a right-leaning libertarian.
13 - Joachim
Sarah e.g. - I misapplied the word "boycott" to your feeling about the new Radiohead album. I understand why you'd be unable to appreciate the music given an artist's crude political outbursts. I might have a more difficult time with it than I thought, especially if I find the music uninspiring.
Doctor Slack - If Hail To The Thief had come out during Clinton's presidency I would have been more confused than annoyed. No one ever accused Clinton of outright theft, after all. Hail to the Perjurer and Obstructor of Justice simply doesn't roll off the tongue easily enough. Sean's idea of Impeach The President -- And Her Husband is better, but the problem's the same. Cheap and partisan bumper stickers don't make for great album titles. I'd still be annoyed that whatever beautiful art in the album was being brought down by petty sloganeering.
Incidentally, you can have a crappy title actually add to a great album. I'm thinking specifically of Achtung Baby. What's the difference? All together now: no political cheap shot.
14 - rebecca
Well, there goes Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit, N.W.A.'s F*ck the Police, and anything by Bob Dylan. Your empty supposition that politics can--or should--be separated from anything is absurd. What the heck did you think Karma Police or Electioneering were about?
Politics is life. The Beat Poets, Pop art, the Jazz Age... some of the most defining moments in our history have been shaped by the involvement of politics in art and music. If you are not happy with that, listen to Clear Channel. I'm sure they'll be content with limiting their Radiohead play to Creep.
15 - Doctor Slack
"First of all, praise Bob."
;-)
"As loathsome as I find many Republican policies, they really just don't hold a candle to chemical warfare, mass graves for children, 200,000 disappeared citizens, babies starving to death while palace after palace is built, turning a major world religion into a death cult, etc. ad nauseum."
Well, given that we've established that Radiohead's politics aren't really scrutable from the album itself, I'll just go on a short general political rant here.
I have some sympathy for those who supported Bush's war for humanitarian reasons. It's part of the tragedy of the Iraq situation that so many self-described liberals were dragged onto the war bandwagon by an appeal to their better instincts. Such folks were, however, and IMVHO, duped. However cathartic it may seem for the West, and America in particular, to spend decade after decade slaying monsters largely of its own creation, those energies are, I think, better spent in pursuit of policies that don't feed the monsters in the first place. Nor do I think that one can "atone" for stupid and destructive policies with more of the same.
Frankly, I don't think it's out of line for people to be more critical of the transgressions of Western governments with whom they are actively complicit every day as citizens and taxpayers. These are societies that claim to uphold a high standard of civic responsibility, international legality, fair play and justice. If we're at all serious about this, then we need to hold ourselves to those standards. People who don't understand the concept of self-criticism can dismiss this as "treason," "anti-Americanism," "blame-America-firstism," whatever, but it's the single greatest strength of democratic societies and part of what made American ascendancy possible in the first place. And when you have the world's major nuclear power openly contemplating first-strike doctrines with the largest WMD arsenal ever assembled, it arguably goes up -- way up -- as a priority. I think those who characterize such a focus as "myopic" haven't really perceived just how serious what's happening in America is.
How much time one should spend on this vs. criticizing known despotic countries isn't an easy question. I certainly don't begrudge the leftist movements that criticized Western companies for dealing with China, that hounded Talisman Oil for getting involved with Sudan, that struggled to publicize the iniquities of the Taliban long before 9-11, and so on. I'm not strictly anti-interventionist, either. Urgent humanitarian catastrophes do demand, I think, attention from the international community; the Congo is an example (one on a far far far far larger and more urgent scale than Saddam's Iraq, however bad Hussein's government was, and where the situation can't be rectified without military intervention), and I hope my own country gets involved there. Of course there's no oil -- but then oil is never, ever a consideration anyway, right?
Anyway, end of rant. I do understand where you're coming from, I disagree, I'll probably listen to the album at some point if one of my friends buys it, won't go out of my way otherwise.
16 - uglyamerican
I'' buy the record the day it comes out, and enjoy it while I'm re-reading "The War on Iraq". As the poet Chuck D said "I got a letter from the government the other day. I opened and read it. It said they were suckers. They wanted me for the army or whatever. Picture me giving a damn, I said "Never!".
An earlier post wrote: "But I don't want to be villified for not thinking Bush is a mass-murderer/thief/criminal - as the popular idea seems to be." You must live in some peace farm collective of some sort, because from what I see, the popular idea seems to be "Let's put a flag on our car, vomit phony patriotic babble, and try to suppress anyone who voices a dissenting opinion, because we "have to support our troops".
17 - Sean T. Collins
Ah yes, the "suppression" canard quacks its way into the discussion. Delightful. My friend, where is this suppression going on? Unless you're a country-music radio programmer or a Fox News managing editor, you haven't done much suppressing lately. Everybody's free to wear sunscreen in these United States. It's exactly this kind of shrill sloganeering that's so disappointing to hear from folks who are clearly capable of nuanced, moving, engaging thought and art, like Radiohead. The most that anyone in this thread is expressing with that kind of politicking is disappointment and irritation. Are people who are annoyed by "Joe Millionaire" attempting to "suppress" reality television? What about Christina Aguilera--do the accusations of tastelessness and nastiness garnered by that "Dirrrty" video make her a victim of suppression? Sigh. These tedious non-arguments never seem to stop being secreted by certain elements of the anti-war camp.
18 - rebecca
I think it's fine that you are annoyed. I'm just asking all of you alleged devotees of OK Computer or Kid A, where was your irritation surrounding their releases? Radiohead's songs are just as political now as they were six years ago. The difference is that six years ago, you weren't the target.
19 - Sean T. Collins
No, the difference is that 6 years ago I too had the luxury of thinking that the Republican National Committee was the biggest threat to the country, because fascist death squads had not yet disintegrated 2,800 people a mile or so south of where I work.
20 - Sean T. Collins
To be a little less strident and humorless about it (I try, I really do), OK Computer and Kid A weren't so much political as philosophical. They weren't protest records in the vein of Dylan or Chuck D, but rather intensely personal explorations of a sort of millenial angst, a feeling of loss of personal agency in the face of changes wrought by technology and global cultural-economic forces. This is a worry I still share, and one which, it would appear if pre-release reviews of the record are to be believed, remains the band's primary focus on Hail to the Thief. It's the relatively, and disappointingly, banal and short-sighted sloganeering evidenced by the record's title that bothers me.
21 - Sean T. Collins
To be a little less strident and humorless about it (I try, I really do), OK Computer and Kid A weren't so much political as philosophical. They weren't protest records in the vein of Dylan or Chuck D, but rather intensely personal explorations of a sort of millenial angst, a feeling of loss of personal agency in the face of changes wrought by technology and global cultural-economic forces. This is a worry I still share, and one which, it would appear if pre-release reviews of the record are to be believed, remains the band's primary focus on Hail to the Thief. It's the relatively, and disappointingly, banal and short-sighted sloganeering evidenced by the record's title that bothers me.
At this point, it should be said that the band has repeatedly denied, in interview after interview, that the record's title has much, or indeed anything, to do with Bush and his controversial election in 2000. But the fact that they need to explain this is a direct indication of the clumsiness of the title they selected.
22 - rebecca
The Republican National Convention remains as a considerable threat to this country.
In any event, I will leave that thread before it turns into the inevitable 'conservatives are fascists/liberals are traitors' rhetoric of which you mention.
I just think that it's a pity we can judge a band who--speaking for myself--understood my questions about life and emotion through its sound better than anyone else at a crucial point in my life could--we judge this now because we can't let ourselves understand where they're coming from.
I've heard the new songs and they're good.
The end.
23 - Joachim
When people say things like "The Republican National Convention remains as a considerable threat to this country" it makes me worried about what solutions they might propose to fix the "Republican Problem". But then I remember how lucky I am to live in the USA, where the kind of suppression uglyamerican alludes to only exists in the mind.
At least for now.
Here's hoping that new Radiohead album cuts the mustard. I remain hopeful, but not optimistic.
Cheers!
24 - Doctor Slack
'it makes me worried about what solutions they might propose to fix the "Republican Problem". '
Yeah, I know what you mean. They might try to get some scary law passed that allows them to imprison American citizens arbitrarily without due process and try them in front of military tribunals.
Oh, wait...
25 - Sean T. Collins
Joachim: "Here's hoping that new Radiohead album cuts the mustard. I remain hopeful, but not optimistic."
You mean they can try the best they can, but the best they can ain't good enough? :)