"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

Mar 7, 2011

Creep in Two Modes

I don't really much care for Radiohead. Maybe it's because I never developed a fondness for heroin; still, Creep is a good song:



Especially since Chrissie Hynde has put her mark on it:

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is it Yorke's voice that blocks all fondness?

I love 'em, but really it starts at OK Computer for me. And I used to love the Pretenders but only their first two albums, while James Honeyman-Scott was alive. It's not that I have something against Chrissie Hynde, it's just that I have something for guitar-based music. Which made Radiohead's electronic period (Kid A; Amnesiac) tough for me but I weathered and soldiered through unscathed.

Jack Crow said...

Charles, honestly a good part of it's the fact that anyone I knew who loved Radiohead, growing up, was a junkie.

Not an I-get-by-and-oh-yeah-I-happen-to-need-a-little-heroin-to-get-thru-this-day kind of user. A militant, proselytizing junkie.

Which perhaps also explains my opinions of Fish, Dylan and the Dead...

Also, I just don't like their sound, mostly.

Thom Yorke's voice is the best part of Radiohead. Good company with Nick Drake, Jeff Buckley, Geddy Lee and Jon Anderson.

David K Wayne said...

You forgot Lou Reed too. Radiohead aren't a bad band, just chronically overrated and pretentious because of that.

The thing about 'heroin-friendly' music is that it sounds pretty yucky when stoned (coke-friendly music sounds horrible under all conditions). Which - ironically - isn't something I can say about the many smack-addled jazz legends who sound simply lovely on 'chronic', or even green tea.

Jack Crow said...

Wayne,

I know he's overused as an example, but Miles really does illustrate that point.

I don't really know enough by or about Lou Reed to form an opinion. LR/VU was for the kids who were already accepted to RISD, WP, Emerson and NYU and who had parents who could afford to send them there.

Anonymous said...

While I spent 2 days on morphine after my 1985 right ACL reconstruction, I've never been a heroin user, let alone addict! I couldn't ever inject myself with anything. Good thing I'm not diabetic.

Radiohead just hits me the right way. I can't even see/hear/feel the "pretentious" character that others often reference. I do feel other musicians & bands embody pretense, though... just not Radiohead.

I don't know that it matters to me what "everyone" thinks about Radiohead, so "over-rated" doesn't even register for me. Whether the bozos at Spin, Rolling Stone, NYTimesSundayMag, whatever like or dislike Radiohead won't be on my landscape of musical appreciation. I think art is about connection, not popularity, and not commerce.

Does that mean I have more in common with 5 guys from relatively privileged English backgrounds, than I do with the throngs of unprivileged people who I grew up among? Is it about privileged-or-not?

David K Wayne said...

In the UK, there was helluva lot of ageing junkies (or even 'party casualties') who loved (solo) Lou Reed. Velvet Underground was more for the goth/indie kids. Sounds like their 'base' may have had a different class character to the US.

To me, Radiohead are just a 21st century Pink Floyd - but i don't wanna get into a discussion about THEM.

Randal Graves said...

I like Radiohead. The White Stripes, too. Doesn't matter whether someone's under-/over-/non-rated in the press or no. Dig what you dig, folks.

That said, everyone knows that weedy bands hold up best under all conditions. Electric Wizard!

Richard said...

I haven't listened to hardly any popular music in the last decade or so, having exiled myself to the world of minimalism, although I do listen to the Mekons and Gang of Four in my car from time, so I can't speak to Radiohead at all.

As for the Velvet Underground, I do have a strong opinion about that. As W. Kasper says, there is a goth/indie connection, and, for me, as someone who started listening to their albums 20 years after the fact (as the goth/indie kids did), the appeal was that there was an alternative music outside of the Stones/Beatles/Dylan axis. Besides liking the music, there was the allure that you could rebel against the rigid consensus in their favor (although, now, with the passage of more time, I can hear the Beatles for what they were, and appreciate that, as if they were never such a massive phenomenon at all).

Strangely enough, the same is true of James Brown, and I still remember one of my friends going apopletic when I dared to suggest that Brown had as much, and possibly greater influence on future music than the Beatles.