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:
Crow's Eye: Maintaining a commitment to Pointless Acrimony™ and Hate Filled Invective™! Also available in corvid mischief and traditional sly dog's mistrust.
Is it Yorke's voice that blocks all fondness?
ReplyDeleteI 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.
Charles, honestly a good part of it's the fact that anyone I knew who loved Radiohead, growing up, was a junkie.
ReplyDeleteNot 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.
You forgot Lou Reed too. Radiohead aren't a bad band, just chronically overrated and pretentious because of that.
ReplyDeleteThe 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.
Wayne,
ReplyDeleteI 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.
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.
ReplyDeleteRadiohead 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?
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.
ReplyDeleteTo me, Radiohead are just a 21st century Pink Floyd - but i don't wanna get into a discussion about THEM.
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.
ReplyDeleteThat said, everyone knows that weedy bands hold up best under all conditions. Electric Wizard!
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.
ReplyDeleteAs 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.