at a glance...

Hometown: Oxford, England
Year Formed: 1987

Members:
Thom Yorke -music, vocals
Jonny Greenwood -music
Ed O'Brien -music
Colin Greenwood -music
Phil Selway -music

Bands In The Family:
UNKLE, Badly Drawn Boy, Unbelievable Truth, R.E.M., Björk, PJ Harvey

Notes:
On A Friday relied on hometown support of their first EP, Drill, before signing a major-label deal. Changing their name to Radiohead (from a Talking Heads song) the band released Pablo Honey in 1993, spawning the anti-hero smash, "Creep." The song became so engrained in the U.S. mainstream conscience, Radiohead were immediately written off as one-hit wonders. Their second album, the lush and complex The Bends, prevented the pundits from burying the band. While it saw brisk sales, critics raved, ranking Radiohead as one of the premiere bands in the world, a positioned solidfied by the 1997 release of OK Computer, which debuted at No. 1 in their home country's charts. A consensus best album choice by critics, OK Computer even convinced conservative NARAS members to give the band a Grammy nomination for Album of the Year, which the band snubbed by refusing to attend or perform at the ceremony. Initial plans for Massive Attack to remix the entire album fell through in deference to Massive Attack's release of Mezzanine. Instead, to satisfy fans, Radiohead released Airbag, a six-song EP featuring several B-sides from their UK singles. The band's groundbreaking music videos and tour film (available on 7 Television Commercials and Meeting People Is Easy, respectively) further displayed the band's artistic bent and desire to expand boundaries. The highly-anticipated Kid A arrived in 2000.

Links:
Radiohead Mothership
We Love Radiohead

"The great way is not difficult/For those who have no preferences."

There are ten commandments of love, nineteen nervous breakdowns, and twenty-three strawberry letters, but there is only one law, and it is this: The songs come first. Respect the law and you make great music; break the law and you're doomed. Something in an artist dies when that law is broken, and that thing is never really recaptured, no matter how many multi-platinum albums come after. It's all very Zen: the process is the product, the journey is the destination, the concept must never come before the actual music. Most people don't understand this law, which is why crap music sells millions of copies and great musicians are often doomed to be critic's darlings. But we know the law, and we can feel when it's been broken, even if we're ten million light-years from home.

So Radiohead, and Thom Yorke in particular, go on a year-long studio quest to follow up the great songs of OK Computer, knowing that every single music journalist, diehard music fan, and innocent bystander is both waiting for them to fail and hoping desperately that they'd succeed. An impossible goal - but as we know, that is the only kind worth having. And what they've come up with is a perfect Zen statement. We are Radiohead, but Radiohead isn't Radiohead anymore. We mean what we say, but we are going to make it very difficult for anyone to understand what that is. This album means nothing and everything. There is no preference; the Third Patriarch is pleased.

So let's start by just talking about the hooks. This album is jam-packed with melodies and counter-melodies and riffs and memorable sounds that sound good together with the other sounds. This is evident from the very beginning track, the supposedly aimless and formless "Everything in Its Right Place." It's not straightforward (you'll have that with a 10/4 time signature), there aren't really any verses or choruses, except maybe the repeated samplings of the title phrase, and it makes no literal sense to speak of. But the way it makes no sense is so beautiful that none of that matters. For an album that apparently grew out of the band trying to get away from melody, there's a lot of it here. They can't help themselves. They try to do a song with a robotic dance beat, load it up with bleak phrases like "laughing till my head comes off" and "take the money and run" and "this is really happening," call it "Idioteque" for chrissake, and what stands out are not the beat and not the phrases or the apparent concept of dance music being silly when horrible things are happening in the world, but the seven or eight different heartwrenching vocal lines and the amazing way they intertwine. It's like Liz Hurley in the '80s: a pretty album that doesn't want to be a pretty album, so it puts on punked-up techno gear and talks about floating down the Liffey, but that doesn't mean it's not a knockout. (Influences this time around: Primal Scream's last two albums loom huge; Brian Eno - all three phases-loom huger; mid-period Mingus and '70s Miles loom the biggest of all.)

As far as what Kid A means, I'll have to say, honestly, that I don't know if it has a thesis. All the previous records have had a viewpoint: Pablo Honey was "it's kind of hard to be young and be in a band," The Bends was "people are lonely," and OK Computer was definitely an "our society's priorities are all fucked up" album. So I guess Kid A is a return to the very personal feel of the unfairly-maligned first album, something like "I've lost my mind because it's really weird to be put in the position of saving rock music three albums in a row and I already tried to tell you that I have low self-esteem and now you're all looking at me instead of burning down the World Bank so therefore I'm going quite mad and I don't really want to but there you have it."

But to see it that way is to subscribe to a view I don't like, which is that this band should be called Thom Yorke and the Radioheads. No, this isn't a straight-to-tape documentary of mental illness; when you're really just about to lose your mind, you don't go 5/4 and 7/4 and pulseless ambient, you just lose your fucking mind. No, this is a band record, a meditation on the themes of powerlessness, depression, and keeping everything - priorities, messages, even singing and guitars - in its right place. It's a very Zen record with a lot of pretty parts, and I like it because it will reveal something new to me every time I hear it: the Great Way. Do I love it? Not sure yet. Is it vitally important for you to hear it fifty or ten thousand times so you can learn to love it and/or throw the damned thing against the wall? Oh yes.