Premier Rock Forum

cervixFORaHEart wrote:you all hate the posse that runs.

huh? wha?

All the makings of crap.

Completely pretentious in every way.
Trendy, strange, and b!tchy.
Often dissonant, wierd, and abrasive.

Yet, they turn out a few really amazing cuts here & there.

NOT CRAP

I find them boring, with no original musical ideas but some interesting twists on "Dark Side Of The Moon" kinda production. My wife is a fan so I've heard a lot of their stuff seep through the walls, and I admit an interest to "Well, that track sounds cool, I wonder what the process was like in the studio?" - but I never wonder where they got their chord progressions or anything like that. Same old, same old, with no inspiring melodies to back it up.

Whenever any band comes along in the mainstream that has any redeeming value, one should declare 'not crap'.

simmo wrote:
One thing that does slightly annoy me about Radiohead is that they assimilate qualities of various underground artists and homogenize it in to their own sound. I must state VERY CLEARLY that this in itself does not annoy me - hell, that's a great thing to be able to do, take qualities of other people's music and make it your own. What does annoy me is that Radiohead are then seen as revolutionary pioneers, and the artists from whom they borrowed remain overlooked by the mainstream press/record buying public. If I was autechre, Steve Reich or Keith Jarrett I'd feel a bit put out.

i remember before kid a came out, reading an article where thom yorke talked about clinic really influencing him. lo-and-behold, kid a seems to have a lot of elements (arrangements, mostly) one might find on a clinic record. not surprisingly, radiohead then took clinic on tour with them after kid a came out.

i vote not crap, but there's a pretty high waffle factor (7?) because i can't stand the last album at all, they're pretentious and act like they hate attention, and it irks me to no end how the press--independent or otherwise--refuse to call BS on radiohead no matter what they say/do since ok computer was released.

granted, my beef is more with the media than the band...

Adam CR wrote:

Antero wrote:Seems like some people always want to up their indie cred by not liking Radiohead

This is patently ridiculous for two reasons:

1 It implies that it's impossible to not enjoy the music of Radiohead.

It's possible to not enjoy, but "Crap" just sounds patently ridiculous to my ears.

2 Judging by the results of the poll, the majority are happy to openly state that Radiohead are NOT CRAP and thus presumably stating the opposite would not 'up their indie cred'.

Isn't the point of indie cred to have the elitist minority view, rather than to go with things that other people like too?

Not crap: Kid A, OK Computer

On the fence: Amnesiac, The Bends

Crap: Hail to the Thief, Pablo Honey

Overall, a band that has gone from no-ideas, mindless crap to great to running-out-of-ideas crap. Kid A is an awesome albiet a bit derivative record, though, and OK Computer is a good one, too, so not crap.

thom yorke is quite possibly the most overrated vocalist of our time. what an overrated voice. and as a songwriter, he certainly can come up with tasteful melodies, but his lyrics kind of suck (but everyone seems to love them).

however, the band has a decent rhythm section (nothing like the barrett brothers (BM and the wailers) or the bonham+jones combo (led zep), but still decent).

plus johnny greenwood, who is a classy guitarist and a genius arranger (for those who dont know, he (and NOT thom yorke) is the brains behind all those crazy arrangements). and nigel godrich is a really good producer.

my biggest beef with them is that they try to come off as a rather depressed group of musicians, while i would guess that in their own day-to-day lives they are actually quite happy. similarly, they try very hard to come off as deep-in-thought, while i think that they are actually rather shallow intellectuals. this deep/shallow-intellect thing is also the case with outkast, in my opinion. its not surprising that the overwhelming majority of radiohead fans are also outkast fans, and vice-versa.

it should also be noted that they are not quite as innovative with electronics as people think. name one electronic "trick" of theirs and i guarantee i can tell you where it's been done before. they even have songs like "idioteque" where most people dont even know that all those drones are really just samples of someone else's creative electronic music. i cant really hate on this, as i am also a "sample artist," but its worth noting that most people think they came up with those sounds themselves.

BClark wrote:thom yorke is quite possibly the most overrated vocalist of our time. what an overrated voice. and as a songwriter, he certainly can come up with tasteful melodies, but his lyrics kind of suck (but everyone seems to love them).

Y... you can understand his lyrics?

my biggest beef with them is that they try to come off as a rather depressed group of musicians, while i would guess that in their own day-to-day lives they are actually quite happy.

Ah, there are two interesting questions from that one.

1) Can't someone be both depressed/angry/dour/bitter and happy/cheerful/joking/silly at the same time? I'm thinking mostly of my own experience, and that of my friends. If you asked most of us to talk about politics or corporate culture or the world in general, you're not going to get optimistic responses but rather an absolute flurry of venom and cursing, along with a lot of dark dark humor. Day to day shit, though, we're pretty good - we like flowers and bumblebees and kittens and we make funny noises and do things that make us happy. I don't think anyone can actually be completely fucking depressed and so forth their whole lives without flipping reality the bird and offing themselves.

2) Why would it make a difference?