Is Radiohead the greatest band around today or what?

[absyntheNsugar]

Listening to all of their albums in sucession - man! What paranoid sorrow! Every time I hear OK Computer it just caputures that element of hoplessness and sorrow that is modern life...

Anyone else moved by this band this way?

Subterranean homesick alien

The breath of the morning, i keep forgetting the smell of the warm summer air - i live in a town where you can't smell a thing, you watch your feet for cracks in the pavement.

And up above aliens hover making home movies for the folks back home - of all these wierd creatures who lock up their spirits, drill holes in themselves and live for their secrets.
/*They're all up-tight.*/

I wish that they'd soop down in a country lane late at night when i'm driving - take me on board their beautiful ship, show me the world as i'd love to see it -

I'd tell all my friends but they'd never believe, they'd think that i'd finally lost it completely - i'd show them the stars and the meaning of life; they'd shut me away.
/*But I'd be all right. I'm just up-tight.*/

[Screaming Lord Byron]

1. No argument there.

[Deja Q]

2. Ask Scott Tenorman!

:evilgrin:

[dwckabal]

4. Scott Tenorman Must Die!! N/T

[absyntheNsugar]

6. Wanna buy some p*bes?

That ep was purely evil and hilarious!

[theemu]

3. What.

For my money, the best band working today is The Flaming Lips.

[absyntheNsugar]

5. The Flaming Lips are a good band indeed

but Thom Yorke's utter sadness and emotion cut raw on OK Computer and Kid A, not to mention Amnesiac...

IMHO OKC was our Dark Side of the Moon and Kid A/Amnesiac was our White Album. I place these guys right next to Pink Floyd and the Beatles.

[CPschem]

11. Flaming Lips are great..

but I like Wilco much more.

[Screaming Lord Byron]

12. I prefer Mercury Rev, but love the lips and Wilco.

[RandomKoolzip]

7. No.

I find them dreary, uncommunicative, and incredibly overrated. Just add some beeps and blips and some automated percussion to a bunch of glacially paced ululating and voila! You can be Radiohead too.Life is fucking sad enough without having to listen to Yorke's boys moaning and groaning. No energy, no raunch, no sense of humor...everything I listen to music for is missing.

Plus they've abandoned the rock process for soon-to-be-outdated technology in an attempt to chase trends while appearing to be avant-garde. In effect, a rearguard attampt at subverting the combustion that is the spark of rock and roll.

PS, BY the WAYY...if all their music sounded like "Electioneering," they'd be my favorite band on Earth-that's a fuckin great song. The fact that they themselves do not want to continue in that vein indicates to me that they've spent too much time reading their own reviews. Again, just my opinion....

[NashVegas]

14. Sadly, Yes

If you look at how huuuuuuge Coldplay is right now, that's how big Radiohead could have been if they wanted to limit themselves to "the rock process."

Kid A was a little too self-indulgent for my tastes; Hail to the Thief is as experimental as any band in this era can get while still having enough clout that US radio, no matter how loathing of experimentalism, is going to be forced to play it due to audience demand.

The Bends is still one of the best fucking albums of the last decade.

[absyntheNsugar]

8. Besides....

Can't argue with this quote from frontman Thom Yorke:

"it's just the law governing western politics pure blind greed - economics is an unquestionable sacred law above all humane considerations (is this just me), it is a justification for slave labour, genocide, environmental and spiritual destruction. everyone wants their cheap sneakers and bloody stupid keyrings and plasticware above all else, and are happy to leave china unchecked, happy to condone their blatant violation of human rights. after all how can we justify our cathedral-like shopping malls and rusting capitalist monoliths, other than fiinding the next oppressed population and get them on the payroll? "thankyou tesco thankyou tesco." all our hands are dirty."

Thom Yorke

[Swede]

9. They do make great music. I have never tired of one their albums yet.

Do you like the Nine Inch Nails too?

[absyntheNsugar]

10. They're OK

I like Ministry tho...

[Zorra]

13. Radiohead

is one of the only rock bands from the 90's that I really like.

Great music, great musicians.

[SEAburb]

15. not anymore, Chevelle has blown past them with

their rock hybred sound.

[jpgray]

16. The Fall kicks the living whiny shit out of Radiohead, now and forever.

[Screaming Lord Byron]

17. (sniggers)

not since about 1991, I'm afraid.

[sendero]

18. Musically....

... I love them. But I just cannot listen to Thom York sing. I can't, I won't, I ain't. :)

[Uzybone]

19. Id say they are

I love em. Even if i dont revel in the misery of the lyrics. They sound like no one else, and they sound good at that.

[Bossy Monkey]

20. I liked Lindisfarne and U2 better the first time

They are certainly competent imitators, however.

[Kenneth ken]

21. I'd have to go with or what? - n/t

[mlawson]

22. Hell, I'm 53 and I like them!!!

Of course, our radio stations here are so shitty, they don't even play Radiohead. And current top-40 is the worst in my memory!

[AliceWonderland]

23. Yes and no

I think Radiohead is both genuinely brilliant and genuinely overrated, as odd as that sounds. Loved the Bends and you can't argue that OK Computer was an incredibly influential album on the UK scene. I think of the fusion of Oasis and Radiohead as opening up space for the fantastic UK (and a very few non-UK) bands on the go right now. Elbow, the Doves, Starsailor, South, Embrace, Gomez, Smog, the Shins, Travis, Tindersticks. There's some great stuff out there.

[annagull]

24. They are fantastic, such an important band

Thom has to have one of the best voices ever recorded.

[Squeech]

25. Probably. But.

That only goes to show you how little there is right now that's genuinely breaking new ground.

You might want to go back and check out the artists who influenced them, and the ones who influenced *them*, and so on, until you've got some real background in pop avant-gardism. Frank Zappa. Syd Barrett. Velvet Underground. Captain Beefheart. Can. Wire. Brian Eno. Pere Ubu. Soft Boys. Negativland. Residents. That band Bjork sang in before Sugarcubes. Dozens of others I'm spacing out on right now.

[absyntheNsugar]

27. I love all the bands you mentioned

and that's why I love Radiohead so much. They draw from all of these influences, and yet carve out their own voice. I think it's impossible to not have been influenced in todays music world - you just have to choose the right influences and create a voice that is originial within those influences.

[Squeech]

28. I didn't mean to belittle you

Just wanted to make sure we had a basis for conversation.

My contention is that rock has always been a mongrel form, chewing up all the other genres in the world and reassembling the pieces into something new and interesting. Early on it was hillbilly music and jump blues colliding in Elvis Presley's and Chuck Berry's heads. Ever since then we've been splicing in other gene pools: jazz in the '60s (Grace Slick famously wrote "White Rabbit" after listening to Miles Davis's Sketches of Spain on infinite repeat while tripping), classical in the '70s (the dreaded prog rock, much of which I love), situationist agitprop in the '70s, '80s and '90s (a/k/a punk), world beat in the '90s, etc. etc. etc.

Now we've got access to just about everything there is. I try to stop and reflect periodically that it is now easier for us to check out the indigenous music of Tuva or Madagascar than it was for the young Keith Richard to hear Chuck Berry! And one thing we've lost is the chance to screw it up, and do it our own way. What made the Stones so exciting was only partly that they were bringing this new American groove to a British audience; it was also that they didn't quite get it right, and the divergence between their erroneous version and the original was wide enough to spawn a whole new style. As Eno used to say (actually it's an Oblique Strategy), "Honor thy error as a hidden intention."

So yeah, Radiohead is doing some really interesting stuff, meaning in particular making some really interesting stylistic juxtapositions. And all I mean to say is that they wouldn't have known they could get away with so much of that, if not for the previous examples of...

And they may be too good at it, and it'd be nice to hear some more rough edges and actual screwups. But maybe the whole process is too well understood by now. All I really know is, I haven't really had a band (or a composer) to fall in love with in at least a decade.

[absyntheNsugar]

29. Didn't belittle at all...

And yes...very true that it is the errors that sometimes make the music.

At the time of the fall of the Berlin wall, I always wondered what music would come out of the ex-Soviet republics, being raised on very bad recordings of American and English pop, and not having much of a choice.

[Squeech]

30. Did you get to hear Plastic People of the Universe?

They originally got together during the Praque Spring of 1968, inspired by the Doors, Velvet Underground, Mothers of Invention et al.

After the tanks rolled in, they kept at it, but the government kept dumping on them. Initially it was just because they still sang in English-- so they started writing lyrics in Czech. Then when the authorities heard what they really thought, they were attacked as counter-revolutionary (as in: it's not allowed to be alienated in the socialist worker's paradise). They kept having their concerts raided, their amplifiers confiscated, and ultimately band members and their supporters would get thrown in jail for arbitrary lengths of time. All this repression actually strengthened their resolve, and not only did they keep at it, but they managed to smuggle tapes out to the West, and at least four albums came out during the '70s and '80s-- obviously recorded under incredibly primitive bootleggish conditions, nowhere near Western technical standards, but well worth listening to, kinda like if the early Velvets were more into Bartok than LaMonte Young.

They were peripherally responsible for the Velvet Revolution. Vaclav Havel, who at the time was just another aspiring writer, attended one of their concerts that got broken up by the secret police, and saw what happened to them. He wrote an account of it that was distributed by samizdat, which spawned the Chapter 77 Movement that kept insisting the government play by its own stated rules, and it was that pressure more than anything else that brought the regime down.

This band I was in got to play with them, maybe three years ago. It was a magical moment, for a number of reasons: (1) because of who they were, and the history related above, (2) because our drummer couldn't make it, so we borrowed theirs for two songs (and I snuck in one of their bass lines), and (3) because I knew it was probably the last time I'd ever get to share a stage with performers from the generation that inspired me! Most of the bands I get to hang out with now, I'm old enough to be their father.

[Bozola]

26. or what. -nt-

[Red_Storm]

31. talented....yes.........important.....yes..........

the greatest band in the world ? probably not.......is there a band out there today that deserves such a title? probably not........