http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/ ... a-20140216



Funny, because I always thought of "Treefingers" as an aural palate-cleanser after "How to Disappear Completely," and now here we are. This is kind of silly, though.

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Not as bad as Chuck Klosterman syncing up Kid A and 9/11.

He actually said something very close to "When he says 'everyone around here,' it symbolizes how, at the time of the attack, everyone was around there."

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So the meal is going to consist of bread, white rice, and other bland foods?

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"When he says 'everyone around here,' it symbolizes how, at the time of the attack, everyone was around there,"
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The internet has not been kind to Klosterman and his musings.

Say what you will about Radiohead, you can't call them bland.

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Is today overrated band day on the CSFMB?

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Maybe he can't, but I can.

They're bland.

See?

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Power is always in the hands of the masses of men. What oppresses the masses is their own ignorance, their own short-sighted selfishness.
- Henry George

He should serve turkey. Overrated food and puts you to sleep when you're finished. Perfect for Radiohead.

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Radiohead peaked with The Bends

was kid A the album where radiohead broke new ground by "going electronic" despite the whole presence of, you know, electronic music?

it's not nearly as bad as when billy corgan went out and gave that one interview all like "yeah i'm going electronic because it's a (new/ish?) genre where there hasn't been a lot done/accomplished/etc [and the inference was that now that billy fucking corgan's here good things can finally happen in electronic music]"

yeah, fuck you billy corgan.

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There were electronic elements to OK Computer, like the MacInTalk on "Fitter Happier," the chopping/splicing on "Airbag," and the bleep-bloops on "Let Down," but Kid A was the one where they started citing Autechre and Aphex Twin as major influences. There's also a lot of jazz and 20th-century classical involved in it as well. "The National Anthem" is basically Mingus; "How To Disappear Completely" is basically Penderecki. I do think they should get credit for synthesizing all three of those genres.

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yeah well i confess to being biased because aphex twin is basically my own personal musical god. i mean, shit.... i'm pretty sure he saw what the KLF did before him and said "you know, what if there was actual musical genius added to that kind of image?" and next thing you know the guy's taking the piss out of the press in the 90s showing off his scout tank (tho in fairness i believe that KLF had an actual tank with speakers blaring music/propaganda/etc), talking about submarines, and of course building up his legend (i got sound on a zx-81 sinclair when i was just a bored kid!) and so on and so forth.

but then the funny thing happened.... it turns out that the legends were true and he was indeed a "regular guy" who was "just like us" in that he had a soul, and when he had those two big chris-cunningham directed videos hit in 97 and 98 respectively, man, with the come to daddy video MTV had that show on circa 97 called "twelve angry viewers" where they'd pit videos "against each other" in a popularity contest and aphex's CTD video won for a week straight and was retired as a champion. and squarepusher was dropping hard normal daddy and big loada and he got a cunningham video too and it seemed like my favorite music was poised and positioned to pimpslap the prodigy / crystal method / etc out of the way and have their moment in the pop spotlight.

but then that aforementioned funny thing happened.... aphex dropped the windowlicker single / video and then he promptly disappeared for 3.5 years until he came out with drukqs, a LP extended to 2xLP with a bunch of piano tracks (one famously sampled by kanye, oh and the album was 2xLP to fulfill the 2 albums remaining on his warp records contract, so he could release future stuff on his own label rephlex) and the electronic shit was fucking amazing..... but then he disappeared again. slagged off a bunch of old str8forward-electronic-tracks circa 04/05 as the "analord" series, and since then he's been having fun with the pseudonym game releasing stuff that isn't formally him but is totally him, like the tuss and steinvord and whatnot. he seems content to stay out of the spotlight nad make his ~50-100k+/year via royalties and high placement near the top of a bunch of european/asian/australian festivals, playing his pre-fabbed livesets from a laptop with a light show.... and thus the legacy of leaving the party fashionably early is maintained, tho if he ever releases another album it'll have all of us hardcore marks guaranteed and you know the press would lap it all up, with pitchfork ready to give it a 5.2 or whatever they gave drukQs because just releasing "more" brilliant music doesn't meet up to their hipster credentials of completely reinventing himself with each release like he did in the 90s.

so yeah, i mean, when radiohead cited him as an influence and andre3000 came out saying he digs afx and SP, let alone future mrs. cross amber tamblyn, it was like !!!! and give some deference cuz man, you know, seeing album covers from the late 90s where aphex had to do the jay-z pyramid thingy over one eye on the cover..... you can see how a real guy with a soul wouldn't want any part of the dog and pony show that is pop music, and while during the 98-01 dry spell i was kind of crestfallen that my favorite music never rose up and got the formal props that it deserved as being a fad/moment in pop music/culture, i totally understand it now and it only goes to cement by belief that i did a spot-on job of picking a musical hero.... cuz while i reckon any sort of celebrity/musician hero worship is fundamentally borne from a bit of folly, shit, my guy didnt hang out at the party way too long and make an ass of himself, which most 90s-heroes-of-ours often do.

c'est la vie. i'm glad he got the acknowledgement from radiohead and others, cuz in the wake of that corgan interview (which happened, tho i dont remember exactly when/where. i was big on electronic music msgboards around the early 00s so i remember it clear as day being just as outraged then as i am willing to laugh at billy now) i was just incredulous as there had to be some sort of recognition of this brilliant music that i unequivocally and inexorably love more than most, and well, to hear that my favorite genre of music was in its infacy til the unequivocal genius of billy corgan got to it.... ha.

and now, well, as friends who "sold out" and went hipster/indie-rock/gay (really) have told me over the years, my aphexian love is just "nostalgia" and even when i'd play him a mighty new ceephax acid crew liveset/song it'd just be brushed off as "nostalgia" cuz you know nothing is more original and future than going out and grabbing a guitar and laying down an effeminate riff and whining about your feelings. WHERE WE'RE GOING WE DON'T NEED.... CHORDS. * delorean zaps off to the future *

anyways, this has been weird semi-tangential hero worship with sini.... so thanks to the ~10 brave souls who read that, and the ~3 brave souls who clicked on a video. in the immortal words of marty mcfly: "you might not be ready for that.... but your kids will love it!" or as my friend would have insisted, "your kids loved it in the late 90s"

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oh since i hit URL overload, here's a link to that one aphex piano song that was famously later sampled by kanye.

edit: and don't get me started on autechre. they were good when they were deconstructing dance music/techno/hiphop/other-peoples-music (and their dj sets where they spin other peoples music are fucking fantastic. they know what the hell they're doing, especially rob booth) but when they started getting lost into deconstructing themselves and making music that sounds like an electronic bowel movement.... man. it just lost me.... even tho there's ppl who go on the watmm autechre board to this day fighting the good fight like the music is some sort of transcendental genius that the haters just don't understand.

it reminds me of a NME article celebrating warp records' 10th anniversary (which would later be their death knell, as now they've got autechre, squarepusher, and fuck all for everything else.... who wants to listen to beans? anyone? tho hey some people like clark so god bless 'em smoke 'em if you got 'em) where they bowed in deference to autechre all like "is that sample the sound of a cricket cascading into a cacophony of [sample source]? or is it [a different sample source] or perhaps just extra-modulated stuff from their gear? we dont know, and we'll never know, and thus autechre wins! they've beat us! it's so perfect and blah blah blah blah blah

whatever. just make a song i can at least 2-step bob my head to with some sort of a catchy synth/bass-line hook and i'm good, cuz if you deconstruct that into post-jackson-pollock dadaists' wet dream stuff, man..... you've lost me and i'd sooner rather go listen to pluxus, that is until the one dude left and their "solid state" album fucking blew.

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Would you say this track has pretty obvious Aphex Twin influences? The stuttering, vocoders, and strings that wash over you sort of feel like a distillation of Richard D. James Album to me, though of course I never made that connection the first time I heard Kid A.

I guess the album is mostly said to be the result of holing up with the Warp Records back catalogue circa 1999, but "Treefingers" is pure Eno, and personally I think there's about as much jazz in the mix as there is electronic. "Morning Bell" is more or less a post-apocalyptic "Take Five."

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I tried Radiohead because everyone and their brother was telling me how brilliant they were. I downloaded OK Computer. I really like Karma Police, but the rest is whiny and pretentious.

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I don't mean to sound bitter, cold, or cruel, but I am, so that's how it comes out. - Bill Hicks

Let's do it for Johnny!

Kyle Hanley sounds like the absolute worst.

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The Bulls haven't done anything wrong, and they're not going to do anything wrong.

Macaulay Culkin's Pizza Underground is the far cooler music/food mash-up I've read about this month.

On the Radiohead stuff, I've always thought Kid A paled in comparison to Amnesiac, which is the only album of theirs I really love. Also I'd say their ambient parts on those albums are also as attributable to Aphex Twin's influence as Eno; something like Treefingers would have fit as much on Selected Ambient Works II as Eno's earlier stuff. And the jazz parts just like a product of touring with Spiritualized in the late 90s.

sini, did you ever download Aphex Twin's supposed "Kickass Violin Solo?" That was one of my favorite mislabels from the early days of file sharing.

Found this reading John Darnielle's thoughts on Amnesiac. Yeah, I didn't think he'd have them, either. But it kinda sums up the electronic talk:

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Wow, Mountain Goat dude is seriously literate. Guess I shouldn't hold it against him that he closed out an Empty Bottle show with Ace of Base 'I saw the sign'. This was "The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton, Texas" era Mtn Goats.

This topic reminds me of a hard copy of a menu I saw many, many years ago of a menu for a wedding, I believe, based on The Beatles The White Album. I've tried to search it in various iterations and have never found it since. I've looked at the song list from the album and tried to half-heartedly reconstruct it, but I can't believe, even if it was just someone's copy from the wedding that I saw, that nobody has ever re-posted this somewhere.

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I don't remember half the time if I'm hiding or I'm lost

He closed with "Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton" when I saw him two Octobers ago. I yelled "HAIL SATAN" at the top of my lungs.

And yeah, he's a terrific writer. Here's his collected musings on Amnesiac, though the format is a bit of an adventure, perhaps befitting John Darnielle on Radiohead:
http://tumblr.insomnius.org/post/143008 ... n-amnesiac

I think at this point my list of bands for whom I will tirelessly evangelize, if I had to pick ten, reads: Mountain Goats, Afghan Whigs, Tindersticks, Weakerthans, Wilco, Magnetic Fields, Belle & Sebastian, Talk Talk, the Smiths, and Radiohead. Honorable mentions to the New Radicals and the Thought Industry, but two those are one-shot deals. I don't evangelize for Frank Zappa; some causes are lost before they're fought.

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Yeah I never had as much problem with Radiohead's use of electronic influences. My main issues were when the worse parts of their fan base would make declarations about how damn innovative they were in complete ignorance of any of those influences ("Radiohead invented IDM" being the peak of ridiculousness surrounding discussions about Kid A).

Then again, I've long had bigger problems with rabid Radiohead fans in general. In the late 90s and early 2000s they seemed like the hardcore Beatles fans of this generation, where they were so excited to proselytize that their favorite band was better than your favorite band, and all that was good in today's music scene likely started with them. I kind of got over that until In Rainbows, when the same people people were also pretending its release was some grand revolutionary moment that would forever change the music industry, never mind the fact that the platform provided by the big record label which promoted the band for years was precisely the reason a release in that manner could be the least bit successful at all.

Yeah, see, I don't think there's much that Radiohead innovated themselves. They're great borrowers, great repurposers, but their antecedents are plain as day. That's not to say that there isn't a great deal of talent and creativity to what they accomplished: you could hole up a hundred bands with the same U2, Eno, Can, afx, and Philip Glass records, and 99 of them would make crap while the 100th made Kid A. (Band #99 would be Coldplay.) It's just that they didn't spring full-formed from the head of Zeus or anything.

The In Rainbows release seemed like a big deal at first as it was happening because 2007-2008 was just a time when every tweak and blip to the internet felt like a Rubicon crossing, but then a few important realizations set in:

1) Bands had been releasing music for cheap on the internet for fucking years now, but none had made Kid A and thus had the capital, both social and actual, to let customers choose the price.

2) All the talk about changing the model of music distribution forever was a bunch of shit because they ended up signing a distribution deal with Merge or XL so that you could buy In Rainbows on reliable old compact disc for $13.95+tax from Starbucks, Barnes & Noble, or a Starbucks inside a Barnes & Noble, right next to the Keane and the Maroon 5. Thom's been bellyaching about how horrible it is to make and market an LP since the Kid A/Amnesiac sessions, and has said that Radiohead will stop making albums and just toss off EPs whenever they damn well feel like it. In such time, there have been three Radiohead albums, a Thom Yorke solo album, and an album with Nigel Godrich and Flea.

3) It wasn't even a very good album!

The worst Radiohead fanboyism/apologism was after The King of Limbs came out and, let's be honest, really kinda sucked. The spin was basically "Radiohead has redefined the concept of The Album by determining that it doesn't have to be good!" Via pitchfork, because of course via pitchfork:



wut?

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Thanks.



Did your parents cry a lot when you came out to them....no Elephant 6?

Some bands along those lines...

Is the Olivia Tremor Control considered Elephant 6? I like them. Never liked Neutral Milk Hotel. In the Aeroplane over the Sea, Baby's First Indie Album.

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I don't get these criticisms at all. I guess I associate "whiny" with all the terrible mall punk acts of the 2000s: your Fall Out Boy, Good Charlotte, so forth. And "pretentious"? Why can't rock music aspire to bigger ideas than "I got a girl and she looks so good"? Why can't arrangements be more than two guitars, a bass, and drums at 120-bpm 4/4?

Listen to "Let Down" next time you're on a train, or stuck in traffic, or in a layover, or any situation where you are required to do nothing en route to doing something but in the meantime find yourself trapped. Then take inventory of all these little moments you've had over the weeks/months/years. One day I am gonna grow wings, indeed. I think it's the best song they ever did, and really central to understanding the whole Radiohead thing (at least from The Bends through Hail to the Thief) and the idea of trying to find real meaning in a meaningless world.

"No Surprises" is really good, too. How can you not love that music box guitar riff?

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