The British rock outfit Radiohead occupies a singular place in today's popular music environment. With a huge global fan base that embraces them with quasi-religious fervor, it would be easy to assume that they make music "for the masses," a sort of Justin Timberlake with an accent. However, their massive popularity belies the fact that Radiohead is really 1/2 rock band and 1/2 experimental music ensemble. Indeed, the miracle of the band is that they've gotten the world to swallow the sometimes bitter pill of electronic experimentation, noise, advanced harmonies, and asymmetrical rhythmic patterns. The only comparable act on the world stage is Björk.
As critic Alex Ross and musicologist Robert Fink have pointed out in their work, the world of classical music is currently experiencing a crisis of cultural authority. Unlike back in the 1950s, when kids knew that Beethoven was "high" art even though they might prefer Perry Como, today the classics aren't just losing audience members (the plight of the American symphony is a often-bemoaned topic) - they are losing authority. Not only are people electing to listen to indie rock or hip-hop or jazz over classical music, they don't even recognize that a chasm of "Artistic value" exists between them. Classical music, to many young people today, is simply irrelevant.
But the aesthetics of the concert hall symphonic tradition are far from dead, and Radiohead is the perfect example of the cultural transformation above at work. Indeed, audiences flock to the band the same way adoring fans idolized Beethoven in the 19th century: with an almost cult-like passion. And just like Beethoven and Coltrane, both of whom developed more zealous supporters as they advanced in their careers and created more and more "difficult" music, it seems that Radiohead has captivated larger audiences as they have traveled further and further down the rabbit-hole of the avant-garde. Back in the mid-90s when the young band released Pablo Honey and The Bends, they were simply a rock band; now, five albums later, they are a cultural phenomenon. The more experimental they've grown, the more "serious" they've become, and audiences have responded by, well, taking them more seriously. If there is an equivalent to Beethoven the brooding Romantic Genius today, it is probably Radiohead. Although classical music may have fallen off its pedestal, audiences still equate music complexity to musical value.
The British group is Romantic in more ways than just their labyrinthine musical structures. On today's pop scene, they stand apart as being one of the only non-ironic groups I can think of. In an era defined by throwbackism, snotty sarcasm, and a postmodern sense of irony, Radiohead actually mean what they say. They are dead serious, and they clearly believe in the transformative power of their music. Humor is a rare ingredient in a Radiohead song. Similarly, in live settings - like the concert I saw earlier this week in West Palm Beach - they are aloof performers, never stooping to the act of hamming up the crowd, giving shout outs to the locale, or any other activity associated with an arena rock concert. Thom Yorke did his manic, twitchy dance a few times, and he managed to say "hello" and "thank you" occasionally, but that was about all. The stage was loaded with a Baroque array of instruments, from a towering mellotron to all sorts of percussion, computers, and even an ondes martenot (an early French electronic keyboard used extensively in the work of Olivier Messiaen). What the audience witnessed was a group of musician/scientists rushing about their sound lab. We were there to behold their creative process; they weren't here to convince us we're having a good time.
The show was packed with people filling a huge outdoor arena. When the band entered the stage, everyone stood and began screaming, which is what you'd expect from such a context, but instead of opening with a crowd-pleasing burner, the musicians sat down at their instruments and played a moody, melancholy, and quiet tune from their recent album. This gesture illustrates the seriousness of Radiohead's place in the pop music world beautifully; like Miles Davis turning his back on audiences, the band made it clear from the beginning that the concert would be on their terms. The mammoth stage setup included a couple dozen long cylindrical light columns that the band used to twinkle in a multi-colored kaleidescope and dazzle the stoned; but when they weren't on, they resembled the pipes of a huge church organ; this augmented the sense that many members of the audience had made a religious pilgrimage to see their favorite band.
A few things really struck me as I watched the show. First off, I was reminded once again of the extreme economy of Yorke's lyrics. I've never been a huge fan of the lyrical content of Radiohead songs - they rarely seem to tell a story to me - but watching them live made me realize that the core lyrical concept Yorke works with it the idea of taking short, simple phrases (like "they will spit you out / they will spit you out") and repeating them in an incantatory fashion until they lose their meaning and simply become a rhythm or a texture or a melody, devoid of linguistic meaning. Furthermore, Yorke often sings with more of a focus on the vocal line itself than on the words. The words of most Radiohead songs (to me) only tell the story of the tune proximally: the primary narrative device is musical, and the arena Radiohead excels at most here is harmony.
Besides the electronic, textural effects that have come to a Radiohead signature since 2001's Kid A, harmonic experimentation is an important component to the band's sound. Almost every tune has some truly unpredictable harmonic ideas in it, even to us experienced and cross-generic listeners. I'm not going to geek out on the theory here, but suffice it to say that Radiohead's harmonic language is of a considerably degree of sophistication. It is interesting to note that the guitarist Johnny Greenwood is a concert music composer of great talent (he did the soundtrack to the recent PT Anderson movie There Will Be Blood) as well as one of the world's few certified masters of the ondes martenot: you can hear the influence of a pantheon of top 20th (and 19th) century composers in Radiohead's harmonies. Indeed, to many audience members, such harmonies are probably only ever encountered in Radiohead - these are totally new chords and key relationships heard nowhere else in pop. The fact that these five men can conjure such distinctive sounds must only increase the perception that they are a group of magi.
A revealing moment came towards the end of the show, when they opened one of their songs from Kid A with a 2-3 minute montage of electronic bleeps and blorps. We really might as well have been listening to Stockhausen, so dense was this sonic collage. But all around me, thousands of people stood in rapt attention. They were transfixed listening to the swirl of sound onstage. To me, this is Radiohead's greatest victory: they are opening up the ears of the world to new sounds. My concert-going partner Nolan and I discussed whether any of these people might be turned on to 20th century classical music as a result of their passion for Radiohead, and we couldn't come to any solid theories; nevertheless, Radiohead is opening people up to more extreme, complex music in much the way that Dylan and the Beatles opened people up to the idea that rock could be art.
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4 comments:
Sounds amazing!
Great topic, and one I have been mulling over as well. These are my stream-of-consciousness reactions to your conceptual approach:
I understand why you are linking Radiohead to the classical tradition by way of Beethoven and the Romantics. But I would like to offer a different paradigm of transmission.
You outline a process of a passing of the aesthetic baton, which creates a thread of continuity. I would suggest that the classical tradition is one of upheaval rather than continuity—or better, the consistent upheaval throughout the history of art music IS its continuity.
Since you used Beethoven as an example, that is as good a place to start as any: Beethoven's aesthetic was upheaved by Wagner, Wagner's by Stravinsky and Schoenberg (in different ways), and so on, with dozen's more of the same, especially in the 20th century.
With this in mind, it is not as important to link Radiohead to the dated 19th century aesthetic of the symphonic tradition or of Beethoven himself. It is much more important to link Radiohead to the position Beethoven had in artistic culture, namely, that of vanguard.
I think this is an important issue to grapple with, but instead of try to link aesthetics of the past, we just need to realize that we are witnessing the latest upheaval in art music aesthetics. At that point, it becomes a question of genre—we don't think of putting Radiohead in "classical" music textbooks because they fall in the realm of popular music. But this view is going to change, and we are going to be the generation that changes it.
Thank you for your addition to this discussion, Mark. You make a very good point, and one that I would agree with - it may not be entirely productive to compare groups like Radiohead to the specific aesthetic ideas that dominated during Beethoven's time. While a case can be made for many of these Romantic values being embodied in their work, I think it's more revealing to see in Beethoven a cultural analog that is, as you mention, defined by his vanguard qualities and the constant will towards change. It is also worth noting that the idea of "artist as prophetic seer" has its origin in Beethoven and can aptly be applied to the way many fans listen to Radiohead.
I would differ from your assessment, however, in viewing the Radiohead phenomenon as only the latest manifestation of change. Aesthetic formulations and musical values move around in big circles, and nothing is truly new. Just like the notion of "pop eats itself," music is always feeding on the past, and indeed all innovations are a response to the past, a dialectic relationship to it. To me, Radiohead doesn't represent something brand new as much as it represents a resurgence of a certain way of music making that has its roots in the Romantic era. Their will to innovate and upheave is precisely what binds them most concretely to a past aesthetic.
Cool. I've been meaning to check Radiohead out for awhile. Maybe now I will.
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