Sic Semper Tyrannis

Radiohead and the Escape from Retail Music Hell

All right, back to the talk of my musical development. I’ve already told you about the figureheads of my aesthetics-Zappa, Beatles, Reich, etc. I wanted to continue on and talk about my days as a working stiff in retail hell. You would think, working at a music store, you would constantly be inundated with interesting new music, kind of like in High Fidelity. Well, somehow that never happened. Oh, I learned about a handful of artists from Manager Jay and some fellow employees, but the large majority of your time is spent looking for “that song on the radio,” the same old thing, for customers in a hurry.  As you may have gathered, I kind of like discussing music and artists. Your average customer, not so much. And you also tend to get a very special insight into just how much consumer-driven anti-art is produced by corporate committee and shipped in box after box. (And yes, I realize that even the most “artistic,” challenging product is still a commodity.)

Be that as it may, there was an occasional cool musical development during my time in the retail music trenches and I still link those albums to the time I spent there in that store. One big album was Radiohead’s OK Computer.  I first heard this album while driving on a Spring Break road trip to Savannah, GA with my good friend Steve. I still remember quite distinctly the gray, cloudy weather as I first heard the moaning descending harmony lines as Thom Yorke sang “Rain down from a great height,” whatever the name of that song is. Numb from staring at the road in front of me for too long, this music was the perfect soundtrack.

There was always some new, interesting timbre coming to the foreground, a wobbly guitar sound or an echoey delay or an analog synth sound. And the harmonies were lush, never quite going where you expected. I think this music strikes a wonderful balance between epic aspirations, (songs with multiple contrasting parts) and rock n’ roll nastiness, (there are some killer distorted guitar parts all throughout the album.)

Some claim that this is some kind of futuristic concept album. I don’t know if I’d go that far, primarily because of the difficulty in interpreting Yorke’s ambiguous lyrics,) but I will say that it does take you on a ride. If you devote the forty-five minutes to an hour that it would take to listen to this album all the way through, (preferably with headphones like the real music geeks do,) you would feel like you had gone somewhere. From the cutting guitar sound and distorted off-kilter drums that open “Airbag,” (still one of my favorite Radiohead songs,) to the sleepy, sunset song “The Tourist,” which ends the whole album with the unexpected sound of decaying tiny bells, (the first time the timbre is heard in the song,) this album is a diverse artistic statement and is definitely my favorite Radiohead album, (The Bends would be a close second.) The production by Nigel Godrich, (who also engineered Beck’s Sea Change), is wonderfully detailed, with all kinds of sweeteners and sounds you don’t typically hear in rock music, and certainly didn’t hear very often during that time: bells and pianos and spacey alien sounds.

It seemed that right after the release of this album, Radiohead were on the cover of every magazine that we sold in the store. And rightly so, if you ask me.

posted by Mike @ 2:20 PM