The Guide to Getting Into Radiohead

https://noisey.vice.com/en_us/article/bmex8d/the-guide-to-getting-into-radiohead

Apr 13 2017, 7:30pm

Theres a reason that everyone from Caribou to Kanye loves them. It's time to find out
what you've been missing.

Alright, so, you know "Creep." Maybe you even smoked out to OK Computer your freshman
year of college. But you still haven't gotten into Radiohead, probably because you think you
missed the boat, and the only version of them you've heard is Thom Yorke's weeping
falsetto sandwiched between Muse and Coldplay on alt-rock radio while driving to work
(two bands which, by the way, would not exist without Radiohead).

But Radiohead is way more than just a posh Grateful Dead with a slightly smaller back
catalog. First of all, they pioneered the surprise album drop with 2007's independently-
released In Rainbows, setting industry precedents for everyone from Beyonce to Chance the
Rapper. Radiohead is also among the first artists to bridge rock and electronic music,
reshaping the pop zeitgeist in the process (they've also lowkey gotten everyone to
#listentomorejazz, with direct and indirect nods to Charles Mingus, John and Alice
Coltrane, Bitches Brew-era Miles Davis, and others embedded across their catalog).

For every "Creep" and "Karma Police," there's an entire album that sounds nothing like
those songs, delving into jazz, ambient, techno, punk, krautrock, and more. There's a reason
that everyone from Caribou to Kanye to those aforementioned stadium rock scions has cited
the group as an influence. Like any great artist, Radiohead's enduring stylistic breadth is a
testament to its talent.

That's also what makes them tricky to get into. Radiohead isn't passive music. It's why the
band sounds so unremarkable on your car radio, and why its best songs don't make it onto
the radio at all. Radiohead does as much with silence and negative space as any melodies or
lyrics, tapping into that part of you when you're alone with your own thoughts. Thats why
people love their music: It gives agency to listening. And also because these five lads from
Oxfordthat is, frontman Yorke, guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Jonny Greenwood, bassist
Colin Greenwood, guitarist Ed O'Brien, and drummer Phil Selwaycan fucking shred.

Twenty years after releasing their landmark third album, OK Computer, Radiohead is
showing no signs of slowing. Time to get on 'em. Here are five sides of Radiohead to explore.
So you want to get into: Mainstream Radiohead?

Ok, let's get one thing out of the way: Yes, Radiohead really only has one song that fits the
radio-friendly, even-your-mom-knows-it sense of the word "mainstream," and that song is,
of course, "Creep." There are a handful of others, like "Fake Plastic Trees" and "Exit Music
(for a Film)," that earned some pop momentum on the soundtracks for Clueless and Romeo
+ Juliet, respectively. For the most part, though, Radiohead and "mainstream" feels like an
oxymoronRadiohead specializes in otherness, a band whose music trades in isolation and
existential vertigo.

But that's also why they're so popular. There's a certain platonic ideal of Radiohead that
lands them at the top of festival bills, and that fuels those massive crowd sing-a-longs: I'm
talking about the anthemic, canonical works of big guitars and pop melodies, often fused
and refried by the band's electronic experimentation. Mainstream Radiohead is all of OK
Computer, that feel in the vitriol and collapse of classics like "Paranoid Android" and "Karma
Police," and it's in much of The Bends and Kid A; mainstream Radiohead even shows up,
albeit more subtly, in the bones of last year's A Moon Shaped Pool. These are the songs with
sugar to help the anxiety and paranoia go down, making the disquietude of Yorke's
songwriting feel less sad-sack than vindicating and cathartic. Quite often, like on "Exit Music
(for a Film)," it's just plain beautiful.

Playlist: "Paranoid Android" / "Karma Police" / "Fake Plastic Trees" / "There There" / "15
Step" / "My Iron Lung" / "Daydreaming" / "Lotus Flower" / "No Surprises" / "Exit Music (for a
Film)"

Apple Music | Spotify

So you want to get into: Visceral, Big Guitars Radiohead

Did we mention that Radiohead fucking shreds? There's a reason these guys are one of
the biggest rock bands in the world. And after three decades, they're only having more fun
with it. This goes well beyond the charming grunge and Britpop of their early material, like
"The Bends" and "Just," and even past the space rock throttle and crescendos of "Airbag"
and "Lucky." Big Guitars Radiohead lives in the hip hop-esque production looping of "I Might
Be Wrong," the digital patching at the end of "Go to Sleep" (best enjoyed live), and the jazz
progressions and arpeggios all over the latter half of their catalog. Some of Radiohead's
most standout guitar work doesn't even sound like guitar, as on the metal-toned, distorted-
to-all-hell "Myxomatosis"to say nothing of the bowed guitar Greenwood uses on live
versions of "Pyramid Song" and "Burn the Witch." Both O'Brien and Greenwood have been
named among the greatest guitarists of all time, and for Greenwood in particular, it's just
another tool in his multi-instrument repertoire to play mad scientist.

Playlist: "Just" / "Airbag" / "Street Spirit (Fade Out)" / "Ful Stop" / "Climbing Up the Walls" /
"I Might Be Wrong" / "Myxomatosis" / "The Bends" / "Lucky" / "The Daily Mail"

Apple Music | Spotify

So you want to get into: Abstract, No Guitars Radiohead

If you're not familiar with the ondes Martenot, you're about to be. As virtuosic a guitar
player as Greenwood is, he's always been coy about deferring to it as his primary
instrument, and that's most evident throughout Radiohead's post-OK Computer work. This
era saw Radiohead, with Yorke on the verge of a breakdown and the band rejecting their
newfound stadium rock success, leaning into the electronics and abstraction they began
flirting with on OK Computer tracks like "Fitter Happier." They drastically changed their
sound, shedding their rock trappings in favor of synthesizers, orchestral strings, horns, drum
machinesanything but guitars, really. And, of course, there's Greenwood's famous ondes
Martenot, an early electronic instrument to which you can attribute pretty much every
eerie, celestial sound you've ever heard on a Radiohead song.

Abstract, No Guitars Radiohead can be, alternatingly, Radiohead's least accessible and most
striking work. Loads of folks hated Kid A and Amnesiac when they first came out, and plenty
still do, but the albums have also gone on to be regarded as some of Radiohead's most
influential recordings. Today, you can hear their textures, additive rhythms, and string
orchestration in the work of everyone from Nicolas Jaar to James Blake to Frank Ocean
(whom Greenwood helped produce).

Playlist: "Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box" / "Everything in Its Right Place" / "Kid A"
/ "Like Spinning Plates" / "Kinetic" / "Feral" / "The Gloaming" / "Decks Dark" / "Life in a
Glasshouse"

Apple Music | Spotify

So you want to get into: Political, Dystopian Radiohead?

"Dystopian" is to Radiohead as "purple" is to Princeit's the milieu they inhabit, seeped into
every dissonant refrain and piece of conceptual album art. The band has plenty of songs that
don't have to do with technological isolation or Western tyranny (more on those later), but
themes of consumerism, narcissism, and hypocrisy have been embedded in Radiohead's
work since the band first began reeling from the sudden fame of 1993's "Creep." Subsequent
releases have gone on to tackle everything from modern disconnectedness (Ok Computer) to
fear and apathy (Kid A) to political corruption (Hail to the Thief).

Radiohead doesn't uphold the legacy of political music so much as holds a mirror to
it, inverting dialogues sparked by forebears like Bob Dylan (see: the squarely un-Dylan
"Subterranean Homesick Alien") to ask how the hell we got here. Political, Dystopian
Radiohead offers some of the band's headiest work, but it's also some of the group's most
ferocious and vulnerable, tapping into that human thing inside us that knows most of what
we accept as normal isn't.

This subset is also the material from which much of the band's pioneering work emerged,
incorporating electronics and distorted production as both a nod to the former
genre's history of dissent, and as a means of underscoring the themes and paradoxes of
their subject matter. Some of it is intentionally abstract, as with the chilling Mac speech
processor featured on OK Computer's "Fitter Happier," but a lot of it makes for some of
Radiohead's most sonically gripping work, from the ambient techno of "Idioteque" to the
garage-punk of "Electioneering" to the trip-hop of popular B-side "Talk Show Host." Though
recent albums have focused more on relationships than social commentary, Political
Radiohead made a timely return on last year's A Moon Shaped Pool, loaded with all-too-
apropos political paranoia: "Stay in the shadows / Cheer at the gallows / This is a round up /
This is a low flying panic attack."

Playlist: "The National Anthem" / "Idioteque" / "You and Whose Army?" / "2+2=5"
/ "Electioneering" / "Talk Show Host" / "Subterranean Homesick Alien" / "Down Is the New
Up" / "Burn the Witch"/ "Fitter Happier" / "Bodysnatchers"

Apple Music | Spotify

So you want to get into: Intimate, Lovelorn Radiohead?

"It's always confused the living shit out of me that anyone could shag to our music," Thom
Yorke once said. "This girl come up to me, she says she bangs to 'Paranoid Android.' How?!"

Right there with you, buddy. But when Thom and the lads aren't busy getting heavy or
deconstructing pop, Radiohead writes some pretty remarkable ballads and orchestral pieces,
much of which take on love and intimacy.

This includes much of 2007's In Rainbowsif Radiohead does have a bone-worthy album,
it's that onealong with much of A Moon Shaped Pool, a record largely centered on the
disintegration of Yorke's 23-year relationship with the mother of his children. But every
Radiohead album has at least one of these delicate, often slow-burning numbers, and
they're the reason the band makes great albums, not just great songs.

If Yorke is ruthless as a rock songwriter, he's equally elegant and austere when turning his
reflections inward. Here you'll find tracks that take on everything from profound alienation
("How to Disappear Completely") to mortality ("Videotape") to unbearable desire ("All I
Need"). They're not all about love, but they're just as intimate, spotlighting the band as
masterful musical impressionists, and Yorke as a singular tenor. Together, they make
for ephemeral callbacks to something tender, in the most exposed sense of the word. You
really don't need to listen to the lyrics to get it (but you should).

"I'm not here / This isn't happening," Yorke repeats over sighing strings and guitar on "How
to Disappear Completely." Neither the lyrics nor the instruments are very effective on their
own, but combined, they elevate to something immediately human and familiar: The
spiritual siege of being so gripped by sorrow, it's all you can do to repeat a mantra for
distraction.

Radiohead's music is a lot like film in that way, evoking a kind of unmoored nostalgia
maybe for past emotions that have no connection to the band, or maybe for things that
haven't even happened yet. But it's there, in the quiet between the rise and fall of strings,
filling the pauses and refrains. What you're feelingand this goes way beyond the gloom
is as much an instrument as the rest.

Playlist: "Pyramid Song" / "True Love Waits" / "How to Disappear Completely" / "Videotape"
/ "Nude" / "Motion Picture Soundtrack" / "All I Need" / "Like Spinning Plates (Live)"
/ "Identikit" / "Codex"