Comments on: The meaning of Radiohead

By: hich

hich — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 11:07:42 +0000

Jamie, thanks for the comment.

In terms of the piece being unsubstantial, I plead guilty. I had to keep it short for space reasons (Ceasefire is a print magazine, as well as an online one). The ‘Meaning of’ series are written with an explicit admission (at least to myself) that these are mere sketches that offer a number of pointers about what a certain artist means. In fairness, i should probably have called it “what Radiohead means TO ME” but I sort of assume that’s what every writer implicitly intends whenever they issue judgements of value.

Peace etc
H
P.S. I should probably fix that error in the lyrics

By: Jamie Ellis

Jamie Ellis — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 10:39:28 +0000

I must say I found the most appropriate and relevant response to this article to be the first one where the Karma Police lyric was corrected. Why can someone not write what Radiohead represents to them and the world without mentioning this Greig essay? What a load of pompous cobblers. Why not just publish said essay then?

That said I found this to be a very insubstantial piece which displayed a rather scant knowledge of the band. It barely mentioned any lyrics nor did it quote anyone from the band. In understanding this cultural behemoth, I found it vital to watch the uncomfortable yet fascinating Meeting People Is Easy to understand their alienation as both a band struggling to cope with their success, and with their (certainly Thom’s) inner demons. Yorke said, when he released The Eraser, that (paraphrased) ‘finally I realised my anger had become external, at the world, and no longer myself’. Something along those lines could have demonstrated the intense humanity to what the band do, rather than depicting Radiohead as some kind of faceless binary cultural movement because they made OK Computer. There’s a lot more to this band than this article’s author seems to be aware.

The other responses to this article come over like grown up Drowned In Sound users: ie people who love their own verbal diarrhoea and the smell of its resultant farts.

By: George

George — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 16:06:43 +0000

Greif’s essay is reprinted alongside many others that answer the question differently (or have a different question altogether) in the book Radiohead and Philosophy: Fitter Happier More Deductive (Open Court, 2009) that Brandon W. Forbes and I just finished editing. Radiohead has many meanings and many identities over the years, but I think much of their “meaning” (depending on what you, ahem, mean by that) comes at looking not at their art, but also its enormous popularity. That is owed to the connection so many people evidently feel to the sorts of alienation and uncertainty (much of it having to do with technology, as Greif emphasizes) that weave through the band’s music. But there is a lot of metaphysics, and not just notions of identity afoot. Check out Michael Thompson’s essay on Time in Chopin and “Pyramid Song.”

By: Paris

Paris — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 17:27:35 +0000

Writing an article on “The Meaning of Radiohead” without referencing Greif’s remarkable essay is a bit like writing an essay on “The Humanism of Existentialism” without referencing Sartre or one called “Animal Liberation” without mentioning Peter Singer or one called “The Meaning of Yes” without referencing Bill Martin. Thanks, Evan, for pointing this out. Greif’s essay can be found in the literary magaize “N+1″ (see http://www.nplusonemag.com/node/395/print for the first few paragraphs). Research, people, research!

By: Evan

Evan — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 06:14:56 +0000

I’d direct your attention to Mark Grief’s very insightful article, “Radiohead, or The Philosophy of Pop”—he offers a fuller analysis of the band’s socio-political positioning within this particular historic moment, and generates a fairly lively description of why Radiohead matters at all just now or for the last decade. Sublimating the self, the ego, dipping into anonymity against tyrant/fascist forces, against a police state, against the “emotionally bankrupt age,” you approximate why this should be so—if only to formalize Radiohead’s development as something half-marketing/half-artistic evolution. In this way, the comparison with Ricky Gervais has some merit. Otherwise, I suppose they are only so similar in that both outfits are British. And Kid A, even before Amnesiac, seems the more risky of their albums hinging as it does on unfamiliar, electronic, cinematic soundscapes, abstracting away from ‘rock’ as such (with Amnesiac profiting as the outtakes of that set). In Rainbows seems more of a return to general rock elements of grunge, the Seattle scene, with the sophisticated computer engineering of OK Computer/Kid A & the like polishing it up. Anyway. Perhaps what is interesting about Radiohead is that the band’s trajectory anticipated certain & key elements of popular music (voice manipulation/electronic audioscapes) fused now with ideas about pop culture (the lyrics and their articulation of mass media/mass terror/invisibility). Probably I’m paraphrasing—apologies.

Idioteque is of course my favorite song by the band.

By: Kuzball

Kuzball — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 19:46:45 +0000

That lyric from Karma Police goes “For a minute THERE, I lost myself.”