Sunday, May 04, 2008
A+E, Music, Reviews
Saving people is easy
Music, not message, key to Radiohead’s credibility
Thom Yorke of Radiohead
Photos/Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images
RADIOHEAD
w/Liars
Thursday, May 8
Lakewood Amphitheatre
404-443-5000
www.livenation.com
By Laurence Station
Fifteen years ago, the fact that jetting across the Atlantic cost as much as fueling one’s car for an entire year apparently wasn’t that big of a deal to Radiohead. Back in the pre-“Inconvenient Truth” era of 1993, the then up-and-coming British quintet had the distinction of being the first band to appear on “Late Night with Conan O’Brien.” How times have changed: When Radiohead returned to “Late Night” last month, the environmentally conscious group opted to save on the carbon offsets, taping an exclusive live studio performance for the show instead.
A convenient YouTube comparison reveals startling contrasts: The boyishly young, 1993 Radiohead had yet to finds its footing, belting out the attention-grabbing alterna-hit “Creep” with tight, coiled efficiency, a shockingly blond Thom Yorke essentially hiding behind his peroxide-blanched coif. The grizzled Radiohead of 2008 eschewed rock-star artifice in favor of using its “Green Week” appearance to rail against egregious CO2 emitters, snarkily dedicating a woozily reserved performance of “House of Cards” to America’s Commander in Chief.
Present-day Radiohead obviously has the cachet (both culturally and economically) to set whatever terms it wants regarding appearances and soapbox proselytizing. Thankfully, Radiohead (unlike, sorry to say, U2) has managed to remain artistically relevant deep into its career, proving that listeners are considerably more forgiving of breast-beating sloganeering—providing the band delivers the musical goods.
After the grab-bag mash-up of 2003’s “Hail to the Thief,” Yorke and Co. crafted “In Rainbows,” the group’s most thematically and sonically unified offering to date. The jazzy textures hinted at on “Hail” are in full bloom here, underpinning the hyper-staccato opener “15 Step” and the sinuously assertive “Jigsaw Falling into Place.” The album finds Radiohead so comfortable in its creative skin that the tension to push the envelope that fueled 2000’s “Kid A” is no longer an issue.
The “OK Computer”-era documentary “Meeting People Is Easy” reveals a band recoiling from the typical jet-set rock ’n’ roll trappings. Such twitchy reticence helps define the group’s appeal: There’s never been a sense of entitlement or presumption of worth. This is a band that works very hard at pushing its creative boundaries and is fortunate enough to do so with a cult following large enough to guarantee a healthy return on investment, no matter what less-trodden avenue the band explores (like last year’s infamous “pay what you want” offer for an “In Rainbows” download). And it’s obvious the new frontier of content distribution was territory begging to be settled. Peer/critic Trent Reznor may have not been a fan of the band’s approach, but he quickly followed suit with a customized download release format of his own.
Could the 1993 Radiohead have made such a brash, non-label-affiliated move? Of course not. But that’s the point: Bands have always relied on live appearances and merchandise sales to stay afloat. The music, be it released to radio stations or given directly to listeners, is simply another form of marketing. And in this anti-artifact age of broadband and bit-torrent file sharing, content delivery has never been easier. But unless some clever programmer can make a carbon copy of Radiohead and have the band play live in 100 places at once, the ultimate trump for the band (or any group) will remain its exclusive appearances, playing songs that have (theoretically) infiltrated every corner of the globe.
Radiohead has survived the transition from a label-based system to Internet peer-to-peer distribution by sticking to its artistic guns, thus remaining immeasurably credible to its fans. While it might be hypocritical for any globe-trotting band to carp about individual environmental responsibility, at least Radiohead realizes that at the end of the day, it’s still more about the music than the message. SP