New Radiohead

Grab your best headphones and crank it up. There's a bit of the Thorn remix of Siouxsie's 'Overground' in this, maybe also a touch of 'Once There Was A Hushpuppy' from the Beasts of The Southern Wild soundtrack. At any rate, me like (a mood-changer after a strange week of being in a post-Prince funk albeit with lots of good funk).

Strange how witches and witchcraft  are so much in the air right now after the near-triumph of The VVitch (2015).

Update: OK Computer was released in 1997 (the year of 'Bittersweet Symphony', 'Barbie Girl', Spice World, Homogenic, and also Titanic, LA Confidential, Boogie Nights, My Best Friend's Wedding, Starship Troopers), which is as far away from Now as Sgt Pepper and The Graduate and Belle de Jour were from 1986 (the year of Master of Puppets, Reign In Blood, True Blue, So, Graceland, The Queen Is Dead, Prince's Parade, and also Aliens, The Fly, Ferris Bueller, Platoon, Blue Velvet). IIRC, 1967 felt like eons ago in 1986. Does 1997 feel that far away to anyone now?

Focus-pulling in The Stepford Wives (1975)

Radiohead have long made no bones about being inspired/haunted by The Stepford Wives (1975). The final track on Hail To The Thief (2003), Wolf At The Door explicitly refers to the basic concept:

Stepford wives who are we to complain?
Investments and dealers investments and dealers
Cold wives and mistresses
Cold wives and sunday papers.

And Thom Yorke told the NY Times that the excellent Bodysnatchers from In Rainbows (2007) was "inspired by Victorian ghost stories, The Stepford Wives and his own feeling of 'your physical consciousness trapped without being able to connect fully with anything else.'"

But this influence appears to have first manifested itself in Jake Scott's acclaimed video for Fake Plastic Trees, one of Radiohead's most beloved early songs.

The video's supermarket setting reprises in part the film's famous, post-climactic 'supermarket scene' (although the vid's supermarket unlike TSW's is a blinding, high-contrast, sci-fi white, which may well reflect another specific influence). But Scott's video also makes very extensive use of very tight/shallow focus which is TSW's visual signature more generally.

My video puts TSW's big focus-pulling scenes and shots together, beginning with the supermarket scene (which the 2004 remake butchered). I cut my video to Radiohead's Fake Plastic Trees, for all of the obvious reasons mentioned above, but unfortunately that soundtrack has been blocked. I therefore recommend that (at some point) you mute my vid. and synch your own copy of FPT up to it from the top (it works wonderfully!).

I've also assembled some frames from FPT's video and some frames from TSW to help make the parallelism clear.



I highly recommend TSW. Along with Cronenberg's Shivers (1975), it gives you the perfect image of the backstory to current, unending cultural wars (particularly in the US).

Update March 13, 2012:
Consider the posh-/alterna-babe who flickers discreetly throughout the FPT vid (and whose look roughly crosses the automatized Joanna Eberhart (Katharine Ross) from TSW's supermarket scene with Andie McDowell's character from Four Weddings and A Funeral):

The second time the posh gal appears she trails a small, white dog with brown patches. But Joanna Eberhart's small, white dog with brown patches, Fred, plays a crucial, extended role in TSW (1975):

Note too that the final track on Radiohead's OK Computer (1997), The Tourist, begins with the paranoid/depressed singer imagining himself automatized/replaced and triggering a pet's suspicions:

It barks at no one else but me
Like it's seen a ghost
I guess it's seen the sparks a-flowing
No one else would know.

While the trope of robots who pass as humans but who can't fool animals is a sci-fi commonplace, in the context of general Radiohead interest in TSW, the details of dogs and sparks rings the TSW bell again. And, of course, the FPT video's focus-pulled/differentially blurry images was evidently a touchstone for OK Computer's cover-art:

In sum, TSW (1975) is occasionally overground in Radiohead 2.0 (Kid A and after), but its themes and visual signatures are a component of Radiohead 1.0 (pre-Kid A (2000)) at its most triumphant.

New Radiohead

The second half of Kid A and the first half of Hail to the Thief having a baby = can’t keep my eyes op….zzzz. I don't want to pull a Nick Hornby, but this music does produce a very specific, 'shutting-down' physiological response in me. I hope that Radiohead intended this - a last-thing-at-night-on-the-ipod record. I listen to a lot of minimalist music, and it very rarely affects me this way. Wake us up please Ms Welch:

Update Feb. 20: OK, King of Limbs sounds a lot better and more interesting through headphones (or, I assume, loud through really good speakers) than it did at moderate volume through computer speakers. In general, it does seem to me now that there's enough here to reward rapt attention to micro-details over months. Not the sort of thing most (or even any other) bands can count on of course, but it's good to be Radiohead! For myself, however, I think I'll always struggle to stay awake through KoL. Since I'm always in the market for a good soporific/anti-insomniac, I'll regularly use it that way; late at night on ze ipod. For music that's to be consciously enjoyed, however, I'll have to look elsewhere. Catching up with Florence (does she remind anyone else of Jenny Lewis? doesn't her presence kind of fuse Lewis with the Watson Twins' height and quasi-hauteur?), processing the new PJ Harvey, getting into both Anna Calvi and The Pierces, looking forward immensely to the new Lykke Li... all these clever, intriguing, striking gals. Is it just my imagination or is pop music overall, and at every level overwhelmingly female these days (and certainly much more that way than it's ever been before)?

LCD Soundsystem, 1983, 1987, and all that

Dance yrself clean, the first track on LCD Soundsystem's forthcoming cd is fantastic: a song/record of the year candidate. Somewhat disappointingly, however, the core of that song is lifted wholesale - though reverse engineered rather than literally sampled - from an obscure 1983 B-side, The Pool's Jamaica running and (alt. version) Jamaica resting. Here are the two tracks for comparison [Update May 14, 2010: 'running' has disappeared from youtube just as LCD's opus is being released - interesting! I therefore link to the less-identical 'resting' version]:
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Of course, we've been here before. For example, Radiohead's Creep builds directly on the Hollies classic Air that I breathe. Here are those two tracks for comparison:



A closer comparison, because it's in the artsy-dance genre: Madonna's Justify my love was built around a direct sample of Public Enemy's instrumental track, drum-loop, Security of the first world (on whose provenance, more below!). Here are those tracks:


And, as a final self-test case, which 1987 smash wholesale lifted from/reverse engineered this song by Colonel Abrams from 1985?


In all these cases, rather like when we find out that a beloved song we thought was original is in fact a cover (Madness didn't originate, let alone write 'It must be Love'? Inconceivable!), we end up with an objectively clearer view of who contributed what to the beloved item. On one level, we are only too happy to re-apportion credit accordingly. On another level, however, this is painful. Re-apportioning credit means exactly undermining at least some of the basis for your original enthusiasm and affection, and fans and (later) artists alike hate that. Thus, the Hollies' gain is Thom Yorke's loss. Creep's still a great song, and what Yorke and Jonny Greenwood added is magic, but overall the credit has to be shared. Similarly then, LCD's song may end up being the song of 2010, and LCD will deserve most of the credit if that happens, but a kid in Austin, TX in 1983 will also deserve some.

Of course, a large part of what most of us like about LCD is how deftly they channel what was great about early New Order, mid-period Talking Heads, The Passage in their pomp, and so on. So LCD's general debt to 1979-1984 pop has always been clear (just as Daft Punk's has been). But in the case of Dance yrself clean, LCD channels directly and specifically. A specific debt is thereby incurred, and a specific credit is therefore due.

So much for the moral/appreciation side of things, what of the legal/monetary side? I think LCD should 'man up' and give The Pool a writing credit (hence a share of any royalties). That's what Thom Yorke ended up doing with the Hollies for Creep. At any rate, some reasonable, formal deal should be made. If a writing credit is thought to be beyond the pale, then perhaps something like a sample clearance fee could be negotiated. (Note however that Daft Punk gave George Duke a writing credit, not just a one-off payment, for the use of his crucial sample on Digital love. Note too that LCD will in any case be negotiating from a position of relative strength: The Pool, which was never on a major label is very unlikely to have anything like The Rolling Stones' Verve-spanking, lawyer demons at its disposal!).

Despite being mad as hell about not getting paid, Public Enemy(PE) didn't get a writing credit or, as far as anyone knows, any other form of payment for having their work be the backbone of Justify my love. The reason for PE's frustration in this regard seems to have been that Madonna and her collaborators knew that PE's beats in large part reverse engineered a section of James Brown's Funky drummer, and that, more generally, M. & co. guessed correctly that PE were living in too much of a legal glass house to throw any real stones.

Colonel Abram's strip-miners, Stock-Aitken-Waterman (SAW), just brazened out the charge that they stole most of someone else's record. Indeed they took being hated by the cognoscenti to the bank for the next few years of pop! Assuming that The Pool aren't in a PE-like glass house (i.e., that they were in fact the way we wish LCD were: just deeply influenced and impressed by things like I Zimbra) then the SAW/Colonel Abrams case like Radiohead/Hollies seems like a good model for LCD/The Pool.

In sum, LCD's basic legal/monetary choice is whether to be honorable like Radiohead (or did the Hollies have to threaten to have the Stones' lawyers drag Yorke to hell?) or brazen like SAW. If LCD takes the latter path then this case may end up famously testing the proposition that 1987-style brazening it out is still possible in our youtube/feet-of-clay-finding era? I suspect that it isn't, hence my advice to LCD remains: your song's great, don't screw around with it, make a deal.