Saturday, February 26, 2011

An Open Letter to Radiohead's Thom Yorke

Dear Mr. Yorke:

I’m going to go out on a limb here—hardy har har, you might say, but this is no laughing matter—and say your most recent album is your most disappointing yet.1

Speaking of laughing, there’s a joke I once heard that seems apropos here, a joke which does admittedly deal in national stereotypes, but it’s about white people, so it’s OK. Anyway, in this joke, a man visited heaven and hell, then came back. Someone asked him what heaven was like, and he said, “Great! The cooks are all French, the mechanics are all German, the lovers are Italian, the police are British, and everything’s organized by the Swiss.” When asked what hell was like, he said, “Not too much different, actually. Except the cooks are all British, the mechanics are all French, the lovers are all Swiss, the police are German, and everything’s organized by the Italians.”

ANYWAY, heaven, when it comes to late-period Radiohead, would probably be an album as warm and accessible as The Bends, as consistent and cool as OK Computer, as adventurous as Kid A and Amnesiac, and as energetic as the peaks of Hail to the Thief. In short, In Rainbows. Whereas this is as cool as Pablo Honey, as warm as OK Computer, as adventurous as The Bends,2 as consistent as Hail to the Thief, as energetic as Amnesiac, and as accessible as Kid A. Admittedly, that doesn’t quite get us to hell, but it does feel like a purgatory or limbo of some sort—a waiting period in a place where paradise is visible, but not quite attainable. (This might be worse, though; someone in purgatory at least has heaven to look forward to, whereas we’re stuck wondering if it’s behind us.) In fact, The King of Limbs might be the strongest piece of evidence yet in favor of the bizarre “1s and 0s” theory, which states that OK Computer and In Rainbows were written at the same time and conceived as a single work, then released 10 years apart purely for showmanship purposes, and to make some sort of statement about our enslavement to the digital world of binary code. In Rainbows now feels like an outlier, quality-wise, unless one organizes your discography by apparent date of conception, in which case it fits perfectly, and The King of Limbs also makes sense, fitting as it does onto a downward trajectory suggested by your underwhelming solo album, The Eraser.3

I’ve been told you’re a huge fan of the late Miles Davis, and perhaps this is part of the problem. (Wait, hear me out.) Neither Miles nor yourself was content to put out a handful of albums whose excellence put most competitors to shame. Nor were either of you satisfied to create an album that made even words like “excellent” seem inadequate; he had Kind of Blue, and you and your bandmates made OK Computer. But you’ve both seemed to relish using your later years spending—some might say squandering—your artistic capital searching for musical adventure, and in the process losing sight of much of what made you great in the first place.

Perhaps that’s a little harsh. There are, to be sure, some great songs on here, songs that take a few plays to wrap one’s head around—or rather, songs that take a few spins to sink into one’s head, but that stay there afterwards. “Bloom,” with its bright horns and swelling strings and adventurous electronics, is actually quite stunning, once one gets used to it. “Little by Little” is built on a wonderful riff that is somehow both angular and accessible. And your vocal work on “Lotus Flower” ranks up there with your best. But the memorable song: forgettable song ratio here’s far below the desired infinity, and even below the dreaded 1; by my reckoning, for every awesome song here, there are about 1 2/3 that are somewhat subpar, at least by your standards—or rather, the standards I’ve set for you, which, granted, may be a little stringent. (But, hey, I also do it to myself, I do, and that’s what really hurts.)

OK, OK. All kidding aside, it seems no coincidence that In Rainbows had a revolutionary pay-what-you-want pricing structure, whereas this one had a fixed price; it’s like you knew that people would be happy with that album on first listen and would enthusiastically recommend it, thereby driving up its market value,4 whereas this one couldn’t count on such goodwill. After all, Track 2, for instance, is just not that great. “You’ve stolen all the magic to my melody,” you croon to some Mr. Magpie, and given the magic of your previous melodies, I want to find Mr. Magpie and beat him until he gives it back. “Feral” is underdeveloped. And, frankly, the last three songs are borderline boring. I wanted to like them—I really did! I took a week to write this review, and I tried to stay away from other critical interpretations of this album, in the hopes that I could just give it time and make up my own mind about it and not be swayed by YouTube videos made by haterade-drinking hipsters. But the fact remains that I’m just not loving its general drabness and off-putting taste, and after listening to it one last time while finishing up this letter, I now feel compelled to cleanse my palate and color my palette with Rainbows.

I sometimes read a lot into your album covers; the sharp snowy computer-generated peaks on the front of Kid A, for instance, implied (to me, anyway) that you were wandering in some sort of icy Arctic artistic wasteland, and that at any moment you might be buried by an avalanche of your own pretentiousness, but that there was a lot of epic grandeur to take in all the while. OK Computer’s album cover had an arty sterility evocative of airplane emergency-exit placards, and this perfectly encapsulated the album’s deft evocation of our attempts to paint an overly comforting veneer over the panic and the vomit of postmodern life. In Rainbows’ cover had computerized words, colors, and an explosion suggesting a new energy and warmth to your exploration of these same themes. But this, with its high-school computer-art quality image of neon ghosts in front of a dark forest, sort of suggests that you are lost in the artistic woods, somehow haunted by your own past.5

I have noticed that you have a tendency to act like you’re going off on some strange tangent, waiting until we think you’re finally off your rocker before launching back into some mind-blowing performance that highlights your awesome skills.6 Indeed, toying with our expectations has become a strange part of your artistry. And with that in mind, I should mention that there’s a new theory floating about, a theory that this is but the first half of a monumental work whose second half will be dropping sometime in the next few months.7 I hope so; even if I have to hear eight Radiohead songs to get three good ones nowadays, that’s better than nothing. But more importantly, I hate to think that three good songs are all we have to show for our three-and-a-third years of waiting.



                                                                    Respectfully Yours,



                                                                    Alfonso Mangione



1 FYI, I know footnotes in a letter probably seem ridiculous and pretentious, but I’ve been reading a lot of David Foster Wallace lately, so I’m on a big footnote kick, and I’m gonna ride it ‘till the wheels fall off. And in response to the obvious objections this statement might prompt: Pablo Honey doesn’t count, for we had no expectations of you then. Kid A may have been shockingly different from its predecessors, but it at least proved you weren’t going to rest on your laurels. Amnesiac may be uneven, but it arrived so unexpectedly soon after its predecessor that we were willing to forgive that and concentrate on the high points. And Hail to the Thief was also uneven, but packed an incredible energy into its high points—plus the live shows supporting it absolutely rocked.

2 Which is still pretty adventurous, I guess.

3 Sorry! I just didn’t like it that much.

4 If you’re concerned with such unabashedly capitalist ideas, which, granted, you may not be.

5 “I’m moving out of all this,” you croon on the opener, which certainly lends credence to my theory. (A side note: is “croon” the right word? “Wail” seems harsh, and “sing” is always a little inadequate, even in your lesser moments.) ANYWAY, it’s a scary sentiment, if one takes it out of context and applies it to something to which it may not relate, which I, like most aspiring music journalists, am wont to do—I know that as an artist, you have to keep moving and all, but we do kinda like “all this.”

6 As evidence, I cite the first few seconds of Hail to the Thief, which, as one reviewer pointed out, sounds like an electronic squelch, but is really apparently the sound of a guitar being plugged in. And there is, of course, the electronic-ish sounding beginning of In Rainbows’ “15 Step,” which somehow then magically resolves into something both more conventional and more awesome. And there was a concert I saw here in Chicago at the Auditorium Theater back in 2006, a concert where you acted like you were going to play “Spinning Plates” for a closer—a song which, by that point, had become a somewhat overused closer for you—and you proceeded to do so in a very distorted and unsatisfying fashion before stopping abruptly and segueing into the most awesome version of “Everything in its Right Place” that I have ever heard. Obviously you can probably think of far more examples than I can.

7 Advocates of this theory point out that, on the last song, you advise us that “If you think this is over, then you’re wrong.” They also make note of the fact that the track’s called “Separator,” implying that it could be a division between the first and second halves of a large-ish work. Also, either the file or the link which we had to use to download it ended with “01,” implying that there will be an “02.” And lastly, but perhaps most importantly, the descriptors for the upcoming physical release of this album mention two vinyl discs of this album, something that seems entirely unnecessary given the sub-40-minute running time of these 8 tracks, unless there’s either a second disc or a remix that is already in the can.


Sunday, February 06, 2011

Tom Robbins = Tom Clancy?

OK, he may have a slightly better sense of humor, but after reading Skinny Legs and All, I'm of a mind that Tom Robbins and Tom Clancy have more in common than either would care to admit. Full review here.

Tuesday, February 01, 2011

A Poem about Columbia and Challenger

OK, I meant to post this on Friday for the 25th anniversary of the Challenger disaster, but I didn't make it home in time, so I'm posting it today on the 8th anniversary of Columbia. I wrote it that day, pretty much, and I'm not sure as to its merits as a poem, but it did seem apropos, so here goes...

seventeen years ago:
you can still remember the day, the minute, the second
the scene, the sound: the principal’s voice on the p.a.
unlike you’d ever heard it, hesitant, tentative
bearing unbearable news, an explosion in the florida sky
you couldn’t understand, and maybe he couldn’t either
why God would kill a teacher

your young eyes watched compulsively the implausible disintegration, the ugly twisted cloud
and even though you’ve seen so much since then
war, revolution, airplanes
tearing holes in buildings
all soon made antiseptic by a glass tube
saturday morning reminds you how it felt when your world was first upended

columbia
first looks like a typo next to the word tragedy
but the pictures seem familiar
smiling astronauts waving, optimistic
you know what they couldn’t

so you take your disbelief
and soundtrack it with the saddest song you know
thom yorke wailing
i’m not here
this isn’t happening

as you watch, over and over
the images, so different than that old ugly cloud
of a silent meteor, brightening and splintering
as it arcs across blue texas sky
so beautiful it breaks your heart