Put this one on while I was running this morning since someone had reminded me of it this weekend and I thought its smooth, bassy, clicky beats would make good music to listen to as I ran up and down Charlottesville’s foothills. I was right. And I was surprised to find that beyond the beats and the great treated pianos, I really liked the lyrics, too.
I have always felt one step behind the Radiohead thing, like there was a depth or energy or appeal to their music that escaped me. Having now caught up with nearly everything in their corpus besides B-sides, I would say that, no, to the contrary, I have pretty much been right with them, although perhaps not as fanatical, prone to exagerration at worst, passionate at best, as those with whom I have talked to about the band. I think that Radiohead has done a lot of innovative, fun, sublime things with music, and without ever seeming too trendy or pretentious about it, and I think they are a prime candidate for the most impressive post-Nirvana rock band, bar none. But I wonder whether any of that matters. I give Radiohead a lot of credit for at least attempting to stay political, avoiding boy-girl love lyrics (although they do have plenty of these), experimenting with cutting edge electronic sounds, veering away from verse-chorus-verse song structures. They do all of these things, but in what measure? What difference does it really make in such a stylistically radical, and radically diverse musical universe? Not much, I don’t think, which is why I respect Radiohead and listen to their music a lot, but could never herald them as innovators, trendsetters, tastemakers in the vein of Hendrix, Presley, the Bomb Squad, Beefheart, Metallica.
And since this is my major complaint against Radiohead, and a weak one admittedly: Not innovative enough! I was particularly surprised that what I like most about Yorke’s “Eraser” is that it is much closer to a typical ‘love album,’ as I hear it, than I think anything Radiohead has done since “The Bends.” Despite the clicky beats, and the frequently far out treated pianos, it sounds to me like Yorke is, in the main, singing about and addressing these lyrics to an ex-wife, ex-lover, maybe even a bandmate or a child or a friend. I’m figuring that if I scoured other reviews of the album or interviews with Yorke, I could dig up the biographical tidbit that eludes me here, but I don’t want to. I don’t want that immediate gratification. I’m much happier listening to an album about divorce or growing older that at times verges on something not really like spoken-word or vocalese gibberish, but downright rap music (not hip-hop, rap), and wondering what’s going on. Yorke has stumbled upon some musical formula – confessional lyrics over new electro beats – that I really like. Obviously, he’s been doing something like this for years with Radiohead, but here, solo, it is more naked and, whether good or bad, more warm, more human. Can we make pop music and ever really avoid this?
