Author: joseph

An interlude on the Radiohead.com web site entitled “Trustees” has the following text:

Well, they are private trustees. They’re not public trustees. And let’s not forget the Internet was developed through enormous public subsidy, through taxpayer dollars. And yet now we’re in a situation where these mergers are being greeted with exclamations of, if not surprise, then at least, “Wow, this is amazing; this is humongous, $350 billion.”
But the very mass media they’re increasingly corporatized are not asking the fundamental questions about these mergers. And I think people who are sitting at home contemplating what this really portends need to look at demanding and need, in fact, to demand antitrust action because in lieu of that, this is going to be looked at as a horrendous, perhaps irreversible step, towards the concentration of media control in very, very few hands.
Yes, this is the radiohead website.

This text is excerpted from a January 10, 2000 PBS NewsHour interview conducted by Ray Suarez with Jim Ledbetter, Bruce Leichtman, and David Bennahum regarding the AOL/Time Warner merger. This merger has been cited before in Radiohead’s art work.

djBC has mashed-up Radiohead and U-God. Available here: “Nothing In It’s Right Place” (sic). Via atease.

I will be lecturing on Radiohead and America at the University of Warwick in Coventry, England this May. An abstract of the talk:

“Radiohead’s America”

This multimedia presentation explores how Radiohead, an English experimental music group, critiques America’s global socio-economic influence in the twenty-first century. In their music, videos, cover art, and web sites, the band elaborates this indirect but incisive critique via complex visual, sonic and lyrical allusions to the work of novelists George Orwell and Thomas Pynchon; painters Anselm Kiefer and Jean Dubuffet; and musicians John Cage and Charles Mingus. In this way, Radiohead’s critique differs significantly from those by many English and American music groups and musicians. While Blur, Wilco, Ben Folds, Jimi Hendrix and others condemn post-industrial Americans’ isolation, apathy and consumerism, Radiohead targets America’s current world situation as an instance of a trans-historical, trans-cultural problem famously articulated by Lord Acton: power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Though this critique is a prominent part of the band’s music and art, Radiohead consistently denies that their work is anything but escapist. Using Adorno’s writings on lyric poetry, this presentation will clarify the band’s escapism as a tortured pastoralism where protagonists desire escape—from personal and private societal pressures, from impotent technologies—but never finally achieve it. This desire for escape plays an integral role in how the band imagines American political power. On their web site in December 2004, for instance, images of miniature crying minotaurs form a collage with an oil-well pump photograph and pictures of George W. Bush and his first-term cabinet members. In this digital piece (with the file name “nicepeople-1.jpg”), the crying minotaurs, supreme mythic symbol of impossible escape, manifest the band’s escapism as an exaggerated pessimism concerning America’s occupation of Iraq—or as their 2003 song “2+2=5” argues, “There’s no way out.” In conclusion, this presentation argues that Radiohead’s pessimistic aesthetic is a pastiche, one masking a serious call for committed political activism.

The book is now available for pre-order as a paperback on Amazon.com.

stayed in bed all day. very cold. the DEMONS are coming for me. so is the tax man.

http://www.chieftanmews.com/

“Think about it: The notional profits of a single corporate project would be enough to provide a hundred days of employment a year at minimum wages (calculated at a weighted average across different states) for 25 million people. That’s five million more than the population of Australia. That is the scale of the horror of neo-liberalism.”

—from Arundhati Roy’s acceptance speech for the Sydney Peace Prize by (from Znet via MeFi).

As reported on At Ease, Thom Yorke is currently reading Alastair McIntosh’s book Soil and Soul: People versus Corporate Power. McIntosh is a Fellow of the Edinburgh-based Centre for Human Ecology (CHE).

As At Ease reports, Radiohead’s music is now available for download at Tescodownloads.com (go direct to Radiohead). The irony of purchasing Radiohead songs via a grocery store chain is too obvious to warrant comment. Tesco was founded in the UK in 1924, as this page explains.

“They’re getting ready to come in and tell me what for and they walk in and get overwhelmed by the atmosphere, and they say, ‘Man, you’re looking pretty,'” he said. “And therefore you need people to walk in on those days when you’re not looking so good and say, ‘You’re not looking so good, Mr. President.'”

NYTimes.com, November 4, 2004

Ham. Does it not, thinkst thee, stand me now vpon
He that hath kil’d my King and whor’d my Mother,
Popt in betweene th’election and my hopes,
Throwne out his Angle for my proper life,
And with such coozenage; is’t not perfect conscience,
To quit him with this arme? and is’t not to be damn’d,
To let this Canker of our nature come
In further euill?