Category: Uncategorized

The New Yorker article on Radiohead is available online here.

There is an article on Radiohead in The Guardian: “The term … is disintermediation.” Yorke was interviewed by the Chicago Tribune: “When you come to see us play you aren’t going to Disneyland … Or maybe you are.”

Jonny Greenwood plays an ondes martenot on “How to Disappear Completely.”

I have written an essay on Radiohead’s antivideos.

Radiohead has released a video for “I Might Be Wrong” that is only available on the internet here in the QuickTime multimedia format. The full-length video, directed by the inestimable Chris Bran of the vapour brothers, was a top story on the Apple Computers web site. A collage built from previously released Amnesiac antivideos and footage for an unreleased video of “Pyramid Song,” the video for “I Might Be Wrong” visually enacts the song’s alternation between disturbingly anxious and calmly claustrophobic moods.

I am a member of the Radiohead Webring. (Join / Home / Previous / Next / Random).

Rain Down Industries.
Follow Me Around.
Idioteque.

The feared commodification of music is rhetorically haunted by metaphors elaborating a loss of control–an ugly, impersonal totalitarian threat to the artists’ unbridled creativity. But this confident vilification of capital as totalitarian in its control should give pause. As Slavoj Zizek maintains in Did Someone Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the Mis(use) of a Notion, “reference to a ‘totalitarian’ threat sustains a kind of unwritten Denkverbot (prohibition against thinking) similar to the infamous Berufsverbot (prohibition against being employed by any state institution) in late 1960s Germany” (3). The totalitarian threat capitalism presents to music, to borrow Zizek’s formulation, becomes “a kind of stopgap: instead of enabling us to think, forcing us to acquire a new insight into the historical reality it describes, it relieves us of the duty to think, or even actively prevents us from thinking” (3).

Zizek, Slavoj. Did Someone Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the Mis(use) of a Notion. London and New York: Verso, 2001.

“Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music” (8).

Cage, John. Silence. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1961.

At 8:15pm on August 29, 1952 the Benefit Artists Welfare Fund gathered in the Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, New York to hear the pianist David Tudor perform John Cage’s latest composition. They heard nothing, a nothing entitled 4’33”. Inspired by Robert Rauschenberg’s three-paneled White Painting of 1951, the handwritten score indicated a silence of three movements. According to the original performance program, the first movement was 30 seconds, the second was 2 minutes and 23 seconds and the last was 1 minute and 40 seconds. Music without music: is it still music? Are music videos without music still music videos?