Radiohead Sucks

For a long time now, I've been hearing about how great Radiohead's music is.  I hear a lot of words tossed around: brilliant, challenging, intellectual, symphonic, post-modern...blah, blah, blah.

Well, kids, I'm here to tell you it's a sham.  Radiohead sucks.  I remember first hearing them when I was a teenager.  They've always been a pretty whiny band, which is annoying in and of itself ("I wish I was special, you're so fucking special, but I'm a creep"), but over the years they've devolved into something even worse: monumentally pretentious. 

Call me old-fashioned but what I want out of music is something that sounds good and possibly lets me in on a feeling or truth that I hadn't perceived before.  I like to be friends with music, not have in kick me in the balls and try and rape me with a metal corncob. Music can be sad, it can be happy, it can have as its only object the causation of dancing, it can challenge me, make me think, make me cry or laugh - but it shouldn't be shrouded in layers of obfuscation and be the sound equivalent of a cynical temper tantrum.  It shouldn't want to make me bleed. It has to be tuneful and honest, and frankly it really should be about girls.  Bu above all it needs to have the hot blood of humanity pumping through its every beat!! That's key.

Sadly, Radiohead, who certainly could use their powers for good, seems to feel that music should actually annoy you.  It's like a performance art fist to the face.  I don't need the same jarring electronic sound forced into my ears while Thom Yorke screams at me in falsetto about obscure paranoid garbage.  I'll say it again: listening to Radiohead is like being raped by a robot with a metallic corncob. It's painful and alienating.

You know who would like Radiohead?  Hamlet.  That's right, Hamlet.  He'd love it.  Radiohead's music is moody, narcissistic, paranoid, cynical, insane and grating.  It's relentless in its navel gazing.  In fact, let's look at the uncanny similarity right here:

 

Let's look at what Radiohead and Hamlet think about a variety of topics:

1) Radiohead:  

She looks like the real thing
She tastes like the real thing
My fake plastic love

But I can't help the feeling
I could blow through the ceiling
If I just turn and run

And it wears me out, it wears me out
It wears me out, it wears me out 

Hamlet:

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world. 

2) Radiohead:
 

Fitter, happier, more productive,
comfortable,
not drinking too much,
regular exercise at the gym
(3 days a week),
getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries,
at ease,
eating well
(no more microwave dinners and saturated fats),
a patient better driver,
a safer car
(baby smiling in back seat),
sleeping well
(no bad dreams),
no paranoia,
careful to all animals...calm,
fitter,
healthier and more productive
a pig in a cage on antibiotics.

Hamlet:

I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.

3) Radiohead:

Flies are buzzing round my head
Vultures circling the dead
Picking up every last crumb
The big fish eat the little ones
The big fish eat the little ones
Not my problem, give me some

Hamlet:

Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest; but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me. I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious; with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves all; believe none of us.

 

You see? Now don't get me wrong, I'm sure Radiohead are serious artists and probably even smoke cloves, just as Hamlet is a great play and Shakespeare a genius...however, Hamlet himself is kind of a dick and I wouldn't want to have to be friends with the guy.  And Radiohead sucks and I wouldn't want to have to listen to them.

Radiohead makes cold, alienating, robot-music and I fucking hate it.

 

Comments

[Account Deleted]

It's tragic really. I could weep for your massive blind spot on one of the best bands ever, but instead I'm going to listen to all of my Radiohead albums while petting my robot and produce a counter blog.

[Lindsay]

I heart this post. Mostly because of the nicely done comparison between Hamlet and Radiohead (whom I very much detest). For this sir, I will gladly obtain for you two comp tickets to Hamlet at my place of business if you so wish to have them ;)

[Ben]

Oh I so wish!!!

[Proustinhisfirstbook]

If you are already alienated, it is comforting to know that others are too. If you feel secure in society, this knowledge may be irritating.

[nicole.babe]

you know..there's this thing about "new waves", the crowd spirit and all that..when something new comes up, speaking of music, and it has an extra smth, it automatically activates that spirit i was talking about..look for eg, lady gaga. true artist, or just in vogue?

[Matt]

everything you said music "needs to have" or "should have" Radiohead has it. everything you said. just know that. and they're easily the best writers of vocal melodies since The Beatles, whom which Radiohead actually got me into.

[420]

radiohead sucks, kings of leon or any other mainstream rock band beats them and it's fucking sad.

[Jeremy]

Radiohead was good once. When the whole band actually played and ol' Thom didn't puppeteer the group for his own drama. I mean, remember when the band was a band instead of supporting Thom? Listening to new Radiohead (circa: Kid A and beyond, mostly - of course they had good songs here and there) on a bright summer day just makes me want to draw the shades and sleep. Bummer from a band who brought us politically driven Electioneering.

[Kid_Ace]

While this blog brings several good points, it fails to make an accurate comparison with Hamlet and Radiohead. I'll give him the first comparison, and even some of the third accurately compares Radiohead and Shakespeare (Which brings up the question if that's even I bad thing, but I digress). The main critique I have with his blog is that Fitter Happier has NOTHING to do with Hamlet's line about living in a walnut. Fitter Happier is about how mundane life is, and how conforming to the set social norms of society leads one to a life that just fills unfulfilled. Hamlet's line is meant to show how big his ego is. He says that he could live in a walnut and still fill like a king if it were not his bad dreams. So angry blogger, how do these two lines go together? Just because both have "bad dreams" in their body does not mean they relate to each other.

[Navarth]

Radiohead is a fascinating pop phenomenon in that Thom Yorke has very limited musical ability, as well as being extremely ugly and annoying. It would've been better if Radiohead had remained the quaint low-rent cult indie band of the early 90s. But OK Computer was embarrassing. Yet Radiohead became inexplicably popular. The only possible explanation seems to have been fans' musical illiteracy. All anyone had to do was listen to Phaedra, Wish You Were Here or Autobahn to become instantly aware of Radiohead's absolute mediocrity and unworthiness. The Wall, for example, is a majestic statement which makes OK Computer or Kid A look feeble in comparison. Radiohead album sales always relied on the gullibility of the public since it had been done before and better. The difference is that Pink Floyd - whom Yorke obviously idolize - actually have songs. Good songs. But teenagers didn't want to make the effort to find any of this out, they just followed fashion's flow and still do. Perhaps the worst thing about Radiohead is that they spawned a whole genre of excruciatingly twee music for bedwetters sung in falsetto by the likes of Coldplay.

[Brandon Matson]

But I listen to Pink Floyd, Kraftwerk, and Radiohead. You guys are a let down.