[Just a reminder: this is the fourth in a five-part series exploring the greatness that is Radiohead. If you haven't read the first three, skip down the page to Saturday, June 12, and work your way forward.] Four quick time-cue beeps sweep us into “Paranoid Android.” If the popular long-running BBC radio program has taught [...]
[Just a reminder: this is the third in a five-part series exploring the greatness that is Radiohead. If you haven't read the first two, skip down the page to Saturday, June 12, and work your way forward.] On Radiohead’s second album, The Bends, the same mythic battle plays out in songs like the first single, “Fake [...]
I suggested yesterday that we might think of Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees” as a kind of alternative-rock power ballad, and I promised to run through the song’s emotional arc. It starts simply, with Thom Yorke singing softly over a strummed acoustic guitar. The musical texture builds with each verse, adding by degrees bass, cello, electric [...]
[Final installment in a three-part posting, republishing an essay that first appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education last September.--KD] I’ve already suggested that for some of us, the appeal of the bad voice is that it could be ours; more generally, we respond to bad voices because they sound so frail, so human. There’s [...]