Pop Is Dead: How Radiohead shed their skin and changed the music industry

Despite the arena-ready choruses and prog-rock leanings that characterized their 1990’s output, Radiohead in the 21st century have been all about simplicity. From the repetition of the opening chords on “Everything In It’s Right Place” – the first track on their 2000 release Kid A – to Thom Yorke’s fragile and restrained solo debut The Eraser, the band that brought the world the six-and-a-half minute mini-rock opera about a certain insecure robot now seemed oddly content displaying an uncharacteristic clarity and conciseness. This transformation ultimately allowed Radiohead to remain relevant at a time when most other ’90s bands were struggling to stay afloat. And not only did the band survive, they thrived in the new era of digital music, remaining on the cutting edge of technology even as its members began pushing their forties. Not only that, but they are also one of a very select group of musical artists that could be considered a contender for “most important band of the decade” not once but twice and because of this it is worth taking a look back at the extent to which Thom Yorke and company affected the last decade of music, both artistically through Kid A and technically through In Rainbows, and where to go from there.

Anyone watching Meeting People Is Easy, the documentary covering their 1997 world tour, could see that after OK Computer, Radiohead were clearly in need of a change of pace. They were simultaneously the most loved and most hated band in the world, topping dozens of “best of” lists while at the same time becoming the embodiment of pretension and arrogance among those who saw their music as nothing more than a whiny Brit moaning over a bunch of dreary noise. And change they did. Though the new direction may not have won over many of their detractors, Kid A became perhaps the strangest album ever to debut at number one on the Billboard charts. They also accomplished the seemingly impossible feat of becoming even more polarizing than before. Nick Hornby, author of High Fidelity, called the album commercial suicide while NME accused the band of “playing one-handed just to prove they can, scared to commit [themselves] emotionally.”

Like Republican criticism of Obama’s health care plan, though, it felt as if Kid A’s strongest critics hadn’t even bothered to listen to the album and were merely basing their judgments on what they heard from other like-minded critics. “How to Disappear Completely,” for example, was one of the band’s most emotional songs to date. Despite some of the not-so-positive reviews the album still managed to garner three Grammy Nominations and Radiohead was named as Spin Magazine’s “Band of the Year, starting the millennium off with a bang.

Already Radiohead were utilizing the Internet as a marketing tool, an idea still in its beginning stages in early 2000. Eschewing traditional singles and music videos, Radiohead chose instead to release a series “blips” online, short films set to music from the album, and even streamed the album, something unheard of at the time. In a move that would become standard practice throughout the rest of the decade, Kid A was leaked a month before it was released and was said to have been downloaded from Napster over a million times before the official release. In an eerily prophetic interview that would have made Lars Ulrich cringe, Thom Yorke was quoted in Time as saying “The cool thing about Napster is… it encourages enthusiasm for music in a way that the music industry has long forgotten to do. I think anyone sticking two fingers up at … the whole fucking thing is wonderful as far as I’m concerned.”

The genius of Kid A and Amnesiac is that, sonically speaking, the band didn’t actually really bring anything new to the table. Many of the more ambient songs would have sounded perfectly at home on a Boards of Canada album while “Idioteque” or “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors” would not have been out of place on the next Aphex Twin release and that’s not even taking into account the many lesser known bands that had been playing around with these sounds for years. Radiohead merely did what critically acclaimed but still popular bands have done for decades. There was Punk before the Sex Pistols and Grunge before Nirvana, however, bands like The Dictators and Green River weren’t about to blow up into international sensations. Radiohead brought previously niche sounds to the masses, many of which had their first introduction to IDM and numerous other underground genres via Kid A.

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It started with a blog post:

“Hello everyone.

Well, the new album is finished, and it’s coming out in 10 days;

We’ve called it In Rainbows.

Love from us all.

Jonny”

The next day Radiohead’s official website crashed, overloaded by thousands upon thousands of fan’s fervently pre-ordering either the digital download of the album or the diskbox, which included a vinyl copy and bonus disc. The odd thing about this “preorder,” however, was the little box on the page in lieu of a price that let you enter any amount you chose, including a grand total of absolutely nothing. Record companies collectively held their breaths as journalists everywhere reported on their inevitable demise. In the first month after the album was announced, 1.2 million people visited the In Rainbows website, making their little project not just successful, but a sensation.

The download statistics revealed as much about human nature as they did about the state of the music industry. Nearly two-fifths of the people who downloaded the album paid for it, with the average price being $6, showing that, despite what the record companies attempted to prove for almost a decade, music lovers are still willing to pay for their music as long as the process is simple and affordable (please disregard the fact that for some reason more people actually illegally downloaded the album than acquired it through the official site, which is another sociological question entirely).

Just a few short months later Trent Reznor tried a similar method for Nine Inch Nail’s album Ghosts I-IV. Despite being offered on his website as a free download, it still became Amazon’s best-selling mp3 album of 2008. It began to look like the RIAA had less and less ground to stand on and despite winning major lawsuits against college students and single mothers alike, in 2009 they announced an end to their legal crusade and instead began focusing on promoting legal alternatives (only the ones that would net them huge profits of course). The big question, though, was whether or not more bands would follow in Radiohead’s footsteps.

As noble as the idea of legally giving away music for free is, it must be remembered that not only were Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails big stars before their forays into musical charity, they are arguably two of the handful or so bands of our generation that will be remembered and revered forty or fifty years from now. So how does this method help the little garage band playing out of their parent’s basement? Sure networking and promotion sites like MySpace have shown that giving away tracks can help get your name out (i.e. Lily Allen and Katy Perry), but it always amounts to parts of the whole; free samples that require a purchase to get more. Lily Allen herself recently summed up the argument in a MySpace post when she wrote, “Last week in an article in the Times these guys from [Pink Floyd and Radiohead] said file sharing music is fine. It probably is fine for them. They do sell-out arena tours and have the biggest Ferrari collections in the world. For new talent, though, file sharing is a disaster as it’s making it harder and harder for new acts to emerge.” It’s true, while Thom Yorke and Trent Reznor have shown the viability of this new method of music distribution for acts for which there is already an established demand, it has yet to be successful for a fledging, or even mid-level, act.

There were few shining beacons of light this decade when it came to the music industry. Depending on who you talked to, the RIAA’s crackdown on illegal downloads were, at best an unfortunate overreaction to a new form of media that should be embraced rather than feared and, at worst, the death of an entire industry. For a couple years there at the turn of the century, it looked as if Napster was going to change the way the music industry worked, bringing music to the people and running an antiquated, bloated method of music distribution out of business. Then the lawsuits started. While legal download services like iTunes and Rhapsody have done a lot to level the playing field, the bright future of an egalitarian means of producing and distributing music is just as uncertain as it has always been. So the question is, did Radiohead succeed in creating a new system for producing and distributing music? The short answer? Sorta. The long answer? Well, like Radiohead in the ’90s, that one’s not so simple.

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2. 10 Music Events to Expect in the ’10s
3. Revival or Renewal: The cultural influence of O Brother, Where Art Thou?
4. Michigan Seems Like A Dream: Sufjan Stevens’ Postmodern Dilemma
5. Vampires and Failures: Musings on the Garage Rock Revival Scene of 2001-2004

Tagged as: 2009 Year End