REAPPRAISING RADIOHEAD
New Yorker

Radiohead doesn’t sell as many records as some other major rock groups, like Coldplay or U2, but it has hundreds of thousands of fans in the United States, who have stuck by the band for fourteen years—even though the spacious, colorfully ambient music that the group has been making lately is unlike the traditional guitar rock it débuted with. Last year, Spin voted Radiohead’s 1997 album, “OK Computer,” the No. 1 album of the past twenty years, and this month readers of NME, the influential British weekly, voted it the fourth-best album of all time, behind Oasis’s “Definitely Maybe” and two Beatles albums. “OK Computer” is this generation’s “Dark Side of the Moon”—complex and catchy songs surrounded by wobbly, atmospheric music that suggests that the band is up to more than fans will ever figure out, even if they listen to the album every day. I seem to know about a hundred of these fans, and they constantly urge me to give the band a chance. Until recently, I hadn’t seen much point in doing so.

The lead singer and main songwriter, Thom Yorke, has essentially three singing styles: a tired snarl, a reedy drone, and a light falsetto. His performances rarely get far before the words dissolve into a moan. On early Radiohead albums, Yorke’s lyrics were sombre expressions of juvenile anomie: cars are dangerous, robots are no fun, plastic surgeons do sad, thankless work. After that, his lyrics became shorter and more oblique, often ending in sentence fragments that were repeated again and again, as if such persistence would give the words greater meaning. (“I will eat you alive,” he groans fifteen times in “Where I End and You Begin,” from 2003.) While Yorke sings, the band makes a wide, soupy sound that seems both a product of and an invitation to stoned passivity.

Yet several of the band’s songs got lodged in my head, and after seeing Radiohead perform three times in the past two weeks and listening repeatedly to its recordings—including Yorke’s plangent, largely electronic new solo album, “The Eraser”—I’ve discovered that with each successive record the fog around the music dissipates a little and Radiohead’s luminous teamwork comes more clearly into view.

I still don’t like Yorke’s lyrics, and I wish that the melancholy that Radiohead favors were not the status quo for so many rock bands. But then the group, which consists of four men in addition to Yorke, is not, strictly speaking, much of a rock band: catharsis, speed, and violence are generally absent from its work. Radiohead’s gift is in creating compositions thick with intricate harmonies. At a performance in Boston earlier this month, the melody of “Fake Plastic Trees,” from the 1995 album, “The Bends,” sounded like the second theme of a Schubert string quartet: Yorke’s voice mimicked the timbre and varied dynamics of a violinist bowing. While deforming the words, he revealed the melody’s elegance, which I couldn’t hear before I saw him sing it. Yorke, as his early sponsor Michael Stipe once did, plays his voice the way his bandmates play their instruments, and he has impressively consistent pitch. Radiohead sounds like an instrumental band that happens to have a singer.

In Boston, the stage was decorated with ten rhomboid-shaped screens, which hung behind the musicians. At first, the screens were covered with glowing green dots. Later, they displayed closeup video images of the band members, or parts of them—the drummer Phil Selway’s hands, Yorke’s head from below, the neck of Colin Greenwood’s bass guitar. Live, the band is as fluid and sparkly as it can be arid and mopey on recordings. Yorke does much more than sing. By the fifth song, he had already played guitar, keyboards, and a pared-down drum set. For the airy, gorgeous “Morning Bell,” from “Kid A” (2000), he was in his falsetto mode, singing brightly and playing a Fender Rhodes electric piano, while Selway locked into a clipped pattern and Greenwood plucked a small, hopeful figure high on the neck of his bass.

The band is recording a new album, and on its current tour is trying out at least twelve new songs. Several reprise the hushed, hypnotic mood of “Amnesiac” (2001) and “Hail to the Thief” (2003). The lovely “Videotape,” which invokes death and Mephistopheles (Yorke opens with “When I’m at the pearly gates, this’ll be on my videotape”), slowly ramps up and then down, the guitars and the drums bobbing around Yorke’s piano chords, emphasizing different beats of the rhythm, as if three songs were slowly becoming one.

Most of the new songs are surprisingly upbeat. “15 Step” pivots on a stuttering drum-machine pattern and prompted Yorke to dance across the stage in a happy jig, his arms raised above his head like a club kid’s. For “Bodysnatchers,” Yorke began alone, playing a short, bluesy riff—a surprisingly conventional figure. Then the band joined in: Ed O’Brien and Jonny Greenwood, both on guitar, and Phil Selway, who launched into a single-minded Krautrock drumbeat. At first, Yorke’s melody sounded like a paraphrase of George Harrison’s “Within You, Without You,” but, as the notes smeared into one another, Yorke sang what may be the ultimate Radiohead lyric: “I have no idea what I’m talking about, I am trapped in this body and can’t get out.” After a few verses, he worked himself up to a peak of wordless sound, while the guitars played odd, dissonant chords. Suddenly, the guitars dropped back in quiet unison, then surged forward again for an intense but brief coda that was as close to straight rock and roll as anything the band played that night.

More typical was the arrangement for “Everything in Its Right Place,” a pulsing song built around Yorke’s gentle vocals and twinkly electric piano chords, which recalled Miles Davis’s “In A Silent Way.” O’Brien and Jonny Greenwood—Colin’s brother and the band’s unofficial co-leader—were on opposite sides of the stage, each hunched over a small electronic box called a Kaoss pad that allowed them to record and manipulate samples of Yorke’s piano and singing. When the band left the stage, the devices remained, playing the distorted bits in an endless loop.

After a second encore, Yorke came to the front of the stage, grinning widely. The crowd howled. He rubbed his hands together, as if they were cold, and held them up, palms out, as if he were about to perform a magic trick. It seemed spontaneous, half greeting, half nervous tic, and the audience responded by holding out their palms to him. Smiling, Yorke repeated the gesture three times.

Radiohead has much in common with the Grateful Dead, including passionate fans who follow the band from city to city, trade bootleg recordings of shows, puzzle out the meanings of the band’s cryptic lyrics, and (in Boston, at least) dance badly while smoking expensive-smelling weed. But Radiohead’s main interest is not improvisation, nor do the band’s affinities to modern classical music and electronica mask the fact that its dominant syntax is pop. The songs mutate briskly, and are larded with hummable motifs. Even when Jonny Greenwood is fiddling with a radio and Yorke is ululating toward the great unknown, the band obeys an internal clock that arrests its elaborations before tedium defeats wonder. Most of the songs aren’t long—only a few last more than six minutes, even live. The band plays nimble, bright-eyed arrangements of dense, heavy-lidded music.

Radiohead no longer has a contract with EMI and says that it has no plans to sign with a label. However the band chooses to release its next record, it can still make a handsome living by touring and selling merchandise. Labels spend a lot of time and money worrying about illegal downloading and file-sharing. What they should be worried about is more bands like Radiohead, which could make major labels a relic of the twentieth century.

RUFUS WAINWRIGHT

Not every single New Yorker was focussed on the Rufus Wainwright concert last Wednesday; a cabdriver from Côte d’Ivoire, who was taking one concertgoer to Carnegie Hall, was listening to a tape of a Mandinka-speaking Muslim preacher, which a friend back home in Abidjan had sent him. But certainly in a particular crowd, one that has a sizable membership in this city—Gay Men and the Women Who Love Them—people had been buzzing about this concert for two months. Rufus Wainwright was going to—can you believe this?—re-create the famous, and famously fabulous, concert that Judy Garland gave at Carnegie Hall on April 23, 1961. That’s right: fabulous. Get the record. Then we’ll talk. Wainwright’s concert sold out immediately, so a second was added, the following night—that sold out immediately, too. E-mails went back and forth: Was this really a good idea? Was it proper, appropriate, really a homage, or was it an insult to the memory of the woman many consider to be the greatest entertainer of the twentieth century? Was it just a bad idea? Was it a funny idea—and, if so, was that a good thing? Maybe: after all, Garland herself had a wicked sense of humor. Whatever was going to happen, it counted as a mustn’t-miss event. In anticipation of the concert, Time Out New York had been running short weekly pieces under the heading “Countdown to Judy,” and now her fans, and Wainwright’s fans, were ready to blast off.

Outside Carnegie Hall before the show, the atmosphere was surprisingly subdued. Perhaps fans were nervous, for Wainwright and for themselves—people who love Judy Garland don’t want to have their feelings upset, and there was so much room for error in this enterprise. Older people wondered whether the thirty-two-year-old Wainwright would get it—there was a time not long ago when young gay men actively shunned Judyism as a suffocating remnant of pre-Stonewall closetedness. (In Greenwich Village in the eighties, Judy Garland albums were seen lined up on the curb, their owners dead of AIDS.) But Wainwright was very publicly gay, and his interest in replicating the show had much to do with the music—he has EGBDF in his DNA (his parents are Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III), and at the age of eight he’d be woken up by his mother at three in the morning to sing “Over the Rainbow” as a way of signalling to guests that it was time to go. (Like Garland, Wainwright has had trouble with drugs. Luckily, he has cleaned up his act, and shows no sign that he will waste away before his time, as Garland did, thirty-seven years ago this week, at the age of forty-seven.)

Inside, venders were doing a tidy business: a representative of the U.S. Postal Service was selling sheets of the Garland stamp that was issued earlier in the month, on the occasion of her birthday, and a man sold pins made from the stamps, for three dollars. He said that he considered Garland to be one of three tragic figures of the twentieth century; another was James Dean, and he couldn’t remember the third. Bummed by the fact that programs inexcusably ran out—come on, Carnegie Hall—people went to their seats braced for a measure of disappointment. But as soon as the orchestra struck up the opening notes of the overture, a medley of some of Garland’s signature songs, the audience became both more relaxed and more excited.

Wainwright was understated compared with Garland—meaning that there were fewer sequins involved. He wore a white shirt that had sparkly navy-blue stars on it, and a suit whose color the J. Crew catalogue would call stone, with black tuxedo stripes on the legs. (Let’s just not discuss the brown belt.) For the second act—following an intermission in which the ladies’ rooms were hauntingly empty, with the wind howling across the lonely tiled plain—he switched to a shiny silk top hat and tux. Wainwright’s nasal voice is supple and liquidy, and it carries tones of amusement, sadness, and I-am-what-I-am-ness. He mostly stayed away from Garland’s well-known patter—“I know, I’ll sing ’em all, and we’ll stay all night!”—but did talk about his relationship with his muse. “I wanted to be Dorothy—on good days. On bad days, I wanted to be the Wicked Witch. I would put on an apron and my father would stand there with a Scotch in his hand and go, ‘Oh, my God.’ I would place my mother’s shoes in this diabolical circle; I would take one of her finest gowns, from, I don’t know, Laura Ashley”—the mention of the doyenne of un-fabulousness got an enormous laugh—“and I would step into the shoes, and I would melt.” The concert didn’t have the electricity of Garland’s album (it did have an appearance by Lorna Luft, Garland’s younger daughter), but if it wasn’t quite a night of magic it was still a triumph, and a moving one, especially when McGarrigle came out onstage for the encore, to play piano accompaniment to her son’s rendition of Cole Porter’s “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye”—a song that Garland didn’t sing, and yet an apt end to the evening. Mom had tears in her eyes when it was over, and so did almost everyone else.