19 Thoughts on Radiohead's In Rainbows
- Now that we all have less lived experience than ever and the same amount of collective imagination we had before when it came to critical thinking (not high), “Song of the Summer” debates have become more insufferably uninteresting. “WAP”? Hasn’t been out long enough, wasn’t as ubiquitous as previous SOTS winners like “Despacito,” and also get off the internet. Any Pop Smoke song? Last summer felt more his, but after his death he’s still been in the air a lot. The entirety of Bad Bunny’s YHLQMDLG? Possibly, if you live in my apartment and have been party to cars parking in front of your building and blasting it on loop for hours on end (not as fun as that might sound).
- Here’s a thought: what if the song of the summer is Radiohead’s “Weird Fishes/ Arpeggi”? Over the last few months, we’ve been treated to not one, but two excellent interpretations of the serpentine track from Radiohead’s seventh studio album In Rainbows from 2007. There’s Kelly Lee Owens’ serene “Arpeggi” from her excellent sophomore album Inner Song, which dips the original’s guitar licks in the type of wooly, electronic psychedelia that Owens is becoming increasingly well known for—and there’s also “Weird Fishes,” guitar god Lianne La Havas’ lush and earthy take on the tune that, unlike Owens’ take, keeps the vocal line and exists as more of a full-bodied cover rather than a selective interpretation.
- For the uninitiated: artist bios—specifically, one-sheet essays used in marketing when it comes to inter-industry promotion of an artist or their latest album—are one example of unseen work that music writers frequently engage in to make money. (As freelance budgets have dissolved and the overall scope of coverage at culture websites has narrowed, they’ve been one of the only ways to make money for some of us, cough cough email me if you need one.) It can be thoroughly uncritical work when held up under a certain lens, and I bring the practice up mostly to make the disclaimer that I’ve written both of Owens’ bios over the last several years as part of a semi-regular relationship with her label Smalltown Supersound. (Joakim, I’ll get that latest bio to you soon, sorry for the delay.) I rarely praise artists publicly that I’ve written bios for in interest of avoiding bias, but my taste runs as such (and if you’ve been a regular reader of my work over the years, you know this) that I’d be a huge fan of Owens at this point regardless, so.
- In Rainbows is my favorite Radiohead album, and it’s been that way since it was released in 2007—a year that quite possibly stands as the best year for music in the 2000s. 2001 and 2009 both come close to nabbing that title in terms of sheer impact, but 2007 truly had the range: within a 12-month span, we got Panda Bear’s Person Pitch, Burial’s Untrue, M.I.A.’s Kala, Feist’s The Reminder, LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver, The Tough Alliance’s A New Chance, The Field’s From Here We Go Sublime, Animal Collective’s Strawberry Jam, The National’s Boxer, Of Montreal’s Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, Les Savy Fav’s Let’s Stay Friends, Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible—and In Rainbows. That’s a lot of classic albums in one year!
- I suppose we should do a brief rundown of my Radiohead opinions here. (I’m not doing a ranking—what do you think this is, Twitter?) I don’t rate Pablo Honey because I’m normal. The Bends is close to perfect, OK Computer is excellent but I’m not reaching for it all the time or anything. The title track to Kid A sounded great when they used it on The Sopranos, and it’s weird that I heard Amnesiac before it (I was just entering my teenage years at the turn of the millennium, give me a break) so I have specific associations with it. Same goes for Hail to the Thief, which marked the first of two times I saw Radiohead live before the end of the concert industry as we knew it (too soon?), at the disastrous Field Day festival in what used to be Giants Stadium.
- Other artists I saw at Field Day: Beastie Boys (they were fun), Bright Eyes (wasn’t into them yet), Gemma Ray (my friend had questionable taste and made us see her), Underworld (amazing, of course), Beth Orton (same friend with questionable taste made me see this over what would be one of Elliott Smith’s final live performances, I’m still incredibly pissed off about this), Blur (saw them do “Tender” with a gospel choir right after getting stoned during Bright Eyes, great idea).
- Second time I saw Radiohead was at another disaster of a festival: the inaugural installment of All Points West, a brief attempt to stage an East Coast Coachella in a national park in New Jersey that didn’t allow anyone to carry beers outside of several small enclosures that were as far away from the stage as possible. (Gee, wonder why this festival only lasted two years.) This was summer of 2008, and Radiohead headlined two of the festival’s three nights as part of the In Rainbows tour cycle; I had a weekend pass but only saw the first night.
- I loved Radiohead at Field Day, but I didn’t at All Points West. This is weird, in retrospect! Particularly because the In Rainbows tour was largely considered a success and the shows were, in the days of music chatter on the pre-social media internet, heavily praised. I think it was me, not them. I did enjoy a huge funnel cake during the set, though.
- My favorite set at that All Points West was Grizzly Bear, who were in the pre-Veckatimest phase of performing much of that album’s cuts live in advance of its release the following year. I ended up seeing Grizzly Bear live multiple times from 2008-2010, and always thought the Veckatimest cuts sounded way better than they did on record. (Great live band!)
- Okay, back to Radiohead opinions. The King of Limbs is bad and boring, and if we’re being quite honest I don’t think A Moon Shaped Pool is much better—an overly morose breakup album that was given more praise because of the emotionality of the subject matter than how engaging the music actually was.
- Around the time Danny Brown’s Atrocity Exhibition was coming out, I remember reading an interview with him where he said he was hitting the treadmill while listening to A Moon Shaped Pool. How fucking miserable does that sound?
- I think of In Rainbows as Radiohead’s Automatic for the People, and not just because Automatic for the People is my favorite R.E.M. album. Both are incredible, intimate, and positively human mid-career album from bands whose track record was already close to spotless. When I was in high school, my favorite R.E.M. album was Murmur, and as I got older it was Automatic for the People; I had the same progression from feeling that way about OK Computer to feeling that way about In Rainbows.
- Obviously, R.E.M. were better than Radiohead by sheer qualitative measures alone. No rock band in the last 40 years has achieved the unbelievable track record R.E.M. had in the 1980s, never mind the incredible work they continued to deliver during the 1990s. I’ve always been a strong proponent that R.E.M. are one of the greatest bands of all time, and I don’t make this claim to diminish Radiohead’s achievements in the slightest.
- In Rainbows has always seemed to me the perfect collision of sonic traits that make Radiohead so beloved and ballyhooed. You’ve got the glitchy stuff (“15 Step”), the hard-charging (for them) rock stuff (“Bodysnatchers,” “Jigsaw Falling Into Place”), the moody ballads (pretty much almost everything else on the album). I enjoyed Thom Yorke’s latest solo album and think Jonny Greenwood’s score work is on the whole incredible, but otherwise I don’t think Radiohead have ever been as all-encompassingly good as they are on In Rainbows.
- I used to play music (went to Manhattan School of Music’s Saturday program for clarinet for three years, lost interest after my high school band teacher effectively bullied me out of having any interest in continuing to improve my skills because he was mad that I quit marching band. Thanks Mr. Haas, you were a real fucking asshole and I do not envy the child you continue to raise). I mention this because I think the key to the dual “Weird Fishes/ Arpeggi” covers we’ve been treated to this summer is how fun the song must be to interpret. (Radiohead? Fun? Well, I never!) The arpeggiated melody that anchors the song sounds like a real pleasant loop for a musician to play around with for hours on end—a hypnotic raga of sorts that one can get lost in forever if they’re not careful.
- My favorite song on In Rainbows is “House of Cards,” and it’s also my all-time favorite Radiohead song. Part of this is time and place: right when this song and album hit, I was listening to a lot of downtempo and trip-hop (Portishead, Massive Attack, etc.) and the low-slung groove and slow burn of “House of Cards” fit right in to where my head was at. In a sense, my head never left that space too.
- But “House of Cards” also has a certain honesty and directness that speaks to me in a way that so much Radiohead—especially as I get older—just kind of doesn’t. “I don’t wanna be your friend/ I just wanna be your lover,” Thom Yorke sings in the beginning, and I feel like it’s one of the more universal statements he’s cut to tape. There’s no barcode nonsense or Orwellian pontificating about who’s inside the top of the pyramid or what the pigs really mean if you think hard enough. To my ears, it’s a song about desire and loneliness, two opposite emotional poles that make it so “House of Cards” hits you no matter where you’re at.
- Radiohead have been plenty influential throughout the years—so much so that after Kid A was released, trying to locate “the new Radiohead” was itself a phenomenon (one that would end up fruitless, of course). But at this point I hear a lot of In Rainbows in contemporary indie, especially since it’s the most R&B-flavored album in the band’s career (and R&B has been very prevalent in contemporary indie). Just look at the xx, a band who’s been massively influential in their own right but also has amassed a catalog of music that essentially sounds like updated versions of “House of Cards” and “Reckoner.” I hear In Rainbows in any band or artist that lowers the volume, pares back the fussiness, and lowers their voice close enough to the mic to convey a certain intimacy. It’s been a long time in which I’ve heard any other band sound remotely close to any of Radiohead’s other records or eras.
- That said, I don’t think their “pay what you want” gambit had nearly the impact that anyone expected it would. When In Rainbows was surprise-dropped with a model that seemed constructed with the intent of explicitly discouraging piracy, there was a lot of discussion as to whether one of the 20th and 21st century’s most consistently game-changing rock bands were about to innovate how music was sold. They didn’t. Instead, piracy charged on for a few more years (not a bad thing), streaming took hold (a bad thing), and surprise releases as well as pay-what-you-want models largely became wieldable tools to acts who were big or established enough to potentially benefit from the models themselves. (Jeff Rosenstock is a good example of someone who’s successfully operated by digital tip jar through his career, but he also comes from the communal world of punk—light years away from Radiohead or Beyoncé.) When it comes to busting down norms in the industry, the only thing In Rainbows really proved was that Radiohead could do whatever they wanted. In 2007, that felt pretty normal already.