Ned's Atomic Link Bin: Radiohead Rules Again

Writer's note: Greetings! My name’s Ned Raggett, occasional music writer for a variety of spots. The Cream approached me to talk a bit about interesting music news, think pieces, longreads and more from the previous week. And some actual music too, strangely enough. You can thank a huge range of friends for suggesting things to their own circles as much as anyone else. Maybe I just like to be my own aggregator. Welcome to the column, and hope you enjoy!

To say that Radiohead ended up taking up a lot of the critical space since the April 8 release of A Moon Shaped Pool would be an understatement. But that itself was just one of numerous notable albums released within a short window, including Kaytranada, James Blake, Skepta and many others. Elsewhere the duo YACHT ended up getting more well known than they had in years — for completely the wrong reasons — while there were many intriguing dives into past history as well as profiles of recent artists and work. And did we mention Radiohead? Let’s mention it again.

11 Very Different Opinions About The New Radiohead Album

NPR went for a series of short essays from a number of writers, including Ann Powers and Lars Gotrich, and per the title, it was definitely a range of different takes, from celebratory to rather the opposite.

Anastasia Tsioulcas: “At times, it's a super-saturated, nearly indulgent effect, as in "The Numbers" (previously referred to as "Silent Spring"). Cinematic strings arrive in formation to create impasto-thick lashes of sound that wouldn't have sounded out of place in the 1970s — with The Who, say, or Led Zeppelin. In "Tinker Tailer Soldier Sailor..." the strings drip like a honey glaze in a score that seems to derive its DNA partly from old Bollywood film scores and partly from the Sun Ra Arkestra; in "Glass Eyes," the strings go Debussy-at-the-movies in a ballad of alienation. (It's in "Glass Eyes," too, that I feel [Jonny] Greenwood's frequent side work as a film composer coming through most thoroughly — and most conventionally.)

“But the sophistication of Radiohead's textures on this album aren't limited to classical instrumentation — similar impulses also underpin many, many of A Moon Shaped Pool's studio-produced sounds, like the warping, woozy and thoroughly manipulated vocals on "Daydreaming" and swirling in the panicky undercurrents of "Ful Stop."

here is what it feels like to be told you’re crying wolf when the wolf is at your door The early-in-the-week attempt by YACHT to get a bit of publicity leverage via a supposedly leak sex tape turned into something more than just a PR disaster within a day, which wasn’t helped by first a snarky non-apology the following day, which led to a more earnest one the day after that — even as the band still provided a link to their efforts. On Medium, Jes Skolnik spoke vividly and from tough personal experience about what their antics made light of.

You can call it a hoax, you can call it an art project, you can call it commentary on the state of media today, but it is an abuse of people’s trust and faith, it is an abuse of hard-won public empathy, it sets the work that I and others have been doing for decades back.

It is irresponsible and cruel.

It is a false claim.

And the band can walk away from it after their performance of victimhood, leaving real victims worse for wear. Which is why I am writing this: I want them to know how much this hurts, how what they thought was a cute stunt was in actuality a cynical betrayal. And maybe next time they’ll think before they pull something like this.

Meaghan Garvey’s take for MTV on Drake’s latest effort took what’s now been his exhaustively examined public profile throughout the decade and put it under study through the lens of Views.

Drake, and myself, and a generation of people whose messy, confusing twenties were soundtracked by The Boy, are approaching 30 years old now. An iPhone dropped in a glass of Malbec, or a shouting match at the Cheesecake Factory, or bragging that your house is “the definition of alcohol and weed addiction,” is exponentially less cute at 30 than it is at twentysomething. The Drake on Views whines that he’s underappreciated, that he’s settling, that the women he expects to wait around for him indefinitely have outright betrayed him. “You’re supposed to put your pride aside and ride for me,” he sing-songs on “Keep the Family Close,” as though that were a reasonable thing to ask anyone, be it an ex-fling or member of his OVO tent village brain trust. He turns dormant relationships into personal affronts, as though falling out of touch with people you once loved wasn’t simply a part of growing up. “You wanna walk around naked in the kitchen without running into one of my niggas — that’s not the way we living,” he scoffs on “U With Me?,” like any grown woman would be out of line to expect a grown man not to live like a frat pledge. But at some point, after all the late-night meltdowns and vain attempts at intimacy, it’s time to grow the fuck up, take a hard look at yourself, and take some accountability for your problems. When you’ve been doing the same thing for years with the same results, and have gotten no further in the quest for human connection upon which your entire career has been predicated, it starts to seem that the problem is you.

Erin Macleod providing a more celebratory Drake note in Rolling Stone, taking a look at his first number one song’s trans-Atlantic sources not merely of inspiration but participation, and what it could signal.

The Wizkid feature is an example of the increasing international popularity of the Nigerian Afrobeats movement, the high-energy collision of Afropop, EDM and hip-hop emerging from Lagos. Artists such as P-Square, Davido and D'banj have been making inroads in America through infectious tracks like "Personally" and co-signs from folks like Future and Kanye West. Wizkid is a star at home, but he's now the first artist from Nigeria to top the Hot 100. This may give him bragging rights, but his appearance on "One Dance" is, unfortunately, very low and tinny in the mix. The positioning of Wizkid floating underneath the beat, however, underlines the way the sounds of vintage Afrobeat influenced U.K. funky in the first place.

A Black Feminist Roundtable on bell hooks, Beyoncé, and “Moving Beyond Pain” One of the higher profile responses to Lemonade came from noted writer and scholar hooks, who questioned the album/film’s success at breaking out of wider economic and social structures and stereotypes, and at resolving deeper pain. At Feministing, a wide range of writers provided their own thoughts and responses in turn to hooks and Lemonade.

Melissa Harris-Perry: “Bell hooks should not lie to herself, to us, or to other feminists — feminism cannot save us from pain. Love cannot save us from pain. Lemonade is beautiful and empowering because it faces that truth so fully. Even the pretty girls, and the rich girls, and famous the girls will feel pain. Still untold are the stories of how many of these girls and women are also inflicting pain–because we are human. We also make choices that hurt and harm our beloveds – even when we are feminists. Patriarchy is evil and must be dismantled. Intimacy can painful, but must be embraced.”

Jamilah Lemieux: “As someone with a deep abiding love for sex, money and men, I have long accepted that hooks and I will not always see eye-to-eye on how to do this gender shit—and that’s fine. However, I am disappointed that her commitment to challenging the hypersexualization of Black women reduces Lemonade’s “display of Black female bodies that transgresses all boundaries” to a “commodity.” I wish she’d consider the sex positivity that is at the heart of the feminism that us younger folks have come to embrace, that she’d considered the joy many of us find in our bodies, in sex and yes, even in the male gaze that she seems to find inherently tied to the evils of patriarchy — as if we are violating a code by wanting to be wanted.”

As part of her forthcoming book project on post-rock, Jeanette Leech shared, via the book’s blog, a series of interviews about two remarkable UK groups from the early '90s as well as the label they ended up on via AR Kane. A little moment in history, captured.

Joe Cassidy: “I finished school, and I’d been doing a lot of demos. Probably around the time I was 16 or 17, I started going ‘I’m gonna do some shows’. I was very shy and I didn’t know what I wanted to do. But I said, ‘it’s got to have a band name’. All my friends at the time were complete intellectual snobs. And they had bands like The Freudian Complex, just ridiculous names. So I thought, screw all that. [I wanted to name it] the most innocent, naïve thing; something from my childhood, even though it’s the worst band name of all time. I thought, ‘I’ll call it Butterfly Child.' "

At the AV Club, Annie Zaleski looked at an artifact that, much like The Star Wars Holiday Special, all participating parties would appear to prefer not to acknowledge. Unfortunately for them, video cassette recorders were already on the market.

Perhaps the worst part of Rolling Stone…The 10th Anniversary was an interminable, cheesy, and occasionally offensive Beatles medley. Ted Neeley (famous for his lead turn in Jesus Christ Superstar) mingled with a cast of Vegas-meets-cruise-ship dancers dressed up to resemble members of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, as well as a troupe of dancing strawberries. (That routine, set to—of course—“Strawberry Fields Forever” tickled Wenner, Draper confirmed, and caused then-picture editor Karen Mullarkey to vacate the mag.) A KISS-esque hard-rock band performed “Helter Skelter” surrounded by recreated scenes of violent war footage. A man in a Richard Nixon mask sang “I’m A Loser” directly into the camera, right after cheerful caricatures of Soviet women cavorted in a replica of the Oval Office for “Back In The U.S.S.R.” About the only redeeming qualities were Richie Havens and Yvonne Elliman dueting on “Here Comes The Sun” and Patti LaBelle wailing on “Polythene Pam.”

Beyoncé, Radiohead and FOMO: How sustainable is the era of the “insta-release?” Zaleski also wrote for Salon about the flood of surprise/near-surprise releases adding to what’s already a crowded release schedule — one so overwhelming that it’s hard to notice anything but the loudest or most persistent (or advantaged) of voices.

All of these acts have the luxury of a loyal fanbase, name recognition and built-in demand: No matter when they release something, people will listen. And no doubt this release method is a reaction to the propensity of albums leaking early, as well as a proactive measure to prevent promos from circulating. But when outliers drop into an already-crowded new release schedule, it’s exacerbating the listener whiplash that’s become an increasingly troublesome phenomenon. As fans, it’s difficult to focus, engage and actually savor the music that’s already out there when there’s always something shiny to absorb—a problem present even without the added consideration of no-lead-time releases. “I used to really know so much about contemporary music, because I was an avid reader of the music press and I really knew my shit,” Shirley Manson said last year when she spoke to Salon. “And now it’s too much. I’m just overwhelmed by it. I don’t even see a jumping in point without spending hours and hours and hours of my day trying to figure it all out and give everything a listen. It’s just impossible.”

Sasha Geffen’s MTV piece looked at how the early 2000s ad campaign for Apple’s mp3 player — specifically the endlessly-referenced/parodied black silhouettes of dancing listeners — has seeped into wider culture from there.

Turning human figures into silhouettes anonymizes them, but it also universalizes them. The silhouette campaign didn’t show specific, individual people listening to the iPod; it showed how they moved when they heard music that they could take with them everywhere. Alinsangan borrowed a technique employed by a wide range of artists, from Disney animators in the introduction to the 1940 film Fantasia (which silhouettes orchestra players against brightly colored backgrounds, inducing the viewer into a synesthetic dream space) to contemporary artist Kara Walker, who uses black silhouettes to overlay histories of racial violence with folklore and myth.

“It’s a powerful tool, to turn people into outlines, to remove all defining characteristics beyond shape and pose. The people in the silhouette ads could be anybody. They could be you. Many of them were coded female and black, opening the ads up to identification with people historically outside music technology’s target demographic. The iPod wasn’t for nerds because these ads weren’t about the product — they were about how the product made you move.

Jeremy Gordon wrote for Pitchfork on how Radiohead’s computer existence, and especially that of its dedicated fans, grew up online together, as well as providing a short history of how the Web worked and changed in ways that are now already long-distant.

[Adriaan] Pels detailed his new online hub with hard facts about the band, like the particulars of their discography, which were not easily researchable in a pre-Wikipedia era. He also updated At Ease with news about Radiohead’s productivity, meticulously collecting news items and writing them up as straightforwardly as possible. Occasionally, people would e-mail tips to him. He updated the website when he could, and that was good enough.

Sitting in a Brooklyn cafe, the now 42-year-old Pels looks a bit like the lead singer of the National on an off day in a grey hoodie, beard, and square glasses. Thinking back to his site’s beginnings and how things have changed, he points to a car that drives past us outside the window. “If that car crashes, it will be on the internet five minutes later, or sooner,” he says. “That was much different at the time—it didn't go as fast as it does now.”

For RBMA’s latest stint in New York, Marc Masters — who quite literally wrote a book on the subject — discussed one of No Wave’s key qualities, the interpretation of ennui.

No wave artists made art that was about boredom, that dared to bore people, and that attacked people for being bored – jolting them out of complacency to confront the fact that convention was sedation. In the process, they insisted boredom could be interesting. It’s a radical idea, striking directly at the accepted notion that art must entertain, creating a new path art previously unheard or unconsidered. Boredom is also a way to reject the tyranny of audience-pleasing – and perhaps the only sane reaction to the stifling deadness that surrounded these artists in New York.

No Wave’s Attack of the Bored shone most vividly in two of the scene’s best groups. Lydia Lunch and her trio Teenage Jesus and the Jerks performed their ennui by standing still on stage, refusing to coax audiences or do anything other than play their music. They looked bored, and they were (one of their songs was called “Popularity Is So Boring”). But they were also rejecting the trained-seal concert game. Lunch’s penetrating stare was like a wordless lecture: “We’re bored, and we’re going to make you deal with it.”

A Moon Shaped Pool

Rolling Stone’s review of the new Radiohead album fell to Will Hermes, who considered it through the lens of wanting to slow down, focus and consider.

The record's most emblematic and powerful piece, however, might be it's slightest. "Glass Eyes" is a chamber music miniature, almost a fragment, a piano plea wrapped in strings rising to the surface of digital sea. "Hey it's me/I just got off the train/A frightening place… faces are concrete grey," Yorke begins, like a cel phone call from an empty station stop. He admits a panic attack coming on (again). The masculine vulnerability is remarkable – it's a song you want to hear Frank Ocean sing. But it's a quintessential Radiohead moment, one character's loneliness transmitting an overwhelming sort of collective empathy. The song ends as diaphanously as it begins, Yorke's voice disappearing behind a veil of violins and violas like celestial static, a dangling conversation. You want to stop what you're doing to hear it again, and again, to get to the bottom of it and simply savor its hand-cobbled beauty; to reestablish the human connection, or at least the model of one. The entire record — which might prove the most listenable in the band's catalog — is like that; it seems to be the point, in fact. And after I hear it a few dozen more times, something I look forward to, I'll see if I'm correct.

Jason P. Woodbury’s interview of Dixon for the Phoenix New Times served as both event preview and capsule history of Dixon’s work, becoming a one-man source for all things Arizonan and musical.

“It’s one thing to have the records and collect them, but to be able to talk to the artists, have the master tapes, see the union sheets … I certainly don’t take it for granted,” Dixon says.

“It’s his way of connecting to his home and to the past, and pushing it into the future. He gets a charge holding a 78 by Billie Maxwell, whose proto-feminist cowgirl songs are some of the oldest music ever recorded by an Arizonan, or strumming the late The Wallace and Ladmo Show musical director Mike Condello’s orange 1960 Gretsch, which will be played on stage at his birthday bash. It’s a thrill Dixon can’t shake, to “go even deeper, to add to the whole richness of these stories.”

For RBMA, Stevie Chick interviewed the underground hip-hop duo, famed for its two amazing releases in the 1990s Heavy Load and Paradise Don’t Come Cheap, along with associates about the group’s continuing impact and groundbreaking work.

This time, live instruments augmented the samples and beats, [Scott] Harding sharing guitar duties with avant-jazzer John Medeski, lending sleazy blues rasp to the brokedown rumble of “Mexico Or Bust” and layering “Animal” in hallucinatory solos. Their beats continued to push boundaries: “Infested’s” bleak, broken funk felt on the edge of collapsing in on itself; “Kickin’ Like Bruce Lee’s” brawny 85 seconds ran “Rock The Bells” through a psychedelic mangle. The album’s second side, meanwhile, went further out than the trio (and, indeed, most hip hop) had ever dared, “Suspended In Air” and “Journey To The Sun” mapping their own courses far from any pigeonhole. “Sonic Youth were working at the same studio,” says [Jason] Furlow. “Kim Gordon told us, ‘Every time your door opens it sounds like fucking monsters are coming out of there!’ ”

On his personal Tumblr, Mike Barthel considered the closing song on Radiohead’s new album, a long time concert favorite now given a formal release, and how time can change the perspective and impact of the song for artist and listener.

Had “True Love Waits” been officially released back in the 20th century, I’m certain that, for a decent number of listeners, its meaning would have changed in this exact same way. The central trauma of love when you’re young is not getting what you want; the central trauma of love when you’re old is not keeping what you already have. For these listeners, “True Love Waits” would have been an expression of longing in 1998, when they were dating, and an expression of loss in 2016, when their marriage broke up, or their mother died. What’s lovely about releasing the song only now is that this journey is written into the record books. That shift in meaning didn’t happen behind the scenes: it’s central to the song’s story, and therefore its meaning.

And to step back an entry to close out the week: