The Radiohead song that came out last week, “These Are My Twisted Words,” is now available as an officially sanctioned free download from the band’s site, after a weekend of online lunacy that was sparked by some crafty fan of the band / Internet provocateur deciding to register WallOfIce.com, in honor of the cryptic text attached to the MP3 file that came out last week. As one might expect, the registration of that domain caused a flurry of anticipatory freak-outs, especially when it was merely redirecting to Radiohead’s official online store. (OMG IT’S A HINT YOU GUYS!!) But today, a cautionary tale went up: More »
Last week, Radiohead fanboys/girls got all upset thanks to someone taking the time to type out part of a Thom Yorke Interview from the July/August issue of The Believer in which the Radiohead frontman said that his band had sworn off the album format. “None of us want to get into that creative hoo-ha of a long-play record again,” Yorke told Ross Simonini. “It’s just become such a drag. It worked with In Rainbows because we had a real fixed idea about where we were going. But we’ve all said that we can’t possibly dive into that again. It’ll kill us.” Some people took this to mean that the band was breaking up and freaked out accordingly, but apparently that statement merely meant that they’d given up on the fusty old model of releasing multiple songs under the same umbrella—because yesterday, a new song by the band wormed its way onto the Internet! More »
Perhaps realizing that a good chunk of the people who still care about its brand wouldn’t know a 3OH!3 from a GaGa, MTV has added a new, retro-tastic category to this year’s Video Music Awards: Best Video That Should Have Won A Moonman, in which an overlooked clip from years gone by gets its space-statue due. (I do wonder if the presentation of said award will be shown on VH1, if only because it can then be blown out into an hour-long special about Loving The Videos That Lost At The Video Music Awards or somesuch.) There are 10 clips up for this honor, and they hail from eras as long-ago as MTV’s earliest days and as recent as the YouTube Age. My biases in this category are probably given away by the above screen grab, but you might think* differently! More »
The Killers’ new video for “Goodnight, Travel Well” was produced in conjunction with UNICEF and MTV EXIT in order to raise awareness of human trafficking and sex slavery around the world. The clip starts off seeming like it’s portraying two young lovers meeting in a splashy hotel, then pulls back the curtain further and further to reveal the squalid, horrific conditions that brought one-half of the couple to the rendezvous point. Clip after the jump. More »
In a long-ranging interview with The Guardian, Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon touched on the “whole machinery you have to build up” in order to sell an album these days, and why the whole idea of “The Radiohead Model” is at its core an art-devaluing myth: More »
In the midst of praising a sort of mediocre, but I guess well-framed paparazzi photo of Rihanna, Kanye West took some time out to offer up his thoughts on today’s biggest stars, and which current celebrities were serving as analogies of stars gone by, I guess because we live in the post-everything age. If you ever wondered which current somewhat-superstar Kanye West views as the new Jimi Hendrix and/or Roger Waters, the answers lie after the jump. More »
The 33 1/3 book series, in which one album is given a book-length treatment by a writer, has finally narrowed its latest shortlist down to 11 titles. The list of approved albums–and the authors who will be taking the albums on–for the 2010-2011 roster of books after the jump: More »
Macy Gray is still around, as evidenced by a Los Angeles performance over the weekend where she took the stage and growled her way through Radiohead’s “Creep.” Perhaps I was setting the bar for this cover at unrealistic levels, but the arrangement by Gray’s backing band–which included Camp Freddy bandmates Matt Sorum and Billy Morrison–made the whole thing sound like Gray was trying to stoke some ’90s nostalgia with a new song called “I Cry (Some More).” (Prepping this post resulted in me playing both videos simultaneously, and the similarities were uncanny; you can experience the cacophony after the jump.) More »
Radiohead, Arctic Monkeys, Fall Out Boy, the Prodigy, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs are among the acts playing this year’s Reading and Leeds Festivals, the twinned festivals that will be held in the UK during the last weekend of August. The Guardian notes that unlike other outdoor extravaganzas in the UK, Reading and Leeds are not sowing the oats of nostalgia, picking for its headliners acts that have actually had albums come out during the latter half of the ’00s. Progress sure looks funny these days! Full bills after the jump.
So last week’s little controversy over Robert Smith saying that In Rainbows‘ pay-what-you-want experiment was maybe not so good for art led to me getting annoyed with the term “The Radiohead Model,” and how it’s been misused for the purposes of arguing that art should be free, or at least pay-what-you-like. (Not to mention that it also pulls quotes out of irritable pop stars.) A reader asked me to define the term outright, instead of just ranting about its misuse—and I figured that my attempt to do so was worth a post of its own. Think of it as a public service, albeit one that’s about a year and a half after the fact!
