in his book The unbearable lightness of being, Czechoslovakian Milan Kundera stated that the eternal return represented the heaviest burden on Nietzsche. Carrying the weight of eternity on your shoulders is something that anyone would drop. However, life as an ephemeral and vain existence becomes light, and text “makes man fly higher, distance himself from the earth and his earthly being.”
And if they are about something kid a (2000) and has a Siamese amnesiac (2001), by Radiohead, is about distance determination. It’s impossible not to think of the wall that made Roger Waters a reality on the album tour stages the wall, erected a huge wall between Pink Floyd and the fans. Could it be, unconsciously, because of the insistent, disturbing, and illusory resemblance established by the press in the mid-1990s between ok computer and the The dark side of the moonYork & Co. wanted to stack every possible stone between the audience, the critics, and themselves?
For Waters, it all started out in an altercation with some fans, with the slashers ending up spitting on them in the middle of the In the Flesh tour. For those from Oxford, in the documentary It is easy to meet people, who depicts the apathy and exhaustion midway through his third album tour, if one thing is clear, that meeting people is easy. Maybe too easy.
In a mysterious scene in the middle of the previous documentary, where it appears on your own again By Scott Walker A fly hovering on the window, as a symbol of distance and solitude. “Hasn’t it been a good year? Hasn’t it been full of conversations?” Scott sings. “You are lonely again…,” he continues, moved by his strange cavernous voice. Radiohead, since then, has decided to play solo.
But the wall that Radiohead built kid a and in amnesiac It’s not a literal wall like a water wall. It’s a wall of sound. Not like the rococo fill of the restless Phil Spector, but close to the wall of the Germans Kraftwerk, who know all too well the dehumanization.
Yes good ok computer lays out from its cover a scene on a highway, kid a He presents himself with a majestic image of the mountains, quite far from civilization. In an interview with the prestigious Mojo, in June 2001, York explains the art of both works: “At first you see fire on the other side of the mountains. Run amnesiacThere you are in the woods, where the fire is.” Both are part of the same reality, but it takes place outside the city limits.
But not only this. when kid a And amnesiac All of the vinyl was pressed released ten inches, not twelve inches. It must be remembered that ten inches was the primary form before the creation of the tall plays, in the golden days of Sarah Vaughan and Sinatra. If the music they contain seems out of context ok computerIt was nothing casual.
But the electronically tainted albums of so-called alternative rock bestsellers weren’t so outlandish in the mid-2000s. I adore; REM has done its job to the bare minimum above; and PJ Harvey – with whom Yorke collaborated on three of his songs Stories from the city, stories from the sea– I have carved the most powerful and formidable Is this desire?. And just one year ago kid aMexican restaurant Café Tacoba has published their very own e-double Reverse / YoSoyNot far from what Radiohead was trying to build.
“The ice age is coming, the ice age is coming… this is already happening,” York sings Stupid. And the ice law was made. If in 1993 the talisman to appear for the first time Pablo honey era Anyone can play guitarWell, no one had any intention of picking up the guitar now. Thinking of U2, in the same year the English were singing crawling, sealed with dynamism ZorbaIt doesn’t seem like a far-fetched idea.
While the parting between kid a And amnesiac It existed in practice, both panels were published with an interval of just over half a year, for Radiohead, all the material appeared at once.
“Our view is completely different, by doing everything we often know the two albums well and it is hard for us to talk about them as if they were something separate. If you put all the songs from the two albums into one, you wouldn’t be able to identify the songs from one of the albums. It was a relief to listen into songs and splitting them into two blocks. We were recording a lot of material and never stopped modifying anything specific, but we kept recording and recording,” York announced in 2001 to Mondosonoro.
The certification of co-creation of both plates for nearly 400 days with producer Nigel Goodrich in those days was the online diary of guitarist Ed O’Brien, and is available today on the Radiohead Fan Portal. greenplastic.com. O’Brien’s diary provides a description of the group’s operation between July 1999 and June 2000. Button: On September 8, the band is rehearsing upbeat And Everything is in its right place, and the next day Take out the knives; Feb 29 Mixed pyramid song On March 1, a drum was arranged morning bell. Shortly before, in April, York admitted to the press that the band had already recorded 20 songs and that they were planning to release a double album.
pyramid song And Everything is in its right place They wrote the same week, “which is the week I bought the piano,” York joked on Mojo.
Song List kid a, the first to see the public light, seems to be pointing to his playlist, almost like a coded message. The first song titled Everything Falls In Place, as if it were a statement. after, after, kid a Type in the name of the new address, self-referencing. Later, National anthem And How to completely disappear They guarantee intentions. in limbo Seems to show the band’s status and upbeatYour expectations ahead of what is to come.
Coinciding with the turn of the millennium and the paranoia of the 2000s that made the planet fear losing all data stored on the internet, Radiohead forged a new identity. in Khalifa kid aSiamese amnesiac, excerpts from the past are illustrated in Take out the knives It is left to the blacksmith, or in dollars and cents It’s epic, but sounds more like damaged, genetically modified versions – like the Bears that were the flagships on both albums – than an earlier sound.
If aura prevails in both volumes, it is the quintessential improvisation spirit of jazz, sealed more directly in the pyramid song (Inspired by Freedom from Mingus) and in Life in a glass hose, whose inspiration came from a story York learned about through the British media: The wife of a famous actor, besieged by the tabloid press, decides to respond to the paparazzi by wallpapering the exterior of her house with the same newspapers they harassed. .
York, somehow, repeated the same scheme in kid a And amnesiac, I’m picking up a mirror according to the listener. While the lyrics were in ok computer It was textual and cinematic, like scenes from a movie, supporting images of flying saucers, plane crashes, and life-saving airbags. In both productions, verses appear to be cut off, ciphered phrases and the singer’s voice cut through mediation, either by a vocoder or an automatic tone. Literally, amidst the popularity ok computer, employment Experienced happiestThe seed of the new language was pulsing.
The short sentences, semi-human, detached, run away from sentimentality or storytelling. Instead, they served as collages, clippings that draw flashes and slivers of reality, backgrounds listeners would have no choice but to show their fears. It is not in vain that the title of the last piece of ice is kid a for free motion picture soundtrack.
After his own life in a glass house, Radiohead becomes obscure in this double-headed album, carving out the sound morphology with which he has been inescapably associated ever since, and has become synonymous with the inevitable. The creative process from which he was born, and which allowed vocal cubism, to make songs out of chaos, and two fraternal albums out of a torrent of material, out of concern to distance himself from the rest, from critics and people. fans.
Inspired by the philosophy that Naomi Klein seals in her influential book There is no logoNot only did Radiohead and designer Stanley Dunwood fill the brochure pages of the two paintings with verbiage and disjointed slogans, they found these “modified bears,” or genetically modified bears, to be their own. With paranoid eyes and sharp teeth, these solo animals have appeared in short, dubbed videos, meant for those who know what purpose, not to promote the band’s new material.
Although there are no official singles, a video has been made Idioteque (Blinking Bear Edition) Its two protagonists are two of these hybrid bears that spin around one another, approaching and chasing them and never touching them. At first, in a close-up shot, we only see a flashing black spot, so we can discern its shapes as the video progresses.
And during the song You and who the army Originated as a repudiation of then British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the meaning it acquires in hindsight ultimately transcends the immediate, and can easily be interpreted as a hymn of self-assertion, self-honoring in light of what will happen in the next twenties. Years of work brought with them to the band. Because twenty years is only, at this point, no one can argue the character of a great teacher to this extent kid a How do amnesiac demarcation. Whoever disobeys, bring an army.
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