Radiohead Research Paper

Are Radiohead The Musical And Artistic Revolution Of Their Generation?

“Radiohead stand unequalled as a band of imagination, originality and popularity. Their haunting and distinctive sound, revealed in beautifully twisted songs of paranoia and bleak prophecies, and sung by Thom Yorke’s chilling vocals, has made them one of the most inspirational and important rock bands around today” (Clarke, back cover)

Radiohead are undoubtedly one of the most influential bands of the late twentieth century and, although they may have disappeared from the centre stage somewhat in recent years, still maintain an enormous and passionate fan base that could even be described as a cult following. Most people’s first exposure to Radiohead would have been their

In his book, Mac Randall describes his first Radiohead experience as such. “The reaction I had to ‘Creep’ was not an uncommon one. It was shared by most of the rock critical establishment, who wrote Radiohead off early and often as a shallow flash-in-the-pan sensation. In all honesty, they had good reason for doing so. ‘Creep’ was the kind of song that practically cries out ‘one-off’, and the band had nothing similar to back it up with.” (Randall, p.1) He continues to recount a holiday in England in 1995 where he happened upon chance to see Radiohead perform live. He Then proceeded to buy ‘The Bends’ and says “What I heard when I slipped that CD into the player captivated me immediately…. Yes, there was still some life left in the ageing corpus of rock music. Radiohead, The new heroes of the genre, had proved it.” (Randall,

While the song ‘Creep’ was the gateway to greatness, they still needed to walk through, and they delivered with a masterpiece. One thing that really makes Radiohead stand out would have to be their lyrical content. “You can’t listen to Radiohead long without noticing how frequently Thom’s lyrics employ physical, bodily references (rather than, for instance, psychological imagery or poetic metaphors).” (Forbes, Reisch, p. 60) Following on from this quote the book uses two examples from The Bends, the first being ‘Bones.’ “I don't want to be crippled cracked, Shoulders, wrists, knees and back, Ground to dust and ash, Crawling on all fours” Another example, ‘My Iron Lung,’ “My brain says I’m receiving pain, A lack of oxygen, From my life support, My Iron Lung.” Analysing this philosophically one could point out one of Kristeva’s theories which “explains that, in one way or another, the abject is connected with the body and its processes and immediate sensations, rather than external objects or ideas, since it is the body that forms the often amorphous region between ‘where I stop and where the world begins’” (Forbes, Reisch, p. 59) Following from this, Kristeva’s ‘psychoanalytic mode’ “explains the connection between the abject and the body referring to that earliest human state where the newborn organism, still literally on the boundary