Radiohead's OK Computer

Author: Dai Griffiths
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 0826416632
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 139

Book Description
Seemingly granted ‘classic album' status within days of its release in 1997, OK Computer transformed Radiohead from a highly promising rock act into The Most Important Band in the World - a label the band has been burdened by (and has fooled around with) ever since. Through close musical analysis of each song, Dai Griffiths explores the themes and ideas that have made this album resonate so deeply with its audience, and argues that OK Computer is one of the most successfully realized CD albums so far created. EXCERPT But then ‘Karma Police' changes. After the second chorus the track lifts, in various ways. Harmonically, there's a key change of sorts (the sheet music charmingly follows the convention of preparing the reader for the new key signature), from E minor to B minor, although in truth both sections use similar chords. Then vocally or melodically, the key change takes Thom Yorke to his angelic register. Texturally, there's a big shift, with all the instruments doing lighter things. Best to my mind though, there's the one word, phew. Phew's great: it's a cartoon word, like ‘gulp' or ‘zzzz' or ‘bah'. Its precision matters, the fact that it's really there, properly pronounced, not just sort-of-breathed...

Radiohead's OK Computer

Author: Dai Griffiths
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1441109161
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 138

Book Description
Seemingly granted 'classic album' status within days of its release in 1997, OK Computer transformed Radiohead from a highly promising rock act into The Most Important Band in the World – a label the band has been burdened by (and has fooled around with) ever since. Through close musical analysis of each song, Dai Griffiths explores the themes and ideas that have made this album resonate so deeply with its audience, and argues that OK Computer is one of the most successfully realized CD albums so far created.

Stanley Donwood: There Will Be No Quiet

Author: Stanley Donwood
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780500021880
Category : Sound recordings
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Book Description
The talent behind Radiohead's iconic artwork reveals in his own words and for the first time the creative process that has driven his career and earned him a cult reputation.A restless and prolific figure, Stanley Donwood is widely regarded as one of the most important visual artists of his generation. His influential work for Radiohead spans many practices and ever-evolving aesthetics over a 23-year period, from music packaging to installations to print-making. Here, for the very first time, he reveals his personal notebooks, photographs, sketches and abandoned routes to iconic Radiohead artworks. Arranged chronologically, chapters are each dedicated to a major work - be it an album cover, promotional piece or a personal project - presented as a step-by-step working case study, from speculative ideas and sketches right through to Photoshop experiments and the finished piece. Accompanying narratives by Donwood explain the inspirations and stories behind his creative process and what it is like to work with the band, told with his typical razor-sharp humour and generosity of spirit. Featuring a treasury of archive material, this is the first deep dive into Donwood's creative practice and the artistic freedom afforded to him by working for a major music act. There Will Be No Quiet is essential reading, and viewing, for fans of the band and anyone interested in the explosive mix of artistic accident, musical ingenuity and creative originality.

Everything in Its Right Place

Author: Brad Osborn
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190629231
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Book Description
More than any rock artist since The Beatles, Radiohead's music inhabits the sweet spot between two extremes: on the one hand, music that is wholly conventional and conforms to all expectations of established rock styles, and, on the other hand, music so radically experimental that it thwarts any learned notions. While averting mainstream trends but still achieving a significant level of success in both US and UK charts, Radiohead's music includes many surprises and subverted expectations, yet remains accessible within a framework of music traditions. In Everything in its Right Place: Analyzing Radiohead, Brad Osborn reveals the functioning of this reconciliation of extremes in various aspects of Radiohead's music, analyzing the unexpected shifts in song structure, the deformation of standard 4/4 backbeats, the digital manipulation of familiar rock 'n' roll instrumentation, and the expected resolutions of traditional cadence structures. Expanding on recent work in musical perception, focusing particularly on form, rhythm and meter, timbre, and harmony, Everything in its Right Place treats Radiohead's recordings as rich sonic ecosystems in which a listener participates in an individual search for meaning, bringing along expectations learned from popular music, classical music, or even Radiohead's own compositional idiolect. Radiohead's violations of these subjective expectation-realization chains prompt the listener to search more deeply for meaning within corresponding lyrics, biographical details of the band, or intertextual relationships with music, literature, or film. Synthesizing insights from a range of new methodologies in the theory of pop and rock, and specifically designed for integration into music theory courses for upper level undergraduates, Everything in its Right Place is sure to find wide readership among scholars and students, as well as avid listeners who seek a deeper understanding of Radiohead's distinctive juxtapositional style.

This Isn't Happening

Author: Steven Hyden
Publisher: Hachette Books
ISBN: 0306845695
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 189

Book Description
THE MAKING AND MEANING OF RADIOHEAD'S GROUNDBREAKING, CONTROVERSIAL, EPOCHDEFINING ALBUM, KID A. In 1999, as the end of an old century loomed, five musicians entered a recording studio in Paris without a deadline. Their band was widely recognized as the best and most forward-thinking in rock, a rarefied status granting them the time, money, and space to make a masterpiece. But Radiohead didn't want to make another rock record. Instead, they set out to create the future. For more than a year, they battled writer's block, intra-band disagreements, and crippling self-doubt. In the end, however, they produced an album that was not only a complete departure from their prior guitar-based rock sound, it was the sound of a new era-and it embodied widespread changes catalyzed by emerging technologies just beginning to take hold of the culture. What they created was Kid A. Upon its release in 2000, Radiohead's fourth album divided critics. Some called it an instant classic; others, such as the UK music magazine Melody Maker, deemed it "tubby, ostentatious, self-congratulatory... whiny old rubbish." But two decades later, Kid A sounds like nothing less than an overture for the chaos and confusion of the twenty-first century. Acclaimed rock critic Steven Hyden digs deep into the songs, history, legacy, and mystique of Kid A, outlining the album's pervasive influence and impact on culture in time for its twentieth anniversary in 2020. Deploying a mix of criticism, journalism, and personal memoir, Hyden skillfully revisits this enigmatic, alluring LP and investigates the many ways in which Kid A shaped and foreshadowed our world.

This Day in Music

Author: Neil Cossar
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781783055104
Category : Rock music
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Book Description
Births, deaths and marriages, No1 singles, drug busts and arrests, famous gigs and awards... all these and much more appear in this fascinating 50 year almanac.Using a page for every day of the calendar year, the author records a variety of rock and pop events that took place on a given day of the month across the years.This Day in Music is fully illustrated with hundreds of pictures, cuttings and album covers, making this the must-have book for any pop music fan.

Radiohead

Author: Tim Footman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Book Description
Footman's book gives a detailed track-by-track breakdown of OK Computer - hailed as the last of the classic albums - and traces its influences, from music, film, literature, art and politics. Setting the album in the context of the period in which it was released, Footman shows how the songs are intended to sit alongside one another, released in an era before downloads and cherry-picking the hits were even fashionable. Not only the largest and most detailed study yet published of the last ever classic album, but the most in-depth analysis of Radiohead available.

The Music and Art of Radiohead

Author: Joseph Tate
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000950611
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 223

Book Description
The Music and Art of Radiohead provides compelling close readings of the English band's music, lyrics, album cover art and music videos as well as critical commentary on interviews, reviews and the documentary film Meeting People is Easy. Established and emerging academic scholars engage with Radiohead's music and art via concerns of broader implication to contemporary cultural studies. Topics range from the band's various musical and multivalent social contexts to their contested situation within a global market economy; from asking the question, 'how free is art?' to considering the band's musical influences and radical sonic explorations. Together, the essays form a comprehensive discussion of Radiohead's entire oeuvre, from Pablo Honey to Hail to the Thief, with a special focus on the critically acclaimed best-selling albums Kid A and Amnesiac.

Radiohead and Philosophy

Author: Jason T. Eberl
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 1459601041
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 458

Book Description
Not only is Radiohead the most innovative and influential rock bandit's also the most philosophically and culturally relevant. Since the 1993 breakthrough hit ""Creep,"" the band keeps on making waves, with its view of the Bush presidency (Hail to the Thief), its anti-corporatism, its ecologically conscious road tours, its videos, and its decision to sell In Rainbows online at a 'pay whatever you want' price. Composed by a team of Radiohead fans who also think for a living, Radiohead and Philosophy is packet like a crushed tin box with insights into the meaning and implications of Radiohead's work. Paranoid or not, you'll understand Radiohead better than any android. ""Can a rock band still matter? Can it be a positive force in a postmodern world? For millions, Radiohead can, and these thought-provoking essays address how and why Radiohead makes a difference by working at the margins of popular culture.""

Bad Island

Author: Stanley Donwood
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324001860
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 176

Book Description
A starkly beautiful, wordless graphic novel about the end of the world by the cult artist and longtime Radiohead collaborator. A wild seascape, a distant island, a full moon. Gradually the island grows nearer until we land on a primeval wilderness, rich in vegetation and huge, strange beasts. Time passes and man appears, with clubs, with spears, with crueler weapons still—and things do not go well for the wilderness. Civilization rises as towers of stone and metal and smoke choke the undergrowth and the creatures that once moved through it. This is not a happy story, and it will not have a happy ending. Working in his distinctive, monochromatic linocut style, Stanley Donwood achieves with his art what words cannot convey, carving out a mesmerizing, stark parable of environmental disaster and the end of civilization.