Not too long before my brother and I downloaded the new Radiohead album, King of Limbs, we were ogling over a graphic we found online. It showed a spore-like creature, depicting the Internet in all of its networking and World Wide Webness, spread out like a spider’s crack-addled artwork, or the nucleus of an atom, or a distant galaxy. I was amazed, to say nothing of my brother’s reaction, at the compactness of it—it was three-dimensional but tiny, all of its arms pointing to the different parts of the world that it touched, but shown as no bigger, of course, than the browser window. How could the tips of that little spiny ball represent the entire connected world? We here in Illinois, the people I met in Ghana. Are there Internets in space? My brother tells me Yes, that cell phone satellites now transfer beams of information so that we can get YouTuber in our speeding cars on our MePads. That amazes me.
I’m admitting this not because I want to come across as a technophobe—that I’m wary, suspicious, or apprehensive about technology. I bring this graphic and what it says about connectivity up because it endlessly reminds me about Radiohead.
This is one of the few bands that I follow religiously that began playing music before the Internet, has continued into our “Age of Information,” and comprehensively uses the Internet as their medium of distribution. Radiohead is the Internet, as far as I’m concerned. I’m listening to them from the Internet Explorer right now, in fact.
Offering King of Limbs as both a digital download and the “world’s first [perhaps] newspaper album,” Radiohead didn’t utterly astound anybody by again trying something new this time around. They pulled a similar, bigger stunt in ’07 when In Rainbows cost any price you wanted for a digital download, including FREE. It is curious, though, that they call this new recording a “Newspaper Album,” when the newspaper is surely waning in popularity and use. And you have to purchase the tangible two-record-one-CD-many-large-sheets-of-artwork version for fifty bucks if you want the said periodical version. Jake and I opted for the cheap, immediate, intangible version for $9. I wonder if that means we’ve neglected the written word.
I don’t know what Radiohead is trying to say by calling the more expensive King of Limbs by a name that is so near out of vogue. But whoever does know what they’re saying, right? This album is forty more minutes of Thom Yorke’s characteristic de-contextualized clichés, falsetto-d and stretched out over drum machine beats and repetitive guitar. “Open your mouth wide, the universe will sigh,” he starts. The quick e-rattle-beat and echoing atmospherics make this sound just like a second Yorke solo album—call it The Eraser II. There’s more to this album, though, now that I listen to it with headphones. It’s grounded more, spending less time actually out in the atmosphere, and there’s more going on. I love the clean guitar in the background of “Morning Mr. Magpie.”
But this album is pointedly more digital-feeling than all the other ones—most of these drums and swells of fuzz sound like tasteful, careful computer work. That’s why it has The Eraser written all over it. And that’s why we’re all puzzled about this whole newspaper business: if this is supposed to be the first “Newspaper Album,” we’ll be getting it on our Kindle, certainly. Don’t get me wrong: you should listen to it. There are no elaborate auto-tuned melismatic passages, and this isn’t dance music. You should, though, watch Thom Yorke dance to “Lotus Flower” on the Tube, if you get the chance. It’s great.
Oh, that’s another thing. I saw the video for “Lotus Flower” before I heard the album in its entirety, and, though that is far from uncommon these days, that is another thing the Blagosphere is good for: sneak previews. Major sneak previews. Illegal sneak previews. Shameless plugs. Channeling new and “important” information between everybody on the web that Jake and I saw.
I don’t know how good or bad that is, or how right or wrong. I do think it’s good and right for me to be able to listen to Radiohead’s new album, but I’m not sure of how many more good and right effects this Internet has had (or will have) on music as we know it. True, there is more accessibility to music criticism, perhaps, than there has been before. And I’m now starting a blog, reviewing albums on a weekly basis, so that’s good, of course (shameless plug, yep) But I am, I think, wary of praising all things technetronic just because they’re new and cool. Listening to Radiohead all the time through my earbuds is convenient, but nothing beats seeing them perform in person, or putting their record on to watch it spin with some people you like.
