COMMENTARY

Radiohead defined a generation

Radiohead band members, from left, Ed O'Brien, guitar, Jonny Greenwood, lead guitar, Colin Greenwood, bass guitar, Thom Yorke, lead vocalist, and drummer Phil Selwayan.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

The turntable was a source of watershed moments for children of the 1950s.

From rock ‘n’ roll’s birth with Buddy Holly and the Crickets, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Elvis, to rock’s defiant teenage years with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, the Doors, and Pink Floyd.

Those of us born in the late 1960s and early 1970s inherited that music, much like a younger brother is made to wear his older brother’s clothes.

Radiohead band members, from left, Ed O'Brien, guitar, Jonny Greenwood, lead guitar, Colin Greenwood, bass guitar, Thom Yorke, lead vocalist, and drummer Phil Selwayan.

Sometimes the clothes fit, sometimes you even liked the clothes, but the clothes were and are never truly yours.

Radiohead, however, is all ours.

The average age in the band is 49 — guitarist Jonny Greenwood is 46, vocalist-guitarist Thom Yorke and bassist Colin Greenwood are 49, guitarist Ed O'Brien is 50, and drummer Philip Selway is 51 — so they’re at the front end of Generation X.

The British fivesome were raised with those same musical hand-me-downs in the 1970s, and as teenagers in the 1980s grew up listening to the jangly-turned-mercurial-turned-raucous college rock sound that defined radio on the dial’s far, far, left, and was largely absent on the stations to the right.

Radiohead is anything but rock’s past, rather it is its prescient present: experimental, less guitar-based, challenging (sometimes frustratingly so), unpredictable, and no longer constricted by rules, tradition, or status.

How many groups sell out arenas — as with Sunday night’s show at Little Caesars Arena in Detroit as part of the band’s mini North American tour — without charting a single higher than No. 34 on Billboard’s Hot 100? That song was Creep, Radiohead’s first single from its 1993 debut album, Pablo Honey.

A rock anthem of heavy guitar riffs and sing-worthy lyrics about alienation, Creep is the ultimate alt-rock song in that it sounds like it was recorded in someone’s garage, even when blaring from a home stereo.

The hit song launched the band, providing them radio exposure and a following, but two albums later, 1997’s OK Computer, Radiohead had clearly moved on from it and their formative sound.

Cold, indifferent, paranoid, spacey, and forward thinking, OK Computer is Radiohead’s contemplation of the then-upcoming millennium as a future less intimate than imminent, a digital age of instant judgement and the technology to make everyone happy and docile but doing neither.

OK Computer was hailed as a masterpiece when released. More than 20 years later, it’s clear the album is that decade — and band — and music-defining work that once came with regularity as rock forged a path through virgin musical territory, and has since become increasingly less common as those paths are highly trafficked paved freeways.

Hailed as the second coming of Pink Floyd, Radiohead was assured of its future post-OK Computer and we were certain of it.

Then band members baffled and infuriated some fans, present company included, as they chose not so much a new direction for their music, but a genre unto itself, with guitars subservient and often part of a musical ethos of experimentation particularly on the electronic side. And not just for a single album, or even two, but for the next six, including 2016’s A Moon Shaped Pool, a haunting work of fuzzy melodies, electronic jitters, ghostly vocals, and studio mastery that casts light and shadows like a dying lightbulb. OK Computer isn’t just a watershed moment, but one of many epochs.

Some liken Radiohead as a vanguard to the post-rock era. But Radiohead is very much part of that tradition of rock ‘n’ roll as an evolution of musical tastes, technological know-how, and creative whims.

In that sense, Radiohead is the last major rock band representing what rock can be, as opposed to the Foo Fighters, the last of the major rock bands in the neo-traditional style of what rock was and is.

Radiohead didn't abandon the music we grew up with, but like the Beatles, Pink Floyd, and so many others, it grew beyond it. 

Contact Kirk Baird at: kbaird@theblade.com  or 419-724-6734.