{"id":21188,"date":"2014-02-25T11:00:14","date_gmt":"2014-02-25T16:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/?p=21188"},"modified":"2014-02-25T11:02:38","modified_gmt":"2014-02-25T16:02:38","slug":"radiohead-pushin-too-hard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/radiohead-pushin-too-hard\/","title":{"rendered":"Radiohead: Pushin’ Too Hard?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Your Friendly Neighborhood Gollum<\/p><\/div>\n

Saturday night I watched an hour-long performance by Radiohead<\/strong> on Austin City Limits<\/em>. It’s the second such hour-long televised performance I’ve watched by the band on PBS. A couple of years ago I saw some performance of them in a studio. In both cases, I was interested enough to keep watching, but despite being impressed<\/em> by their arsenal of avant-garde touches; instrument juggling; and obscure and cool gear as well as the maximum effort that all the band members put into their music, I got very little out of the experience of trying to listen to and feel the music. It added up to a whole lot of nothing.<\/p>\n

Surely, I’ve been missing something.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I’ve bought 3 Radiohead songs for my iPod: “High and Dry,” “No Surprises,” and “The National Anthem.” I like those songs a lot. They played none of those songs on the recent Austin City Limits. In fact, I guess they were playing a lot of obscure numbers, because Thom Yorke kind of apologized about playing so many songs that only diehard fans might recognize. Then, at the end of the show, he announced that they were finally going to play a song everyone would know, “Paranoid Android,” I think it was called. I was aware of this song, and whenever they played the big, King Crimson-like guitar riff I recalled having heard it before, but other than a couple of flashes of heaviosity the song sounded no more or less memorable than all the B-sides that had preceded it.<\/p>\n

The crowd went wild for Radiohead. I know they’re popular and have achieved legendary status. Again, I think it’s really cool that they’ve achieved this by playing music that I can’t imagine many people would actually listen to if it wasn’t being played by Radiohead. Something about the band pulls them in. It’s got to be the power of the people who play that music, because\u2014again\u2014there’s little that’s objectively catchy and capable of casting a broad appeal if you can separate their music from their performance. Is there?<\/p>\n