Matt Mayhall

Sam finally gave me a disc of a gig we did with Adam Benjamin about a year ago.  We listened to it and decided that it was “killing,” to use the parlance of our times.  Despite their relatively poor sound quality, I posted a few tracks in the Listen section.  Pictured above is the guy inadvertently responsible for bringing the three of us together.  Photo by me.

There seem to be at least two different kinds of Radiohead fans: those who readily consider everything the band has released as the work of collective genius, and those who pretty much quit paying attention somewhere around OK Computer. It has been my observation that those who fit into the latter category are predominately male.  This makes sense, because it appears to me that Radiohead’s sound and overall aesthetic pre- vs. post- OK Computer work to represent two distinct, opposing male identities.  One identity is the that of the sensitive yet powerful male, more or less represented by the band’s earlier,  guitar-based music, which is replete with conventionally “stable” harmonic devices (most of the songs on The Bends are representative of this).  But a conflicting identity begins to crop up on OK Computer and comes to the fore on Kid A and Amnesiac, both of which showcase a predominant reliance on electronically manipulated sound and relative harmonic stasis or ambiguity (see “Idioteque” from Kid A). The confluence of these factors on Kid A and Amnesiac enable an interpretation of the music as being somewhat androgynous, where the lines between “masculine” and “feminine” musical signifiers become blurry to the point where some males feel the need to disassociate.  Given that the electric guitar has historically served the male performer in molding the audience’s perceptions of his power, what happens when that instrument’s role in the music is greatly diminished?  Similarly, what happens when a more or less conventional usage of harmony is replaced by a static loop of bleeps, blurps, and hums?

And as my friend Nick recently pointed out to me, what about those who didn’t really care about Radiohead until Kid A?

Seeing as how those records came out a long time ago and we’ve all had some time to sit with them, I’m sure someone’s already written at length on this topic before, I just don’t know about it.  If you do, let me know.

Is this thing on?

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