Published at 8:00 AM on December 7, 2009

Listen Up: Maybe Radiohead Does Kinda Blow, and Maybe That's a Good Thing

Listen Up: Maybe Radiohead Does Kinda Blow, and Maybe That's a Good Thing

So, there's this movie. It's about two teenagers in love—two dreamily pale, smooth-skinned teenagers who, through strange forces beyond their control, cannot be togetha 4 eva like they so deeply desire with the passion of a hundred of the raging pimples that have yet to mar their porcelain visages.

The young actor who plays the boy in this troubled affair is on his way to becoming a huge star—he's all tousle-haired and slim-limbed, flashing wry smiles at the cameras that trail him around. The girl is a bit moodier and no one's quite sure what to do with her yet. Oh, well. We'll figure something out.

Opening weekend, this movie was #1 in America. It was huge. There's a soundtrack, too, and it's also huge. What's crazy about this soundtrack is that it's not full of what you might think of as "typical teen fare," even though the main characters and the target audience of the film are barely old enough to drive and when they finally are will still probably be listening to top 40 tripe in their mom's sedan. The artists on the soundtrack you wouldn't hear on the radio, but folks who pride themselves on treading waters outside the mainstream know the names well.

Perhaps the most unlikely band on the soundtrack is Radiohead. Weird, right? They're usually all into artistry and authenticity and making albums and being thorny, but now they're offering up their songs to a hyper-popular teen movie soundtrack? And not just any song, but one they wrote specifically for the movie itself? This is ridiculous! Disgusting! Confusing! Doesn't anyone value art anymore? Must everything be commodified, marketed, sold back at us as something edgy and wild? And Radiohead, of all bands—aren't they above this?

Aren't they?

Well, no, apparently not. Frontman Thom Yorke wasn't above it when music supervisor Alexandra Patsavas approached him this year about contributing an original song to the Twilight: New Moon soundtrack, and his band wasn't above it twelve years ago when the late-1990s equivalent to Alexandra Patsavas, whoever that was, approached them about contributing an original song for the soundtrack to Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet.

Yeah, remember that?

More than a decade before Yorke tossed the elsewhere-unreleased "Hearing Damage" at Atlantic for what would quickly become the #1-selling album in America, Radiohead tossed the elsewhere-unreleased "Exit Music (For A Film)" and The Bends' "Talk Show Host" at Capitol for what would quickly become the, uh, #1-selling album in America. And in case you missed it, "15 Step" from In Rainbows played over the closing credits of the first Twilight installment, too. If you weren't already pissed about that, time to catch up.

Stephenie Meyer sure ain't Shakespeare, but this still clashes with the general sense that Radiohead's recent involvement with a big-budget Hollywood flick is somehow a betrayal of the band's artistic core. ("Fake Plastic Trees" could be heard in Clueless, too, lest we forget.)

Last week, I was invited to be on WNYC's Soundcheck's Smackdown to talk with host John Schaefer and culture writer Chris Norris, who penned Spin's current cover story, an attempt to debunk the grand myth that "Radiohead can do no wrong." In reality, he asserts, "Radiohead kinda blow." I'm by no means a die-hard Radiohead fan myself—I have a pretty visceral adolescent connection to OK Computer, in particular, but more recently I've had a hard time mustering up much interest, which actually puts me in the same camp as Norris himself. Maybe I wasn't the best person to bring on the show because of this, and also because I tend to daintily skirt most conversations involving rock music and subjective extremes, and also because I tend to suffer from telephone-related mental retardation, but oh well, it was mostly fun.

Aside from whatever doofy stuff might have come out of my own mouth, a few things were mentioned by the other guys that I wish I'd had more time and space and mental acuity to respond to as it was all happening. One moment in particular stuck in my mind. When our host Schaefer took a call from a Radiohead fan who said he was "completely horrified" to hear that Yorke had contributed a song to the New Moon soundtrack, Norris replied, "It's pretty inscrutable. I'm assuming that Thom Yorke perhaps had a song lying around or something—I've heard the song, it's just about where they're at... I don't get it. I don't know how it makes sense in their world-view. It's like, 'We're not kotowing to these huge industry giants—oh by the way, [here's] this likely huge selling movie, here's a song that we don't really want to use but we'll take the money for it.' They probably have a reason for it, they probably have it thought out, but I don't really get it."

I found this odd on a gut level at the time, and for more specific reasons after having some time to process. First, the idea of "selling out" has become so increasingly irrelevant in the past decade that it surprises me when any band—even one like Radiohead, who have of course not only eschewed major label support but given a fat middle finger to the music industry as a whole with the In Rainbows release (shaking it up at all levels, not just the majors)—is given any amount of grief for this choice. We should know now that bands are not necessarily devalued by the decision to sell their music to anyone other than loving, adoring fans. If there's some greater artistic issue lingering within the band, if they themselves are confused about why and who they are making music for, that's going to crop up sometime anyway, whether before or after the point of transaction. Still, there's a lingering anxiety that "selling out" will render a band unappealing and unrecognizable to the fans that once loved them, all for the sake of mass consumption—all clean and shiny, corners rounded, teeth pulled.

But as Norris himself notes in the Spin story, the big problem with Radiohead right now is that they aren't making the music their dearest fans really want to hear—that the band is becoming increasingly alien, artistically solipsistic, cloistered and cold. "Inscrutable," as he said during the Smackdown and in the story itself.

This is probably true—although as I said on-air, I don't think Radiohead cares that anyone is concerned. Regardless, even if we don't love the music they're making right now, shouldn't we at least be grateful that it's not easy to like? Maybe the band is in a rut, maybe Yorke is "so far up his own formalist ass we might as well... not even [be here]," as Norris wrote, but isn't this band's disinterest in coziness what we've always loved about them? And can't we be glad, at least, that they've maintained this contrarian snarl despite licensing songs to major-label blockbuster movie soundtracks?

Some kind of balance between these two extremes would be preferable—I am not attempting to proliferate the idea that Radiohead can do no wrong, because it's most certainly a myth—but isn't this sustained inscrutability also some kind of triumph?

By the way, of course the band—or, more specifically, Yorke (since it's his song)—has a reason for wanting to be on the New Moon soundtrack, and I'm pretty sure it's not that he simply has an abiding love of teen vampires and abstinence-porn (but who knows!). It's about money. But then, so was the strategic In Rainbows leak. And so was every bumper sticker, poster or t-shirt anyone's ever bought with the band's name on it. And so was the band's decision to have its songs on the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack twelve years ago. And so will be, I'm sure, many other seemingly "inscrutable" choices made as time goes on.

They need and want to make money. They also need and want to make art. As long as the former doesn't interfere with the latter—as it's clearly not doing now—everything's gonna be fine.

In the Spin story, Norris laments the "newspeak" surrounding the band's recent career. "Does Radiohead's every move have to be without precedent? Must they define a new music language?" I'm making myself even less of an obvious choice to have debated him on the radio by saying: No and no, of course not. But it should come as a relief that when it comes to the issue of "selling out" or not, Radiohead has long been just another five faces in an ever-growing crowd—blessedly normal, for once in its life.

Rachael Maddux is Paste’s assistant editor. Her column appears at PasteMagazine.com every Monday.

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