On the heels of my one-two punch (more like a wussy little slap) against Radiohead–a bemoaning of their post-9/11 politics coupled with a faint-praise damning of their new album–Bill “Gadabout” Sherman writes:
“Picked up a copy of the new Radiohead disc last week, incidentally, and, you know, I kind of wish that they’d followed up on the political rantwork promised in its title and cover (which reminds me a bit of the back cover to the Mothers of Invention’s Absolutely Free – now there’s an album that knows how to be disrespectful to the president: it opens with an impersonation of LBJ doing “Louie Louie.”) If they had, it might’ve made the album more exciting.”
Seriously! Political brio isn’t necessarily a guarantee of “interesting music”–I’d imagine that NOFX’s The War on Errorism sucks, for example–but Bill’s right: the biggest problem with Hail is the lack of life. However, I’m actually starting to enjoy it more now that I’ve been flipping through Radiohead’s back catalog on my
iPod–bouncing around through various songs on Pablo Honey, The Bends, and Amnesiac has helped me contextualize Hail through their already extant body of incredible work, as opposed to through a political issue about which the band and I disagree passionately. But Bill’s still right–a little chutzpah would have made the whole enterprise more invigorating. (I still enjoy my Rage Against the Machine records, for example, probably for that very reason. Well, that, and the fact that I never took Rage’s hardcore Communism very seriously. I mean, the hammer and sickle on Tom Morello’s baseball caps is supposed to represent a viable political and economic ideology? C’mon–you’ve GOT to laugh at that!)