The world of mainstream music is constantly transforming as new artists, styles and trends are embraced with each passing year. In spite of these changes, some musicians have maintained their popularity across decades, reinventing their sounds and careers. Each week, A&E columnist Emily McCormick will discuss the evolution of ’90s artists who have carried the spirit of their decade into today’s music scene.
When Radiohead first became popular, they were just a bunch of creeps.
“I’m a weirdo / What the hell am I doing here? / I don’t belong here,” Thom Yorke, Radiohead’s lead vocalist and songwriter, whimpered on the 1993 album “Pablo Honey.” The hit single was “Creep,” the song that became the ultimate anthem for the outsider-looking-in inside all of us.
At that point in ’93, Radiohead was slated to be just another one-hit wonder, the producer of a mediocre album with one redeeming smash single. “Creep” might have made its mark, but the rest of “Pablo Honey” was garden-variety grunge, noticeably borrowing music and style tips from alternative rock predecessors the Pixies, The Smiths and Nirvana.
Luckily, Radiohead’s 15 minutes of fame was renewed more than just a couple times over. Its next album, “The Bends,” solidified its fan base in its home country of Britain and a place in the rock mainstream. However, it was its last album of the ‘90s, “OK Computer,” that really proved the band’s permanence.
“OK Computer” signaled Radiohead’s emergence from the musical puberty of ‘90s adolescent angst into adult territory. The 1997 album was cutting edge in every possible way, among the first to deal with an outer space, electronic rock hybrid sound.
It experimented with song form, especially with the six-and-a-half-minute “Paranoid Android,” which dared to forego catchy choruses in favor of a verseless format à la “Bohemian Rhapsody.” As a whole, “OK Computer” featured a sci-fi vibe filled with ominous lyrics foreshadowing technology-dominated millennium to come.
Radiohead stuck with the tech-rock vibe from “OK Computer” with their first album of the 2000s, “Kid A.” By that point, Radiohead’s sound was secure. Like a soft-spoken person who gets listeners leaning in, Radiohead’s combination of glitchy instrumental ambience combined with Yorke’s whining vocals created music that mesmerized.
I certainly felt the impact of Radiohead’s music the first time I saw the band’s headlining set at Coachella in 2012. Its energy was intoxicating, and the members managed to make the enormous outdoor arena of thousands feel intimate. I’d been in the crowd about a football field away from the stage, pressed face-to-back against die-hard fans, yet I felt like the hypnotic music was directed right to me.
It’s the kind of music I got lost in. It’s music that says a lot, even when it isn’t actually saying anything. Though many of Radiohead’s songs feature disjointed, surreal lyrics – like the ones on the album “Kid A,” written by pulling random lines out of a hat – the emotion in the music was always clear even if the exact meaning was not.
Radiohead’s music celebrates the imperfect and the ugly, a theme spanning from “Creep” to their latest album, “The King of Limbs” from 2011. With its sound and ethos, Radiohead has earned its place at the top of charts, in film music and at sold-out concerts, even after all these years.
As the band matured, it has graduated from classic rock band to a group of cool-guy techies with commercial appeal. But even its most recent and more pop-based albums include homages to its earlier works, like its inclusion of the 1996 song “Nude” on the 2007 album “In Rainbows.”
Radiohead will pull a similar old-meets-new trick with their unnamed upcoming album, to be released by the end of the year. The album will feature a recording of “Lift,” a song the band used to play in the mid-’90s, to contrast the more modern, accessibly pop-centric melodies of the Radiohead of ’00s. Last year, drummer Philip Selway promised Radiohead’s best album was yet to come, setting the bar high for this ensuing collection. I have no doubts the band will rise to the occasion.
“I wish I was special,” Radiohead had lamented in the ‘90s, still just another scruffy boy band. Two decades, I’d say its wish has come true.
– Emily McCormick