As some of you may recall, for the past couple months the guys over at Radiohead Tournament have been compiling people’s lists of their top ten Radiohead songs. After collecting a bunch of data, the tournament has officially started, and the first 64 songs are up for voting. As always, the decisions are pretty hard. Some of the choices weren’t too bad (Everything in its Right Place > High & Dry, obvi) but most of them took a lot of thought. Anyway, should be interesting to see what some subset of the internet thinks are Radiohead’s greatest songs of all time. Check it out.
I don’t really have anything to say, other than you should vote. Or Puff Daddy/Diddy/Puffy/P. Diddy/Sean John/Sean “Puffy Combs will kill you. And here’s a song that decries politicking but that came on random this morning on the way to work and made me happy.
So I was thinking we should update this thing regularly, at least by having short posts on who knows what. So this morning I went on a small quest on YouTube to find older music videos that we may remember from our younger years and then write a sentence or two about the video and call it a day. Well, I stumbled across something far more interesting.
So the first thing I went for are bands I love and their videos from back in the day. Yep. Started with Radiohead. I know. I’m as surprised as you are.
I found the video to “Idioteque” which I remember seeing a bunch of times back in high school, and it’s a pretty cool video. Nothing mind blowing like the video for “Street Spirit (Fade Out)” or “Karma Police” or the legendary “Paranoid Android,” but a nice video nonetheless.
Now here’s the weird part. The audio in the music video is completely different than the audio on the album version. And it’s also different from the live version that they have out. So why would you put out a video with completely different audio? And was it recorded while the video was being shot?
Experts and non-experts weigh in.
Here are the album and released live versions of the song:
Just got an email from waste, Radiohead’s merchandise arm. As some of you may be aware, they held a remix contest several months ago for their song “Nude,” off their latest album In Rainbows. Radiohead intentionally released that song for the remix contest because it’s in 6/8, a difficult time signature to remix, half as a joke, and half to see what people could come up with.
That contest was a success, apparently, so they’re doing another one for the song “Reckoner,” which is certainly my favorite song on the album, and probably top 3 all time favorites. Color me excited. Also, the song is in the much more common/stable 4/4 time signature, so it will be much easier to tool around with.
You can head over to the official site, where you can listen to some of the remixes people already sent in. And, if you have any inclination towards remixing yourself (and/or own a copy of GarageBand), there’s a link to pick up all the different tracks from the song via iTunes.
Also, for something really cool (and something that undoubtedly took waaaaay too much time to complete), James Houston, an art student from Glasgow, remixed the song using a bunch of old computer hardware he had lying around. This one’s been floating around the internet for some time now, but if you haven’t seen it, it’s well worth the trouble.
Let me begin by saying this is no easy task. I have obsessed over each and every song on this list at some point in my life (as well as songs not on this list), and narrowing this list down to ten songs was a real challenge. Not only that, I also have put them in order from my all time favorite, Number 1 on this list (duh), to number 10.
I was initially going to post these as a comment to Dave’s Top 10, but I had too much to say about each song. So here they are. From 10 to 1. It’s a countdown. It’s the final countdown.
10. The Bends (from the album The Bends) - Great song. Flat out. It starts off with some weird sounds that apparently Thom recorded outside a hotel. Then all of a sudden you get hit with that really bright and crunchy guitar riff. The lyrics are some of the best in the Radiohead catalogue in my opinion, including some personal favorites like “the planet is a gunboat in a sea of fear,” and “alone on an aeroplane, fall asleep on against the window pane, my blood will thicken,” among others.
9. Optimistic (from the album Kid A) - Yeah, it was a single. But nonetheless an amazing song. Great lyrically as well, painting some dark and twisted images on the human condition such as ”nervous messed up marionettes, floating around on a prison ship.” Plus that lead into In Limbo…
8. Let Down (from the album OK Computer) - A song of sheer desperation. Or maybe not. Maybe just a casual observation on every day life while being completely removed from it, just watching the people coming and going. Either way it’s incredible lyrically, and musically it’s beautiful.
7. Everything in Its Right Place (from the album Kid A) - One of the best album openers ever. Of any album I have ever listened to. I remember when I heard it for the first time, and I knew I was about to hear something that I had never heard anything even remotely close to before. And I was right.
6. Lucky (from the album OK Computer) - Starting out with the sounds of what is apparently Ed’s guitar being played on the strings above the nut, on the head stock through a delay pedal, this song transforms into a beautiful epic, with the guitars hinting at dark undertones, until the 3:12 mark where they surface completely, only to resolve beautifully into a guitar solo at 3:46. A masterpiece both lyrically and musically.
5. I Might Be Wrong (from the album Amnesiac) - A powerful guitar driven track on a very dark and electronic sound based album. It is an incredible combination of styles and sounds. The highlight for me is the buildup, and then when it completely breaks down around the 3:50 mark.
4. Kid A (from the album Kid A) - A song unlike any other. Thom’s voice is distorted and twisted (to distance himself from the heavy lyrical content according to some sources), which kind of reinvents vocals, and the role of a vocalist, and makes them into more of an instrument.
3. Knives Out (from the album Amnesiac) - Creating an atmosphere of fear and paranoia, this song is one of Radiohead’s best in my opinion, with the repetitive guitar riffs, Thom’s haunting vocals, and lyrics to match. “If you’d been a dog, they would have drowned you at birth.”
2. Motion Picture Soundtrack (from the album Kid A) - Everything in Its Right Place is a great opener. Motion Picture Soundtrack is an incredible closer. One of the best I can think of. It has always sounded like the end to me. It’s what I expect to hear at the end if that makes any sense. If there is a heaven, this is what it sounds like going in. Simply beautiful.
1. Street Spirit (Fade Out) (from the album The Bends) - This is the greatest closer of any album I have ever heard. It stands on its own. It is unlike every other song on The Bends, but doesn’t fit on any Radiohead album really. But it is “THE” Radiohead song to me. According to the band, they didn’t write the song. It wrote itself. They were simply its “biological catalysts.” A hopeless song about living in a world filled with identical mass produced homes, cold detached machines that we created and depend on to run our lives, and finally, about staring death straight in the face. Despite all the things described in the song, there is still a glimmer of hope at the end with the closing line “immerse your soul in love.”
12 13th, 2008| 
