Record Company Fights Back
By Tony Sauro, The Record, Stockton, Calif.
Jun. 5–Call it getting your corporate comeuppance. Or recording-industry revenge being exacted.
Really, though, it’s all about making bucks. What isn’t these days?
The EMI/Capitol recording empire — in precipitous decline as the Internet assumes more and more command and control of how popular music is consumed — got even Tuesday with Radiohead.
Without the band members’ input or participation, Capitol Records released a trifecta of Radiohead “product.”
“Radiohead: the Best of,” covering most of the artistically adventurous, platinum-plus Oxford, England, group’s 16-year career, was released as a 17-track, single CD, a 30-track double CD and DVD collection of 21 videos.
Thom Yorke and his Radiohead mates aren’t too thrilled, even though they will profit financially.
“We haven’t really had any hits. So what exactly is the purpose?” was Yorke’s Internet reaction. “There’s nothing we can do about it. The work is really public property now anyway, in my head at least.
“It’s a wasted opportunity, in that if we’d been behind it — and … wanted to do it — then it might have been good.”
Actually, nearly all of Radiohead’s music is better than good, verging on that much-abused adjective: great.
That’s not really the point.
The vital issues are achieving genuine artistic independence and maintaining control — financial and otherwise — over what you create.
Last October, Radiohead famously released a new album — “In Rainbows — only on the Internet, allowing purchasers to pay whatever they thought it was worth. It was a daring gesture and direct challenge to corporate hegemony after Radiohead’s contract with EMI/Capitol had expired.
Though Yorke and Radiohead never released any numbers, The New York Times reported they averaged an estimated $2.26 per MP3 download — including in places such as Afghanistan and North Korea — which is still more than most conventional corporate contracts allow.
“In Rainbows,” one of Radiohead’s best albums, subsequently was released through an independent distributor to commercial outlets Jan. 1, selling for as low as $7.99. The band also sold it as an elegantly packaged, limited-edition, mail-order box set (two CDs, two vinyl discs, booklet, photos and a portfolio of digital artwork). They did it their way and their hard-core fans responded, even at $80 per set.
It’s unlikely the completists among them will totally boycott Capitol’s collections, either. After all, there are 135 minutes of mostly excellent music there.
It’s also difficult to dissuade those who might not be as obsessed, but are interested in sampling Radiohead’s output. That, however, is easily doable on the Internet.
Following the success of their introductory U.S. single — the self-flagellating “Creep” from “Pablo Honey” (1993) — Radiohead has crafted increasingly ambitious and experimental albums that resist being chopped up into bits and pieces.
“The Bends” (1995) and “OK Computer” (1997) were brilliant explorations of pop music’s possibilities, picking up where Pink Floyd left off and venturing into entirely unexplored sonic universes amid themes of alienation, dread and badly bruised idealism.
Led by the restless creative energy and limitless imagination of Yorke (and his crushed choirboy voice), Jonny and Collin Greenwood, Phil Selway and Ed O’Brien kept rewriting the rules on the less-accessible — simultaneously puzzling and entrancing — “Kid A” (2000), “Amnesiac” (2001) and the slightly more conventional “Hail to the Thief” (2003).
They didn’t seem to care if anyone accompanied them into this alien territory or not. Like all bands of their stature and staying power, they trusted their followers’ faith and instincts.
So, stuffing “Creep” between the apocalyptic detonations of “Paranoid Android,” cautionary “Karma Police,” anxiously fraught “No Surprises” and panicky “High and Dry” is jolting.
Like so many young bands, Yorke, 39, and Radiohead didn’t retain control of the rights to their music when they signed with EMI as eager neophytes from the Oxfordshire boonies. So they have no control over this.
Maybe those songs — as well as the beautifully mournful “Fake Plastic Trees,” deeply agitated “My Iron Lung” and soaring “Black Star” (mysteriously missing here) — should have been “hits.” Recording “hits” wasn’t, and isn’t, this band’s motivation or objective.
That’s a major reason so many people respect and admire them so much.
Not surprisingly, these Capitol releases just happen to coincide with Radiohead’s current tour, which brings the band Aug. 22 to San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.
Known for its dynamic, often overpowering, live performances, that’s when the genuine “Best of” Radiohead truly emerges and always will be sustained. Under its full control.
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