Welcome to the Machine~OK Computer and the Death of the Classic Album [2007] by Radiohead

Author:Radiohead
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-11-01T10:10:56+00:00

CHAPTER 17

M A K E S Y O U L O O K P R E T T Y U G L Y –

T H E V I D E O S

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O K C o m p u t e r

What are you looking at?

—Madonna, ‘Vogue’

The use of moving pictures to promote musical performers and their recorded product goes back to the late 1920s, when jazz and blues artists made short films of their latest hits. This developed into Soundies, short, black-and-white films that were played on modified jukeboxes; Scopitones, shot on 16-millimetre colour film, were a French enhancement of the same idea, and were popular in Europe in the 1960s.

The increasing dominance of television, and the rise of youth-oriented pop shows, created a need for more filmed performances, especially by performers who weren’t present in the studio.

Unsurprisingly, key innovations came from Bob Dylan (‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, 1966) and The Beatles (‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, 1967). Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ (1975) was one of the first promotional films to take advantage of the technical possibilities of videotape, but it was the launch of MTV, an all-video cable channel, in 1981, that created the situation whereby any band with a successful single was almost obliged to release a video. Landmark productions such as Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ (directed by John Landis, 1983), Robert Palmer’s ‘Addicted To Love’ (Terence Donovan, 1986) and ‘Sledgehammer’ (Stephen R. Johnson, 1986) by Peter Gabriel reached new levels of sophistication, innovation and (in many cases) budget. For consumers, the visuals became inextri-cably linked to the music; the releases of videos by performers such as Jackson and Madonna became news events in their own right, often overshadowing the music that they were supposedly intended to promote.

Many video directors (such as Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry and David Fincher) have gone onto successful Hollywood careers; and plenty of respected movie directors (for example, Landis and Martin Scorsese) have travelled in the opposite direction. However, the critical status of the promotional video in rock and pop is shaky.

Of course, there’s potential within the form for astounding artistic and technical achievement, but many critics hold the dismissive view that they’re little more than advertisements, one more method 157

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to persuade the fans to part with their cash.1 Part of this suspicion may come from the fact that the heyday of the video was in the materialist 1980s, and pioneers in the form (such as Duran Duran) were seen to be in thrall to the glossy, vacuous values of the time.

Radiohead, whose whole essence was in opposition to this kind of chocolate-box mentality, did not take to videos naturally, and many of their early promos are little more than filmed ‘live’ performances. It was only with Jamie Thraves’ video for ‘Just’ (1995), the fourth single from The Bends, that they put their name to something particularly memorable.

In visual and narrative terms, it’s relatively simple. A man in a suit half-collapses, half-lies down on a London pavement.

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