How NOT to write about music – 80. Radiohead

Radiohead is shit.

Do not believe the hype. Never believe the hype. Just because the last 50 years in music journalism has been one long exercise in self-congratulatory self-important white boys writing about other self-congratulatory self-important white boys does not mean that it is a worthwhile, a noble, a salutatory craft. It is not. It is simply the sound of one long expulsion of air, flatulent and windy and peculiarly odorless, a miasma of meaningless pseudo-academic pontificating about nothingness and air, artifice, pomp and circumstantial crap, a dizzying diatribe of denial, an expedient expelling of extraneous emotion, valueless. Nothing.

My life over the last two decades has been swamped with people spouting crap like “I don’t want to say Radiohead is shit because you gotta applaud their effort and their imagination, their ability to find new directions and pathways and wasn’t it great when they put out that one album for as much as you wanted to pay”. No. It fucking wasn’t. They should have OFFERED me money to listen to that shit, and even then I wouldn’t cos… you know. Just say no, kids. Don’t be misled by all the serious boys and their serious beards playing their serious music under the serious moonlight. Just don’t. This is noodly whiny tuneless shit. All of it. Every last fuckin’ bit.

Fuck ’em. Flash, shallow and with no inner core. Fuck ’em. Radiohead is shit. All the dullest bits of all the dullest parts of histrionic rock vocalising, coupled with the dullest bits of Balearic – and man there have been plenty – coupled with the yawning chasms of imagination Supertramp have traded in since they dropped ‘songs’ from their repertoire, coupled with the dullest parts of the 1980s and the 1990s – and man there have been plenty – coupled with the dullest parts of life.

Grey, masquerading as grey.

I have nothing against pretentious and imagination, but Radiohead are like the pseudo-intellectual equivalent of the Rolling Stones: WILL NOT ONE PERSON STAND UP TO ATTACK THEM? And if you do? Cue the fucking crows. Cue the fucking weeping wailers. HOW DARE WE SLAG SOMETHING OFF OBVIOUSLY SO GENIUS? Says the fuck who. Shit you go to college to learn just so you can avoid listening to it ever again in your life. Some shit is so cancerous that not even the most benighted benevolent generous hapless hipster should be leaping to the fucktards’ defense.

Like being left alone in a world of fusion.

Do not believe the herd. Do not believe the herd. Never believe the herd. Unless the herd amuses you, or serves to provoke enemies, or divert attention away from yet another delayed train journey between Redhill and Dorking Deep fucking Dene.

Radiohead is shit. You don’t need to be beautiful to say this, you don’t need to be lonely. You don’t need to be popular, you don’t need to be a geek. Radiohead is shit.

Radiohead is shit. Do not fear the crowd. Has it not occurred to you that the crowd can be wrong sometimes? Radiohead is shit. Scream it from the rooftops and the balustrades. They have no grace, no style, no panache, no imagination. Nothing.

Ed Sheeran is shit. He makes James Blunt sound soulful. He makes Coldplay sound like coleslaw. He puts Morrissey into perspective. He is the grey. He is the grey. He is the grey in the middle of grey. His emotion is not. There is no anger, no joy, no passion. Neutral colour neutral carpet neutral wallpaper shit designed for the sole purpose of being neutral.

I’d eat at McDonald’s, if Haywards Heath fucking had one. I ‘d drink coffee at Starbucks. If Haywards Heath fucking had one. I’d buy my groceries at Asda. Yes, you got it.

Radiohead is shit. And that shit is everywhere.