EVERYTHING IN ITS RIGHT PLACE Everything in its Right Place ANALYZING RADIOHEAD Brad Osborn Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Osborn, Brad.Title: Everything in its right place: analyzing Radiohead/Brad Osborn. Description: New York: Oxford University Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016022990 (print) | LCCN 2016023712 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190629236 (pbk.: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780190629229 (hardcover: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780190629243 (updf) | ISBN 9780190629250 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Radiohead (Musical group)—Criticism and interpretation | Rock music—England—History and criticism. Classification: LCC ML421.R25 O83 2017 (print) | LCC ML421.R25 (ebook) | DDC 782.42166092/2—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016022990 Contents Preface Acknowledgments Abbreviations and Notational Conventions 1. Analyzing Radiohead 2. Form 3. Rhythm and Meter 4. Timbre 5. Harmony and Voice Leading 6. “Pyramid Song” BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX Preface SINCE OK COMPUTER (1997), five of the six records released by the English rock band Radiohead has peaked at #1 on the UK and/or US charts, and these six records have accounted for nearly 26 million of the band’s 30 million albums sold. This success in their mature period (1997–2011) is especially notable since, following the generic “Brit Pop” and “Alternative Rock” heard on their first two albums (1993’s Pablo Honey and 1995’s The Bends), the band’s sound has never piggybacked on any mainstream trends. Their commercial success in this mature period stems instead from an ability to write music that balances expectation and surprise. Though most of their songs present the listener with myriad surprises and disjunctures, they only do so after first setting up rich expectations listeners have inherited from various musical traditions. This book analyzes Radiohead’s studio albums from OK Computer (1997) through The King of Limbs (2011) to reveal this balance in four musical parameters: (1) song form, (2) rhythm, (3) timbre, and (4) harmony. Songs often begin as if they were in standard verse/chorus form only to replace the expected final chorus with a radically new section at the song’s conclusion. Rhythms that initially suggest a standard rock backbeat become stretched or cropped to the point of deforming standard meters. Radiohead’s music, qua rock music, relies on guitar, bass, drums, and tenor vocal, but those timbres are often digitally manipulated in a manner that disguises the source instrument. Finally, most Radiohead songs exhibit the same Western tonality as Mozart, The Beatles, and children’s songs, but dissonant notes do not always resolve in expected ways. Expanding on recent work in perception, this book approaches Radiohead’s recorded music as a sonic ecosystem in which listeners participate, react, and adapt in order to search for meaning. Listeners bring into these ecosystems a set of expectations learned (if only tacitly) from popular music, classical music, or even Radiohead’s own compositional idiolect, which is largely the product of the band’s primary songwriter and lyricist Thom Yorke. Particularly important to this perceptual process are moments in Radiohead’s music where a certain expectation—formal, rhythmic, timbral, or harmonic—is strongly cued through recognizable musical stimuli only to be violated by an unexpected realization. Of course, these expectations and realizations are contingent on one’s musical background. An augmented sixth chord suggests one continuation to a classical aficionado but quite a different one to a jazz pianist. Hemiola is a novel and fleeting surface rhythm to a baroque oboe soloist but forms the basic meter of entire pieces in post-millennial rock and Ghanaian drumming. Violations of these subjective expectation–realization chains prompt the listener to search more deeply for meaning. Linking these musical details to the corresponding lyrics is often the first step in meaning creation, but an individual listener’s search for meaning can also involve biographical details of the band or intertextual relationships with music, literature, or film. ORGANIZATIONAL LAYOUT Following the preface, an opening chapter lays out some methodological premises based on ecological perception and semiotics, and argues why Radiohead’s music, more than any other commercially viable rock band in the past two decades, deserves such careful study. The book then proceeds through four intensely analytical chapters, each reflecting one of the four parameters named above. Following each of these chapters is a short “analytical coda.” Whereas the chapters themselves focus on situating many short examples within Radiohead’s catalog, the coda synthesizes the approaches provided in the chapter to illuminate a more comprehensive and interpretive view of one song as a whole. The final chapter animates the theoretical groundwork laid throughout the book in a sustained analysis of one of the band’s most popular songs, “Pyramid Song,” showing how the same strategies can be used to analyze music videos. Chapter 1 surveys some of the foundational work in musical semiotics and perception that makes my analytical method possible. Studies of musical perception (e.g., London 2004, Clarke 2005, Huron 2006, Margulis 2013) show that cognitive arousal is maximized by music that meets us somewhere between the expected and the unexpected. Put differently, the brain goes into overdrive when music presents a stimulus that at once draws upon our prior experiences and yet provides some novel twist. In relating this observation to semiotic theory, I suggest Radiohead’s balancing of surprise and expectation in form, rhythm, timbre, and harmony—the very balancing act that maximizes a hyperactive cognitive space—can be described in terms of salience. Like Beethoven’s late music, Radiohead’s albums between 1997 and 2011 maximize salience by building upon a host of expectations inherited from classical and popular music while at the same time subverting those expectations several times over the course of a given song. After building a case for how Radiohead’s music is so consistently salient in this mature period, the chapter ends with a comparison with the more predictable—and therefore less perceptually marked —two albums that precede this period. Rock music carries with it a set of formal expectations inherited from the late 1950s (strophic forms), which were transformed by The Beatles and other artists in the late 1960s (verse/chorus). These have remained almost completely unchanged in conventional rock music over the past four decades. Chapter 2 begins by demonstrating these conventional song forms in a handful of Radiohead songs. However, many of their songs begin as a strophic form (AA) or verse/chorus form (ABAB) but replace the expected final chorus with a brand new section of climactic material. The resulting song structure, which I call terminally climactic form, does not appear with any frequency in rock music until after 1990. Radiohead’s use of this song form is thus not unique—it situates them within an emergent post-millennial formal trend—but the frequency with which they use it is unparalleled. This is notable because the terminally climactic form, in presenting listeners with a very strong sense of expectation (final chorus) only to subvert that expectation with a surprise realization (terminal climax), which nonetheless behaves like a chorus though it uses completely different thematic material, is a clear example of salience—a sweet spot between expectation and surprise. Chapter 2 ends with a sustained analysis of “2+2=5” (2003–1). What starts off as a repeated strophe (suggesting verse/chorus or strophic form) is merely one of four unrelated sections progressing in an ABCD through-composed formal design. This particularly teleological song form narrates a dystopian future of “progress” (A to B to C to D) in accordance with its Orwellian title. Its withholding of the heavily distorted rock guitar timbre until section C also reflects the band’s self-awareness. Fans who missed the guitar-centered band of 1993–1997 are rewarded for their patience not just after two albums (2000 and 2001), but also the opening 1′54″ of what might seem at first blush an equally navel-gazing record. Yorke’s petulant cry “you have not been paying attention” can also be read as a dissatisfaction with the mixed critical reviews of their earlier albums Kid A (2000) and Amnesiac (2001). Chapter 3 begins with a backbeat, the most prevalent rhythmic expectation in rock music. Though its genesis dates back to 1920s Memphis, it was imported almost wholesale into early rock music in the late 1950s and has remained a steady facet ever since. This chapter addresses all of the moments in Radiohead’s catalog that deviate from backbeat-related expectations. Radiohead’s most salient rhythms are those that begin with, or contain some elements of, a backbeat, but add or subtract beats from a standard measure of time to produce elements of surprise. The repetition of such structures allows a listener to learn to entrain to these rhythms through the process of embodied cognition. Dozens of examples of particular rhythmic manifestations of this principle, including odd-cardinality meter, maximally even rhythms, changing meter, and polytempo, demonstrate that, far from reinventing the wheel in every song, Radiohead consistently alters our backbeat expectations in only a handful of different ways throughout their recorded output. Two competing metrical layers throughout Radiohead’s song “Idioteque” (2000–8) can be read concomitantly alongside the lyrics, which describe a similar battle, struggle, or war scene. Throughout this sustained analysis that ends Chapter 3, I show that a listener’s search for meaning within complex grouping dissonance and changing meter can be fruitfully applied to the lyrical narrative in a holistic interpretive framework. Though formal structure, rhythm, and especially harmony are well-worn territories for music theorists, timbre is a newer area of study that scholars are just now beginning to come to terms with. Chapter 4 demonstrates that ecological perception is well suited for the task of describing how we perceive novel timbral sources. Denis Smalley’s concept of source-bonding (originally designed for the analysis of acousmatic music) is introduced as a method for describing how we perceive two surprising timbres in Radiohead’s music: (1) source-deformation and (2) synthesis. In the first case, two timbral signifiers so essential to rock music—the lead vocal and the electric guitar—are deformed through digital and analog effects. Source-bonding becomes a question of a listener’s ability to perceive the invariant properties of the original that remain after digital effects. By exposing the invariant properties of effects pedals and patches used throughout Radiohead’s catalog, this chapter also shows that listeners can learn to perceive the invariant properties of the effects themselves over time. Radiohead also uses electronic instruments that transcend the boundaries of normal rock expectations. Synthesized timbres such as those created in and by Pro Tools, MAX/MSP, and the ondes Martenot present formidable boundaries to source-bonding until listeners have gained significant exposure to these timbres and the means by which they are produced. At the end of Chapter 4 I analyze the bizarre timbres heard throughout “Like Spinning Plates” (2001–10), which was conceived more or less accidentally when a failed demo for “I Will” was played backwards. Inspired by the backwards track, Yorke then went about the convoluted process of recording a new vocal track, reversing it electronically, memorizing it phonetically backwards, recording that backwards version, then reversing the reversed to create a simulacrum of sung English. The only other sound added to the reversed “I Will” demo to create “Like Spinning Plates” is a corrugaphone cut to exactly the length needed to produce overtones harmonically compatible with the backwards “I Will” demo. A listener’s ability to recognize these three timbres, despite significant source-deformation, influences the intertextual connections available to that listener in the search for meaning. The majority of rock music, from The Beatles through post-millennial rock, reflects the same voice-leading structures as those heard in common-practice classical music. Chapter 5 begins by illustrating (through voice-leading graphs) this functional tonal system in Radiohead’s music, then moves beyond to define and demonstrate two related systems by which their music deviates from functional tonality: (1) contrapuntal systems and (2) functional modal systems. With this framework in place, I then define four harmonic organizational strategies—absent tonic, double-tonic complex, sectional centricity, and underdetermined—that regularly appear in their music. Brief analyses of two unique voice-leading structures—“Knives Out” (2001–6) and “Paranoid Android” (1997–2)—lead to a sustained analysis of perhaps the most perplexing harmonic design of any Radiohead track. “Faust Arp” (2007–6) begins squarely in B minor, but the verse quickly introduces modal mixture by juxtaposing B minor and B major triads in an egalitarian fashion. An unexpected turnaround at the end of the verse (C–A –D ) pivots by tritone toward a mode-mixed G-centered chorus. The ending terminal climax brings about yet a third pitch center, but one whose allegiance seems split between B and F. This extraordinary harmonic structure is not only notable for Radiohead, but actually contains two harmonic progressions found nowhere else in the common-practice or rock canons. My approach highlights three different strategies for hearing this structure, which I animate through three hypothetical listeners who differ by degrees in their willingness to hear long-range tonal and/or motivic coherence, as well as their intertextual knowledge of sources as disparate as 19th-century Lieder and early 17th-century lament bass. To create an accurate depiction of what it means to analyze Radiohead, Chapters 2 through 5 each begin with the music itself, organize recurring trends into categories, and present a way of understanding and interpreting those categories. Though painstaking and encyclopedic at times, this bottom-up framework puts us in a position to look at any Radiohead song in context. How do the unique elements of a single song relate to similar phenomena heard throughout their catalog? In Chapter 6, I synthesize and distill the major theories and analytical methods in the book’s first five chapters into the analysis of one