On Radiohead Being The Blackest White Band

My friend Chris asked me how I feel about the new Guardian article making the rounds, expecting a nice one message response. Bad move. Here is an essay instead.

I think the article itself is a very solid look at Radiohead's relationship to seminal black artists; what I take issue with is that, however implicitly, the point of this article is ACTUALLY "here's why it's *okay* to still like radiohead."

This is very hard to quantify or explain but basically this one girl made an political compass of all the different types of terrible boy she'd fucked - tag yourselves, I'm '1990s German football shirts' - and it's not on there but "guy who is way too into Radiohead" is one of these archetypes, and the dude whose image is conjured up when this archetypes is invoked is very white, and very uncool. "You know a guy got into Radiohead way too young when even his pocket rejects him," that sort of thing. You don't wanna get caught as one of these stereotypes, it's very uncool and potentially problematic. I'm surprised it's not on the chart in all honesty.

(hi, person from album party if you read this far! You've probably not been on my blog before, and you're probably wondering why I posted this ridiculous image of Messi vs Ronaldo! It's a little inside joke that I do it on every post, regardless of relevancy. You'll also note that every single blog post is tagged "skills" and "goals" for much the same reason. Enjoy your stay!)

The people that hate the Guardian from the left are very aware of these kind of archetypes. For context, these are the people who only joined Labour for are Jez, who definitely tried to fuck up their local statue in June, regardless of who it actually was, and who are very active on twitter.com. These people are not to be confused with people who hate the Guardian from its right, who are all named Paul, who all hate this newspaper more than anything and hold it directly responsible for the destruction of their beloved England, but who also have Guardian accounts with countless comments stretching back years.

Daphne herself is happy to write the article because it serves the purpose of reminding people "yes I'm a Yale professor that listens to Radiohead, but I'm still Black as hell!" which is fine, but I don’t care and neither do the Grauniad. This article doesn't make radiohead any less memetically white, it does not remove them from their white lineage - like Talk Talk or U2 - nor their progeny - basically every British band that didn't decide to bite the Libertines instead - and place them in a black canon. They're still boring old old-Pitchfork-approved Radiohead. "Old Pitchfork?" I mean when it was like five white dudes just chatting shit online rather than a multiracial propaganda arm for one of the biggest publishing houses on the planet. You know, back when it was good.

"So what's your point?" Half the point is the article is designed to garner hateclicks from both those types of people up there. Paul says "i dont like radiohead - i guess creep was alright - but why do you have to bring blm into every bloody thing?" and our literal communist gets to quote tweet and say something like "this dad band???? um it's literally a pandemic and BLM and global warming but go off????" or else say something hilarious like "lol guardian havingn a normal one" or else quote a dril tweet. But we all clicked on the article.

It's the same thing that happened with the damn HSBC advert, and I fell for it too, don't get me wrong. Headline got me mad and I read the whole thing. That's how I know it was the point.

The other thing is that it's really hard to make the point that "whiteness" is code for "cultural irrelevance" without sounding like a Ben Shapiro ripoff but that's basically what's happening. Radiohead WOULD be passé and uncool, EXCEPT they're influenced by Charles Mingus, who is a person of colour. It's a subtle thing, too, subtle enough that I know you'll think I'm crazy after reading all this nonsense, and that subtlety is purposeful too, because coolness is not supposed to be widely accessible. If you know, you know. You know? If you need it explained you're not part of the club (note: this is the actual purpose of "It's not my job to educate you." Those guys LOVE lecturing you when you haven't asked! Their sudden reluctance is because they don't want you in the club).

"You're too paranoid, we're just trying to reorganise the musical landscape around Black voices." Who is we? Is it me? Do I get to place Around The Fur around the top of every album list? No? Doesn't EVERY Black Opinion On Alternative Metal Matter? "Cool your jets, dude, I just think the canon is a little too white." And I think the Fall are fucking atrocious, but only one of us works for Condé Nast.

                         look, is tom york :)

I personally don’t give a shit about Black History Month - at least partly because I'm unemployed and live in a fantasy land without anchors like "dates" and therefore "months" harshing my vibes - but it's disingenuous to use the movement to religitate what is actually an argument about coolness. I don’t know. That's just me, though.