David Foster Wallace once wrote a story about a video cartridge that was so entertaining people couldn’t stop watching it. It was so good people would rather die than stop watching it. With “A Moon Shaped Pool”, Radiohead have created nearly as great a piece of sinister entertainment. Listener beware, for anyone who plays this album all the way through risks suffering a high degree of permanent neurologic damage. Music critics are already showing evidence of their deteriorating cerebral cortexes. Take the following quote of nonsense from the Rolling Stone review of their latest effort:
His falsetto scat on “Present Tense,” delivered over a bossa nova-style acoustic guitar, recalls the angelic earthiness of Brazil’s Milton Nascimento amidst greenhouse-gas ambience. “Desert Island Disk,” which Yorke premiered solo last December in Paris, is a folk song that conjures Nick Drake but, perhaps, for its ecstatic joy: “the wind rushing around my open heart,” Yorke sings with uncharacteristic bliss, “totally alive!”
The RS critic goes on to welcome us to the world of “artisanal anti-pop” “Welcome to the new artisanal Radiohead: provisionally unplugged, old-worldly, and mass-produced with small-batch aesthetics as an antidote to low-flying panic attacks, if we could only slow the fuck down and savor it.”
Shall I start cutting my wrists now or wait until the zombie apocalypse has gained a little more steam?
After spending five futile years trying to top their techno-rock classic “King of Limbs” Thom Yorke sat his band down and said the following:
“ George Bush is no longer murdering innocent civilians by the hundreds of thousands. There simply isn’t anything to inspire me anymore. I’ll bet you we can put out an album of complete garbage and our fans and critics will still love it. I’ll bet you they will buy it by the Millions. To prove it to you we will release an album containing horrible lyrics about how bored we are. Here’s my favorite giveaway line “This dread still covers us, you gotta be kidding me”. To show that no one is even paying attention, we will release the songs in alphabetical order. We will even throw in “True Love” from 1985 using one of the worst of the original demos. The album itself will have a throwaway title called something like “A Moon Shaped Pool” ha ha. Everything about it will completely suck. We will use drum machines and stilted canned chord sequences. We will tell everyone we’re using the London Symphony Orchestra but in fact they will be 6th graders with annoying tendencies to call attention to themselves in the most subtle parts of the music.
Finally, we will make a deluxe package of the album inspired by the 78rpm shellac records in the library of La Fabrique, France. The artwork will consist of 32 pages of paintings of colored rocks. It will be a steal at only one hundred dollars! Just think we don’t have to try and make any more good music. We just have to release a load of crap and then watch everyone pee all over themselves trying to write the most fawning of critical reviews published in all the great periodicals of the world. I can’t wait to read all of the hundreds of five-star reviews on Amazon that will pour in week after week. We will have so much fun, because soon America will be so great.
Unfortunately for us Radiohead did not realize where the next hundred thousand of innocent civilian casualties would come from. Or rather, they just couldn’t wait.
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