The Song of the Summer is 16+ hours of 25-years-old Radiohead music
Yesterday, the story goes, Radiohead released about 18 hours of hacked material, recordings that were made back when they were putting together the songs that would (mostly) become OK Computer. They did this because the hacker demanded a $150,000 ransom, or else he would release the trove of old material online. Instead of paying the ransom, the band put all the music up on their Bandcamp site themselves—free to stream, or you can purchase a download for about twenty bucks, with all the proceeds going to an environmental activist outfit. You have less than three weeks to make such a purchase, though, because after that the band will take it down, and the only way to get it will be to steal it for free from any number of places online. Despite this being the story as reported by just about every outlet you can shake a news cycle at—hence my obnoxious hyperlinking in the first sentence—it’s pretty clear this is not exactly the truth.
What seems to have happened, instead, is that somebody got their hands on 17 hours of unreleased material from Thom Yorke’s minidisc recordings from the OK Computer era. That person began communicating with some other people in the Radiohead fan community who care about and traffic in things like live bootlegs or rare and unreleased Radiohead music, and leaked some significant proof that he had the goods. He said he wanted $500 per track—this wasn’t a ransom, it was a black market sale—which added up to about $150,000 for the whole 17 hours of audio. The fans in the bootleg community wanted to alert Radiohead that someone out there was trying to make a buck off of material that had been stolen from the band, so they posted this on Reddit. The original leaker did not appreciate being outed as some sort of money-grubber, and decided to leak the whole thing for free a full week ago. So the full 17-hour minidisc archive had been up for a week before some version of the story seems to have made it back to Radiohead themselves, who then posted the following:
This is either Jonny Greenwood misunderstanding what the hell was going on because of the tendency of messages to get garbled, or it’s a bit of clever myth-making that he knew would make for grabby headlines. (The unnecessary but welcome Lebowski reference in the subject line perhaps suggests he knows he’s purposefully muddying things a bit, here—or maybe it means nothing at all.) In either case, it seems not to be the case that the story he’s telling is accurate. The 17 hours was edited down a bit, with some copyrighted stuff taken out and apparently a lot of ambient noise recorded in a field trimmed out, leaving us with about 16-and-a-quarter-hours of mid-to-late 90s Radiohead.
In other words, Radiohead took a giant cache of leaked material from their most productive, immortalizing era and turned it into a way to make a pile of money for a charity they like. In the process, they got a news-cycle worth of fawning press coverage at no cost. Good for them! And better for us.
It does bother me a bit, though, that the obviously bullshit story Radiohead told was repeated without even cursory questioning by the entire media. Maybe it’s too much to blow it up into some sort of meaningful critique of journalism, but goddamn it! What’s the point of the press, if not to see through obvious lies by powerful people and simply find out the truth, instead? That this is a harmless lie, or even a beneficial one, in some ways, and that it is about something so fundamentally silly as a rock band, shouldn’t matter.
On the bright side, I have more than 16 hours of new-ish Radiohead to listen to than I did just a couple of days ago—and it took me all of two minutes of the very first track to conclude that that absolutely fucking rules.
Rather than go through and try to pick out my favorite musical moments of 16 hours of songs I’ve largely heard in more polished formats many, many times before, I want to give a couple of examples of why this sort of thing feels so enriching and rewarding to someone who really loves this music already. The very first track of the first disc suggests that two of my favorite Radiohead songs—Exit Music (For a Film), and Life in a Glasshouse—were once two parts of one big song. I’ll embed the track below, but Radiohead says it’s coming down in a couple weeks, so who knows how long it’ll stay embedded.
There are another three or four versions of Life in a Glasshouse throughout the collection, and those are wonderful, too. But I especially love this tease of a song within a song—recorded a few years and two albums before the band would perfect it and release it on Amnesiac—a tiny window into how a song evolved from a one-line idea into a transcendent piece of music that makes me feel things I otherwise cannot.
Not the official video, it’s safe to say.
And then there’s the even vaguer connections to songs that wouldn’t be finished until even later in the band’s career. If you listen to the fifth disc, at just past the 54-minute mark, you’ll hear a poorly recorded drums jam that sounds an awful lot, to my ear, like the drums on 2007’s In Rainbows song Reckoner.
Thom Yorke has said that Reckoner was written partly in homage to John Frusciante—the guitarist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers through all of their best music—and you can really hear it, in the noodly, pick-y guitar part.
And here, below, is an absolutely staggering piece of music by John Frusciante that is far less illustrative of how Thom was paying tribute to him. I’m including it anyway because Frusciante is one of my favorite songwriters of all time, and I love that Thom—one of my other favorite songwriters of all time—also loves him, and this is my blog, and you can’t stop me.
Anyway, the point is, this drum jam from 1996 or whatever sat rattling around for a decade before Radiohead found a use for it, and when they did, it became one of the best songs on the record. And I likely would have never realized that Reckoner was written in tribute to one of my favorite guitarists and songwriters if not for the fact that I thought I recognized the drum part and started googling and wiki-ing away.
Is it cool to hear unfinished and alternate versions of Paranoid Android and Karma Police and all the rest? Absolutely! But what I really love are the little moments of discovery and connection, like those two above, that span Radiohead’s entire career output. There are early versions of songs that would go on to appear on every Radiohead album that followed, except (I think) for Hail to the Thief. They mined their most creatively productive few years for decades worth of brilliant and beautiful material, all while pushing their music and their sound forward in such a way that they’d never be accused of repeating themselves.
It’s also sort of melancholy to hear so much of the band’s entire career in these 16 hours. I hope it doesn’t reflect an uncomfortable truth, but it probably does—some artists are at their best, and most productive, when they’re at their absolute, nearly broken worst. Thom Yorke was in the middle of a years-long depression when he recorded all this stuff—and then he and his band-mates fine-tuned it over the course of two decades into masterpiece after masterpiece.
As a brief not-a-footnote, I find it interesting that there aren’t any hints of Hail to the Thief here, so far as I can tell. The band has talked about that album as existing outside their normal process, recorded quickly and relatively unedited—and both the band and the fan base don’t seem to regard it as highly as all the rest. It’s also maybe my favorite Radiohead album, even as I recognize it’s not as important as OK Computer or even most of the other ones. But it always felt to me like a sort of furious combination of everything that was great about OK Computer and KID A and Amnesiac without sounding much like any of them. It sounded to me like they plugged in the guitars and spat out a righteous and angry album that came from an honest and particular place, from a particular moment. It felt like Radiohead in a way that the live performances did, the band at its unhinged but still brilliant and contained best. It makes a lot of sense to me that the Hail to the Thief songs were not culled from this era of the band’s peak songwriting productivity. Instead, Hail to the Thief lives as its own discrete creation, set apart from so much of the rest of Radiohead’s oeuvre—which, it is now clearer than ever, draws so deeply from their work in the mid-to-late-90s.
But what matters, here, is that it’s absolutely goddamn awesome to have 16 more hours of Radiohead excellence to listen to, and to listen to the ways in which this band is in conversation with itself over the course of its unparalleled career. The joke has been made 11 billion times already, but hail to the thief, indeed.
