Radiohead - No Surprises Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 4500 words

Radiohead - No Surprises - Essay Example But suddenly, all over the world, gothic culture broke out, arresting conservatism and demanding the right to be musically deranged. Alice Cooper drank chicken blood on stage. For some reason, Ozzy Osborne bit the head off of a bat. Graphic tattoos, pythons and tongue piercings had become boring. Out of nowhere, a musical emancipation pronounced darker theories of death and pain that drew many punk rockers and pop culture fans into the dark. John Lennon was replaced by Marilyn Manson. Novelist Tom Wolfe labeled the 70s as the ‘Me’ Decade in â€Å"The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening". By the late 1970s, a culture of black lipstick, blood and men adopting female names had grown into its own genre. The State of California was easing its ban of marijuana and by 1979, the Gay Movement was red hot. Roughly between 1971 and 1984, everybody was in some type of artistic movement and expressed themselves through music. It was this era that inspired the gothic music genre unification of punk rockers, heavy metal fans, and even some conservative Rock-n-Rollers through the World Wide Web. In 1985, Jonny and Colin Greenwood, Thom York, Ed O’Brien, and Phil Selway joined the melodic movement of the misunderstood as Radiohead in Oxfordshire, England. Influenced by alternative rock, American indie and surges of punk and Britpop that surrounded them locally, the band brought their own kind of ‘strange’ to Rock. This paper is an exploration of a new era genre of music; particularly that of the fairly new punk rock band Radiohead. The focus of the study of the linguistic analysis of the musical style and songs including, Ok Computers, The Bends, and Radiohead’s 1997 release No Surprises, within the context of popular music idioms and rock. 1.1 Radiohead Radiohead was formed in Oxford because all the band members grew up and attended secondary school in Oxfordshire (Osborne, 2004: 15). Through their use of harmony, disruptive melodic figuration and rhythm, Radiohead has been able to build a reputation by accumulating a distinctive musical language, and by drawing from a musical palette characterized by a strained relationship between mainstream expectation and convention. The band’s music style is based upon garage band effects: loud and expressive, much like the American grunge bands Nirvana, Sound Garden and Pearl Jam (Hiburn, 1998:7). A significant part of Radiohead’s reputation as original composers and performers of music, punk-ish rock that did not conform to stereotypical pop-music expectations and norms. A vital part of engaging with their music is being able to track the events that form associations for the Radiohead-listener with equal events in a single Radiohead song or album (Moore, 2003: 58). Radiohead’s early music was rather mainstream. Radiohead’s first two studio recordings seemed quite primitive due to lack of a provocative esotericism that came to be associated in their later works. The making of OK Computers played a large role as a significant paradigm shift for the band, arti stically and musically (Tate, 2005: 14). Both of their first two albums, 1993’s Pablo Honey and 1995’