Quote:
Originally Posted by Comus
Nirvana never really tried to make their music accessible to large audiences. Everything they did was on a whim. Cobain wanted to do a pop song, they did a pop song, Cobain wanted to do something loud and obnoxious, they did something loud and obnoxious. Nirvana will always have Endless, Nameless and that gallons one. What Nirvana did was make honest music, which at the time pushed the envelope straight out of the 80's. The era known for the manufactured sound. The era where "metal" bands had to include a ballad to sell records.
Radiohead however have just continued making the same boring crap over and over. Sure they've changed in parts, don't say I haven't endured their rubbish. But challenging? Yeah maybe for someone who has listened to nothing but Britney Spears. Radiohead are good at what they're good at. Of course they are, or they wouldn't have so many fans. But what they're good at is making shitty pop music that pretends to not be shitty pop music. They're this generation's Beatles. They're what you listen to if you want to be different, but don't have the patience to enjoy proper music. Or the band that you can feel safe in listening to without ruining your reputation.
Next time anyone calls radiohead experimental or pushing the boundaries. Listen to them again. Don't do anything, go into an empty room, and listen to them, and then try to pinpoint what's so expe... oh, you fell asleep.
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First let me state, yet again, that I'm not a big Radiohead fan and I'm not claiming that they are super experimental. All I'm saying is that they are more so than Nirvana. Got it? Unlike you, I was not still wearing a diaper at the beginning of these two bands careers and was in fact actively listening to music at the time so I actually had the benefit of experiencing the evolution of both bands first hand instead of just reading about it later.
When I first heard Nirvana (when
Nevermind came out, nobody I knew ever heard
Bleach until after the fact) I thought they were good, nothing groundbreaking and very much in keeping with a lot of the other music they played on my local college station, but they were still good. Then they got really popular. Then they released one more album was a bit more raw but still in the same ballpark. Then Kurt Cobain killed himself. The end. Not a whole lot of experimenting or defying of expectations occurred during this brief window of time. I'd say the most surprising thing about them was that they ever became so popular.
When I first heard Radiohead I also thought they were good but not really groundbreaking and in fact after buying
Pablo Honey I was pretty disappointed. Imagine my surprise when they proceeded to release album after album that defied expectations and were actually pretty interesting. Have I ever loved a Radiohead album? No. I appreciate a lot of what they've done but they're not really my thing, but even as a person who is not much of a fan I have to admit that they've certainly defied expectations and evolved a lot over time. For a band that was perceived as britpop in the vein of Oasis or Blur to release a Pink Floyd-esque opus
is pretty ballsy. For a band that built its whole reputation around a guitar-driven sound to release a pair of droning, post-rockish albums where guitar is either absent or pushed way to the back
is very unexpected.