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Originally Posted by dac
How little have you gathered? Radiohead has one of the most diverse resumes in music. How many other successful bands can include songs as diverse as Paranoid Android, Idioteque, How To Disappear Completely, Like Spinning Plates, Life in a Glass House, Wolf at the Door, and Reckoner all on the SAME resume?
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It wouldn't be particularly hard to come up with a whole myriad of bands more diverse and experimental than
Radiohead! Oh, except for the point that you included the word "successful" in there. Well, it may be true that Radiohead are more successful than the sorts of bands that might be cited as examples of the "real deal" in terms of diversity and experimentation, but let's step back a second and ask ourselves why. So, what IS the secret to Radiohead's success? That they are such a "diverse" and deviously "experimental" outfit? Tosh! It has nothing to do with the direction they took after 1999, and everything to do with what happened beforehand. The secret to Radiohead's success, if indeed it can be called a secret at all, is the point that originally they were a perfectly commercial ALTERNATIVE ROCK BAND. They had massive airplay on mainstream pop/rock radio stations, and OK Computer was a huge success (mostly owed to Karma Police, Paranoid Android, and No Surprises). Had Radiohead not enjoyed their 1990s commercial successes and started out anew, without any fans, in 2000, then let me tell you this much buddy,
Kid A woulda been NOTHING. It would have completely slipped under the radar. No 10/10s from Pitchfork, and not much of nothing else; a few critical nods here and there, but widespread popularity and attention? HELL NO. Same goes for everything that came after Kid A. It woulda been SMALL-TIME indie music enjoyed by only a niche minority. Hell, Kid A wasn't even THAT much of a critical success. A few glowing reviews, a fair number of lukewarm ones, and but the majority were sorta 4/5 star nods. People refer back to it as if it was the most critically acclaimed album of all time. It wasn't. It was less well received than at least 30 albums that have come out every year since.
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Originally Posted by dac
No one goes around praising Radiohead as a "new genre of music." They don't belong to any genres. HTTT was a very political album, something they didn't really do before that. Also, isn't your name derived from Radiohead?
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Nobody falls completely outside of genre. Even bands who play around with a lot of different genres generally tend to fall more within one than another. And even if they didn't, you still wouldn't call them genreless. You'd just say that they frequently cross over from one genre to another, and say what those genres are. There is no song by Radiohead that could not be broadly inserted into a genre category.