Lost In The Edit

23 August 2009

I’m sure you didn’t fail to miss the hubbub that milled around the internet last last week; the rumours, the leaks, the falsely registered domains names – it was all finally put to rest on Monday with a simple post on radiohead.com:

So here’s a new song, called ‘These Are My Twisted Words’.
We’ve been recording for a while, and this was one of the first we finished.
We’re pretty proud of it.
There’s other stuff in various states of completion, but this is one we’ve been practising, and which we’ll probably play at this summer’s concerts. Hope you like it.
Download the audio here or torrent here.
Jonny

These Are My Twisted Words.mp3

So, is this the much vaunted ‘future of music’, then? It sure doesn’t feel like it.

Firstly, I’m a little stumped over the fact that the track leaked almost a week up front of the ‘official’ release; was it on purpose? The Radiohead ship is pretty tight these days so I vote ‘yes’ and that throws up a whole new set of questions, the most important being: why? One of the most interesting things that Radiohead have done of recent times is created a distribution platform for themselves that they control – they can put out anything they want, whenever they want without anything standing in their way. People know now – since the release of In Rainbows – that Radiohead release their music directly through their site; this track release via torrent sites seems to undermine this.

The other thing it does is shift power back to the media. As previously mentioned, you’d be hard pressed to find a decent sized music site that didn’t cover the leak and, for me at least, that sort of saturation coverage coupled with the lack of official confirmation totally took any sense of excitement over a new Radiohead track out of the equation. Compare that to the release ‘Harry Patch (In Memory Of)’ two weeks previously which went on sale from radiohead.com at the same time anyone anywhere discovered it existed (by being played on Radio 4, of all places); that felt exciting, this did not.

However, there’s one other point that plays into this. Rewind up a few sentences to “they can put out anything they want, whenever they want without anything standing in their way”. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. In this new age of instant distribution, where songs can be finished and distributed the next day without the need to slot into the traditional album release schedule I fear we may have lost something: self editing.

Now, don’t get me wrong; I am in no way beholden to the album format as a piece of work and have argued as much on these pages before. However, I hadn’t previously considered the ramifications of a single track instant-release ‘format’ could have on quality; previously, you’d go through a brutal process of selection, whittling down tracks that are good enough until you’re happy with the final selection. Now, you do not.

Maybe it doesn’t matter, but how are we supposed to tell this single track from a lead single or a forgotten B-Side? Is this the best we’re to expect from the next set of Radiohead material (I almost said album but that’s hardly a given at this point), or merely just something they were playing around with?

From: Articles

23 August 2009