Radiohead Turns Up The Static at Garden

Radiohead
Madison Square Garden
New York
August 7, 2001

Aside from a quick nod to R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe, Radiohead singer Thom Yorke dedicated most of his band's Tuesday night show to those who resist what he called the toxic creep of consumer culture.

Before a sold-out crowd at Madison Square Garden, Yorke toasted those who protested in Genoa against globalization and have bought electric cars to foil oil companies. Then he roasted those who wear leopard skin while walking down Fifth Ave. And decried record labels that force bands to suck up to radio stations just to get a little airplay.

While Radiohead's music is often groundbreaking and frequently beautiful, it's vision of the world is tattered and bleak, a place where cannibalism is an act of casual pragmatism and trapdoors open beneath your feet. In the past 10 months, Radiohead has issued a pair of albums - Kid A and Amnesiac - that blend this world-view with minimalist electronica experiments, a pulling away from the anthemic sweep of its 1997 masterpiece, OK Computer.

At the Garden, the electronic bleeps and swirls that mark this recent work were generated by guitarists Jonny Greenwood and Ed O'Brien, who frequently kneeled on the stage so that they might reach the buttons and knobs on their vintage synthesizers and modern effects processors. But the constant fiddling and the icy demeanor of songs such as "Knives Out" and "Dollars and Cents" gave the first half of the show a distant quality that kept the crowd at bay.

Once Yorke loosened up, however, and began playing with the cameras that were positioned at odd angles around the stage, the final hour of the 135-minute show began to thaw. When Yorke peered into a camera during "You and Whose Army?," he made the kind of gesture that blacktop basketball centers do when they mean to ask, "Who dares dunk on me?" The audience went wild with the acknowledgment that Yorke believes his fans have got his back as he crusades against the corporate mores of a digital planet.

Radiohead's show was essentially the inverse of U2's invigorating performance at the Garden two months ago. While U2 makes an overt search for hope among society's ills, Radiohead forms an underground resistance that is furtive in its methods and lives in constant fear of being stamped out.

But no matter how ugly things may get, there is always defiance, as evidenced by the band's final dyspeptic message, which arrived in the closing bars of "Exit Music (For a Film)." Two lovers who have snuck off together in the manner of Romeo and Juliet give their salute to the forces that drove them to escape through death.

"We hope that you choke, that you choke," Yorke sang. He had delivered perhaps the sourest parting shot in the history of arena rock, yet still managed to comfort those who heard him.

Isaac Guzman

New York Daily News
09.08.01