It was no ode to joy

Radiohead/ Kid Koala/ The Beta Band
Madison Square Garden
New York
August 7, 2001

THE audience adored Radiohead. Based on the applause the British rock group got Tuesday night at Madison Square Garden from its mostly college-age crowd, it was all music should be.

Those of us in the minority were either too stupid to grasp the angst message of alienation and doom - or smart enough to know that the real messsage was: Buy the records about our screwed-up world and save Radiohead from poverty.

Even those tuned into Radiohead's frequency should have found the joylessness disturbing.

The evening plodded on without any sense of optimism and zero good humor. The world that pasty-faced anarchist-sage Thom Yorke writes about has a broken spine. It's a bad place that's only getting worse.

Yorke and the Radiohead cadre are fakes, because you can't stand inside and outside the system at the same time - and mainstream Radiohead is firmly broadcasting from the inside.

Yorke whined and waved his freak flag about how The Man is keeping us from driving electric cars - yet the band moves its road show along on 18-wheel rigs and hops around New York in limos. Yorke even took a shot at fur wearers on Fifth Avenue, but more than likely he owns leather shoes, belt and wallet.

Then again, who in music today isn't a hypocrite? As far as the show goes, it had all the mopiness but none of the clarity and sonic attention that is the hallmark of the band's recordings.

Granted, the show had its moments. Yorke hit his mark nicely on the song "Packt Like Sardines in a Crushed Tin Box," when his mournful wail dovetailed with the tune's Beckett-like lyrics: "After years of waiting, nothing came, nothing came." Overall, his vocals were best in the upper register and most grating when he attempted to shout his way through numbers.

There was a smoke-and-mirrors quality about the structure. The concert proper was only an hour long. For the second hour of the show, the band hammed it up by playing three lengthy encores designed to pump the fans for cheers - in effect, making the crowd beg for the two-hour show that was rightfully theirs.

Dan Aquilante

New York Post
09.08.01