HIGH AND DRY

Despite all the hoo-hah I hear on campus about the new Radiohead album (well, admittedly something this page is contributing to), it's worth pointing out that OK Computer, their most successful album ever, has only sold 1.7 million copies in the U.S. So I guess it's a certain segment of the population-hipster-wannabe college students?-who are the ones generating all the buzz.

Which brings up the interesting question of influential groups. Not many people own an album by the Fall, yet so many bands cite them as an influence. The same thing probably applies to Sonic Youth and Kraftwerk (although both are probably more popular than the Fall), and to even more obscure bands like 23 Skidoo. Would you rather be best-selling or influential? Answers on a 3 by 5.

SINGLED OUT

Continuing the general theme of Radiohead love, Ed O'Brien, Radiohead's guitarist, said they intend to release a new EP soon.

Apparently the band plans to release a few albums soon in a short space of time and free themselves from contractual obligations so that they can go on to release more songs and short EPs as and when they feel songs should come out. That's good news,I feel. After all, why should the release of an album be a sacred event? Why should it be that we think of artists as producing music not continually but rather in fitful starts and stops?

Plus, it becomes so hard to make any true judgements about an album once it's surrounded by all this buzz. I wonder how many people who're currently proclaiming Kid A's use of electronic instrumentation as groundbreaking would say the same if they hadn't known the identity of the musicians before listening to the album? Take the audio equivalent of the Pepsi Challenge!

I don't know-if I were a successful musician, I'd be tempted to release albums or singles under a false identity in order to see how well they're released independent of any fame. (That's not a completely original thought: it's a trick artists as diverse as Eric Clapton and Basement Jaxx have employed.) But maybe that's just me being neurotic.

INSTANT KARMA

Quick update on something I wrote about last week: Mark Chapman, JohnLennon's killer,was denied parole.

DOWNLOAD

Meanwhile, the Napster saga goes on and on. It isn't the first time the recording industry wanted to crack down on technology: as the excellent book Last Night a DJ Saved My Life (written by Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton) notes in its chapter on the history of the radio DJ, record companies in the '40s were initally skeptical about the power of radio as a promotional tool, and were afraid it would take away sales. Similarly, when FM stereo was introduced, they were likewise afraid the quality of home taping would make LPs redundant. And yet these obviously haven't hurt the music industry too badly. So there's historical precedent for Napster's arguments.

I recognize, of course, that radio is a very different format from MP3: there's the music-on-demand aspect, for one, and there's the fact that MP3s are full recordings while to get a proper recording off radio requires immaculate timing as you hit the "record" button.

Maybe it'll all be redundant. I met a record company executive who claims that what the music industry has planned for the future of recorded music will blow MP3 out of the water. (Although my BS meter was wavering between TRUTH and MORE HOT AIR THAN A RICHARD BRANSON BALLOON.)

CONCERT NEWS

It's concert season again. Green Day (below) are performing a free concert at Axis today, and for those of you who just found this out and can't get tickets, we'll have a report from the concert next week. As good as being there! (Okay, not really. But pretty darn close.)

Also today, Enon opens for the Flaming Lips. (Question: the Flaming Lips' version of "She Don't Use Jelly," while hilarious and probably one of the most well-known of their songs, is unrepresentative of their sound. How many other bands are there which have been stereotyped by being associated with a specific song?)