Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [123]
Then a Sheer Drop
The culmination of this methodology came in October 2007 when the band announced the release of their first album in four years, In Rainbows. At the time, Radiohead were not contracted to any record company, and elected to make the album available as a download. This was already becoming a popular method of distribution, especially among acts with committed fan bases. However, Radiohead struck fear into the heart of the record industry by insisting that ‘buyers’ of In Rainbows should pay only what they wanted to pay, if anything at all.
This was interpreted by many as representing the band’s last, desperate attempt to escape the compromises that they were forced to make as agents of commercial production. By eliminating the obligation upon listeners to pay money for product, Radiohead had apparently absolved themselves of any incriminating links with capitalism.
But the pay-what-you-like model had a more profound impact on the perception of Radiohead. It stripped away much of the extraneous interference that distanced the listener from the music. No accompanying marketing campaign, no in-store displays, not even any cover art to pore over. The short time between the announcement of the project (a seemingly casual comment from Jonny Greenwood on the band’s Dead Air Space site) and the release of the download itself meant that no advanced copies were sent to critics, who lost their privileged role as mediators between artist and fan. By the time the hacks had began their frantically typed appraisals, fan-led reaction and analysis was already populating blogs and message boards across the planet. Here is the music, Radiohead seemed to be saying, in ones and zeroes: take it or leave it. As far as modern technology allowed, the simulacrum had been pushed aside, and authenticity was permitted to poke its pale, pimply nose into the sunlight for the first time in ages.
At any rate, that may have been what was supposed to happen. Instead, the unorthodox method of delivery, and the ‘honestybox’ mode of payment, became a new story, a new simulacrum, one that obscured the music as completely as a conventional marketing campaign would have done. Once it had been exposed to the fierce glare of the media, In Rainbows became not so much a collection of ten songs, beginning with “15 Step” and ending with “Videotape,” but more a narrative about itself, about the anti-commercial perversity of its creators and its own mongrel status. You couldn’t buy it in record shops; it didn’t have a sleeve; it wasn’t eligible for the charts; was it a ‘real’ album or wasn’t it? For example, the critic Paul Morley, of the Observer Music Monthly, ‘liveblogged’ his thoughts as he listened to the album for the first time on the morning of its release, and allocated his own recommended retail price to each track (http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/observermusic/2007/10/rainbow_warriors.html).
The joke was that there was a real album on the way, available in various desirable combinations of CD, vinyl, and hardback book, for sale at a normal, non-negotiable retail price, under the auspices of a normal record company. The band, of course, could not live by digital goodwill alone, and it soon became apparent that the free download was little more than advance publicity for the hard-copy album. Essentially, the digital ‘pay what you want’ record was only a simulacrum of something that had yet to come into existence. A rainbow is essentially an optical illusion and, as such, doesn’t exist for anyone or anything to be in it, a fact that may or may not be coincidental.
Rather than feeling duped, the consumers loyally sent the (‘real’) album to the top of the charts in Britain, the United States, and beyond. One is irresistibly reminded of Graham