• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Radiohead’s move, then, was toward C-M-C. Yorke told BBC Radio 4 that “the big infrastructure of the music business has not addressed the way artists communicate directly with their fans. In fact, they seem to basically get in the way. Not only do they get in the way, but they take all the cash.” The music business was oper-ating under the sign of M-C-M? and Radiohead switched to C-M-C: they made a record that you could buy with, or without, money and that money the band can use to live, not just turn into wealth to make money, but to make more music. Whatever one might say about the money made, In Rainbows gave the music business a different economic model where there’s no capitalist in the middle stringing Radiohead up by the wrists.

Freed this way, Radiohead made what might be their most human-sounding album. Jon Pareles wrote for the New York Times that much of the album “comes across as fingers on strings and sticks on drums.” Going back to fingers and sticks on instruments while going forward with a new way to get their work to fans may be Radiohead’s biggest triumph in years. With In Rainbows, digital distribution ends up hardly as disembodied as it has been accused of being. The band has done several live performances released online, performances in which you can see their fingers on strings and drums. And you can see a Thom Yorke that would be out of place in Meeting People Is Easy: he’s visibly happy.

Radiohead took its name from a Talking Heads song titled, as one might guess, “Radio Head.” David Byrne sang on one of the band’s songs, “Found a Job,” that “if your work isn’t what you love, then something isn’t right.” It isn’t far-fetched to argue that the band found something right. The band’s freedom from contracts enlivened its work, freeing that work from the capitalistic vampires that suck out the creative marrow. To borrow from Marx, their working lives have been reverted to lifetimes, where work is enjoyment. The kind of enjoyment, let’s say, that one might find reveling drunk and throwing paving stones at streetlights.

10.

Everybody Hates Rainbows

D.E. WITTKOWER

“The Culture Industry.” Does that phrase make you as uncomfortable as it makes me? Culture shouldn’t be an industry; it should be something natural and organic. Culture is our communal history and legacy; the context in which we learn and grow, and to which we may contribute. In the past, our culture might have consisted of the stories we learned as children, the songs we all sang together, perhaps traditional clothing or dances. In some sense, it’s hard to imagine today.

Our culture, to whatever extent we have a culture, might still consist of stories (Disney), songs (the Jeopardy! theme), clothing (Prada), and dances (The Electric Slide). But these elements are integrated within the marketplace, and, if not produced out of an explicit profit motive, they are at least taken up into a system of economic control and exploitation.

It’s a strange thing to consider that an element of culture as basic as, for example, the song “Happy Birthday to You,” has an owner. I’m not making this up. It’ll be under copyright until the year 2030. That’s why big chain restaurants don’t sing it—they’d have to pay royalties. Oh, and who owns it? Half the rights are held by AOL Time-Warner. The other half is owned by the estate of Patty Hill Smith (died 1946) who wrote a different song (in 1893) which “Happy Birthday” was based on. Consult Snopes if ye doubt.

When Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer came up with the phrase, “the Culture Industry,” they used it to describe how profit-motivated capitalist production had fundamentally changed the role that art played in our lives. Instead of offering an alternative to the very limited view of the world offered by our lives as economic actors, industrially-produced music and film helps to integrate us even further into the cycle of mindless production to support mindless consumption. “Amusement under late capitalism,” they wrote in 1944, “is the prolongation