Tuesday, 13 May 2008
This sonic abortion treats the band and their fans with the dignity of a can of baked beans and the grace of a rapist.
Guy Hands has blood on his hands. Guy Hands is a ruthless businessman. Guy Hands is a tasteless cretin who would kill the golden goose if he could get to lay the golden egg one quarter sooner in order to get his obscenely huge bonus. Guy Hands is everything that is wrong with this world : profit over ethics, opportunity over investment, always scrabbling to make an ever-more desperate slice of meaningless profit.
Come the revolution, when they throw the slave masters against the wall, Guy Hands and his ilk will be the first one there. Because all Guy Hands, and his talentless league of cretins see, is money. Like bank robbers, all they see is the chance to exploit the consumer by producing increasingly worthless permutations of ‘art‘. In art - less is more. After all, when Motorhead have released something 16 compilation albums - all with the same 16 songs on, whats the point in buying anything? Overexposure dilutes - and thus destroys - the market. How many yachts can you ski behind? How many expensive dinners can one eat? Does it matter? Nobody at EMI appears to have heard of the law of diminishing returns.
Guy Hands does the same thing that all those who do not create do - they destroy. They never see what is or what could be but only how much money they can make out of it. Forests turn into profit. Animals turned into profit. People turned into profit. Everything becomes profit. And when people like Guy Hands have cut down the last tree and slaughtered the last cow, maybe then they will realise that you cannot feed yourself on dollarsand cents, the pounds and pence. Don’t worry. That ain’t talking. That’s the way you do it. Anyone can play geetar on MTV. Money for nothing, and chicks for free.
Besides, it’s been at least six months since EMI last released an artistically worthless Radiohead Reissue. Time for another one. This time around, instead of giving a flying fuck about anything except the sacred Profit, EMI follow their usual latest burn-and-clean rape-and-pillage operating method and eschew taste or common sense with an ill-thought, hastily-assembled ‘Best Of’ Radiohead set. Assembled by a blind and deaf man with a iTunes random play list that spits in the face of chronology, convention, or sense, “The Best Of Radiohead” is two and a half hours of brilliant music thrown up in the air and let to fall at random, slapped onto a CD, using artwork stolen from an old T-shirt, ‘remastered’ to win the Loudness War, and thrown insultingly at customers with the dignity of a can of baked beans and the grace of a rapist.
This is the artistic equivalent of taking random 3 minute slices of Mozarts work, or creating a patchwork quilt out of 144 different great works of art and expecting it to be anything other than commercially-driven rape and vomit. This album is a meaningless, shoddy piece of shit. Radioheads fine artistic legacy has been punched in the face by this appalling treatment at the hands of a major arms manufacturer. Well done, Guy Hands. You pissed on a corpse, and expect people to pay to watch you do so. Moron.
Given the musical evolution of Radiohead between 1992 to 2003, from aspirant Pixies imitators to unique innovators, you might expect EMI to consider - for one second - that perhaps a chronological selection of the bands singles would be the least they could do. For some bands, an essentially random track listing works in tying together thematically the strands of a career long work of art to set existing works in a new context. Making a good compilation requires - at the very least - reading a chapter of High Fidelity.This however, is the result of a random computer algorithim. It takes the bands work and insults it with an ignorant and disrespectful treatment.
Think, briefly, of what could have been. Had Guy Hands had half a brain, he would’ve got in his chauffeur driven car, driven up to Oxford, and spent a couple of hours treating the golden goose with respect. He would’ve sat the band down and presented them with a fait accompli : We’re doing a Greatest Hits - what would you like the track listing to be? We’re doing some reissues - would you like to choose the demos and b-sides to include? At the very least, if EMI were to release a Radiohead Box Set, the first thing to do would not be to put the existing 7 albums (with not one bonus track between them) in a flimsy piece of white plastic and expect you to buy them all again. If I were EMI, the Radiohead Box Set would could all the A and B Sides that weren’t on any albums. Instead of 69 songs that have sold between them 50,000,000 copies, why not the 70 songs that haven’t been on ANY Radiohead album? Why not release a product that complements the bands work - and pleases the very people who’ve made Radiohead and EMI a lot of money, by treating the band with respect?
No. Not EMI. When faced with the choice between ‘Quick and Easy and Worthless’ and ‘A Good Piece Of Art That Takes An Afternoon’s Work’, EMI chose the quick and worthless route. This ‘Best of’ is no such thing. It’s an insult to the band, and their fans, and a contemptuous piece of artistically worthless junk that treats some of the finest music of the 20th century as nothing more than the basic ingedients of mere product to be shoved at the general population in the hope that it will provide EMI’s Chief Executives with some new, fast killer cars. Well done, morons. Leave art to the artists, next time. I wouldn’t even touch this ’product’ with a bargepole to shove it away. Avoid. Spend the money on some new music instead.Only registered users can write comments.
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