Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Radiohead at the Verizon Center: On Alienation, Dubstep, & The Natural Order of Things

#radiohead #dc
Every so often I like to play music blogger, and I'm lucky I have some friends who will indulge me. On Sunday I attended a Radiohead concert and I've written it up for a friend's site. Here's a taste:
About two-thirds of the way through “Feral,” the fifteenth song Radiohead played at Washington, DC’s Verizon Center on Sunday, June 3rd, something odd happened: Colin Greenwood dropped the bass, in the dubstep sense of the term. This doesn’t happen often at rock shows, yet it did here. It was unexpected, chest rattling, and, in hindsight, completely logical. Economist Joseph Schumpeter wrote that twentieth century capitalism and its processes prepared souls for socialism. In 2012, Radiohead prepares indie rock fans for dubstep. While Skrillex can go from emo never-will-be to superstar DJ, Radiohead has attempted, at least on record, to do the opposite; a group of people so alienated and detached from place and time, from what’s around them, that they go beyond getting lost in the machine, ultimately becoming it.
You can read the whole thing here.

Regularly scheduled programming to return shortly.

Pic via Julian Franco.

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