Le 1er juillet 2017
de 11h30 à 12h00
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
salle 3206
Séance - Sounds of Popular Music (II)
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Christopher Doll
The music of Radiohead is filled with sounds both strange and familiar. In addition to the band’s obvious postproduction manipulations of instrumental parts and Thom Yorke’s deliberate garbling of his sung lyrics, distortions of tonal structures are rampant throughout the group’s oeuvre. This paper develops a notion of tonal distortion that supports interpretative claims concerning much of Radiohead’s music—specifically, that the band’s songs often evoke recognizable structures only to defamiliarise them, an expressive strategy not unique to Radiohead but striking here in the originality of its implementation. I identify two basic approaches to tonal distortion in Radiohead’s music: the first entails the alteration of the structure of a specific earlier song, while the second involves the alteration of a generic pop-rock tonal archetype. These tonal distortions, taken together with the darkly confusing imagery of Yorke’s lyrics, provide fodder for a brand of musico-poetic analysis that can serve well for interpreting nearly all of Radiohead’s songs, as well as the works of other contemporary popular musicians working in a familiar-yet-strange aesthetic.
