Sonic Youth Slams Radiohead’s In Rainbows Model
By Scott Thill: June 8, 2009 Wired.com
Sonic Youth bass player Kim Gordon has dismissed as a ruse Radiohead’s much-hyped, pay-what-you-want online model for In Rainbows, which netted the band an instantaneous $3 million.
“They did a marketing ploy by themselves and then got someone else to put it out,” Gordon told The Guardian Friday. “It seemed really community-oriented, but it wasn’t catered towards their musician brothers and sisters, who don’t sell as many records as them. It makes everyone else look bad for not offering their music for whatever.
“It was a good marketing ploy and I wish I’d thought of it! But we’re not in that position either. We might not have been able to put out a record for another couple of years if we’d done it ourselves: It’s a lot of work. And it takes away from the actual making music.”
Where to start? It seems disingenuous to complain that Radiohead’s model is responsible for making other bands — especially ones like Sonic Youth, which admitted in the Guardian interview that it spent many unhappy years on the major label Geffen — look bad. It’s also a bit hilarious to hear that Sonic Youth was too busy making albums to try the idea on for size. The band could have skipped makingNYC Ghosts and Flowers entirely to save time, to start.
But the strange irony of Gordon’s criticism is that Radiohead’s strategy was initially positioned to pre-empt the traditional marketing of the album in the mainstream press.
“We were trying to avoid that whole game of who gets in first with the reviews,” Radiohead vocalist Thom Yorke told David Byrne in Wired mag. “These days there’s so much paper to fill, or digital paper to fill, that whoever writes the first few things gets cut and pasted. Whoever gets their opinion in first has all that power. Especially for a band like ours, it’s totally the luck of the draw whether that person is into us or not. It just seems wildly unfair, I think.”
Gordon’s condemnation as a ploy of what by all accounts was a very successful experiment in online distribution just because it didn’t adhere to an imaginary solidarity (“brothers and sisters?”) or a traditional model that has obviously come and gone is bad faith. Can’t they all just get along?
Even if they can’t, I’ll stick with Sonic Youth, if I have to choose favorite bands. But Radiohead, for all its warts and so-called ploys, seems like the band of the future. Especially when compared to Sonic Youth, whose latest effort, The Eternal, has been hailed as a throwback to the days of Evol and Daydream Nation. Good luck turning back the clock, Sonic Youth. I’ll be rooting for you. Musically speaking.
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