Quick question: Anyone else think Radiohead sucks?

You probably all heard their exclamations last week when tickets went on sale for the “lucky” bunch who beat the post-registration culling. “Argh, I’m number 39,870 in the queue, wish me luck!” Bro, you’re 55 years old, show some composure.

As a lifelong obnoxious contrarian, there’s no surer way to make me uninterested in something than millions of people telling me it’s the greatest thing. In the words of Pee-wee ( via The Get Up Kids ): I’m a loner, Dottie, a rebel.

The downside is that sometimes I come around to things late, hopelessly out of touch, years after everyone’s moved on. “Hey guys, did you know The Bear is actually great? I don’t think people know how great The Bear is…”

But other times the topic in question is Radiohead, and I remain correct in perpetuity. Because Radiohead is the worst.

I’ve tried to appreciate Radiohead, just because 30 years of critical discourse has told me I’m supposed to. Some of the early stuff’s fine. For all it did to bring the evils of Coldplay, Snow Patrol and Keane to the world, at least The Bends had songs. The way that riff repeats on Black Star ? Thumbs up, Jonny and/or Ed.

But revisiting the rest, just to write this piece, was a torture I wouldn’t wish on my nemesis (you know who you are). I would rather listen to literally anything else. I’ve spent 26 years trying to get through Kid A , and I still haven’t made it awake past Treefingers .

As a sentient human being in the age of AI, I firmly believe that one should never miss an opportunity to yuck someone else’s yum – a sentiment that Radiohead, humanist believers, would surely get behind – so here we go.

The singing! Why does he do it like that? The fundamental truth about every Radiohead song is that it would be better as an instrumental. Because Thom Yorke boasts the absolute worst voice in music, and I mean worst in a bad way (unlike, say, Billy Corgan or Selena Gomez, who have worse voices but in a good way).

Yorke’s caterwauling whine is the nails on the chalkboard of my temporal lobe. Jeff Buckley died for this? He sings like his throat is in dire need of WD-40. He sings like he’s a cat being squished into the bosom of a brutish toddler. (The other problem with Radiohead fans is they’ll read this and go “Exactly!” and explain how the cat is “us” and the brutish toddler is “consumerism”. It must be fun to claim a band’s every horrible choice as intentional.)

Worse than his singing is Yorke’s writing. His fans call his lyrics “impressionistic”, I call them “barely there”.

For a guy perennially praised as the voice of our post-technological alienation, he has some clunkers (that is, when he can even be bothered stringing a sentence together, and not just blaming his lyrics on Burroughs’ “cut-up technique”). “Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon” isn’t the sort of line most artists would repeat once, let alone four times. Lana Del Rey conveys more alienation in one breathy sigh.

Sonically, Radiohead is everything bad about music: overly-intellectual, anti-melodic, self-serious, and other similarly hyphenated terms.