American Popular Music: The Final Chapter

            For our final listening journal entry, we have one song to reflect on. That is Radiohead’s “Bodysnatchers”:

            I am familiar with some Radiohead music, but this one was new to me. I enjoy the musical stylings of Radiohead and this song did not disappoint. I like the distortion you hear on the guitar and how it works with the repeated bass line. With the interesting subject matter of the song, the listener is instantly sucked in. “The song’s lyric describes the alienation of a person incarcerated within his own body. Like an etherized yet conscious patent, the first-person subject of the song is confined within the limitations of his physical body, unable to connect directly to the world around him” (Starr & Waterman, 2014, p. 558).

            I really enjoy the fact that the album that “Bodysnatchers” is recorded on was available to fans for the amount they were willing to pay for it. This gave the fans and listeners more of a responsibility to really think about the value of music and the work put behind it. Though I am sure some only paid pennies, it still gave the musicians a profit by not going through a big record label. This idea was utilized by other artists since then, many doing Kickstarter projects. Even comedians like Louis C.K. started doing direct to fan sales of his shows.

            As a final thought, I enjoyed the way this book summed up this song. “Although the emotional angst of rock superstars and the melodrama of the music business may not seem the most lofty or compelling subject matter, it can be argued that the subtext of “Bodysnatchers”—that is, the role of free will and creativity in a business traditionally dominated by corporate concerns—is both an essential theme in the history of rock music and a key component of the ideology of contemporary alternative rock” (Starr & Waterman, 2014, p. 559). This would be a great topic of discussion within a classroom that has studied rock music and the evolution of the music industry.

Reference:

Starr, L., Waterman, C. (2014). American popular music: From minstrelsy to MP3. New York: Oxford University Press.