“A funny thing has quietly accompanied our era’s eye-gouging proliferation of information, and by funny I mean not very funny. For every ocean of new data we generate each hour—videos, blog posts, VRBO listings, MP3s, ebooks, tweets—an attendant ocean’s worth of reviewage follows. The Internet-begotten abundance of absolutely everything has given rise to a parallel universe of stars, rankings, most-recommended lists, and other valuations designed to help us sort the wheat from all the chaff we’re drowning in.”
Writer Al Horner nailed this, but I’m unsure if people realize that instant opinionating isn’t a phenomenon reserved for Radiohead, and that esteemed Internet “critics” post one-sheet copy masked as “reviews” in an immediate fashion whenever [insert indie superstar label here] decides to fire an email blast to its mail list because something has “leaked” from a record coming out three months from now. This happens hourly during the work week, and when I’ve run out of things to write about music, I don’t know if I’ll ever get over the queasy feeling of opening an email with one of these “leaks” and, within minutes, seeing a 30-word blurb on a highly trafficked Web site known for its “criticism” of new music. Yuck.
The King of Limbs, the eighth studio album by Oxford titans Radiohead, will be “the world’s first newspaper album” according to the group’s website. After a frenzied day following the early digital release of the record, this now seems riddled with an irony I suspect Thom Yorke and friends…
