The Radio Dept: Music for Music's Sake

This past April 20 was a music fanboy dream-day. Not only did I get to see Moscow Olympics and The Radio Dept. – the top two artists on my decade-ender music list – perform live on the same stage, but I also got a chance to talk to the Swedish trio at their presscon hours earlier.

I was unequal parts nervous and excited prior to the presscon, not really because I haven’t interviewed a foreign act before (and I haven’t), but because I was all too aware of The Radio Dept’s reputation as a truculent bunch when it came to media relations. The band has allegedly canceled a number of interviews and has admitted, on the handful of interviews they haven’t canceled, that they aren’t too thrilled about touring. Now they were going to play in Manila, in the middle of the humid, sweltering Philippine summer. The stage was set for some good ol’ Pinoy music press probing.

The “Pinoy music press” that turned up was actually just a bunch of bookish-looking dudes and hipster chicks that totaled to no more than ten or twelve, which is like one-tenths the coverage that Taylor Swift got when she came here. The “presscon” turned out to be a close roundtable thing that I assume The Radio Dept. found reassuring, since they were pretty nice and accommodating the whole way through. This doesn’t mean, though, that getting them to talk about themselves was easy.

You could tell that most of their quotes have been formed and polished through years of answering the same types of questions, but it was very clear that these were guys who didn’t sit around thinking about their “image” too much. This explains their reluctance over publicity; they weren’t assholes (they spoke in a constantly polite “aww-shucks” manner that I’m sure was a really big hit amongst the aforementioned hipster chicks), they just weren’t interested in talking about themselves and what they “mean”. When someone asked Johan (the lead singer) if his muffled vocals stood for alienation, he was at a total loss. After meandering about vocal effects and some technical mixing stuff, he finally said: “I don’t know, actually. Sorry.”

To assume that every little thing in music must mean something is such a Gen-X sentiment. Those of us who went through their formative years during the early-90s alternative music explosion are the most prone to this. We assume every abrasive guitar effect, every primal howl is meant to signify “alienation” because that’s what rock critics have taught us Nirvana’s “Nevermind” and Radiohead’s “OK Computer” were all about. We grew up listening to all the politics, the navel-gazing, the self-consciousness of 90s alternative music that everyone just laughs about now. The Radio Dept. has an unmistakable emotional quality to their lyrics, but they don’t think their musical aesthetic mirrors this. And I found this very interesting.

Recently, I have been playing the Postal Service’s “Give Up” album so much that I’m beginning to regret not putting it in my end-of-the-decade top ten. When I was listening to this album six years ago, I was convinced that its blip-bloop electronica was supposed to further emphasize the artificiality that Ben Gibbard’s lyrics were lamenting. In the song “Clark Gable”, for instance, Gibbard sings: “I want so badly to believe that there is truth and love is real,” to the hyper-paced backdrop of 80s post-disco synth beats. But listening to it now, I don’t think that’s the case anymore. It’s entirely possible that Gibbard just really liked to work with Dntel and the only way he knew how to write songs (as evidenced by Death Cab For Cutie’s entire discography) was to write songs about the alienating nature of modern relationships. I’m pretty sure his lyrics would be exactly the same had he decided to work with Guns n’ Roses.

It took some time, but I think I’m getting used to the prevailing aesthetic in pop music today. Back in our “Alternative Nation” days, everything had to mean something: the lyrics, the guitar sounds, the production style, the choice of instruments, the dead-like quality of Kurt Cobain’s vocals in “Something in the Way”. Albums weren’t just a collection of songs – they were like Herman Mellville novels or Stanley Kubrick films. Every little thing was tied to a greater theme. Now the lyrics are all that’s meant to mean anything. This allows the music to breathe.

It’s no surprise that The Radio Dept. treat their music with a purist protectionism since they are obviously music snobs. They look down upon the “shoegazer” label (“we think dream-pop is corny”, Johan says), they don’t like Swedish indie-pop (I wanted to ask them about this but I wasn’t sure they wouldn't punch me in the face), and they wrote a song called “Worst Taste in Music” (the song is addressed to a girl, to whom Johan sings: “He’s got the worst taste in music…if I didn’t know this, I’ll lose it”). To them, the music, in and of itself is the main art. Not only do they not subscribe to the traditional treatment of music serving the lyrics, they also go out of their way to subvert it.

In the song “Heaven’s on Fire”, the cheery London club beats belie the vitriol in the lyrics, referring to what I presume to be music industry people as “charlatans just out of reach and out of time”. In my favorite Radio Dept. song ever, “Always a Relief”, the warmth of the lovely bass lines mask the coldness of the words: “It feels like our time has gone to waste, want to feel strong and not like a waste, want to feel the illusion, the confusion.” In “David”, the hip-hop beats serve as a backdrop to the totally unhip-hop homoerotic lyrics: “Oh David, won’t you look into my eyes.”

Under the precepts of the Advanced Genius Theory (discussed in detail in a previous post), the music-for-music’s-sake approach is pretty Advanced. For all their apparent unpretentiousness, however, The Radio Dept. is still not very Advanced. For one thing, the earnest use of a highly Overt Thurston Moore quote at the start of “Heaven’s on Fire” disqualifies them outright. Although keyboardist Daniel Tjäder’s 80s moustache as well as his gyrating white-man dance moves have all sorts of potential for Advancement.