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Radiohead Learns the Hard Way - People Attend Concerts for Music, Not Environmentalism

Radiohead

I have the new Radiohead album, In Rainbows. I’ve been a fan since Pablo Honey first came out. I think their latest effort is pretty good – not quite up the standards of OK Computer or The Bends mind you, but much better than Amnesiac, which puts me to sleep.

I have never seen the band in concert, despite my longtime love of their music, and I’ll be honest, this article about a recent promotion to give away tickets if people would bike to get them makes me never want to see them live.

I have a hard spot in my heart for celebrities who mouth off about their unique little worldviews as if their opinions are more important, than say, the average garbage man. You hear them quite frequently in the political arena – people like Sheryl Crow who enlighten us with wisdom along the lines of, “I think war is based in greed and there are huge karmic retributions that will follow. I think war is never the answer to solving any problems. The best way to solve problems is to not have enemies.” That’s brilliant. When is Disneyland College going to start offering accredited courses toward a degree in international relations? “I think war is never the answer to solving any problems.” – Really? I think that African Americans in this country, for whom the Civil War solved the problem of slavery pretty definitively, may tend to disagree with you. I also think the Jews might have some insight into how World War II ended something called the Holocaust. Sheryl was also the one who advocated putting limits on the number of toilet paper squares you could use in order to fight climate change - I’m serious - so she’s not the brightest person.

You hear a lot of people in the music industry spout off on stuff that’s way out of their swim lane – another one of my favorites is Zach de la Rocha of Rage Against the Machine fame, who consistently rails against evil corporate America while failing to acknowledge that it has made him incredibly rich and famous. The last time I checked, Epic isn’t really considered an indy label. I would also like to note that if not for the American corporate success that he so loathes, it probably wouldn’t even be possible for him to play in a rock band as his profession. Go to a poor country and see how many professional musicians you have – not many when existence is truly a fight for survival.

Look, everyone is entitled to their opinion. Hell, I mouth-off outside of my swim lane in virtually every post I write, but I don’t pretend that I’m doing something else. I don’t pretend that I’m selling advocacy when I’m really selling music. People who come here to listen to me vent understand straight away that that’s exactly what they’re getting. The problem with the Bruce Springsteens of the world is that I don’t want to hear about the evils of the Republican party, I want to hear Nebraska. And you’re holding me hostage to your beliefs in order to gratify me with the songs that I paid for to enable your existence.

It would be one thing to announce up front that you’re going to stand on stage, not play music and express your views on climate change, then people who care can show up to hear it and you can be honest about your credentials. But it’s another thing to lure people into a concert and ambush them with personal opinions they don’t care for, and try to use your celebrity status to influence people while clouding the issue of your qualifications on the subject.

In the interest of full disclosure, I am not a scientist, engineer, politician, economist, inventor, or any member of the other groups I routinely criticize. I am just an average person who applies common sense when someone asks me to sacrifice, and gets angry when it turns out to be a charlatan asking. But I don’t sell you anything different. I don’t lure you in here with the promise that I am some world renowned economist before I rip the budget to shreds. I make outrageous claims, back them up with common sense and some basic research, and ask people to prove me wrong. And if I was a rock star, I certainly wouldn’t lure you in to this site by hiding behind my celebrity status to ambush you with transportation issues.

But back to Radiohead. At their Paris show on June 9th:

Singer Thom Yorke and his gang announced that 50 passes were up for grabs for their show at Paris’s 17,000-capacity Bercy Arena and would be available on a first-come, first-served basis.

The only snag was that punters would have to collect them by bicycle from record label XL’s Paris office.

Guess what the response was.

If you hear the wind blowing across a desolate prairie, you are close. They managed to give away 15 tickets. I saw a pair of these tickets on Ebay selling for $290, that’s $145 a piece.

If you can’t entice people in Paris, a mass-transit and bicycle friendly city, to ride their bikes to a free ticket giveaway that will save them $145 for one of the last remaining rock supergroups, then how does anyone ever expect that they will persuade people in this country to stop driving cars and adopt bicycles as their primary form of transit?

The results of this little stunt are so pathetic that they are almost past the point where it was humorous. This is becoming sad.

Here’s some news for celebrities: we come to concerts to hear you play your pretty little songs, we don’t give a crap about your personal activism.

I find it interesting that Radiohead only offered 50 of the 17,000 tickets up for free. This is the band that offered their whole last album for free. If they’re such believers in the cause, why not give all of the tickets away instead of a paltry 0.3% of them?

One of the 15 people who biked in for free tickets

This shows the cold calculus of practicality at its ugliest.

The reason they didn’t do it is this – despite all of their activism and promotion, they know they can’t count on 50 lousy people taking them up on the offer. They have to test the waters first, and it would look pretty bad when you end up selling most of the tickets you tried to give away for a bike ride.

Look at it from the perspective of the average Parisian. If you knew 50 tickets were up for grabs and all you had to do was ride a bike, why not do it? Even if you didn’t get there in time to win, you could get out and get some exercise, and you could still buy the ticket. You could probably even cheat - drive most of the way, park the car, take the bike out of the trunk, ride it a mile and claim the free ticket, then ride the bike back to the car and the car back home. This seems to be a cinch.

Well, it appears that when there are only 50 tickets available, the average Parisian’s time isn’t worth the $145 savings. I’m willing to bet that this calculus holds true even if all of the tickets were free, and Radiohead didn’t want to sell more tickets than they could give away, so they limited the number to 50 to minimize the impact when no one gave a crap.

Let me shoot some truth at you, Radiohead, and all the rest of you, people don’t care about your activism, they care about your music. It’s easy for you to be environmentally friendly, you have tons of money and your job involves playing guitar all day. You have the time to care about this crap; most people don’t.

People will probably counter, “Well the point isn’t that they would change the world with one concert, the point was to raise awareness.” Steaming load of bullcrap alert! What “awareness” did you raise by having 15 people show up to get free tickets to a sold out show? What awareness would it raise even if all 50 tickets were snatched up? What is that supposed to prove – something along the lines of “you could think of your bike as an alternative for short trips when you don’t need a car”? Guess what, this little stunt just proved exactly the opposite. My awareness of the fact that no one cares is tremendously heightened.

Of course, if you want to do something really ecologically friendly, here’s an idea – DON’T PLAY A ROCK CONCERT.

How much energy did it take to power the instruments, amps, PAs, lights, the venue’s facilities? How much trash was produced? How many people traveled for how many miles to converge to hear you sing a few songs? And how does any of that help the environment?

If you want to hug trees in your free time, have at it, but don’t waste our time preaching from your high-tech bully pulpit. I’m buying a ticket, not an ethos.