Is that a girl shirt? I think that’s a girl shirt. I’m pretty sure that’s a girl shirt. I’m pretty sure I HAVE that shirt.
fuck the gender police jonny good job
Radiohead and gender… another essay waiting to be written. Challenging the gender binary is nothing new in rock and pop, of course. What I find interesting about Radiohead’s particular approach to this is how mostly very un-ostentatious, non-statementlike it is. (Like almost everything they do, then.) It’s like they’re from a kind of future where playing with gender markers *really* isn’t a big deal.
I’m not just talking about the occasional wearing of “girl” clothes here, or Jonny Greenwood’s 1990s nail polish phase, or that infamous Thom Yorke eyeliner pic, or Colin Greenwood’s (certainly more statementlike) teenage experiments with leotards (lol), or Ed O'Brien’s various displays of weird shirts, or Phil Selway’s preternatural dapperness. I’m also talking about the clothes sharing here, and “unmanly” public physical displays of affection (almost every Yorke hug ever, especially this one: 4.20), and general body language stuff. They seem fantastically unconcerned with performing masculinity in the traditional sense.
That’s a very conscious thing, I think. A kind of disgust with traditional ideas of masculinity is a thread that runs through their interviews from very early on. Colin Greenwood certainly seems to have had his own ideas of how to be a man from a fairly early age, and I’d imagine Thom Yorke had, too.
The Radiohead reinvention of masculinity seems to be mostly about caring, allowing certain kinds of vulnerability, a general openness to feeling. The way they all seem to have embraced fatherhood so enthusiastically fits in with this, too.
It’s the classic “new man” idea, mostly, really - with a small dose of genderbending thrown in (see pic above). As “fuck you"s to the gender police go, it’s probably one of the mildest ever - but it’s a very sustained one.
(Radiohead fandom: proof that women do like “nice guys”. :D)
there’s also that one early interview of Colin’s where he talks about his “biker chick” girlfriend and how he’d always be the only man sitting at the back of the motorcycle with the woman at the front and he just gave literally zero fucks about it
they have always been just so fantastically unconcerned with all that, but without it feeling like an affectation if that makes sense? they’ve also had some pretty scathing things to say about the whole hyper- masculinity thing as a whole, from memory
There was an interview where someone was asking Jonny who was the “mother” of the group, and he replied that they were all mothers. There’s an atmosphere of nurturing among themselves and toward their fans that is very particular to Radiohead. For a band that has been so successful for so long, they simply never stopped being the same caring people they had always been, and being under the microscope of the press has never altered that because they never cared about the perspective of the media in the first place.
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