#warren lain

[dreamer434]

The secret rhythm behind Radiohead's "Videotape"

Welcome to Vox Pop: Earworm! In my first episode of Earworm, I speak with Warren Lain. He's a Radiohead fan who also happens to be an incredibly talented musician and music teacher....

[adamverzum]

Secret rhythm, hidden syncopation, buried rhythm displacement and other mystical creatures

Most of you probably know Videotape by Radiohead. It is the final track on their 2007 album In Rainbows. What you probably don’t know is that it has a ‘secret rhythm’. Well, it doesn’t really, but it sounds cool, doesn’t it?

The album version is a piano-heavy song, with a strange atmospheric background noise and unusually placed beats. In short: a Radiohead song.

What makes this more interesting, is the evolution of this track, from live performance to the album version. Apparently, some Radiohead fans were baffled by the fact, that Thom Yorke had such a difficulty starting such a ‘simple’, straightforward song during one of their shows. This spurred some fans to go on a fact-finding mission. The whole ‘conundrum’ is probably best summarized by this video with a rather clickbaity title: The secret rhythm behind Radiohead's "Videotape"

While the video presents an interesting case, their solution is not really correct, as it is pointed out in the comments. If I counted and understood it correctly, you have to assume a double tempo for the song, and count 4 :

1 e & a 2 e & a 3 e & a 4 e & a

in which the beats in bold are the ones Yorke is playing piano on. 

What is really great about this song, it that it has a sort of ‘hidden double time’ playing in the band members’ heads and it gives a whole different feel to the song if you try to count the measures the way they do, and not the way the piano suggests. I can agree, that it is great, that the band members wanted to challenge themselves with this ‘background rhythm’, so much so, that they eventually decided to remove it from the album version completely. This is the aforementioned ‘Bonnaroo version’ of the song from 2006:

Still, it is ‘only’ rhythm displacement, not some secret voodoo. You can also observe a more extreme case of this in the song Bells by the Norwegian experimental trio Cakewalk: