This month on Twitter, @sotachetan hosts #BrandedInSongs – which is a head-on collision of my personal world of music and my professional world of branding and advertising. The challenge is to simply pick a song with a brand name in its lyrics or title. I added one more criteria to my picks, which is this: the songs themselves must be as iconic as the brands they mention. No filler here.
Music fans have mostly heralded the originality and ambition of OK Computer and Kid A over all the other incredible Radiohead albums. OK Computer is one of my favorite albums of all time, no doubt. But it’s not even my favorite Radiohead record. That distinction belongs to The Bends. I love innovation just like any semi-serious music fan, but at the end of the day, I just want a great collection of bangers. Like the first six studio albums from Zeppelin, The Bends is an album built on monster guitar riffs, not monster ambitions. There’s not a weak link in the bunch. “Street Spirit (Fade Out)”, “Fake Plastic Trees” and “(Nice Dream)” are perhaps the most well known songs on the tracklist, but “Bones” is one of those that makes me wish Radiohead would keep rocking out a little more.
How about Jonny’s guitar chops on this one? On “Bones”, this makes me think of all the kids out there who want to play guitar. I think most of them want to play like Jonny. Thrashing, screeching and motoring his way across a three-minute piece de resistance. Everything else rides on this monster wave, that grooving bass line and Thom’s vocals that fluctuate from straight-ahead underground to falsetto in the heavens. “Bones” is the kid in Thom, Jonny, Ed, Colin and Philip jamming in the garage because there’s nothing remotely better to do with their time.
“Now I can't climb the stairs. Pieces missing everywhere. Prozac painkillers. When you've got to feel it in your bones.”