#87, “Black Star,” Radiohead (1995)

150 Favorite Songs: #87, “Black Star,” Radiohead (1995)

When you revisit early Radiohead, it becomes a little bit funny that they ended up probably being the ’90s alt-rock band that survived the passage of time the most intact. The band’s debut album, Pablo Honey, is a nice collection of mostly sad guitar songs that took its title from a prank call on a Jerky Boys record. (The Jerky Boys were a prank phone call group that released several CDs of themselves being goofy on the phone; the first two went platinum. The ‘90s were a weird time.) The follow-up to that album, The Bends, is still mostly sad songs, mostly played on guitar, but the songs are transcendent and the way they sound is bigger, fuller, like they’re carving out something new. It’s funny; by the time they moved on to OK Computer, and then especially the mostly-electronic Kid A and Amnesiac, they were more important than ever—but also, so many of the discussions of the band in the decades after involved fans and critics asking if they’d ever get back to making guitar music again.

Listen to “Black Star” and you can understand why that was such an important question. Because for as groundbreaking and important as Radiohead became, when it comes to guitar rock bands, there really weren’t many better.

The song starts with the band’s three (3) guitars crashing in from out of nowhere, the sound fading in like the band has been playing off somewhere else for a few hours and only just now wanted you to hear it. Then almost immediately, the actual song starts, and things get more muted, Thom Yorke doing his very best Jeff Buckley impression, before the chorus comes around, and the guitars from the very beginning of the song come crunching back. The hook to “Black Star” is immense, a full-on arena banger made for waving a lighter in the air—it’s funny to think that Radiohead used to write songs that had choruses that Journey might have wished they’d come up with, but that’s the thing that makes “Black Star” so great. It’s doing these very interesting things, using the elements of a song you’re used to—crunchy guitars, beefy hooks—in ways that nobody else would think to. There are lovely little harmonies on the vocals, especially in the third verse, when Thom Yorke starts singing about being on a train looking for the face of whoever the song is about, knowing he won’t find it. There’s a line delivery there, where he’s got harmony vocals as he sings “i keep falling over, i keep passing out…” and then the other layer of voices disappear as he finishes the line, “…when i see a face like you,” but his voice lifts and lilts all by itself, that I have thought about roughly four thousand times since I first heard it. You could imagine a lot of Radiohead’s contemporaries coming up with the riff that opens “Black Star,” or writing a chorus that satisfying—the Foo Fighters could have done them—but nobody else would have done what they did with those things.

I like that Radiohead are what they are today, and I think if they’d kept trying to push forward with innovating guitar rock past OK Computer, it probably would have gotten boring pretty quick—someone (I think it was Billy Corgan but it might have been Trent Reznor) once said that if you keep focused on guitar rock for too long, you end up writing these huge riffs that it turns out Deep Purple already came up with in the seventies, and then where are you? But also, I’m glad that they spent those first few albums fully dedicated to trying to be the most interesting ‘90s guitar-based alt-rock band in the world. If that’s where you are on album two, then it makes sense that you’re somewhere else entirely for album seven. I don’t wish they’d spend the next twenty years trying to do The Bends over and over again (I’ve heard Coldplay and Muse and most of the other bands that decided to do that, happy for them but I’m not gonna listen to all of that), but I’m glad they spent a few years there, too. You don’t get an In Rainbows without nailing “Black Star” first, and we’re lucky to have them both.

Weirdly, “Black Star” has found its own life in country music—or I guess probably “Americana”—in recent years. Here’s Gillian Welch doing it with David Rawlings on backing vocals, keeping it quieter, and then Jade Bird playing pretty much Welch’s version note-for-note, but still sounding great.