Rhythm and Meter
Brad Osborn · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2016
Chapter 3 analyzes all of the moments in Radiohead’s catalog that deviate from expectations inherited from rock’s most prevalent rhythmic expectation: the backbeat. Radiohead’s most salient rhythms are those that contain some elements of a backbeat, but add or subtract beats from a standard measure of 4/4 time to incite surprise. The repetition of such rhythms allows a listener to learn to entrain with the recurring stimulus through the process of embodied cognition. Radiohead employs several particular rhythmic manifestations of this principle, including odd-cardinality meter, maximally even rhythms, changing meter, and polytempo. Far from reinventing the wheel in every song, Radiohead consistently subverts our backbeat expectations in only a handful of different ways throughout their recorded output.