No Hope Radio  Prog Cognition and the Future of ?  Anyway, few
Radiohead fans need or want so much specificity. All they ask is
a Tone —call it Bummed, why not?—that's dramatized and rendered
perceptible by the music. Music is without question foremost
here, not lyrics or image or mystique. So for us skeptics, it's
unfortunate that this music must begin with Yorke's singing.
While stray suggestions that Yorke's vocal equipment is operatic
overstate a power and range dwarfed by Jeff Buckley's as well as
Pavarotti's, they certainly get at what people love about him—a
pained, transported intensity, pure up top with hints of
hysterical grit below, that has as little Africa in it as a
voice with those qualities can. Fraught and self-involved with
no time for jokes, not asexual but otherwise occupied, and never
ever common, this is the idealized voice of a pretentious
college boy. Its attractions for Radiohead's fan base are self-
evident. But like it or not the voice is remarkable, and many
others respond as well.