It has not escaped my attention that Michael Jackson has passed away.  It’s just that I don’t really care.  Far more important to me was the death of the obnoxious, foul-mouthed, genuinely funny genius that is (was) Steven Wells.  Probably most famous for writing for the NME, Wells was never afraid to have a go at, well, everything. Targets included pompous guitar players, collectors of vinyl, the Olympics and many, many others.

He infuriated me no end.  Below is a chunk from an article he wrote for The Quietus about Radiohead a band who I regard as being off limits when it comes to criticism.  In my world view Thom and Co are beyond reproach, Mr Wells thankfully didn’t agree.  Here he decimates, the band, the video and the middle classes. I would have loved to have read his opinion on Michael Jackson’s death and the way that the media has reported it.  Alas it is not to be.

Thom phones. “Turn on the Chart Show, they’re playing the video,” he says.

It’s the video for ‘Just’. Which, by the way, just happens to be an amazing piece of music.

But this video — way more than the song or the album it comes from — speaks great echoing volumes about Radiohead’s massive popularity with white Western middle class 21st Century males, aka the most privileged and pampered group in human society.

It features a rich white male lying down on the pavement.

As a rich white male pop band look down form a nearby building, rich white people approach the geezer and ask why he’s just lying there and not running around going “whoopee!” and spending cash and generally enjoying being the one of most privileged bunch of cunts in human history and that.

Now I imagine a lot of editing went on at this point because no one tells the miserable fuck to get up, pull his socks up, take some Prozac and stop feeling sorry for himself. No-one says: ‘Look our grandparents used to make regular visits to the doctors to have tapeworms wound out of their fucking arseholes on sticks (true story, hence the American Medical Association logo) so think on you sad cunt, stop just fucking lying there blocking the pavement and go do something useful, you pathetic, self-pitying piece of shit.”

But even under the video’s truncated badgering the bloke on the ground cracks and whispers the reason he’s lying on the ground into another white middle class male’s ear.

The last shot is an aerial view of every white middle class person for miles lying on the ground being really sad.

The moral is clear: the message whispered into the bloke’s ear (which we don’t hear and isn’t subtitled) is the secret reason why rich, white, healthy 21st Century westerners are totally justified in being like really sad and oh-woe-is-me and why they love rock bands fronted by rich, white, healthy 21st Century westerners who bellyache on and on and on about how fucking pitifully miserable they are.

Of course I don’t know what that reason is. And Radiohead’s legions of rich, white, male, healthy 21st Century Western fans don’t know either. But the fact that it’s in this video means that it most definitely exists, totally justifying their insatiable appetite for sad, depressing pop music that feeds both their (otherwise apparently totally unjustified and self-obsessed) melancholy and their sense of me-me-me self-importance. It also, of course, totally justifies Radiohead.

And it explains why the band have never written a song titled ‘Fuck Me — More Money!’ or ‘Let’s Go Down The Cashpoint’.

In short the video for Just was a bit like Monty Python’s Funniest Joke in the World Sketch except in reverse and really self-obsessed and adolescent and wanky.

In 1999 Travis asked ‘Why Does It Always Rain on Me?’ At my command thousands of NME readers sent whiney Fran Healey a postcard reading “Because you’re a cunt”. But I then wrote a personal letter to Fran, stating that if he really wanted to know he should ask Thom Yorke but that he might not like the answer because it would almost certainly make him like down on the pavement, like forever.