Tag Archives: 1995

Kenneth’s Frequency

Posted on by Muggs

On October 7th 2011 Chieftan Mews changed his location to Kenneth’s Frequency, a tribute to the title of a R.E.M song named ‘What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?’.

Screenshot of Mew's Twitter Profile taken by Inkybrown on October 7, 2011

Previously on September 22nd a fan posted a Youtube video of R.E.M’s videoclip for ‘The Great Beyond’ on Youtube the day after R.E.M broke up. Chieftan Mew’s simply replied to with “Aluminum” a lyric from ‘E-Bow The Letter’ which was the first single from R.E.M’s 10th album ‘New Adventures in Hi-Fi’

Mews replies to a fan on Facebook with a lyric by R.E.M

XFan: I know Radiohead cares
R.E.M. – The Great Beyond (Video)
http://www.youtube.com
© 2006 WMG The Great Beyond (Video)
22 September 2011 at 13:41 ·

Chieftan Mews: Aluminum
22 September 2011 at 17:00 · Like · 3

YFan: tastes like fear
23 September 2011 at 01:33

R.E.M was a major influence for Thom Yorke and the band who toured with them in 1995 and in 1998 Radiohead joined R.E.M to perform at the Tibetan Freedom Concert where Michael Stipe and Thom Yorke took turns joining each other on stage. You can find footage of Radiohead performing Lucky with Michael Stipe and Thom Yorke performing Be Mine and Backup on E-Bow The Letter on Youtube.

They remain close friends and Thom Yorke sometimes adds the start of ‘The One I Love’ from R.E.M’s fifth album ‘Document’ to the start of ‘Everything in It’s Right Place’ when performing live.

The date of the change to Chieftan Mew’s twitter profile marks exactly 9 years since the release of R.E.M’s 8th album ‘Automatic for the People’ which was released on the 7th of October 1992 before going on to sell 16 million copies worldwide.

What’s the Frequency, Kenneth? wasn’t from Automatic for the People, instead it was the first single from the next album ‘Monster’ from 1994. Radiohead where the support act for this tour.

Michael Stipe describes What’s the Frequency, Kenneth? as:

I wrote that protagonist as a guy who’s desperately trying to understand what motivates the younger generation, who has gone to great lengths to try and figure them out, and at the end of the song it’s completely fucking bogus. He got nowhere.

( Source: Wikipedia )

R.E.M announced on the 21st of September last year that “As lifelong friends and co-conspirators, we have decided to call it a day as a band” on their website, they had been together 31 Years and released 15 Albums of which ‘Collapse into Now’ was their last.

Rolling Stone did a really nice interview with Thom Yorke while Radiohead where in New York last year about R.E.M’s influence on him and the band, you can read it here.

1/10: Was/Is this all a w.a.s.t.e. of your/our time? Stay detuned.. .. .. .. .. .␄

Posted on by Muggs

Oct 7, 2011:

@ChieftanMews: 1/10: Was/Is this all a w.a.s.t.e. of your/our time? Stay detuned.. .. .. .. .. .␄

This was the last of the #10 series of tweets from Chieftan Mews sent out each Thursday for 10 weeks. On the same day as this tweet Mew’s sent a second message stating that he was ‘free’ (Like you, once again, I am a free fugitive of life.) assuming that the quiz had lead to him escaping from the Ziggurat from where he’d been trapped over the previous months.

w.a.s.t.e stands for We Await Silent Tristenro’s Empire and is the name for Radiohead’s official online store and fanclub since 1992. According to Follow Me Around it is from a 1966 novel written by Thomas Pynchon titled The Crying Of Lot 49.

Wiki gives a brief description of the book as:

The shortest of Pynchon’s novels, it is about a woman, Oedipa Maas, possibly unearthing the centuries-old conflict between two mail distribution companies, Thurn und Taxis and the Trystero (or Tristero). The former actually existed, and was the first firm to distribute postal mail; the latter is Pynchon’s invention. The novel is often classified as a notable example of postmodern fiction.

Time included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005

The novel follows Oedipa Maas, a Californian housewife who becomes entangled in a convoluted historical mystery when her ex-lover dies and designates her the co-executor of his estate. The catalyst of Oedipa’s adventure is a set of stamps that may have been used by a secret underground postal delivery service, the Trystero (or Tristero).

According to the historical narrative that Oedipa pieces together during her travels around the San Francisco Bay Area, the Trystero was defeated by Thurn und Taxis – a real postal system – in the 18th century but went underground and continued to exist into Oedipa’s present day, the 1960s. Their mailboxes are disguised as regular waste-bins, often displaying their slogan W.A.S.T.E., an acronym for We Await Silent Tristero’s Empire, and their symbol, a muted post horn.

( Source: Wikipedia )

Amusingly according to a interview with Thom and Jonny in 1995 the band started their own church titled ‘The Holy Church of Waste’ while on tour in the US.

Jonny: (cutting Thom off) No, we’re reverends…..

Thom: (Cutting Jonny off) Oh yeah, we’re reverends…we’re all reverends.

Jonny: We started our own church.

Thom: The Holy Church of Waste.

Jonny: Well, we can legally marry people and bury people in 13 American states, including California.

Thom: So if anybody needs, you know, to get married, we can do it for them now. (to Jonny) How much did it cost us? Twenty dollars?

Jonny: Ten dollars or something. So we are going to conduct a mass community-style wedding at our LA show, that’s tomorrow.

You can read the rest of the interview on Follow Me Around here.

While we do not yet know if this was ‘just a waste of our time’ on November 9 Radiohead announced on Dead Air Space that they would be releasing a Bluray/DVD edition of The King of Limbs – From the Basement with Supercollider ‘added as a bonus track’.

We’d love to hear what answers other people sent to Mew’s ‘quiz’!
Let us know in the comments or email muggs@ersmenoo.com.