‘Just’: The Radiohead song written as a competition
Music should never be looked at as a competitive sport. Even though every artist might try to be as proficient on their instrument as possible, making songs that are intended to outdo the person next to you often never results in anything too groundbreaking. It’s always good to have healthy competition now and then, though, and when Radiohead were making their song ‘Just’, Thom Yorke threw down the gauntlet to Jonny Greenwood.
Before Radiohead became the massive rock idols we know today, they didn’t make the best first impression. From one listen of the band’s debut album Pablo Honey, most listeners would be forgiven if they thought that they would never amount to anything outside of their major hit, ‘Creep’, clearly being a carbon copy of the kind of angsty rock songs that were coming out of the American alternative scene.
After washing their hands with their first album, The Bends was a moment when the band started to toy with their sound for the first time. While there were still some lingering odours from the grunge movement, many of the album’s best moments came when the group started mixing elements of Britpop and stadium rock into their sound, resulting in massive hits like ‘High and Dry’ and ‘Fake Plastic Trees’.
While ‘Just’ would join this company as one of the album’s cornerstone tracks, most guitarists would have difficulty figuring out where it’s going. Compared to the standard chord structures that make up most pop songs, every piece of the track seems to veer off in a different direction, either adding extensions on the chords that came before or adding a dissonant chord to add an eerie vibe to the song.
Although the band may have had an idealistic plan for what their masterpiece would have been, Yorke initially came up with the idea as a game between him and Greenwood. Instead of trying to write in the traditional format, Yorke thought it would be interesting to make a song that featured as many chords as they could think of into one song.
Given the strange sound of the track, both musicians delivered in spades, never letting up for any one section. Just when you think that you’ve got a handle on where the track is going, the guitar solo has a random key change before reverting to the main tonality of the song. No one’s off the hook in the outro, as Greenwood brings the famed ‘Hendrix chord’ in the last few seconds before going into his final guitar solo.
If anything, the true power of the song comes from how well Yorke can sing over the top of every one of those chords. Instead of trying to write a melody to fit within the key of every chord, Yorke’s angsty growl gently glides across every one of the changes, creating a strange push and pull to the track that makes everything feel uneasy.
Although the band would make bold choices on their next few albums, this experimentation with different chord progressions would occasionally pop up. While the idea behind ‘Just’ came from a childish sense of fun, it’s easy to see the discordant chords here as a precursor to the strange left turns in songs like ‘Karma Police’ off OK Computer.
