Thom Yorke's expensive words
As a fan of The Simpsons and Radiohead, I would really like this post regardless.
However, it starts with an interesting and rather sober digression from pop culture:
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Which is to say: I paid $350 (in US funds) to use a handful of quotes from Radiohead songs in my book.There are several odd things about the whole rigamarole that surrounded procuring this license agreement:
1) I was not required to fork over a single dime to quote from The Simpsons itself, nor to quote at length from Tony Hendra's excellent book Going Too Far, nor to quote from Foucault or Mark Twain or David Foster Wallace. But to use 87 words from the collected lyrics of Radiohead? Three hundred and fifty simoleons. Roughly $4.02 per word. (Which, incidentally, is more than double the highest amount I've ever been paid per word to write for a magazine or newspaper.)
2) Specifically, I paid to quote from "The Bends," and indeed I do - three lines of lyrics, 22 words total, as one half of the epigraph on the title page of my book's Introduction. I paid to quote from "Idioteque," and you'll find 24 words from the song on page 208 of my book. And I paid to quote from "I Might Be Wrong," and lo and behold you'll find nine lines (41 words) from the song on page 220 of my book, pursuant to a discussion of Lisa Simpson's symbolic connections with the left-wing activism of recent years.
On page 219, however, there are 15 words from "Karma Police," five from "Paranoid Android," and 18 from "Subterranean Homesick Alien." Total cost: zero, zilch, nada. Which means either a) you can quote from the Radiohead album OK Computer free of cost but not from other Radiohead albums, or else b) there is some threshold crossed between 18 and 21 words of citation (20 perhaps?) at which point citing Radiohead lyrics legally transforms from free-of-cost "fair use"/"fair comment" to use of copyrighted material requiring a licensing fee of $4.02 per word. I dunno which it is.3) Perhaps the oddest thing about the situation: of all the TV shows and movies and books and rock & roll songs I discuss in Planet Simpson (a vast, vast, vast number), the only artists I've met personally are Radiohead. In other words, I've had to pay to discuss the work of the only people cited in the book who, in theory, I actually could've asked in person for permission to use their work.