Sasha Frere-Jones ends Slate's Radiohead debate with his own best-of

Sasha Frere-Jones closed Slate's Music Club on Hail to the Thief on Thursday with a 17-track Radiohead best-of of his own, and nothing on it from Amnesiac, the album he had called their best a day earlier and says he plays end to end. Four days of playing the CDs to argue against the band has left him liking Radiohead, with every objection confirmed.

The Music Club ran as seven letters from Monday 2 June, the week before the album's release, between Frere-Jones and Gerald Marzorati of The New York Times Magazine, who has profiled Radiohead for that magazine and here argues the band's case. To Marzorati, Hail to the Thief is their Abbey Road, a band playing together again after the Kid A and Amnesiac sessions, and Radiohead belong to a line of modernist art that takes in the Beatles and Godard.

Frere-Jones answers that rock is pop culture and has to be judged as pop. Radiohead, to him, are the Merchant Ivory of rock. To the last letter he holds that there is little of punk, hip-hop or club music in their work, and that their studio experiments go no further than what Eno, Kraftwerk and Pink Floyd did 30 years before. A kind of class anxiety, he thinks, is why audiences take them for art. He sets Dizzee Rascal's “I Luv U”, then on British radio, against the album's electronics as the kind of record that makes them sound quaint.

Half the album pleases him, above all the first five or six songs, “Sail to the Moon” (his favourite) and “2 + 2 = 5”. He concedes Marzorati was right about “Sit Down. Stand Up”, which he had heard as a polite version of Can. OK Computer, he decides, is nearly perfect for eight tracks and overrated after that. Pablo Honey stays off the mix as an outlier, and the live record because it is live.

None of this, he says, settles whether a band can make good records, and the Radiohead mix is going in his car for the weekend.

Sasha Frere-Jones's Radiohead best-of, as published