OHAHEHEHAHEHOEAHAEOHEOHEHEAHH.
You know Oasis is one of the most notoriously plagiaristic bands in the history of music, right? They've been sued like five times.
Plus everything Noel Gallagher does is the same, just slightly different. Don't get me wrong, I like Oasis, but it's not exactly groundbreaking.
I would (cautiously) challenge you to listen to a considerable amount of Radiohead before making calls like "it's not creative" or it's "artsy bullshit"-- as you said yourself, music's subjective, and just because you don't enjoy it or they use chords you see in other places doesn't mean it can't be something new. I mean, shit-- to me, Oasis sounds like half the other bands from around that time in Britain. Just... Standard rock. It's not very deep (not that music
has to be deep) and the lyrics are generally... Well. Fuckin' in the bushes. To me, there's nothing that creative there, but maybe that's just because it's not my style.
I have to challenge the view that Radiohead went different just to
be different. They started mixing it up at a time when hipsters didn't exist yet-- and there was a backlash against them. Most of their fanbase deserted them because after Pablo Honey they decided to do their own thing. At that point in time, being weird wasn't something you just Did, like it is today (lol hipster market). It was a serious risk, and it was one they took because they believed in what they were doing.
It's... Kind of like surrealist film
(except that's a bad example because it tends to focus on higher planes of reality and evoking subconscious emotion without evoking regular feelings) in that... What you hear when you listen to them sometimes doesn't come across as conventional music. But it inspires an emotional response a lot deeper and a lot broader than something as plain as Morning Glory could.
i.e:
That thar is an underrated song. Basically, it's not necessarily all laid out on a plate like something like Oasis is (where basically, what you hear is what you get, without any ambiguity. She's electric? From a family full of eccentrics? Okay, buddy, I'll take your word for it) and on the surface people often feel like it doesn't make a lot of sense, or that his voice is all wrong, etc., etc., but for me that song creates a visceral emotional response. It makes me feel things where Oasis just makes me go "Yeh, okay, that sounds pretty cool".
Your opinion of Radiohead, i.e. that they were all different and strange just to be pretentious and new, is not fair to the band-- I think you're getting your wires crossed a little bit, though. Because while Radiohead didn't go weird to be hipsters, hipsters like Radiohead to be weird. A lot of folks who 'like' the band these days like it because they are filthy hipsters who don't have any taste of their own and just want to be artsy, and so what happens is people make a reverse association and pin the same douchey label on the band itself.
Now, I'm not a hipster. I like a
really fucking wide variety of music and I'm not the kind of person who hates a band just because they're mainstream. So I can understand where you're coming from, and I agree that there are some hipsterasfuck bands out there that are every bit as shallow and hollow as the people who pretend to enjoy them-- but Radiohead is not in that category.
For the record, I'm not referring to Radiohead's more recent stuff. At the moment they're just kind of stumbling in obscurity. King of Limbs was pretty lackluster.