Inspiring a Legion of Garage Bands with Mac-Made Melodies (Photo source: angela n.)

We’ll readily admit it: “Air-laptopping” is not going to catch on. Nonetheless, one of the most significant trends in music-making—whether you’re a DJ, a live band, or a studio producer—is to use a Mac to mix, manipulate, and create sounds. Björk, Erykah Badu, and Trent Reznor all do it, but perhaps there’s no better ambassador of Mac-music love than Radiohead, headed by Apple fanboy Thom Yorke.

The band uses two Macs during live performances-—with one serving as a fail-safe in case of a crash.

The indiegeek contingent of Appledom is always to quick to point out the MacBook Pros that conspicuously dot the Radiohead stage. The notebooks run Kontakt 3 and Reaktor 5 developed by Native Instruments, but there’s more to Radiohead’s Apple pedigree than using software to help support live performances. Music critic Hua Hsu referred to their later albums as “post-guitar experimentation,” with tracks dominated by deeply textured compositions layered by laptops. And Thom Yorke himself gave credit to his Mac in the development of his solo album, The Eraser. As he told Rolling Stone in 2006, “A lot of the basic ideas were kicking around when I got all of my software on my laptop. They weren’t things that would ever get to the band; they just worked in that isolated laptop space.”

Some will be scandalized to see Yorke listed as an Apple influencer. Sure, he’s famously pictured with an Apple logo on his guitar, but it wasn’t until their seventh album, In Rainbows, that Radiohead deigned to be distributed via iTunes. And even in this case, the album had already been available on the band’s website for three months—at the low, low price of “whatever you’ve got.”

Leave it to groundbreaking rockers to come up with a distribution stunt so novel, it made iTunes look like the safe, old-fashioned option.

Director of Commercial Success

From the very first episode of the “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” miniseries, our collective mind was entranced. Every new installment triggers office chatter, and the entire oeuvre of ad spots has turned Justin Long and John Hodgman into pop-cult icons (after all, you don’t get 30-plus pages of YouTube parodies until you reach that lofty station). The commercials were created by TBWA\Chiat\Day, which has a single building dedicated to the Apple account and places its employees under unfailingly effective gag orders (a smart move, for as Gizmodo
.com’s Brian Lam says, the building likely “houses the greatest concentration of Apple secrets outside of Cupertino”).
So, while we don’t know who conceived or authors the ads, we do know they’re directed by indie filmmaker Phil Morrison—our go-to influencer du jour, as we lack a more identifiable choice—and they’re instrumental in reaping huge chunks of Apple mindshare throughout the Western world.
“There’s just one narrow, technical reason these ads do so well: They are perfection,” says Bob Garfield, cohost of NPR’s On the Media and columnist at AdvertisingAge. “Apple got to define the image not only of themselves, but of their own Antichrist. They get to say what PC is—and rather than actually portraying an Antichrist, they created an affable, harmless, ineffectual nerd, while the Apple guy is cool, hip, but nice and respectful, and in no way arrogant. It’s just magnificent.”
Of course, Microsoft has finally issued a response to the Mac-PC ads: a Hodgman-like figure kicks off a series of appealingly diverse Vista users declaring, “I’m a PC!” The commercials, however, only underscore the success of Morrison’s direction. As Garfield says, “You know you’re victorious in a campaign if the competition has to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to answer your ads. You expect it in a political race, but this is Microsoft, reduced to spending a fortune to make a direct retaliation.”

Next, John Loiacono and Victor Wang