Twenty years. They are really good at music!
I've lived 2/3rds of my life since hearing Creep for the first time on the car radio in 1992, wondering who in the entire blue fuck would write such a fantastically demented and poetic song -- and then, nary a whisper about that band publicly again until a smattering of praise here-and-there on MTV Europe while living in Denmark in 1995.
There was a wildly popular British gentleman on-the-air at that time by the name of Ray Cokes (whose scant Wiki page is unworthy of his greatness) who hosted a show called MTV's Most Wanted that basically provided the gist of my musical experiences in Europe. Danish Radio 1 was not providing anything but a very intense lesson in late-millennial Euro club-pop, and the pub music tended to be the kind of shit that could be sung to emphatically after 7 or 14 pints:
Cokes was -- and very well might still be -- the biggest Radiohead fan I've ever known. By looks of things, he's probably not doing too much else besides listening to Radiohead in a dim closet somewhere -- but he will always be the harbinger of Radiohead to the European masses, plus one teen-aged American boy.
Cokes championed their then-current album -- The Bends -- on a nightly basis, then would serenade us with the massively profound video to the song Just, with its famously tactile opening chords and brilliant cinematic conception. They say that today's action becomes tomorrow's habit, and so I would sit in front of the tube at 9PM on weeknights to hear -- and watch -- what would become the most important band I would ever be subjected to. This was just how you had to do it before the convenience of YouTube.
When I got back to America, and the buddings of Oasis, Blur, Supergrass, Sleeper and other Third-Gen Brit-wavers were freebasing everyone's brains like crack-cocaine, Radiohead was notably absent. It seems that they considered Britpop, Britpoo, and would have none of that jangly nonsense and musical dickheadery.
Still, this country would not recognize the complexity and the labor that this band was embodying, even though there was some marginal rabble-rousing in response to their theatrical soundtrack debut in Clueless -- a notion so absurd to think about at this point, that its almost ironically unironic.
Then, an album dropped that changed the way everyone -- EVERYONE -- perceived popular music.
OK Computer is what falcon punched American right in its FUPA. People became stupidly berserk about this band, and for a majority of 1997 -- my sophomore year at UT -- its all that anyone listened to. House Party: OK Computer. Bonfire: OK Computer. Asian Fraternity Party: OK Computer. Spice Girls pay-per-view Live! In Istanbul! watch party: OK Computer. We just couldn't get it out of our 6-disc changers.
OK Computer was a 12-song album that, if a dozen friends chose to listen to it together, all the way through, each could identify an entirely different song as their favorite. I even think it was the last time Rick appreciated a musical note. This thing was molding lives.
Radiohead had basically had made the perfect album -- from production quality, to track sequence, to the volumes and volumes of textures and layers within. This album so much more than the overt the genius of its melodies, lyrics, and vocals. This was a gamechanger.
What got me through all the shitty coursework of the second year of college -- the worst for anyone in that time before meeting your future life-friends and being able to legally drink -- was track 5, Letdown. It felt like I could not shovel it into me ears and through afferent neurons towards my cerebral cortex at a quick enough pace or voluminous enough amount. I took all the other discs out of my changer. I pretty much mutilated every other song until only Track 5 would play. It was something that I had been hungry for since hearing and loving The Queen is Dead.
Then, just about when Radiohead apostolic hit critical mass, the cheeky punters choked their entire fandom in the face with something called Kid A.
Kid A made everyone question their loyalties. Few bought the album. I think Selken accounted for the entire inventory of Kid A CD purchases at Tower Records on The Drag. Napster was peaking, and so were heavily shared music files with terrible bit rates. With all of the irony of a band whose whole identity was the technological pursuit of harmonies, all of it was being lost through horribly rendered electronic data. It was too far advanced to be released when it was -- a horribly overused and cliched notion for sure -- but the mis-timing of this album was akin to Kubrick shelving A.I.:Artificial Intelligence until the technology was advanced enough to convey the his vision.
Kid A was weird. Radio ignored it entirely, and popular music morphed into the shittastic rap-rock phenomenon. We felt like they had let us down by not pursuing all of the momentum they had gathered. But Radiohead was developing -- only without an audience -- and we were forced to pay attention to trash goblins like Crazy Town and Sum 41. I've yet to receive a formal apology.
Only years later, when I went back to bridge the gap between OK Computer (album #3) and Hail to the Thief (album #6) did I start to understand the brilliance of Kid A, and their subsequent release: Amnesiac. It was now going to be apparent that Radiohead would be eternally evolving, with or without us -- an ethos that most people resist in their favorite bands -- but necessary to shed infantile ideas from one stage of their development to the next.
Kid A, the song, was their manifesto:
After the Kid A/Amnesiac interlude, the band returned to the gritty forefathers-of-awesome with the album Hail to the Thief. 2+2=5 was the first Radiohead track in a half-decade that made you remove yourself from your water bong and move your ass. It was melting so many faces left and right, no one was looking directly into cameras anymore. It was a triumphant return to rock-and-fucking-roll for the band.
The song I like to take from Hail to the Thief is less of a stark contrast as 2+2=5 was from their previous two albums. If I'm telling Enzo the story of Radiohead, then I would choose something that aggregates the path the band had taken between OK Computer and this album, and also the direction they appeared to be heading.
Much like their touring history, Radiohead tends to take long hiatuses from their masses, and though the reasons are always unclear, one has to image that alchemy takes a long time to generate.
Four years after Hail to the Thief, we are gifted what is considered to be the band's masterstroke: In Rainbows.
One of the memories that will likely go the distance with me to my grave, is the first time I heard a track off of this album: in the midst of a long, peaceful, and silent cab ride through the rainy jam of Buenos Aires with a few of my best friends. Fans of the band we all, none of these participants really mentioned the in-the-moment magnitude of hearing such a widely anticipated event -- so much so that it was presented in full stereo to the people of the planet in full accordance, including Argentina.
But when the track finished playing, and everyone was staring thoughtfully out of the wet windows into the fussy city, I remember Mike alluding to the fact that it was pretty special to have just heard a track from In Rainbows for the first time -- in a cab; in rainy Buenos Aires.
What is fantastic is that I don't even remember what song was playing. Just that it happened. That detail doesn't even matter, because sometimes when I listen to the album, I like to think that any of these songs could have been with me inside that cab. That makes it better -- at least to me it does. This is the one I like to imagine the most because it is likely one of the greatest songs ever scribed:
And still, Radiohead continues to evolve: From guitar alt band, to electronic explorers, to psychedelic rock gnar balls -- and all sort of congealed flirtations with each, going forward. King of Limbs was a finessed album that is taking Radiohead somewhere that I cannot yet imagine. Maybe its another bridge to a far off place yet undiscovered.
This is the final installment for this band on this day, but it is by no means is it an end to the evolution of my interest. This track is a perfect circular anomaly that reflects on the bands original artistry. Right at 2:32 when Jonny Greenwood's skinny, deft riff slips in the harmony, then fattens like a collapsed tire as the song progresses is my favorite Radiohead moment in several years ...
Until this happened ...
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