I am currently watching Showtime where they have Radiohead in concert (2004), and I am amazed at how the first few chords and guitar strums of their songs can evoke such vivid memories and even bring a smile to my face.
Now I’m sure everyone who was in their teens during the early ‘90’s is familiar with the (subtly parodic) song “Creep,” and both “High and Dry,” and “Fake Plastic Trees,” passed by consciousness thanks to KROQ, but it wasn’t really until OK Computer came out that I listened, really listened, to them.
I owe E to introducing me to the entirety of Pablo Honey, particularly the song “Thinking About You,” which itself is loaded with all sorts of murky memories and tangled history, but which mostly makes me think of barrelling down the I-5 at 80 mph, thinking of women, but I really owe Michella with making me listen to OK Computer repeatedly, over and over again.
I doubt that I would survived the trials and tribulations of my last year in college if not for the wondrous, anxious nihilism of Thom Yorke et al. OK Computer is a perfect soundtrack to a nervous breakdown.
I was probably destined to fall in love with the album just because of the title of one track, unarguably the best track on the album, and likely Radiohead’s magnum opus at least to date. I speak of “Paranoid Android,” which immediately evokes thoughts of Marvin from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, even though there is no real connection between the song and the character. (Naturally as I talk about it, Radiohead begins to play it on TV.) The evocation of angst-ridden ennui, simultaneous with the depiction of not-giving-a-fuck, alternating with sense of complete alienation and even a thin shred of redemption, this is easily the most epic of their songs. Probably the strongest memory associated with it is driving down the Pasadena Freeway towards Downtown L.A., as I threaded my way through rush hour traffic to try to get to San Diego. The sky was a perfect, featureless grey-white, not really that much different from the front cover of OK Computer itself, and the wondrous sense of—I don’t know—communal soullessness and the bizarre feeling of loneliness amidst the massing throngs that characterizes rush hour traffic really just washed over me.
The last three of their albums evoke memories of my time in Chicago. I note that for some reason, the memories are always those kinds of things that are extremely depressing, and yet I still look upon them with fondness. “Idioteque” from Kid A seemed to prophesy the Fall of the American Republic (and especially the specifics of September 11th itself), and it reminds me of driving my dilapidated 1988 Ford Taurus down the Eden’s Expressway trying to rendevous with J. The entirety of Amnesia evokes my personally imagined sense of T.S. Eliot’s Unreal City, which in simplified form is the amalgamated mess of memories involving mostly pre-9/11 New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, all rooted in Los Angeles, which is the city of my birth, and was nominally Home. “The National Anthem” reminds me of waiting for the Radiohead concert at the Shoreline Amphitheater in the Bay Area with B, J, and R, evoking an Orwellian atmosphere. I fantasized of CIA operatives, of NSA spooks. The Agents that police the Matrix. It also reminds me of staring at the vast ocean and the seagulls milling about as me and B sat silently in an empty parking lot off of the Great Highway in S.F. And “Sail to the Moon” from Hail to the Thief reminds me of that melancholy day I wandered the streets of Chicago all alone (once again smarting from the ache of romantic rejection), using public transport to navigate to the Tower Records in Lakeview/Lincoln Park. Naturally, as I walked down Clark Ave, it started pouring rain, and it was just so clichéd and pathetic that I couldn’t help but laugh.
I didn’t really appreciate The Bends until quite late, not really realizing what a great album it is. It is perhaps unfairly eclipsed by OK Computer. Clearly the sensibilities are different, but certainly The Bends is more than simply the unformed nidus of what catapulted Radiohead to greatness. Still, in retrospect, The Bends mostly evokes in me trite, teen-ager like angst, about love unrequited, love lost, and the sad emptiness that is the aftermath. However, the sense of absolute bereftness, emptiness, and near-insanity caused by grief, the brutal alienation from the well-adjusted that is the warp and woof of major depressive disorder, is absolutely lacerating to the soul in “Street Spirit (Fade Out),” and if I’m in the right mood when I listen to it, it can drive me to tears. (It would perhaps be one of the songs I’d like played at my funeral, maybe.)
The other thing I can’t help ponder is how many words, how many lines and stanzas, how many sentences and paragraphs I’ve spewed forth onto the electronic ether using Radiohead as a subliminal soundtrack. I wonder if it would be possible to comb through my blog(s) and figure out which ones I wrote while listening to them. It is interesting how other pieces of art almost force you into responding in kind. I think (rather nerdily) of the dialectic between electricity and magnetism, about alternating sine waves not quite in phase, about natural cycles in the ecosystem that are not clear cut but intuitively seem linked in some fashion. I can’t even begin to count the number of hours I’ve spent under the inadvertant tutelage of Thom Yorke et al.
It is odd that, despite the fact that their songs frequently evoke the sense of profound alienation, of giving shape to the vast abyss that lies between me and normal, happy people, it nonetheless makes me happy. I don’t know if it’s simply masochism, or if there is something really healing, cathartic, and redemptive, about giving form to this hollowness that circulates within me and around me, and around Western Civilization in general.