My experiences with Radiohead, and boys becoming men

There was a certain kind of nose-in-the-air purveyor of faulty music gyaan[1] that preached the gospel of Radiohead in college in 2008. The you don’t know music if you don’t worship Radiohead sort of gyaan. Of course that sort of pseudo-intellectual exclusionism is just part and parcel of online Radiohead fandom, making a lot of self-respecting adults shy away from their music, lest they be mistaken for clove cigarette smoking, dark rum swigging snobs. It’s really a pity, given a lot of their music is wonderful, and it’s unfortunate to have it associated with such exclusionism.

That Radiohead is a ‘great’ band that makes ‘great’ albums is a message that’s passed on from balding wrinkly music journos to elitist online gatekeepers to the smirking college seniors from earlier. Ever since there’s been nerdy people on the internet writing about nerdy music, there’s been nerdy people writing about Radiohead. There’s no shortage of articles by nerdy (mostly) boys listing their favourite Radiohead albums and songs, making hundred-and-something-entry lists of songs from worst to best across their now twenty-seven year history, with the holy trinity of the Bends, Kid A, and OK Computer occupying the top three album slots in most lists, getting perfect scores in most of these estimations. I have no interest in perpetuating the mythos of great men and great art, so I won’t do this. Instead, I’ll talk about discovering Radiohead, and my experience of my favourite Radiohead songs and albums. At the end of this piece, you will find a playlist of my favourite Radiohead songs. I hope you enjoy it. 

My first Radiohead song was what most people’s first Radiohead song is: Creep. I was a schoolboy who had just discovered unrequited love and the rush of listening to a song while staring into the middle distance, pining for a girl about whom I knew two things: one, her name, and two, that she would have no interest in me whatsoever. Naturally, I felt a natural attachment to Radio Head -creep.mp3 [64 kbps], which up to that moment was just a file on a CD appropriately named Songs.

Soon, I discovered the significantly better formatted Radiohead - Paranoid Android and Radiohead - Karma Police and Radiohead - High & Dry and No Surprises. By the time I got to college, listening to albums by default rather than songs, I’d naturally gravitated towards Pablo Honey, which was Creep plus other songs that sound like the 90s, and OK Computer, by then widely considered the Beatles’ much-awaited followup to Let It Be. Once in college, I encountered the rarified-air-breathing seniors who worshipped at the altar of Radiohead, and got briefly turned off by the idea of listening to any more of the band.

Until I listened to Everything In Its Right Place, which introduced me to Kid A, the album to  which it belonged. I took to calling it a ‘significant’ album. To me, it was an ‘undeniable masterpiece’. I peddled (for a while) exactly the sort of thing that I complained about earlier. This sort of reverential critical acclaim. This inability to just tell the story, the personal story; this tendency to have one's own narrative usurped by a 5 star rating and the capital T Truth: This is the greatest album ever.

So let me tell you my story of why Kid A is a significant moment in my personal history. To me, Kid A is long walks aged nineteen, maybe twenty, under cover of darkness, reeling from evening after long evening spent in disreputable establishments, bad grades and horrifying examinations, a boys’ hostel life so all-encompassing that the world outside seemed to fade away in the distance. What's a life outside of this campus? What's life after this campus? When I think of Idioteque, I think of myself proverbially throwing empty punches at the world in aimless anger, like a teenager would. To me, the title track is an anxiety about the future that is entirely natural for someone whose attitude is beginning to plummet along with his grades. Everything In Its Right Place is a sense of impending doom, the feeling of the walls closing in. Ice age coming, ice age coming. The National Anthem is relapsing into the ludicrous view that it's everyone else's fault that that’s happening. How To Disappear Completely is thinking about just fading away. But underneath it all, Kid A is an album of such unimaginable beauty that even though it harkens back to dark days, it isn’t desolate. Standing where I’m standing today, more than anything, it signifies hope.

The Bends evokes just as vivid a set of images. To me, it evokes memories of a time before I’d ever heard the album end-to-end. After the end of the 10th boards[2], the summer is a time to think not of the future but of the present. It’s boxers, beanbags, boredom. It's a series of 5 PMs spent doing absolutely nothing. Baby's got the bends. It’s the darker flipside of Oasis’ (What's the Story) Morning Glory?

Straying away from the holy trinity of the Bends, OK Computer, and Kid A, the Amnesiac, Hail to the Thief, In Rainbows trinity is the Radiohead era I least visit. Amnesiac is my least  favourite of the lot. Hail To The Thief, to my ears, contains several top-notch moments, but also has the most filler of any Radiohead album, something the band acknowledges. It’s perhaps why it’s Nigel Godrich’s least favourite Radiohead record. Or why Thom Yorke put out an alternate tracklist of only 10 songs, which he felt more accurately represented what the band should’ve put out. 

But In Rainbows? I was wrong to underplay In Rainbows. I suspect a large part of why I missed out on it is because Kid A, OK Computer, and the Bends were all so widely acclaimed that I didn’t think of the other Radiohead albums as deserving of as much attention. This is a band that’s given me at least two works of long-form music that have created such a significant imprint in my mind (that’s Kid A and the Bends). The point I’m making is this: one of the eventual victims of nose-in-the-airedness is the owner of the nose. In this particular case, I, the owner of said nose, lost out on some great music.

I'm going to go ahead and blame the internet, everyone's favourite scapegoat. Social media, overabundance of information, reduced attention spans, the hype machine. There's too much to read, too much to listen to, too much to watch. Too much responding to the boss on Slack. Too much watching wedding teasers on Facebook. Too much wondering what the next big thing is. So much so that you chase the new cool act, and forget about reliable ol’ Radiohead. 

Luckily I was smart enough to not fall into that trap by the time Radiohead’s latest album, A Moon Shaped Pool, was released in 2016. With Moon Shaped Pool, I went full circle from awe through indifference back to awe. Even today, four years on, it sounds fresh, new. And there’s this fantastic rendition of the Numbers that’s mindblowing in its simple elegance. I feel like it might be my favourite Radiohead album since Kid A. 

Or maybe it’s In Rainbows. Or maybe it will be, as it gets as many spins as A Moon Shaped Pool. Maybe, when I look back at In Rainbows, I’ll say In Rainbows, to me, is this moment in time. I’ll say it is rediscovering something familiar, but taken for granted, many years later. It is enjoying good music for its own sake. It’s taking the time. It’s new beginnings. Who knows? Things change. People change. The thing with the written word is that it confers a false sense of finality where it has no business to do so. 

So let me close the loop on the wisecrack that started this whole mess. The one about the certain kind of nose-in-the-air purveyor of faulty music gyaan that preached the gospel of Radiohead. I may have been seventeen, but they were themselves twenty. If it took me until the age of twenty-nine to do something as inconsequential as listen to a really good album because of some minor preconceived notions I might have had about it and the band that made it, imagine the damage entrenched notions on the intersection of intelligence and masculinity, and the role of a senior in a predominantly male hostel environment must have had on impressionable twenty year olds. If how they expressed themselves was you don’t know music if you don’t worship Radiohead, is it really such a big deal? It probably isn’t. 

And this probably isn’t some sort of statement on toxic expressions of intelligence in overly masculine environments, and their unintended consequences on the boys who become men in these environments. It probably isn’t a statement on how groupthink in closed societies such as these, results in boys pretending to be someone they aren’t just to fit in. It almost certainly isn’t a thought that maybe creating closed university environments with unequal representation and non-holistic admission criteria, and a schooling system that rarely allows for holistic  growth in the first place, will result in harmful expressions of one-dimensional definitions of value: whoever has the highest salary wins, whoever gets into the best business school wins, whoever likes Radiohead wins, why bother listening to In Rainbows?

It’s probably none of that. I’ll just listen to Radiohead.

Here’s a Radiohead playlist on Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube.

[1] gyaan = knowledge

[2] The end of 10th grade is a significant stepping stone in the Indian education system