There are doors that open by themselves.
Radiohead's music long held a special place in my life. Not in the sense of "Thom really understands me, man!" or "You just don't understand how deep it is!" or anything silly like that. It's just been an odd coincidence that followed me up until the last couple of years, where Radiohead's current album reflected my state of mind at the time.
I first heard Radiohead in boot camp. One Sunday, not long before graduation, the drill sergeants left us largely to our own devices for the first time. And of course most of the recruits used the opportunity to break the rules. The drill sergeant on duty that day had left a lounge room unlocked for the first and only time (I don't remember why). It was packed with privates listening to smuggled Walkmans and jury-rigging a small TV with a clothes-hanger, filling the room with the mingled sounds of Judge Judy and would-be soldiers bullshitting with each other. A kid named Ransome, who had been nice to me despite my then-crippling social inability, let me take a listen to his earphones. I don't remember which song it was, or whether it was from Kid A or Amnesiac. All I remember is it was something heavy and complex, brooding, fraught with glitches and strange sounds. Thom Yorke's disembodied voice murmured like a long-ignored conscience above it all. It fit that part of my life perfectly.
That first year or so in the army was a dark depersonalized time. I only had one or two friends. With everyone else I retreated deep into my shell; other soldiers said, only half-jokingly, that I was bound to go on a shooting rampage sooner or later. Halfway into AIT, maybe six months after my training began, my class was finally permitted to keep personal belongings and go off-base on weekends. One of my first purchases was Kid A; within a couple weeks I picked up Amnesiac as well. Almost every weekend thereafter I could be found lurking in one of the barracks' empty sleeping rooms while everyone else stayed out drinking, writing out my angst in my diary while listening to those two albums over and over. We all went to heaven in a little rowboat.
I was a different person when Hail to the Thief came out. I was still in the army, but I was in the "real" army now, living in a relatively comfy two-person room with as much freedom as anyone on two-hour deployment alert can have. I'd even had sex. I still brooded by myself listening to depressive music, but I wrote my angst down in a LiveJournal, where other people could sympathize, and sometimes I even went out to town on the weekends. Jen and I got married not long after, moving off-base into a for-real apartment; my growth into a fully-functional human being continued. I had been one of the 25% of Americans who were correctly opposed to the Iraq war from the start. From that seed sprouted my nascent political and social awareness. Thief fit perfectly into the thoughts and concerns of that emerging Rick. It was often the soundtrack as I wrote long screeds against neoconservatism and the Iraq folly, as I fell into the trap of seeing Dubya Bush as the cause instead of the symptom. Thief comes to mind whenever I think of that long October in 2004, as my unshakeable moral confidence gave way to concern and confusion as Bush inched forward in the polls, and then a sense of national betrayal on the morning of November 3. January has April showers, and two and two always makes a five.
When I downloaded In Rainbows in late '07, I was an entirely new person (you may sense a theme). Jen and I had been polyamorous for more than two years. That first fumbling catastrophic poly relationship was long in the past. I had Chrissy now, and everything was just oh so precious and perfect. Except that she was spending less and less time in New York. She moved back to Florida in March '08, then New Mexico that August. What had been a seemingly idyllic love affair, full of confident plans to spend our future together forever, began to show its first inevitable cracks. In Rainbows fit perfectly, communicating both the fragile joy and the sentimental loneliness of a newly long-distance relationship, the pulsing current of sadness and ephemerality under it all. This is one for the good days, and I have it all here in red, blue, green.
These days... I still like Radiohead, still listen to a complete album every now and then on my iPod, but they don't touch me quite the same way. I have The King of Limbs on a hard drive somewhere but I haven't heard a single note from it. If anything, the Radiohead album I find myself drawn to now is The Bends. "High and Dry" fits my adolescent species of cynicism and disappointment. "Fake Plastic Trees" of course has an obvious connection to Chrissy/Christine. "Bones," "(Nice Dream)," "Just," "My Iron Lung," "Bullet Proof... I Wish I Was," "Sulk" -- they all conform to a pattern of pushing on to become a person despite all the disappointment, disaffection, and shitty choices. You just sit there wishing you could still make love.
But really, that's stretching the pattern a bit. My musical tastes have expanded so radically in the last two or three years that one single band isn't going to dominate my mental soundtrack in quite the same way again. I don't have time to keep listening to the same album over and over anymore. I guess that's a good thing, though I kind of miss the days when one album caught the mood of my life for a time.
I first heard Radiohead in boot camp. One Sunday, not long before graduation, the drill sergeants left us largely to our own devices for the first time. And of course most of the recruits used the opportunity to break the rules. The drill sergeant on duty that day had left a lounge room unlocked for the first and only time (I don't remember why). It was packed with privates listening to smuggled Walkmans and jury-rigging a small TV with a clothes-hanger, filling the room with the mingled sounds of Judge Judy and would-be soldiers bullshitting with each other. A kid named Ransome, who had been nice to me despite my then-crippling social inability, let me take a listen to his earphones. I don't remember which song it was, or whether it was from Kid A or Amnesiac. All I remember is it was something heavy and complex, brooding, fraught with glitches and strange sounds. Thom Yorke's disembodied voice murmured like a long-ignored conscience above it all. It fit that part of my life perfectly.
That first year or so in the army was a dark depersonalized time. I only had one or two friends. With everyone else I retreated deep into my shell; other soldiers said, only half-jokingly, that I was bound to go on a shooting rampage sooner or later. Halfway into AIT, maybe six months after my training began, my class was finally permitted to keep personal belongings and go off-base on weekends. One of my first purchases was Kid A; within a couple weeks I picked up Amnesiac as well. Almost every weekend thereafter I could be found lurking in one of the barracks' empty sleeping rooms while everyone else stayed out drinking, writing out my angst in my diary while listening to those two albums over and over. We all went to heaven in a little rowboat.
I was a different person when Hail to the Thief came out. I was still in the army, but I was in the "real" army now, living in a relatively comfy two-person room with as much freedom as anyone on two-hour deployment alert can have. I'd even had sex. I still brooded by myself listening to depressive music, but I wrote my angst down in a LiveJournal, where other people could sympathize, and sometimes I even went out to town on the weekends. Jen and I got married not long after, moving off-base into a for-real apartment; my growth into a fully-functional human being continued. I had been one of the 25% of Americans who were correctly opposed to the Iraq war from the start. From that seed sprouted my nascent political and social awareness. Thief fit perfectly into the thoughts and concerns of that emerging Rick. It was often the soundtrack as I wrote long screeds against neoconservatism and the Iraq folly, as I fell into the trap of seeing Dubya Bush as the cause instead of the symptom. Thief comes to mind whenever I think of that long October in 2004, as my unshakeable moral confidence gave way to concern and confusion as Bush inched forward in the polls, and then a sense of national betrayal on the morning of November 3. January has April showers, and two and two always makes a five.
When I downloaded In Rainbows in late '07, I was an entirely new person (you may sense a theme). Jen and I had been polyamorous for more than two years. That first fumbling catastrophic poly relationship was long in the past. I had Chrissy now, and everything was just oh so precious and perfect. Except that she was spending less and less time in New York. She moved back to Florida in March '08, then New Mexico that August. What had been a seemingly idyllic love affair, full of confident plans to spend our future together forever, began to show its first inevitable cracks. In Rainbows fit perfectly, communicating both the fragile joy and the sentimental loneliness of a newly long-distance relationship, the pulsing current of sadness and ephemerality under it all. This is one for the good days, and I have it all here in red, blue, green.
These days... I still like Radiohead, still listen to a complete album every now and then on my iPod, but they don't touch me quite the same way. I have The King of Limbs on a hard drive somewhere but I haven't heard a single note from it. If anything, the Radiohead album I find myself drawn to now is The Bends. "High and Dry" fits my adolescent species of cynicism and disappointment. "Fake Plastic Trees" of course has an obvious connection to Chrissy/Christine. "Bones," "(Nice Dream)," "Just," "My Iron Lung," "Bullet Proof... I Wish I Was," "Sulk" -- they all conform to a pattern of pushing on to become a person despite all the disappointment, disaffection, and shitty choices. You just sit there wishing you could still make love.
But really, that's stretching the pattern a bit. My musical tastes have expanded so radically in the last two or three years that one single band isn't going to dominate my mental soundtrack in quite the same way again. I don't have time to keep listening to the same album over and over anymore. I guess that's a good thing, though I kind of miss the days when one album caught the mood of my life for a time.