Encounterculture

In recent weeks, I've been trying to give Hail to the Thief a few more chances. I assure you, I don't really want to - there's something enormously attractive about being someone who rejects Radiohead right now, seeing as how most of my favorite critics from the 70s are the ones who rejected Pink Floyd and Led Zepplin on whatever level - but Hail to the Thief seems very much like they're trying to win fans like me back, and given how much pleasure I've gotten from Radiohead in the past, well, like I said, it just seems stupid to write it off.

For the most part, I can't say I care much about the whole album; I mean, I like it more than the other works in their Please Please Mention Us In The Same Sentence As Remain In Light phase, but given my unbridled contempt for the phase as a whole, that's not saying much. It's very much one of those albums which can sustain me intellectually, but increasingly that's one of the things that I care about less and less as regards to music. (This is the same impulse that has me kind of shrugging off the Dizee Rascal album AND the new Basement Jaxx one too - sensory overload isn't ideal forever.) I hate the fact that I'm getting old so soon, but I'd much rather be honest than turn into one of those loathesome scenesters with a moral agenda set by the Mag Of Note (or whatever The Kidz are reading these days), and the truth is this: most of Hail to the Thief just doesn't sound very good.

Except, and this is a mighty and tempestuous Except, for "Backdrifting", which I cannot for the life of me stop playing. It's weird - I must have heard the album ten times before yesterday and never really noticed it, but all of a sudden that wobbly, throbbing synth just gave the back of my neck a forceful yank. It's just that the song is so harmonious and complete, and I guess I never really noticed it before yesterday because what I was getting from the album was more of a feel for how much it, as a whole, was striving for a complete sound. Which it is, of course, but that's an intellectual realization, and nine times out of ten those are much less captivating than the other kind.

It's worth pointing out, incidentally, that I've had this exact same kind of reaction to another Radiohead song. Eight years ago (JEEEEEEEEEEEEESUS), I remember being in Boone, North Carolina for this summer program thing, and one day we all went off to the Boone Mall (and let me tell you something, if you live in a moderately large city sometime and you start to get all frustrated at the impersonality of it all, go visit a mall in a city much much smaller than yours. And be honest about how you'd feel if that was all the access to culture that you had). And I found my way into the Sam Goody's and plugged into the listening station and promptly got flattened by the behemoth known as "Planet Telex", the first track on their recently-released second album. It's rare that I'm moved to buy an album after hearing one song, but that did it for me. "Planet Telex" was in many ways a kind of golden ideal, the end of the line as far as standards of songwriting go, and even though I'd put a bunch of songs ahead of it today whenever I break down and start composing lists, there's something to be said for the absolute conviction in its quality that it filled me with, however quickly it faded. It was, simply put, a statement which left no room for a reasonable response, and if you're susceptible to that kind of thing, then it's really tempting to make it an endpoint on your qualitative scales.

That, I think, is the Myth of Radiohead: if you want more than anything else to be Right in this world, then they're awfully tempting as a standard. If you ask me why I don't like Kid A, my answer will involve me shuffling my feet while I admit that I just think it's boring and vacant, whereupon (and this is fact, because I've seen it in action) you are free and clear to straighten your back, give me one of those poor-baby simpering smiles, and begin to explain why it's so "interesting" and "significant" (stop me if this is sounding familiar). And the worst part is that I know I deserve it; what claim can I make to legitimacy when all of my judgments on something as significant as Kid A - and all taste aside, I do know it's significant in the continuum of modern music - are essentially what you'd get from a 12-year-old if you showed them 2001?

Answer: none. I just like music, and THAT is why I don't much care for Radiohead these days. It's pathetic that I need to say it (and even moreso that I have to borrow the phrase from Nick Hornby), but all I want from music is for it to sound good; anything else is a neat little side-effect, but on the whole I do not give a Fuck. Qualitative judgements, I am rapidly coming to realize, are just a quick-n-dirty way for people to avoid doing the work of developing a taste, and here I'm definitely speaking from experience. I've bought album after album because they are what Good is, and in nearly every single case every one of those albums ended up in a used-CD bin within three months. It's just not worth it; standards change without your knowing them and the time and money you put into the project just falls apart. None of my favorite songs are ethical battlescars; I just like them, and that's enough.

And yet, like I said, I can't write off the people who think like that. The urge to figure things out is one that a lot of people really want to put to rest, myself included, and I can't fault people who seem genuinely satisfied with Radiohead as an ending point. Hell, as far as ending points go, I'd side with the Radiohead camp long before I'd side with, say, the Creed camp or the Avril camp or the Murder Inc camp (assuming that such a camp does in fact exist). Radiohead, for better or worse, is at least philosophically aiming higher than the typical human experience, and I can't say that I have no interest in that (which isn't to say that I have no interest in the human experience, of course). It's just that trying to find a meaning beyond life means missing out on life itself in a lot of ways, and people who don't recognize that make less and less sense to me with every passing day.

What I like most about "Backdrifting", I think, is that my enjoyment of it has absolutely zero to do with anything other than the song itself, and that reminds me of what I liked about Radiohead to begin with. The thing that got lost in all of the Experimental Experiential Furor surrounding their recent releases is that they can make some damn attractive music; I've never really given much thought to their lyrics (and considering that they broke big with a song with the chorus of "I'm a creep/I'm a weirdo/What the hell am I doing here/I don't belong here", I've never really understood why other people are so eager to do just that) outside of how the lyrics sound as, well, sounds. If there is an ethical or ethereal dimension to the song, I'll deal with it later; right now all I want to do is listen to the fuckin' song, but the fact that I'm willing to say that after the personal debacle that was Kid A is a statement of hope and prosperity. The future that I see for Radiohead involves seeing awful parents reprimanding their kids for pointing out the exceedingly obvious ugliness of their music, but I'm kind of comforted by the fact that my experience with some of their music means that it doesn't have to be the only way.