Radiohead, "Subterranean Homesick Alien"

Tomorrow I turn 41 years old. Instead of reaching a milestone, I'm just one year closer to the grave. Whenever my birthday comes around, I do a lot of reflection. I was originally going to pick a song this week about the onset of autumn, but all that thinking made me reflect back on how much I've changed since I first heard the songs under consideration. That's especially the case with Radiohead's "Subterranean Homesick Alien," maybe my favorite track on OK Computer. It expresses a feeling I had a lot in my youth, which I am not always happy to remember.

The narrator is walking around his mundane town, and fantasizing about being abducted by aliens as a kind of deliverance from a thoroughly unfulfilling existence. I first bought OK Computer in August of 1997, a time when my need for deliverance was especially acute. It was right before I was going back to college for my senior year, and it was the summer that almost broke me. In college I had usually done factory work to make money, but that summer there weren't any full time positions at the place I usually worked. Instead of working part time and enjoying my summer more, I made the idiotic decision to take a telemarketing job. Needless to say, it was a nightmare, and that combined with getting my heart broken in an awful fashion and having to endure living with my parents in my boring hometown where my only friend in the area was at that time institutionalized in a mental hospital in another state made each day a wretched trial. I ended up taking the part time gig at the factory on top of the telemarketing job, that way I could work sixty hours a week between the two jobs, then quit telemarketing once August rolled around. It also meant working so much that I didn't have to confront my depression.

I remember hearing OK Computer as a kind of revelation, a voice calling out to me to give solace during my time in the void. It seemed to speak to my feelings of alienation and my overwhelming desire for escape from my own flesh. These were emotions that I had often felt, and now it seemed that Thom Yorke was a kindred spirit who had felt them, too. Often in my childhood and teen years I felt trapped in my own body. I was constantly bullied until about the tenth grade, (including by former "friends"), after which point I was merely ignored. Awkward, shy, and prone to developing obsessive crushes rather than talking to women, I had managed to make it to the cusp of my 22nd year without ever having kissed a girl or woman in a romantic fashion. (I still feel embarrassed to be typing those words.) Maybe I was some kind of alien orphaned on a strange planet, a Kal-El without any yellow sun powers.

Obviously a lot has changed since then. At 41, I am almost to the point where I have spent half of my life outside of the void. It's been long enough that sometimes I forget how much of my life was spent there, and how hopeless I felt back in those days. So instead of wishing for deliverance, at 41 I am happy to be where I am. Maybe I can be happy that I hopefully have more years ahead of me, enough to make my time in the void a distant memory.

Track of the Week: Radiohead "Lucky"

This week brought the news of both Donald Trump's impending nomination and a new Radiohead song. I find the coincidence to be entirely fitting.

Of all the musical artists around, Radiohead has most directly addressed the alienation and absurdity of modern life. The lingering despair and lack of meaning that I experience in moments like being stuck in an airport terminal with some smarmy haircut on cable blaring their empty words on a big screen TV is the food for their art. In the aftermath of 9/11 I listened to OK Computer, Amnesiac, and Kid A as the only music that seemed to make sense. After Trump's electoral victory on Tuesday, I did the same.

So many songs on those albums are great, but only one gives me hope: "Lucky." It was first released on a benefit album for refugees from the war in Bosnia, and is fittingly about survival. Near as I can tell, it is about someone who survives a plane crash. Confronted with horror and the failure of the technology we rely on for our existence, the narrator feels "it's gonna be a glorious day." But the song ends with a note of doubt: "we're standing on the edge." The words are hard to discern in any case, what's more important is Johnny Greenwood's guitar. The mellotron dread of the song's beginning builds to a beautiful soaring lead by Greenwood, personifying the chilling thrill of surviving a brush with death. 

At times in my life when I've felt distressed I've laid on my back, closed my eyes, and waited for that sound to come out of the speakers and wash over me. Thank you Radiohead for coming back exactly when I needed you.

Track of Week: Radiohead, "Go to Sleep"

There was a period in my life, roughly from about 1997 to 2004, when Radiohead meant more to me than any other band, except maybe Wilco.  Ok Computer, Kid A, and Amnesiac summed up for me, more than any other works of art at the time, the empty, dehumanized void at the heart of our postmodern way of living.  The paranoid, closed world of 2000's Kid A also felt like a prophecy of post-9/11 America's insanity.  I listened to that album daily for months after the attacks, trying to make sense of a nation that had reacted to tragedy by completely lose its senses, led into the abyss by a feckless idiot and his Machiavellian handlers.

Radiohead were obviously upset by this state of affairs, and let it show on the more explicitly political Hail to the Thief.  It came out in 2003, after the invasion of Iraq, in the midst of intense concern about the future and a feeling by people like me that world events were taking a dark turn.  While it is a good album by any band's standards, it's not quite as impressive as the amazing run they had leading up to it.  I liked it, but it never really achieved heavy rotation in my personal listening habits, and soon got dusty.

Last year I listened to it again, and realized that I had not given Hail to the Thief a proper hearing the first time around.  While there are some weak moments, the best songs are really great, and belong with the best on Radiohead's other records.  I developed a real love of "Go to Sleep," with its catchy acoustic riff in a Dave Brubeck-esque time signature segueing into moody electric guitar and later some of Johnny Greenwood's best experimentation on the solo.  The lyrics are typical Thom Yorke dread and anxiety, and I love the ominous way he croons "over my dead body" in a high voice.  Hearing this song today takes me back to 2003 and my own feelings of dread and anxiety about the world.  Perhaps it's hearing the usual neo-con suspects beating the drums of war over the Crimea crisis that's got me thinking about that time eleven long years ago.

Track of the Week: Radiohead, "Pyramid Song"

The recent revelations about government surveillance of telephone and internet communications have been sending my mind reeling with memories of the Bush administration.  It is easy to forget today that such an irresponsible and palpably incompetent person was given practically untrammeled authority from September of 2001 to about the summer of 2005 (Katrina finally broke the spell after months of severe screw-ups and the deterioration of Iraq).  Hardly anyone in the mainstream media was willing to criticize him openly between 9/11 and his infamous "mission accomplished" moment.  In fact, even the more liberal news outlets seemed to be doing his bidding.  It was a reporter at the New York Times, Judith Miller, whose articles gave creedance to false claims about Saddam's nuclear ambitions.  During the invasion of Iraq, MSNBC had an American flag in the border of their screen, and actually hired the likes of Michael Savage.  When the Dixie Chicks were brave enough to criticize Bush on the eve of war, it almost destroyed their careers.

During those dark days, my already deep love for the brooding British band Radiohead intensified.  Their paranoid, skittish music, dripped with dread, and seemed to speak to the insanity of the times.  Strangely enough, the two albums I clung to most, Kid A and Amnesiac, were released in 2000 and 2001, before the towers fell.  Somehow these two albums had prophesied the world of nightmares that was to come.

On September 11th and on many days in the coming years, I found myself listening especially to "Pyramid Song" from Amnesiac.  The album is willfully difficult, and not loved by fans, but this particular song is by far the band's best.  It's based around a jazzy, minimalist piano figure and Thom Yorke's voice at its most keeningly eerie. The spare, haunting accompaniment, which is made up more of soundscapes than melodies, evokes a passage from the world of the living to the world of the dead.  The last lines, "there was nothing to fear/ nothing to doubt" make it sound like a relief to be done with the pains and deprivations of living.  I found the song strangely comforting.  When I listened to it, I could escape a world gone insane and contemplate something higher, something better, or at least something else.  A world where George W. Bush and his nefarious henchmen could be allowed to exploit tragedy and spin lies into wars seemed well-worth escaping.

Twelve years later, things do not seem to be as horrifying insane as they used to be, but the paranoia and fear that drenched that world have not left us, nor the tendency by those in positions of authority to exploit those fears to grab more power for themselves.  On a night like this, I just want to listen to "Pyramid Song" and escape.