![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Okay, some more on this... Radiohead thing I seem to have developed.
Which really is only partly an embarrassingly teen-girl like crush on Thom Yorke. Because I suppose that, in a blog devoted to a large degree to my fannish obsessions, this 'phase' deserves at least a minimum of elucidation, even if it doesn't fit the usual pattern. Or rather, especially because it doesn't fit the usual pattern.
I've loved Radiohead for a long time. OK Computer was one of the first albums that really showed me what music I could like could sound like - if that makes any sense. I'm glad I encountered it at an age when I had finally begun to work free of some really strange ideas about music that I had internalised in my teenage years. Basically, at an age when most kids begin to discover music, I felt music didn't belong to me (although it attracted me very strongly). Music - most of it, anyway - was for the cool kids, and as I was clearly not one of the cool kids, it could never be mine.
Strangely enough it was okay for me to like R.E.M. And Midnight Oil. So, for rather a long time, I made do with essentially just these. Not that there's anything wrong with them - I still love them, and, Midnight Oil in particular, being the very first band I ever consciously liked, at age 13, will probably always hold a very special place in my heart. But I knew, even at 13, that there was really a lot *more* to music than that, and some part of me was yearning to go beyond the very narrow limits of what I considered 'appropriate'.
I don't actually know what it was exactly that eventually made me braver. I think probably it was just growing up. ;-)
Anyway. 1997 was something of a watershed year for me, music-wise. Björk's Homogenic deserves a mention alongside OK Computer here. These were perhaps the two most important milestones in my personal musical development. I also started vocational school that year, where I met a girl who introduced me to lots of other interesting stuff - tindersticks, Suede, Mazzy Star, The Smiths... This was before I had internet access, and a while before the internet became really useful for discovering music.
It wasn't so much that my taste was formed that year; rather, I finally discovered that the kind of music I had always been waiting or hoping for actually existed, and could be found.
And OK Computer was the very first album I bought that really felt like... I was making a conscious decision. Not just following a script provided for me by other people's expectations. Or my own idea of what other people's expectations might be. (Ah, youthful self-image issues. So recursive.)
But I still had a lot of music-related hangups. For instance, I still felt that there were *ways* of interacting with and liking music that weren't 'appropriate' for me, even if I had begun to dare to like the music itself. So, I would never have considered seeing a band live. Or rather, I did - once - but only to accompany the aforementioned classmate. (Suede; I wasn't particularly impressed, I seem to remember. Maybe it wasn't a particularly good gig. Maybe Suede isn't so good live. Maybe it was the ambiance of the dreadful small town we lived in that dragged it all down. Maybe it would have been better if I had been able to do anything but stand frozen in place with a kind of embarrassment all the time.)
Aside from not seeing any band or artist live, I also kept myself carefully ignorant of anything but the music itself. Partly because getting obsessive about the people behind the music was what I imagined 'they' would do - 'they' being the kind of teenagers who had ostracized me and who, in my later teens, I had learned to proudly distinguish myself from by carving out an identity for myself as some kind of disinterested intellectual. (So, *of course* I would like Radiohead. Heh. The nice thing about Radiohead, though, is that their music still works even when you're *not* a pretentious kid anymore.)
And also, I think, I didn't want to risk tainting the music I loved with knowledge of the - I imagined - often sordid and depressing things one might find out about the people who made it.
I actually don't think that's a hangup, really. Rather, it's a perfectly sensible attitude to have, and I intend to keep it. Because in 99% of all cases, the things you're going to find out if you do go looking for info on the people behind the music are going to be celebrity gossip - pointless at best, and horrible enough, at worst, to spoil the music by mere association.
Also, why would you do it anyway? The music speaks to you without your knowing anything about the people making it, doesn't it?
What else do you need?
Well. An answer to the question "Why the hell would Thom Yorke write music for Twilight?", apparently. :D
See, it seems I had built more of an image of Radiohead (and Thom Yorke) in my mind than I would have expected, having never actively sought out any information about them. There was a firm enough idea of what they would and wouldn't do there to make me do a *serious* double-take when I stumbled across the Twilight thing a few weeks ago while listening to the new album on youtube.
It was enough of a WTF moment to make me, for the first time in my life, feel like I needed more info about these five people who'd made some of my favourite music. "Thom Yorke Twilight why," I asked Google. Google had no answer to that, so I cast my nets wider...
What happened then, of course, was that I found Interesting Stuff. Lots of it, and interesting in ways that tapped into some of my central intellectual and emotional preoccupations. (Identity. Art. Commodification. The possibility or impossibility of integrity. The possible end of civilisation as we know it, and how to live with that.) And, I hardly found any celebrity gossip at all. (I think if I had found significant amounts of *that*, it would have killed by burgeoning interest in Radiohead-as-people rather than just Radiohead-as-purveyors-of-some-of-my-favourite-music pretty fast.)
So, yeah. The bottom line, after a few weeks of this is that as far as I can tell, the music of Radiohead is made by five genuinely interesting people. (One of whom I happen to find improbably hot.)
I still don't know what to make of the Twilight thing, though. For now, I'm putting it down to a lapse of judgment. :D
Go watch these five very lovely and interesting men making music here:
Probably my favourite live video of them on youtube. Mostly from In Rainbows, with some older stuff mixed in. In some cases, I prefer the version of the songs in this live session to the album versions.
Live at Glastonbury, 2003. Hail to the Thief and earlier stuff. (People curious about Yorke's occasional, ahem, Simm-ilar moments, this is the one you want to check. No beard! ;-)) ETA: I feel like I should mention that this also features some dramatic/hilarious/disgusting drooling/spitting. *snerk*
I've loved Radiohead for a long time. OK Computer was one of the first albums that really showed me what music I could like could sound like - if that makes any sense. I'm glad I encountered it at an age when I had finally begun to work free of some really strange ideas about music that I had internalised in my teenage years. Basically, at an age when most kids begin to discover music, I felt music didn't belong to me (although it attracted me very strongly). Music - most of it, anyway - was for the cool kids, and as I was clearly not one of the cool kids, it could never be mine.
Strangely enough it was okay for me to like R.E.M. And Midnight Oil. So, for rather a long time, I made do with essentially just these. Not that there's anything wrong with them - I still love them, and, Midnight Oil in particular, being the very first band I ever consciously liked, at age 13, will probably always hold a very special place in my heart. But I knew, even at 13, that there was really a lot *more* to music than that, and some part of me was yearning to go beyond the very narrow limits of what I considered 'appropriate'.
I don't actually know what it was exactly that eventually made me braver. I think probably it was just growing up. ;-)
Anyway. 1997 was something of a watershed year for me, music-wise. Björk's Homogenic deserves a mention alongside OK Computer here. These were perhaps the two most important milestones in my personal musical development. I also started vocational school that year, where I met a girl who introduced me to lots of other interesting stuff - tindersticks, Suede, Mazzy Star, The Smiths... This was before I had internet access, and a while before the internet became really useful for discovering music.
It wasn't so much that my taste was formed that year; rather, I finally discovered that the kind of music I had always been waiting or hoping for actually existed, and could be found.
And OK Computer was the very first album I bought that really felt like... I was making a conscious decision. Not just following a script provided for me by other people's expectations. Or my own idea of what other people's expectations might be. (Ah, youthful self-image issues. So recursive.)
But I still had a lot of music-related hangups. For instance, I still felt that there were *ways* of interacting with and liking music that weren't 'appropriate' for me, even if I had begun to dare to like the music itself. So, I would never have considered seeing a band live. Or rather, I did - once - but only to accompany the aforementioned classmate. (Suede; I wasn't particularly impressed, I seem to remember. Maybe it wasn't a particularly good gig. Maybe Suede isn't so good live. Maybe it was the ambiance of the dreadful small town we lived in that dragged it all down. Maybe it would have been better if I had been able to do anything but stand frozen in place with a kind of embarrassment all the time.)
Aside from not seeing any band or artist live, I also kept myself carefully ignorant of anything but the music itself. Partly because getting obsessive about the people behind the music was what I imagined 'they' would do - 'they' being the kind of teenagers who had ostracized me and who, in my later teens, I had learned to proudly distinguish myself from by carving out an identity for myself as some kind of disinterested intellectual. (So, *of course* I would like Radiohead. Heh. The nice thing about Radiohead, though, is that their music still works even when you're *not* a pretentious kid anymore.)
And also, I think, I didn't want to risk tainting the music I loved with knowledge of the - I imagined - often sordid and depressing things one might find out about the people who made it.
I actually don't think that's a hangup, really. Rather, it's a perfectly sensible attitude to have, and I intend to keep it. Because in 99% of all cases, the things you're going to find out if you do go looking for info on the people behind the music are going to be celebrity gossip - pointless at best, and horrible enough, at worst, to spoil the music by mere association.
Also, why would you do it anyway? The music speaks to you without your knowing anything about the people making it, doesn't it?
What else do you need?
Well. An answer to the question "Why the hell would Thom Yorke write music for Twilight?", apparently. :D
See, it seems I had built more of an image of Radiohead (and Thom Yorke) in my mind than I would have expected, having never actively sought out any information about them. There was a firm enough idea of what they would and wouldn't do there to make me do a *serious* double-take when I stumbled across the Twilight thing a few weeks ago while listening to the new album on youtube.
It was enough of a WTF moment to make me, for the first time in my life, feel like I needed more info about these five people who'd made some of my favourite music. "Thom Yorke Twilight why," I asked Google. Google had no answer to that, so I cast my nets wider...
What happened then, of course, was that I found Interesting Stuff. Lots of it, and interesting in ways that tapped into some of my central intellectual and emotional preoccupations. (Identity. Art. Commodification. The possibility or impossibility of integrity. The possible end of civilisation as we know it, and how to live with that.) And, I hardly found any celebrity gossip at all. (I think if I had found significant amounts of *that*, it would have killed by burgeoning interest in Radiohead-as-people rather than just Radiohead-as-purveyors-of-some-of-my-favourite-music pretty fast.)
So, yeah. The bottom line, after a few weeks of this is that as far as I can tell, the music of Radiohead is made by five genuinely interesting people. (One of whom I happen to find improbably hot.)
I still don't know what to make of the Twilight thing, though. For now, I'm putting it down to a lapse of judgment. :D
Go watch these five very lovely and interesting men making music here:
Probably my favourite live video of them on youtube. Mostly from In Rainbows, with some older stuff mixed in. In some cases, I prefer the version of the songs in this live session to the album versions.
Live at Glastonbury, 2003. Hail to the Thief and earlier stuff. (People curious about Yorke's occasional, ahem, Simm-ilar moments, this is the one you want to check. No beard! ;-)) ETA: I feel like I should mention that this also features some dramatic/hilarious/disgusting drooling/spitting. *snerk*