Transport, motorways and tramlines,
starting and then stopping,
taking off and landing,
the emptiest of feelings,
disappointed people, clinging on to bottles,
and when it comes it’s so, so, disappointing.
Let down and hanging around,
crushed like a bug in the ground.
Let down and hanging around.
Shell smashed, juices flowing
wings twitch, legs are going,
don’t get sentimental, it always ends up drivel.
One day, I’m gonna grow wings,
a chemical reaction,
hysterical and useless,
hysterical and
let down and hanging around,
crushed like a bug in the ground.
Let down and hanging around.
Let down,
Let down,
Let down.
You know, you know where you are with,
you know where you are with,
floor collapsing, falling, bouncing back,
and one day, I’m gonna grow wings,
a chemical reaction, [you know where you are,]
hysterical and useless [you know where you are,]
hysterical and [you know where you are,]
let down and hanging around,
crushed like a bug in the ground.
Let down and hanging around.
—”Let Down” by Radiohead
Man, I really hate how my mood is totally pegged to the weather. Gray sky dawning means a touch of melancholia.
The underlying, repeating, melodic theme—four notes descending down the scale, the second and the third exactly the same, the last one barely audible at times—arrested my attention as I skidded to a stop at the end of the offramp from the 805, and I found myself mesmerized. I couldn’t really catch any of the lyrics, but reading them here, I find them disturbingly apt for my frame of mind.
When I’m at the pearly gates,
this’ll be on my videotape,
my videotape,
my videotape.
Mephistopheles is just beneath
and he’s reaching up to grab me.
This is one for the good days
and I have it all here
in red blue green,
in red blue green.
You are my center when I spin away
out of control on videotape,
on videotape,
videotape,
videotape,
videotape,
videotape,
videotape.
This is my way of saying goodbye
because I can’t do it face to face
so I’m talking to you before it’s too late.
No matter what happens now,
I shouldn’t be afraid,
because I know today has been the most perfect day I’ve ever seen.
Definitely my most favorite song from In Rainbows thus far. It’s a pretty fucking good album.
Oh, sure, everyone knows “Creep” and “High and Dry” and “Fake Plastic Trees”, but Radiohead didn’t capture my consciousness until OK Computer came out. In retrospect, this album helped define the existential angst of my senior year in college. It is the simplest and one of the most enduring of my memories from that year, reminding me of working on {m}aganda magazine (interesting, when did the curly-brackets become intrinsic to the name? I credit JRM)
Tempus fugit, indeed. So now it’s been 10 years since OK Computer first came out. Each song is carefully etched into the inside of my brain. Most vividly are the memories of this album that came from the early ‘00’s, when Kid A and Amnesiac came out. The seeds of these two albums were born in their predecessor. Despite all the new material, I still listened to OK Computer fervently.
I watched Radiohead perform at Shoreline Ampitheater in the San Francisco Bay Area (was it 2000? 2001? Is it really that long ago?) But memories of cities are all jumbled up in my mind: L.A., S.F., Chicago, NYC, Miami, San Diego, Sacramento.
The most easily accessible are the memories of travelling either by train or car down to S.D. to visit my sister. It always seemed to be February. The sky was the indistinct grey that reminds me so much of OK Computer’s cover. Easily my most favorite song, “Paranoid Android” captures the ennui and alienation of being an outsider caught up in the maelstrom of the Hollywood lifestyle. This is the dark side of L.A., often ignored by the city’s boosters, but revelled in and frequently mentioned by the city’s detractors. (I don’t think it’s an accident that L.A. is the setting of the future dystopia depicted in “Blade Runner”.) It also captured my loneliness and sense of being abandoned as I slogged through a depressive episode. And I can’t help but think of Marvin the Paranoid Android from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a robot with major depressive disorder.
Has it been 10 years already? While I’ve somehow ended up sort-of where I wanted to be, I definitely took some unexpected ways to get here. If I had a time machine and could meet my younger self, I doubt I’d have any wisdom to offer that would allow myself to avoid any of the unpleasant experiences I could’ve done without. I’m not really sure that I’ve learned anything practical about life, really.
In any case, there are two tribute albums available for download as (mostly) mp3s (A track or two are AACs, I think)
