First things first: as I suspected, I was premature in my "car loan paid off!"-ness last week, turns out I still owed about a hundred to the Bank of United States and Principalities and Whatnot. But I paid that this Friday, so *now* I'm paid off! Unless I am mistaken yet again.
Anywho: I am by my nature a comedian of sorts, a "funny guy" who often finds it hard to be serious. But every now and then, I like to go full-on emo and dress in Joy Division-style drab, or at least emotionally dress myself that way. Perhaps it's actual honest-to-goodness depression, or just me trying to take it down a few notches in the "Trevor is always making funny comments" department, because sometimes my funny comments become mean comments. And I am sensitive enough to know when I've crossed the line, though of course often it's in crossing that line that my awareness kicks in.
In those times, I have gravitated far from the feel-good pop music that is often on the radio at the time (seems like an epic time for cheesiness whenever I'm in a foul mood), far from the stuff that, in my own record collection, would normally be my go-to good-time music. I'm talking, of course, about listening to Radiohead.
Everyone knows Radiohead, so I don't need to explain who or what they are. But for a time there, between "OK Computer" and "Hail to the Thief," every band wanted to be them, or reacted against their sad-bastard rock (remember that it's songs from "The Bends" that are playing in Clueless when the screenwriter wanted Paul Rudd to seem like a dreamy, indie-rock depressed dude. But, you know, dreamy, in a former-stepbrother kind of way for Alicia Silverstone). Bands like Coldplay were compared to them because 1.) they sounded like Radiohead and 2.) they sucked compared to Radiohead (though in all fairness, Coldplay has launched onto their own delusions-of-grandeur rock, a' la U2, and truth be told, if they ever put out a best-of, I'd buy it). Radiohead themselves got tired of being "Radiohead," as anyone who's ever sat through that documentary of the "OK Computer" tour can attest. That's why they went into shitty, shitty electronic music.
You may disagree with me (and that is your right), but Thom Yorke and company went down the rabbithole after "Computer" and turned into the sort of detached "artists" that so often take themselves seriously, at the sake of what actually got them there in the first place. Yes, I loved "The Bends" (not when it came out, but later, when I'd had enough life experience in heartbreak and disappointment to "get" it), and "OK Computer" (whose hypnotic video for "Karma Police" still haunts my subconscious). But sometimes you follow a band for too long, and you lose that initial feeling that "these guys speak for me!" because they don't or you can speak for yourself or the lead singer turns out to be a dick or the guitarist wants to make a Spaghetti Western soundtrack on the side or the drummer explodes or what have you. I'm not saying that I wouldn't welcome a return of Radiohead back into my life with new music, but for the most part I'm good with anything pre-"Amnesiac." Because that was my shoe-gazing music.
Shoe-gazing, if you aren't familiar, is a handle created for neo-psychedelic English bands around the beginning of the Nineties (i.e., you're so stoned you gaze at your shoes while the band plays on), but it could just as well apply for downer music, because when you're down you look at your feet and wonder why they just don't wanna move. To me, the National is shoe-gazing music par excellence, and a future contender for "mope-rock kings" if they're not already. I'm barely familiar with anything to do with them, I caught a performance of this song (and I think "Don't Swallow the Cap" blended with it) on The Colbert Report, and I went out for the album shortly after. I won't front: this summer has been hard for me, and at the time the National were perfect. But I could only take so much of their admittedly entrancing doom and gloom; every now and then I might pop it into my car stereo (my chief means of listening to music of my own choosing), but after a day or two it's time to switch it up. My chief switch-to choice has been a Talking Heads best-of. Make of that what you will.
Perhaps the National can become my new favorite band, but I doubt it; musical love affairs start to decline as you age, as you can hear something a new artist is doing and remember it sounding like something you once loved and never quite trusting either again. And I'm not saying I hear Radiohead in the National (I get more of a Joy Division vibe, especially with the baritone lead singer), but Radiohead helped me out in a time of woe and strife as the National did, and for that I thank them both. Sometimes we need music to be happier than we are, sometimes we need it to be as sad or sadder. It succors us for a while, and then we move on. Like an old friend, it's always there when we need it, but sometimes we don't need it for a long, long time.
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