Your Daily 90s Breakdown: Radiohead - Paranoid Android
I don’t really have a particular moment that I’ve spent with a Radiohead song that I need to tell you about. I’m sure all of us have sung “Creep” at karaoke at some point. My experience with them doesn’t get any deeper than that. (Well, except having a phone sex partner in college who’s blog was called “Paranoid Android”, and no surprise that this girl just dropped off the face of the planet one day, eh?)
Radiohead is about as close as you’ll get to a universally admired band nowadays. It’s not everyone’s favorite kind of music, but few would argue the depth and innovation of their music. The other day I made it a point to mention Green Day as an example of a popular mainstay… Green Day’s songs are not complex, experimental, or groundbreaking. Radiohead, on the other hand, has no problem spending months or years in the studio (and quarrelling with one another) so that they can produce an album that makes you say at first, “WTF”. I am still puzzled about Kid A.
But we all know it’s good stuff. We know this because their music gets better over time. We know that our resistance to anything they release is just fighting the future. We know that, in the years since, they’ve been ripped off by everyone, and that all imitators were vastly inferior. (The whole emocore scene owes a huge debt to them, and have repaid their influences by mostly embarassing themselves to anyone over 23)
Right now I can think of only two good acts to derive from Radiohead: Coldplay and MGMT. I’m ok with that, though. Just like with Radiohead, I can listen to their albums straight through, no song-skipping or single-picking.
The thing is, when “Creep” came out, we just thought it was this great poem about pathos and insecurity with a plain music video by a decent band from Britain. (I mean, is Chumbawamba going to be in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame someday? No. But imagine if Chumbawamba was the band that released OK Computer) Pablo Honey was a good album, but no one was calling them the next Beatles. Well, more than anyone else who was called “the next Beatles” in the time since then, they’ve lived up to the name. They’ve innovated and influenced both rock and ambient music very strongly. Some of the stuff that they’ve done was just plain new like the way the Beatles came out with stuff. We’ll be talking about how good they were… forever.
I chose “Paranoid Android” as a good transitional song from their early-to-late music, with downtempo lead-ins to aggressive rock chords, the Douglas Adams inspired name, and the kick-ass video with the bare-tittied mermaids (along with all the other stuff that is messed up now, but was way messed up for basic cable in 1997). That said, who of you isn’t also big on “Creep”, “High & Dry”, “Karma Police”, or “No Surprises?” I thought so.
