I actually didn’t really like Radiohead until a few years ago. I mean, I liked them, I knew the words to most of their songs, but my mom is a Super Fan, so my enjoyment seemed small in comparison. She’s seen them live almost 30 times, travelling overseas and across the U.S. She’s dedicated. And because of that, Radiohead always seemed like my Mom’s band[1]. I never really had my own relationship to the music.
Despite the fact that my very first
boyfriend and I bonded over Radiohead when we started dating. I still remember he
told me his favorite song was “Idioteque”, which I pretended to know very well.
At least I knew enough to not reply with “Creep” as my favorite song. And despite
the fact that I woke up to “Everything In Its Right Place” every day for two
years as my alarm in high school, despite the fact that a girl I had a crush on
would put “Hunting Bears” on every time she was in my car, leaving me to
associate that song with her for the rest of my life, Radiohead never felt like
a band I liked until I had a panic attack at one of their live shows.
My friend Rowan and I had travelled
to Montreal with my mom and my sister to go to the Osheaga music festival.
Rowan had food poisoning, and neither of us are big festival people. I hate crowds,
I get anxious about lack of comfort and bathrooms and access to water. It was
hot, crowded, and loud. Radiohead was headlining, and my mom wanted to get good
seats towards the front[2],
but Rowan was exhausted, and I noticed she was losing steam. I asked her if she
wanted to leave, go on a walk and go back to my family closer to when Radiohead
started, and she agreed. Much to my mom’s distress, we separated, and almost as
soon as we did, the overwhelming anxiety of the day hit and we both started
crying. At first, I was just crying because Rowan was crying, but then it
evolved.
Soon, we were both sobbing on the
sidewalk. Radiohead started their set, and I laughed through my anxiety attack
when they played “Burn the Witch”. There’s a lyric in that song that goes “this
is a low-flying panic attack”, which I thought was a deeply funny soundtrack to
have in the background of my and Rowan’s collective undoing. We missed
Radiohead’s entire set that day, but we had a good cry that brought us closer
together as friends. Another bonus was that after that day, A Moon Shaped Pool
felt like the first Radiohead album that I had context for outside of my mom.
It felt like mine.
While that feeling of ownership
hasn’t extended to all of their songs, it’s certainly gotten larger with time. Every
time I’ve seen them live I’ve been with my family, and I’m happy to have
something I can enjoy both within and without the context of my family. “Present
Tense” is my favorite song on this album. It has a beauty that I don’t hear in
a lot of earlier Radiohead songs. I also really love Thom Yorke’s most recent
solo album, Anima. It came with a short movie that my mom and I watched
together, and I loved hearing her insights on it all.
[1] Some
bonus Radiohead content that doesn’t really fit in the essay is the time my mom
made my current partner, James, watch an 11-minute-long YouTube video about the
syncopation in the song Videotape. Also worth mentioning is the person in college who exclusively spoke to me about Radiohead for at least two years.
Comments
Post a Comment