Mike recommends “Creep (Live in Oxford, 2001)” by Radiohead
As a band, Radiohead has always been legible. They tell you how to think about them: what their story is, what their music means. And if you were a Radiohead fan in the 90s, you knew they hated their first hit, “Creep.” You knew this because they told you, but also because they made a series of albums that were aggressively the opposite of “Creep”s anglo-grunge angst; because tour documentary Meeting People is Easy made clear their disgust with the kind of mindless fame a song like “Creep”; engendered. “I want to have control,” Thom had sung in the song, and now they were taking control of their narrative. They wanted to be smart, and “Creep” was not smart.
The problem was, if you were a Radiohead fan in the 90s, you yourself probably loved “Creep.” When I first heard the song, I was just the kind of teen to feel that crunchy angst deep in my soul, and even as I went to college and wanted to seem smart and do smart things myself (OKComputer, Kid A, and Amnesiac are all very “I went to college” sort of albums), every moment of “Creep,” from its chiming beginning to its jet-takeoff chorus to its transparent self-loathing, was a blast. My gross teenage soul felt seen. And anyway, wasn’t Radiohead’s rejection of the song exactly the kind of self-loathing that “Creep” itself had managed to capture so perfectly? I was a creep, I was a weirdo; what the hell were we doing there? Let’s not do that again, guys. Come on.
After college, I spent a lot of time online arguing with past versions of myself. I was embarrassed about the college-age Radiohead superfan who’d spent hours decoding the band’s inscrutable website updates, convinced that they contained some galaxy-brain higher message, some greater masterpiece. When In Rainbows came out, given away at the band’s website for whatever you wished to pay, the fan narrative became that Radiohead had boldly pioneered a new economic model that would save the music industry. But by that point, I’d become knowledgeable enough about both music and the music industry that I could smugly point out to you the many ways in which that was wrong. I didn’t listen to the album for years, even though, when I did, I liked it well enough. Your old self can get in your head, can become a region on your internal map filled with sea dragons and smoke. Don’t go here.
When you’re in your 40s, like I am now, you can’t just react to your last identity; you have too many to choose from. It’s easier to look back with regret on the many old selves you’ve lost than to boldly forge a new identity opposed to your last one. I was a writer for a couple decades, then got a professional job that didn’t allow me to write. Since leaving it, I’ve been trying to put my writer-self back together, and I’ve had some luck lately. But back before I did, in assembling my first bio, I noted that many of my publications were in outlets that no longer exist. It’s easy to fall into regret; to feel illegible, your self-perception out of sync with how others see you. You can’t afford these arguments with your past self anymore. You have to find a way to embrace them.
In 2001, after releasing Amnesiac, Radiohead played a triumphant homecoming gig in Oxford,where they’d all met at university. (Like I said: a very “I went to college” band.) At that point, they hadn’t played “Creep” in four years, even as they’d put out two confirmed masterpieces, and all signs pointed to them never playing it again. They weren’t planning on playing it that day, either.At the end of their final encore, they began to play “Motion Picture Soundtrack” the bleak love song that closes “Kid A.” It was written around the same time as “Creep,” but where “Creep” is easily legible, guitars and lyrics united in message, “MPS” pushes against itself, a cozy organ harshly contrasting with Thom Yorke’s declaration that he’ll never be with the object of his desire, and will only “see you in the next life.”
But the crowd would never hear it, not that day. The band flubs the intro, and instead of starting again, Thom says, “Okay, I’ve got a better idea. This is a slightly older song.” As the first note of “Creep” hits, a sound erupts from the crowd: not just a cheer, not just a scream, but the clearest expression of release I’ve ever heard. It is a true surprise, a fulfillment of their heart’s desire;one that they never expected to happen, or at least not that day. They sing along to every word.And the band shows no signs of the embarrassment they’d felt so strongly for the song since releasing OK Computer. Jonny launches into the first roaring chord of the chorus audibly out of tune, and you can hear a moment of hesitancy, the old embarrassment threatening to creep in,before he gives in to the song’s pull. Thom sings it with a gleeful lightness. It’s a reunion, a band realizing, in a flash, that they’ve had enough distance from their past self to love it again. You need that distance, need to see your earlier selves were right, or at least not wrong; not smart, maybe, but maybe smart isn’t what really matters. Maybe what really matters isn’t being smart or right but that feeling, that release, the crowd and the band together, in perfect purpose, deciding to love the sound itself and its adored history rather than the barren meaning of the words. The explicit legibility slips away into something richer and more complex, and together,they find joy in having made it far enough from that angst to view it with affection.
Mike Barthel is a music critic and media researcher, with bylines in The Atlantic, GQ, and The Awl. His non-fiction work has been covered in The New York Times, NPR, ABC News, the CBC, and the Boston Globe. He is currently working as a survey researcher in Washington, D.C., where he lives with his three children. He is on Twitter @michaelbarthel.
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