Keegan Bait

I'm just gonna get right to the post I've subconsciously been waiting to write for at least a year: my retrospective, in your (read: Keegan's) face defense of In Rainbows, by Radiohead. For a little background, Keegan thinks this is one of Radiohead's single worst albums, referring to it as nothing more than a "45-minute-long jazz odyssey of B-sides," generally followed by the patented dismissive-Keegan-hand-gesture, and perhaps an added scoff. I, on the other hand, increasingly view this as one of Radiohead's best, most mature albums, and a welcome shift in musical subject material and narrative. (I would also add that Keegan likes Hail to the Thief, which I think has a few good tracks but then devolves into aimless, uninspired musical place-holding...but that's another debate).

To start off, I should mention that In Rainbows is actually the first Radiohead album I ever listened to. I didn't used to like the band like I do today, and because of that I really didn't have much context in terms of where Radiohead had musically been before this album. Only this last year, in response to a Southwest Airlines employee telling me that I look like Thom Yorke, did I do my duty and get the fuck into all the previous albums. And in an odd way, I'm actually glad I didn't have my first OK Computer listening session until I was a senior in college, because it was as if I was experiencing it as a 22-year-old right when the album came out...and I was old enough to appreciate shit that I wouldn't have picked up on when I was in middle school.

Anyway, as I feel like it is with a majority of Radiohead fans, it was the combo of OK Computer and then Kid A that really got me into the band. For a few months, those two albums were practically all I could listen to. I would try escaping from them, but after I listened to anything else for more than 10 minutes, I would just think to myself "man...I could be listening to 'Everything in its Right Place' right now." And as musically limiting as that might sound, I felt like that period of time opened me up to more new ways of hearing music and thinking about the world than any other point in college. I complained to Keegan about this one night, to which he responded "It will consume your life if you let it. Fear Radiohead." They are albums that build an all-encompassing worldview, one which begins to creep into your everyday, non-Radiohead-soundtracked life. I've had my best epiphanies and worst breakdowns to those two albums. I wish this were pure romanticized exaggeration. It's not.

Which brings me back to In Rainbows. Whereas Keegan sees this album as an uninspired collection of songs that sort of accumulated while Radiohead dicked around touring (which is exactly what I think of Hail to the Thief), I'm more inclined to take Yorke at his word: it's about love in a foreign, modern world with which we all too suddenly find ourselves faced. And that's really new material for Radiohead: they spent so much time living in their heads worrying about technology and the postmodern condition that I think they finally figured out that they were leaving out a really important piece of the puzzle. While their earlier albums deal a lot with extraordinarily crushing societal realities, In Rainbows offers what perhaps it took Yorke raising a child to come to terms with: love can be really scary, but it is deep and real, and even if it is harder to attain in the face of the postindustrial world, it only becomes that much more important if we hope to retain our identity. We emotionally need each other if we're going to live:

I am a moth

Who just wants to share your light

I'm just an insect

Trying to get out of the night

I think to dismiss an album this thoughtful and powerful, mostly on the grounds that it doesn't seem at first to fit in with the Radiohead we are used to, is a mistake. I think it says more about the true nature of love and relationships in today's world than most of the type of music we usually associate with that subject material. And yes, it is probably true that when I personally think of putting a Radiohead album on, my mind usually jumps to the more obvious choices. But being a few years removed from its release, and a whole lot more experienced than I was (not just with Radiohead, just in life), I am definitely willing to crown In Rainbows as one of the band's truly best works.