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\nIt’s his birthday today. <\/p>\n
My associative memories involving Radiohead are a little bit too intense and specific, and so I find it difficult to listen to them anymore. Some music is like that. It’s so associated with something specific you kind of don’t want to re-visit it. Cliff Eberhardt is like that. Tori Amos too, a little bit. OK Computer<\/i> is so attached to a very very specific – and un-repeatable – moment in my life that the whole album – dystopian and creepy already – brings me right back there to that time, a time of deep sadness but also unexpected exhilaration because I met this guy<\/a>. It was just an encounter in the night, a passing-by of kindred spirits, but it changed me. I was not doing well. At all. Meeting him was … well, I wish I never met him. The parties I went to at that time – hanging out with that whole crowd, him and his friends … OK Computer<\/i> was floating in the background. <\/p>\n But before OK Computer<\/i>, of course, was the massive culture-wide juggernaut that was “Creep”. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say it captured a zeitgeist, it spoke to a generation – right into the heart of things – I suppose the sweep of it hit the millennial generation first: this song hit when they were teens, young 20s. For Gen-Xers it was “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. “I feel stupid and contagious” is just another way of saying “I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo.” When you speak of generations, you speak in generalities, I realize there are many exceptions, but when you are talking about a watershed song like “Creep” – and the long shadow it casts – you have to look at overall generational forces. Sometimes something so strong comes along, something strikes such a universal chord, that the generation it belongs to thinks: “That is OURS. We can respond to things that came before us, we can love what comes after, but this? This is OURS.” Nirvana, Liz Phair, L7, Soundgarden, etc … I remember the feeling of “wow … this is OURS.” <\/p>\n \n