let down and hanging around

reminiscing about radiohead

i. a heart that’s full up like a landfill

When I was introduce to Radiohead in 2003 as a 12-year-old, it cracked me open in ways that nothing had done before. I’d mostly only listened to stuff on the radio until then. Songs like Street Spirit and No Surprises felt achingly bleak in a way that almost didn’t seem ‘allowed’, at least according to my frame of reference as a Singaporean.¹ And the soaring elements in Fake Plastic Trees and Let Down² would give me a swelling in my heart unlike anything else I’d felt at the time. I’d plaster the lyrics all over my website and use them in my MSN Messenger screen name and scribble them on my folders and notebooks. Radiohead gave me access to parts of myself that I didn’t quite have before. I have cherished memories of blasting OK Computer on my Discman at full volume after school, walking through a blur of commuters, fully feeling my alienation from everything. There was something glorious about it even as it was sad. Maybe it was that for a while I fell like I was fully owning my experience.

I find myself thinking about other media that did similar things for me. Anime was similarly surprising when I first encountered it. I had watched all sorts of cartoons on TV before, but several of the went to a darker place, asking questions like, is redemption possible? Can one truly atone for one’s sins? How does suffering beget suffering? How are monsters made? It was unflinching. I was 10, and it was some of the realest shit I had encountered yet. Along with books like The Chocolate War, and After The First Death by Robert Cormier. These were ‘deeply pessimistic’ books where terrible things happened to ordinary people, and then things got worse, and there was no happy ending or resolution. Why was I reading books like that? I was drawn to them, they felt like they were saying something true that I needed to look at. Why did I “need” to look at it? I felt somewhat incomplete or unfinished without it. I’m reminded of a line from Karl Paulnack’s welcome address to the Boston Conservatory³ (2004) – he said, “Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us…” – those works, while pessimistic, helped me acknowledge how I was feeling.

ii. one day i am gonna grow wings

People on twitter tend to know me as this really upbeat, optimistic guy, and sometimes they assume that that means I’ve had a charmed life, full of happiness and good cheer. And that’s not really the truth. The truth, which is harder to express in 280 characters, is that I’ve always been a really sad person, wistful, even despondent and despairing. The optimism I’m known for is a response to all that. The lotus of my optimism grows out of the mud of my despair. And really, someone with a blissfully charmed life probably wouldn’t think to make a big fuss about being optimistic and prosocial and so on. They’d just be that way naturally. It would be something that they’d take for granted. I don’t take mine for granted, because I had to fight for it.

Lately though I don’t know if I feel as optimistic as I used to. I went through a personal crisis a while ago that I’m still not comfortable talking about. I’m also really tired all the time, largely from being a parent. I’m not doing too great financially, and I have another baby on the way soon– which means I’m not going to get any less tired any time soon. I’m going to have to figure out ways of becoming more energetic within the spaces I already have. Which is funny to talk about in a post that cites Radiohead, because they have a song called Fitter Happier that kinda mocks the whole notion. But we have to try anyway, right? Even if we are the pigs in a cage on antibiotics. We can see the bleakness of the situation we’re in, poke fun at it, and still have to live it.

iii. somewhere we will meet

I also wanted to think through Radiohead’s career and discography, because I think there’s been an interesting development there. A question I’ve been grappling with for some time is, how did they do it? How did they go from Pablo Honey (1993) to The Bends (1995) to OK Computer (1997)? In case you’re unfamiliar with the albums, a quick overview– the first album was the one that had Creep in it, which was a breakout hit, but not really what the band wanted to be doing. The rest of the album was somewhat grungy, angsty rock, much of it forgettable. The second album was much more interesting and sophisticated, with several great songs. But the third was something truly magnificent, genre-breaking, world-changing. It was released 29 years ago, and if they had released it next year it would still feel fresh, relevant and surprising. How?

I asked several LLMs. Claude gave me an fun answer, which is “they kept following their anxiety rather than their success.” ChatGPT said “they weren’t a grunge band, they were a weird art-rock band temporarily dressed as one”. Grok emphasized how they were willing to reject comfort, used success as license to evolve, and treated each album as a chance to learn and reinvent. Deepseek emphasized that the crucial element was “their willingness to be uncomfortable”, how they resisted the easiest path and instead “followed their own curiosity and frustration, even when their record label was nervous.”

I’ve been reflecting on this question for years now, because I feel similarly that I don’t want to simply do remakes or reruns of my existing material. I don’t want to play a popular hit just because it did numbers once. I want to grow and evolve as an artist. I want to risk failure and make mistakes and try strange and unusual things. And I have a lot more to say about that, which I think I’ll get into tomorrow.

1. Fun side-digression here about how the most popular national song in Singapore is a bittersweet one that opens with “whenever I am feeling low”, and the committee was skeptical about it, because they were used to the idea that national songs are supposed to be upbeat. How can Singaporeans be feeling low??

2. I am very, very pleased to hear that Let Down has been discovered and popularized by the kids on TikTok. The kids are alright!

3. This is one of my favorite speeches of all time. I remember quoting it extensively for a talk I gave in Junior College, and I basically quote it at every opportunity I get.