In Rainbows
Radiohead; "House of Cards"; acquired when a roommate moved out of my girlfriend's house
Radiohead has an outsized influence on my musical discovery and development—perhaps the biggest, most lasting one. I’d argue that their finest collection of music has only received a limited release and isn’t available on LP: the Com Lag EP. However, in terms of full-length albums, In Rainbows stands as their most cohesive and best-sequenced record.
On October 10, 2007, I woke up to an email that surprised and delighted me. The new Radiohead album had come out, and was available for “pay what you want.” I’d spent so many years furtively scouring the internet for pirated tracks from obscure bands, and now here was one of my favorites just giving their latest release away?
I was confused and curious—Saul Williams had tried this a few months earlier, but he didn’t have the same high-profile presence. I typed in zero, clicked the button, downloaded the variable bitrate MP3s to my iPod, climbed into a tree by the river near my dorm, and listened to the album front to back, at least twice before coming down for lunch. Little did I know that this moment would foreshadow the collapse of the music industry, that album releases would no longer feel like decisive before-and-after moments in a listener’s life. Music was about to become "too cheap to meter."
And the calculus exam I had that day? I skipped it. I got a D in the class eventually.
Thanks to something called “freshman forgiveness” I was able to retake calculus. But really, the university should forgive me for the shambolic attempt at a non-major math department experience. Having a mumbling East German man attempting to teach me the central limit theorem is not a great way to learn; nor is occasional problem sets during office hours with a grad student who had a comically stereotypical Italian name, who mostly talked about ultimate frisbee and his hangover from the previous night. I retook the class with a different teaching team and got an A. The natural experiment of the “In Rainbows” effect on higher-order mathematical operations had concluded.
It’s hard for me to pick a single song from In Rainbows since every track has carried me through a different season of life. However, Reckoner is the tune that stands out in terms of sonic world-building. There are plenty of internet theories about how the album is based on the golden ratio, and that the "golden moment" happens at a specific time during the breakdown in Reckoner—right after Thom Yorke sings, "Because we separate…" for the second time. People think it’s mathematically predisposed to be a crowd favorite.
But if I’m picking a song for my current life stage, it would have to be House of Cards. Maybe it’s about succumbing to forces outside of our control, a kind of social unveiling, using imagery that’s both public and private. There’s a line that goes “the infrastructure will collapse/from voltage spikes/throw your keys in the bowl/kiss your husband goodnight”. Orgy at the end of the universe, followed up with “Denial, denial,” in the chorus—as if we can go through the motions, live as libertines, until the buck stops and the reckoning arrives.
Verdict: Keep
What will be your reckoning, sonic or otherwise?