“The Daily Pandemic: People Who Are Really Proud of Themselves for Knowing Who Radiohead Is”

For just a quick refresher on the cultural status of Radiohead these days, let’s remember that as recently as 2018 they played a four-night set at Madison Square Garden, hence furnishing the type of tour popularity in that venue otherwise exclusive to Billy Joe, and maybe not even The Rolling Stones. 

But am I just being a scumbag, or is this still a band with a severe identity crisis? No, it’s not even that — their “fans,” and I use that term loosely, have an identity crisis, toward even threatening to imbue the band themselves with one, as well. Actually, I remember Rob Sheffield in his Rolling Stone writeup of the MSG shows even saying something along the lines of there still being a lot of unanswered questions about Radiohead and the exact kind of band they are. (Personally, for me, Radiohead is uneniably gloomy day music, so for them to so inundate the season of summer with this extravagant masquerade seemed kind of odd to me). 

But it’s a name-drop band. That’s without question. It’s like saying you like “Bowie.” The disposition itself comes with a certain distinction, a mystique, like you’re just better than people who enjoy 38 Special or Electric Light Orchestra.

Fortunately, unlike with Bowie, fake Radiohead fans are at least partially capable of discussing music, as opposed to fashion and aesthetic appeal (what the aesthetic appeal is in David Bowie is likewise lost on me, I must admit). Anyway, this brings me to the most pandemic, the most widespread permutation of the fake Radiohead fans, and that would be the “Kid A”’s. The Kid A’s are really proud of themselves for ever having listened to (probably free of charge, still) a Radiohead album other than Ok Computer and “Creep.” They’ll go on and on about Kid A, never, mind you, citing a single track off said outlet that means anything to them. They tend to hate Amnesiac, despite that Amnesiac is a coherent electronica album and Kid A is like if your uncle from Wales chose your cookout guests for you. Kid A claims to be I.D.M. — well if this is the case, then tracks eight and nine, “Idioteque” and “Morning Bell,” must be pretty da**ed life-changing, because the rest of the album is pretty much alternative rock and drone ambient, with the best songs, “Everything in its Right Place” and “Optimistic,” falling into those two categories, respectively. Still, the Kid A’s will drone on, completely oblivious to Radiohead as a band, to the year 2021 (or 2016, for that matter), or the concept of a cohesive, stylistically ingenuous statement in rock… electronica… or whatever the He** this stuff is.

The second brand of fake Radiohead fans are probably even worse and are proud of themselves just for knowing who the He** Radiohead is. These fans are called Pandora’s Blockheads. They put on Radiohead on Pandora (usually at a really awkward time, like eight or nine at night when you’re moving in on closing the restaurant), and treat you to an enticing array of songs like “Creep”; “Karma Police”; more “Creep” and maybe that “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” song on In Rainbows, which successfully positions Thom Yorke as someone with the aspiration of being physically attractive. The only more nauseating track on that nauseating album might be “House of Cards,” in which we envision Yorke taking his shirt off on an episode of The Office and trapping you in room you really, really want to exit. 

So with Radiohead on Pandora — I mean I guess that’s preferable to some things in life, and maybe it shouldn’t bother me that much. It’s just that I tend to hear the same songs over and over. Maybe if I’m lucky I’ll get some “There There” but that just makes me long for the resigned placidity of “I Will,” which follows “There There” on Hail to the Thief. This brings me to another reason why Pandora’s Blockheads pi** me off so bad and that’s a disrespect to Radiohead’s album selection and sequencing, which tended to be pretty brilliant, save for the disorienting caterwauls of Ok Computer’s midsection and Kid A’s schizophrenic skittishness. Even A Moon Shaped Pool plays as a great b-side collection, with a lot of those catchy pop numbers having been penned back in a different era, circa-The Bends, probably, and conjoining to form one unified album statement where all the parts are in some way like the whole. From Pandora, we get the uncomfortable transience between the gut-check self-loathing of “Creep” and the indulgent, entitled romance of “House of Cards,” which really seem like complete semantic opposites, when you think about it, and so as a tandem represent a sort of bet-hedging that only the most oblivious music listener could abide, within one sitting.