Ok, so about two months ago (or so) I checked my inbox when I got to work, and lo and behold there was the announcement: Radiohead has a new album out, released digitally, pay here, etc. etc. My plood pressure rose slightly. I quickly whipped out my credit card, paid the paltry sum, and began downloading. It took 30 minutes, during which time I went to get coffee, returned, feverishly counting off the minutes before I could finally listen to it - a new album by one of the world's most celebrated bands. I didn't want to leave this experience to the tiny speakers on my laptop in my drab and dreary classroom. No. This warranted something more extravagant. I burned a CD, took it out the car, and had a listen...only to remember, sadly, Radiohead just, kind of, bores me. There I said it. This is a fact I've been hiding even from myself. Mind you, this is not an album review discussing the relative merits of "King of Limbs" in relationship to the broader radiohead catalogue. No. The next few days, there was the usual back and forth between friends on Facebook regarding a Radiohead release. "Aw, the best band in the world does it again. Pure magic." And the response. "Hm. I just don't get Radiohead. They always seem a bit, I don't know, depressing?" With the requisite response. "Hm. I guess I just like intense music. I never thought of myself as so much more intense than other people. Thanks for clearing that up for me. You may now put your Journey album back on." And the mildly contrite comeback. "Actually, I prefer true genius, like U2 or Dave Bazan. They inspire me to see the world in new ways without the powerful urge to slit my wrists." Now, while the different points may have their merits, my argument doesn't fall along the intense/depressing spectrum. And I didn't contribute to the discussion because I didn't quite have a handle on how I felt about the music. Then I got a hold of the aforementioned Morton lectures (UC Davis - Romanticism, see below or see tunes, i) and his lecture on Wordsworth made me want to revisit his work. I read all of the Prelude I had merely skimmed in undergraduate. And it struck me. Wordsworth, at least in the Prelude and in Resolution and Independence, is boring as hell. Sure, he has his moments, and Tintern Abbey and Intimations Ode have their truths, their beauty, but after slogging through the Prelude, I could rattle off 15 straight cantos of The Commedia and feel like I was sitting poolside reading Crichton. Morton calls it innovative. I get that, a complete stylistic breakthrough, low-intensity language on purpose. New forms and all, and I thought hm. Now these epithets remind me of the critical literature on someone else, too. Hm. Oh. Ta-daa. Radiohead. Innovative, stylistic breakthrough. No highfalutin' rhetoric in Wordsworth, no choruses for Radiohead. Here's the thing, though, also. I find at least one, sometimes two tracks on every album that are pure transcendent bliss, just as there are lines in Wordsworth that shoot me to the moon (as it's dimly perceived by my half-creating mind, of course). In fact, in polite company one feels obligated to champion both these artists' virtues. But the rest? Actually, as snide as my facebook friend's remark to my other facebook friend was, some songs make me actually long for a good Journey song, to, you know, kick the evening into full gear. I appreciate the need for a contemplative space that some claim to be led into by both Radiohead and Wordsworth. I appreciate that mental opening, but do we really need some flat sounding smushed together beat that suddenly turns into a tick tick tick throughout a fairly boring song? That might be equivalent to the blank verse of Wordsworth's Prelude. The spectrum along which this comparison lies is different than the above "intense/depressing," but rather is constituted along the artists' world-weariness: Wordsworth in his poetry seems cautiously naive, and you never quite feel like you've penetrated into an intimate space, for all its self disclosure, his person in the poems feels constructed, self-conscious, a posture, not quite genuine. While Radiohead's music feels cautiously jaded, given to dehumanized electronic flights of fancy. Similarly, you never quite feel you've penetrated through to something genuine. This is odd, given that so much of Wordsworth's poetry is literally about encounter, and the Romantics are certainly critical of the stylized, mannered culture that precedes them. And Radiohead seems critical of a manufactured, plastic society and its oppressiveness. Neither one seems to offer a means of transcending these cultural deficits, however. Well, except on those rare moments, that one poem in the catalogue, that one song per album, that offers a way out. And although I'm open to being convinced about the virtues of stylized monotony and how innovative it is, right now, I'm not feeling it.
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