Radiohead felt like grown-up music. It took time and effort--patience--to get into the band. Unlike pop-punk music, the melodies did not instantly trigger a sugar high, they weren’t ear candy, they did not immediately “click.” I listened to OK Computer over and over again, the cascading guitar chords flowing like a milky river into the unexplored recesses of my brain. I developed a relationship with OK Computer; we fell asleep together, wandered through malls together, drank coffee and read the paper in the mornings together. I got to know the album; I read and re-read the liner notes; thought about whether the layout of the “Airbag” lyrics intentionally created the outline of a tank; analyzed the ambiguous lyrics. And I began to love OK Computer, began enjoying the once uncomfortable silences.
As a result of the process, the emotional response to the music was, inevitably, different. Whether it be the delayed gratification, the self-satisfaction due to one’s own awareness of the effort that has been invested, or simply brainwashing through repetition, the connection to the album proved lasting and transcendent. At the risk of sounding overly cynical, let me say that the music itself was (is) beautiful. A dreamy world of layered sounds and echoes, of whale songs and bursting bubbles; the image of swimming underwater and looking up at the sky as a light drizzle falls on the other side, blurring the vision like an impressionist painting. But Radiohead would also come up the surface from time to time, and immerse itself in the gathering storm clouds, the flashes of lightning, the thunder, and the crashing wave of Jonny Greenwood’s guitar. Radiohead was the roaring “Off with his head man, off with his head man, why don’t you remember my name?!” and the serene “Rain down, rain down on me.”
Radiohead might have been the most important band Elton “brought to my attention,” but it was one of many bands. Hanging out at the underground lair of his house, his girlfriend and he would make mix tapes as I tried to memorize the names of the bands they mentioned. The key to Elton’s musical preference was originality. He would shift through the collection of records he had amassed from his weekly visits to Everyday Music (the one great music store in our suburban enclave) and pull out the albums whose songs would makeup that day’s mix-tape play list. The weirder the song, the better. A pair of European musicians twanging two banjos over rhythmic snippets of ambient noise? In. (The Books) A garage band recording of the raw emotional whispers, and then wails, and then whispers of a schizophrenic singer accompanied by an organ and a drumbeat? Done. (Xiu Xiu) A fifteen piece band, with an orchestra horn section, and a choir? You got it. (The Polyphonic Spree) Needless to say, every mix-tape had to carry a good amount of static and noise. (Side note: If a band wasn’t “original,” it at least needed to be incredibly depressing, and have a singer that mumbled most of his lyrics.)
Once I became a devout follower of Elton’s music, I entered the ever confusing realm of the indie-music scene. The indie scene of the early 2000s was a precursor for the hipster scene that would reach a tipping point a decade later.* Take Pitchfork for instance, a damn good online music magazine, and, at the time, the authoritative filter through which all indie music had to pass. The few friends I had that also listened to indie music must have visited the site, since most of the bands they mentioned ranked high up on the many “Best of…” lists Pitchfork compiled. (I, for example, have on my computer around eighty percent of the albums that ranked as “Best of the Year” from 2001 to 2005. I physically own the CDs of probably around forty percent.) The website was an indispensable source of great music, and yet indie social norms had taught us to ridicule people who tried to get a free-pass into the scene by reading the website reviews. Any mention of Pitchfork deserved an immediate roll of the eyes, and a glance to a fellow conspirator to indicate disapproval. The idea was that you had to find good music through the natural and random process of visiting record stores, and not by following the helpful suggestions of a trendy website. (This was the ideal that everyone professed, and few followed, due to the obvious extra time and effort involved.)
Besides the need to reject that which singles you out as being part of something, the other aspect the indie scene shared with hipster culture was the ubiquitous use of irony. The punk scene had taught me to hate pop music, to see it for the generic puppet-game of profit-obsessed corporations. The antithesis of creativity, of art itself. Elton liked it; or at least some of it. He put Justin Timberlake’s song “Señorita” from his Justified album on one of the his mixtapes. He also listened to Kanye West. (Pitchfork are also big fans of early Kanye and anything by Justin Timberlake.) He did it with a face that always seemed to be hiding a smile. Like, he knew he wasn’t supposed to take that music seriously, and that is exactly why he took it seriously. And when everyone in the indie scene started doing the same, suddenly it actually became serious music.
Slowly, I left behind my punk phase beliefs, and embraced my new identity. I rolled my eyes at those who mentioned Pitchfork, while at the same time visiting the website daily. I started listening to the radio and liking certain songs, and defending their musical creativity. I was an apt pupil.
*: This sounds like a historical insight, but it's not, like everything else it's a personal point of view based on a narrow experience.
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