Let Down (download)

Time changes perspective, in all things.

You see, I can reevaluate conversations I had earlier today and be able to recognize and identify whole subtexts and emotions attached that I hadn’t caught earlier.  

What’s really a treat, however, is when it happens on a much larger, grander scale, and it can maybe affect the way you breathe, or do business, or scratch at the world around you.  And for me, the biggest perspective-shifts take place in how I interact with art, and, more specifically, how the years have changed the manner in which I relate to the music I let into my life.

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A few months back, several friends and I had a discussion about where we were when we first heard Radiohead’s OK Computer.  I had to think about it some;  I found I couldn’t really remember when I hadn’t had the guitar hook that kicks off “Airbag”, with its right angles and sharp edges, careening around inside my head.  It’s just always been there, encoded in my DNA.  To belabor an already belabored point, I can’t imagine a world where I haven’t heard OK Computer.  

And that’s what has made reevaluating it all the more fun. It’s been twelve years, and I’ve lived in 5 or 6 different houses, made countless plane trips, seen weird, remote edges of the world, been in love 2 or 3 times, and reformed my faith and refashioned my morals;  Yet, OK Computer is the constant.  

And still, even though, by all rights, I should be done with it, I should’ve solved its puzzles and moved on, I still am transfixed when “Climbing Up the Walls” or “Lucky” comes up on my iPod.  This is a part of me I’ll never lose, a part of me I would never want to lose.

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Just like my perspective on OK Computer has changed (when I was 18, I thought it was about was “paranoia” and “alienation”, terms that don’t really mean anything;  now I see songs like “Let Down” as richly written treatises on putting away false nostalgia and embracing life as is, dark spots and all), my perspective on how I’m going to create has changed as well.

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Here’s a picture of me and Rachel Higuera.  Together we are Northern District.

(picture by Casey Mackenzie)

We sat down today, listened to “Let Down” about ten times, and set about to making it ours.  Of course, it won’t stay ours;  we have no stake in it, no claim to its dark metaphors of a bug dying or its lyrical plea of “don’t get sentimental”;  but for an hour, in a tiny room with high ceilings and an overhead light that won’t stay lit, we made it ours.

It’s scratchy, and at certain parts of the song our voices were too much for the little microphone.  That doesn’t matter right now; what matters is that we are, as T. Yorke terms it, learning to not “get sentimental”.  Learning that music is what it is, that you can only make it useful by meaning it, and not meaning it in the sense of screwing your eyes shut and wincing into a microphone, but meaning it in the sense of being sure-footed, being wide-open to the possibilities of what you possess, and not loading it up with the figurative bells and whistles that we’ve all been taught make music “accessible” or “appealing”.  “Accessible” and “appealing” are terms that should be given a Viking funeral.  Let’s get real, and mean it.