Like that icky surgery show you can't take your eyes from, a particularly fascinating car accident you pass slowly by (hmmm...what's that wet stuff on the pavement?), or a movie that's so bad you sit through it just to say that you did...Radiohead's music has me scratching my head, unable to walk away. I'm attracted to it for a shifting set of reasons. There also seem to be reasons that I can't quite put my finger on, but that's nothing new: do any of us know, completely, why we like a particular piece of music? To me there's some mystery there...and that's what keeps me interested.

I missed out on 'early' Radiohead. "Creep" flew under my radar. In fact, my first exposure was a segment about them on Terry Gross' "Fresh Air". Most of the talk centered on the meanings behind the music and lyrics of OK Computer. It all sounded so intriguing. After reading a bunch of articles about them, and despite some pretty wacky Amazon reviews ("...most important...", "...best rock band of all time...", etc), I caved and bought OK Computer.

My first reaction was something like "...are you people out of your freaking minds?!" After all the hyperbole (rabid at times) OK Computer struck me as low-rent King Crimson. While I can dig the whole alienation caused by technology thing, the music and York's voice...well, the whole package really just left me cold.

Then right around the time of Kid A, we get another barrage of media coverage. This time it's about how the boys have turned a corner...leaving rock behind them. I started to see descriptions like "post-rock", "experimental", and "eclectic". Hmmm.....now my nerdy side is interested again (despite the fact that I tend to think reviews employing "post-anything" are full of crap).

The nerdy side failed to win out right away. What happened was that one Sunday afternoon, during a drive through that amazing valley between Oneonta and Albany, New York, I heard a long piece of very interesting and spacey music. It turned out to be some Radiohead EP material that was only released to college radio stations (the College Karma EP maybe?) I don't know exactly which tunes I heard that day (the danged station faded out before they got to that) but the tunes just scratched the right place in the musial part of my brain.