From Great Darkness Comes Great Beauty

A typical discussion I have with someone I've just met tends to play out like this:

Person: So what kind of music do you listen to?

Me: Oh you know, I'm a huge Radiohead fan. Joy Division, Arcade Fire, Interpol, stuff like that.

Person: Uh, those bands are so depressing, they make me want to kill myself. how can you listen to them?

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Recently I've been thinking a lot about such exchanges, I've asked myself the same question; Why do I listen to bands like that? The subect matter of their songs is undeniably depressing, and they don't exactly specialise in upbeat pop.

The answer is, of course, that I find listening to bands like these, Radiohead in particular, to be the among the most incredibly uplifting experience of my life. On the surface level, this doesn't appear to make any sense, so what I'm going to do in this post is attempt to analyse exactly why I find it to be so uplifting.

When you first look at it, the detractors of Radiohead appear to have a point. The reason we listen to music is that it makes us happy. It allows us to escape to another world where, temporarily at least, everything is alright. Who in their right mind would want to listen to music that is depressing?

Let's take the song Street Spirit (Fade Out) as an example. The following is a quote from Thom Yorke about it:

"Street Spirit is our purest song, but I didn't write it. It wrote itself. We were just its messengers; its biological catalysts. Its core is a complete mystery to me, and, you know, I wouldn't ever try to write something that hopeless. All of our saddest songs have somewhere in them at least a glimmer of resolve. Street Spirit has no resolve. It is the dark tunnel without the light at the end. It represents all tragic emotion that is so hurtful that the sound of that melody is its only definition. We all have a way of dealing with that song. It's called detachment. Especially me; I detach my emotional radar from that song, or I couldn't play it. I'd crack. I'd break down on stage. That's why its lyrics are just a bunch of mini-stories or visual images as opposed to a cohesive explanation of its meaning. I used images set to the music that I thought would convey the emotional entirety of the lyric and music working together. That's what's meant by 'all these things you'll one day swallow whole'. I meant the emotional entirety, because I didn't have it in me to articulate the emotion. I'd crack...
Our fans are braver than I to let that song penetrate them, or maybe they don't realise what they're listening to. They don't realise that Street Spirit is about staring the fucking devil right in the eyes, and knowing, no matter what the hell you do, he'll get the last laugh. And it's real, and true. The devil really will get the last laugh in all cases without exception, and if I let myself think about that too long, I'd crack.

I can't believe we have fans that can deal emotionally with that song. That's why I'm convinced that they don't know what it's about. It's why we play it towards the end of our sets. It drains me, and it shakes me, and hurts like hell every time I play it, looking out at thousands of people cheering and smiling, oblivious to the tragedy of its meaning, like when you're going to have your dog put down and it's wagging its tail on the way there. That's what they all look like, and it breaks my heart. I wish that song hadn't picked us as its catalysts, and so I don't claim it. It asks too much. I didn't write that song."


Not exactly 'Naive' by the Kooks, is it?

However, the detractors have made the mistake of presuming that songs with depressing content are inherently depressing. This is not the case.

Personally I don't see the appeal of listening to songs that actually make me feel depressed, it makes no sense. But this song doesn't make me feel depressed, even though the sentiment behind it is unbelievably depressing.

The reason is simple. What has happened here is that Radiohead have taken an unbelievably hopeless and dark theme, one that by all rights should leave me in a state of perpetual sadness, and turned it into something mind blowingly beautiful.

And it is mind blowingly beautiful. It may be dark, but no-one can deny its beauty.

I'll say that again, something of great beauty, and this is the case in a huge amount of songs by Radiohead and other bands, has come from complete and utter darkness. And that makes me feel fucking amazing. Because as long as people exist who can take fear, hopelessness and sadness, and turn it into something beautiful, I know that, no matter how much shit is going on in the world or in my life, that there is still hope, that there is, and always will be, something to live for.

I can be having the worst day of my life, and it wouldn't matter. Because the moment Thom's vocals kick in on the third verse of Let Down; the moment the piano starts on Tunnels by Arcade Fire; the moment Ian Curtis' Baritone rises above the bass of Disorder, I know that everything will be okay.

No matter how dark and horrible something is, it's possible to create something beautiful from it. Think about it. For me, this is the most life affirming fact of all, and bands like Radiohead continually remind me that it is possible. Because of this, music that others would dismiss as 'too depressing' efffectively operates as ecstacy for me.

So if you're one of the doubters, try to approach bands like Radiohead with a different mindset when you next hear the, and remember that from great darkness comes great beauty.

It's Official: Life Hates Me

To call this blog a bit of a non-starter thus far would be the equivalent of referring to the dark ages as the slightly underwhelming sequel to the Roman Empire.

Unfortunately for my vast, vast readership, I have been otherwise occupied. I am not looking particularly like a bitch, yet life is still fucking me like one.

I exaggerate to the extreme of course, I've only suffered a series of what can only be described as minor setbacks. But sometimes the minor things hurt the most. At least when something really bad happens, one is allowed to mope away to one's heart's content. With this sort of situation I feel like I can't complain at all, and I bottle up all the frustration until it's released in a vulgar and unsubtle Pulp Fiction reference, like the one above.

This all started about a week ago, when I downloaded the new Liars, album Sisterworld, on my laptop. I was quite excited to hear it, because by all accounts and the evidence of the one track that I have heard from it so far, it's going to be quite the doozy. Anyway, now that my indie cred is undisputed, I proceded to open iTunes so I could put the album onto my iPod, when I saw a notification that is familiar to all of you by this stage I'm sure.

'There is a new version of iTunes available. Would you like to download and install it?'

Naive fool that I am, I clicked okay. Inevitably this lead to my laptop freezing and crashing. More than that, I was unable to restart it after this and I had to bring it into school for repair, where it remains to this day.

Of course the upshot of all this is that I haven't been able to devote enough time to run this thing properly. Fear not though! My laptop shall be back soon, the blog will start running and once it is rest assured that the internet itself will implode as a result of the pretension of its content.

Welcome!

Yeah, I've finally reached it.

I have finally reached the point where I have become SO pretentious that I've had to create an entire site, completely separate from any of the social networks I already frequent, to keep my extensive collection of nonsensical, egocentric, self-indulgent rantings, that absolutely no-one in their right mind could possibly care about.

Not only that, I've also taken the time to write this introduction in a vein attempt to convince myself that this is all in some way 'ironic' when there isn't an ounce of irony in at all.

Such a paradoxical combination of pretension and insecurity could, one presumes, only lead to disaster. But this 'one', whoever he may be, would be very wrong. It in fact leads to the best damn blog ever.

Yes, 'Gucci Little Piggy' (Oooh, his blog title is a Radiohead quote, how edgy...) from Michael Coleman of 'Hoofsnap' fame, is set to take the world of art faggotry by storm. It's cynicism, hatefulness, and the ill begotten sense of intellectual superiority that one could only find in a well raised middle class teenager are sure to prove a winning combination, as the aforementioned teenager casts his keen eye on subjects as diverse as music, sport, film, and day to day life.

Or, as is much more likely, he'll just forget about this tomorrow and someone will stumble across this page in 50 years time and shake their head in bemusement at the fact that someone could switch from writing in the first person to the third person halfway through a blog introduction without noticing.

Such is life.