Radiohead - Pablo Honey

Radiohead. Oh, Radiohead. You released this album in a more innocent time in your career, a time long before you would confound me with another album the entire music industry has convinced themselves they love, an album that represents perhaps the greatest existential threat to Jamwise and my quest to become a good, open, and fair music listener - it shall remained unnamed for now, since we’re still lost somewhere in 1993, but it’s always there on the horizon, looming abstractly. Pablo Honey is the tortured teenage poppy alt rock offering that started your career; music I could, if not fully love, at least understand. 

Some Jamwise readers might have noticed my running gag about Radiohead and thought I outright disliked the band, or that I never even gave them a chance. Not totally true - I even owned Pablo Honey on CD, a purchase that represented a big investment for me at the time, namely a couple of weeks of cutting my parents’ grass and raking the mountains of oak leaves that fell in their front yard in exchange for an allowance. As much as possible for my age, I’m a Radiohead OG, for better or worse. 

But none of Radiohead’s later work is in focus today. This is their debut, and it’s an album I actually listened to quite a bit in the late 90’s/early 2000’s when I became old enough to discover it. There’s a specific time in many teenagers’ lives where Radiohead’s brand of gloomy whine hits close to home - and although I have no clue what caused those feelings in my own life, for a little while, roughly from the ages of 11-13, Radiohead actually hit right. I think discovering this album led me down a musical tangent where I discovered many such emotional songs, to the point where my mom thought I was going through a phase and started feeding me even more than usual.

I don’t know when I gave up on Radiohead. I discovered their debut after the infamous Kid A had already been released - maybe even then, a young Dave stumbled across Kid A and thought “this must be my punishment for seeking out new music. Better stick to what I know from now on.” Maybe Radiohead is singlehandedly responsible for forcing me to only listen within my comfort zone for so many years. I don’t know.

While there’s some science behind the idea that repeated listens often make us enjoy music more, this is a case where repeated listens have dimmed my excitement level considerably. Some songs still give me a little jolt of enjoyment like they used to, but it’s more like I’m remembering when I was a pre-teen with my life problems still hazy and unformed, which I think is the only frame of mind when Radiohead actually makes sense. Today, with the problems in life more or less clear in front of me, the aimless loathing of life that Radiohead built their sound upon just doesn’t do much for me.

From the roundup Jamwise #44 - The Best Albums of 1993, pt. 3.