Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: I Don’t Get It

My coworker at LucasArts, through no fault of his own, ended up having to share an office with me at the beginning of my obsession with Soul Coughing. That meant he had to listen to El Oso countless times, since using headphones at work hadn’t yet become common practice for whatever reason.

I got a kind of karmic payback, though, at my next job: my office-mate was really into Dummy by Portishead. I never outright disliked it, but I did keep waiting for it to win me over, even on familiarity alone, and it never quite did. It was more that hearing the opening of “Sour Times” got to be like hearing the noon siren over the loud speakers in San Francisco. “Oh, it must be Tuesday again.”

Fast forward several years, and I’m listening to a cover of “Wandering Star” and wondering why on earth it sounds so familiar. So I listen to the entirety of Dummy again, and I realize that hey, this is a really good album. My coworker was right all along.

Radiohead is a tougher sell for me. I have really tried to get into them, I swear, but it just never sticks. Usually, when somebody tells me about a band they’re really into, I just nod and move on, but Radiohead is different. I really want to like them, because occasionally I’ll hear something that convinces me they were doing something genuinely special. Like the track “Fitta Happier” from Quakers, which samples the Pride of Arizona marching band doing a medley from Kid A and OK Computer.¹In particular, “The National Anthem” and “Optimistic.”

I was convinced that I would only like covers, and I’d never be able to get into the originals. But then I heard a bit of “Fake Plastic Trees” somewhere, and I thought, “Hey, I really like this song, I wonder who sings it?” So until I’m able to fully catch up to where everyone else was in the late 90s and early 2000s, I can at least say that yes, I do in fact like exactly one Radiohead song.

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  In particular, “The National Anthem” and “Optimistic.”