20 Years After The End Of The World
On a freezing night in the early 2000s, I stood in a packed crowd at Washington, D.C.'s legendary 9:30 Club with friends who were, like me, barely old enough to get past the bouncer. I don't remember the exact date, even the year. The band that brought me to the show has since drifted from my memory. What sticks with me to this day is a moment before the actual concert started, listening to the pre-show music. The glitchy synths popped through the speakers. The bass drum thump hit my chest. I stopped and listened intently, and everything else faded into the background as the song cast its spell.
"Who is this?" I asked. "Radiohead!" replied one of my friends, shocked that I didn't know. Radiohead? "Creep" Radiohead? "Karma Police" Radiohead? I turned my attention back to what I would learn was the song "Idioteque," from the 2000 album Kid A, and focused in on the lyrics. "I'll laugh until my head comes off. I'll swallow till I burst." "Here, I'm allowed everything all of the time." I recognized exactly what Thom Yorke, Radiohead's lead vocalist, was singing about. I knew that feeling. And I knew it might never leave me.
The very next day, I bought Kid A and its companion album, Amnesiac, on CD. The covers of both albums, created by longtime Radiohead collaborator Stanley Donwood, matched the music I had heard the night before. The images were eerie and haunting: digital snow-capped mountains dotted with blood, a hunched being looking claustrophobic in an all-red room. I listened over and over, until the discs were too scratched to play and I had to buy new copies of each. These albums were weird: They oscillated between harsh distortion and soft intimacy, held together by a sense of dread and alienation. But they were also hopeful, articulating feelings that felt complex and adult. They gave me language for things I was feeling, but couldn't express.
Like many other millennials, I spent the awkward transition from childhood to young adulthood in the years when the 20th century was becoming the 21st. For many in America, everything felt possible, yet very little felt right. We were told this new thing called the internet would revolutionize the world and improve our lives, yet we heard about the planet warming and genocides happening in faraway places. Wall Street soared while people worked more hours and
