After watching this cover of “Creep”, I got a little nostalgic and looked up the original Radiohead video from (gasp) 1992. I listened over and over, clicking for a replay every time the last notes died away.
Part of my fascination was the emotional lockbox I had forgotten I’d left inside music that was part of my high school life. Lots of fun stuff to kick around and blow dust off of in there! But when that was over and done, something was still scratching at me. Sure it helps that Jonny Greenwood has that wounded puppy look on his face that just makes you want to flash your claws and protect him from the world, even while he rakes his own against his guitar. But sonically, the song is all fish hooks, attractive in the most base sense, which isn’t about beauty or cool so much as how it holds itself–immediate and raw and temptingly close. That’s what I heard, anyway. Think back and recall the sounds that spoke most to you when the adult you’d become started waking up inside you.
“Creep” makes a basic and fast and easy connection, and I don’t mean to hold it up as any kind of musical ideal or goal. It’s just what got me thinking. A lot of us who talk about art feel a need to push whatever we presume falls into the entertainment category into the wastebasket, or at least keep it isolated in the junk food drawer. We tend to get protective of the line drawn between because it’s art that’s “teaching us something profound about how to be human”. Great art as Bible or something. “Creep” would not make the cut using the definitions we are taught; it probably wouldn’t for me if I had only just heard the track for the first time today. But whether you’re 15 or 50, you don’t necessarily go looking to the Western canon for guidance. You look and read and listen, and when you’re hunting for some deeper understanding of yourself and your world and your messed up head, you sometimes find it in places like this and discover something that sticks with you for a long time after, making it art in every sense of the word, no, even if it’s only for you, only for a little while?
For years, the only version of “Creep” I’d heard was the live Tears for Fears cover.
Molly says: A distinctly different experience, for sure. I didn’t know till I read some background for this post that Greenwood actually uglied up the prettiness of the song on purpose to ruin it, sounds which became the track’s defining sonic signature.
Folsom Street Coffee…Folsom and Canyon. Just a few hop (that’s the name of the bus) stops away from campus.
And you did a great job at the Brave New World panel yesterday.
Molly says: Thanks, Kathrine. I’ll try and check these out, though they are keeping me plenty busy at the CWA. I’m having an amazing time and learning lots. More when I have processed what I’ve heard.