I was reading Layla's post about not being able to enjoy contemporary music and I could sympathize but I couldn't relate. As a music lover I can't help but feel the opposite of Layla, that I was born at exactly the right time. I love music today, I love music yesterday, and I love music from 250 years ago. I have yet to find a genre of music that doesn't hide some gem of brilliance I could not relate to. The way some people say they like all music only scratches the surface of my roughly 10 year expedition through the entire human music catalog.

I was born at exactly the right time, at a point where all those genres of music began converging into a twisting, meshing, overlapping and underlapping network of sounds and styles. And to me, Radiohead is the ultimate representative of the state of music today. Brilliant.

Radiohead assaulted the indie scene of the early 90s with Creep and rather than fall victim to the scene and crumble into obscurity with a few characteristically youthfully idealistic and sad if not slightly uplifting songs, they have instead ridden the wave of musical progress and are arguably one of the top 5 biggest acts in the world. From album to album they shift their focus and grow, experimenting lyrically and musically as if testing the water temperature of the current scene. They never recline into ease and they continue to fully devote their art to their fans as much as themselves.

To listen to Radiohead is to listen to truly devoted musicians and fans. They compose intricate pieces that combine classical elements with the ever-shifting electronic. When you look at videos of them in the studio it's as if they are engineers as much as musicians. And how else could it be in this age where every single song is consciously or not subjected to the will of the internet. And in every song the lyrics are imbued with a degree of honesty that is rare among the lyricists of our day. Thom Yorke has no qualms with admitting his fears and preoccupations (artistic and otherwise) to his audience.

From Bodysnatchers:
I do not
Understand
What it is
I've done wrong
Full of holes
Check for pulse
Blink your eyes
One for yes
Two for no
I have no idea what I am talking about
I am trapped in this body and can't get out

As he screams that last part the guitar from Johnny Greenwood is so distorted as if filling the lungs of the song with a crescendo of vibration that can't completely be controlled by the band. In listening to the whole album In Rainbows you travel through time, through that musical catalogue of every imaginable sound and melody. They do so much in the space of 10 songs and so coherently that you wonder what the word synthesis even means.

To me that word, synthesis, is the defining one of our age of music. At no other point has so much power been in the fingers and the brain cells of our musicians. And the best ones out there, the Radioheads, are the bands that are continuing the legacy of Layla's favorite classical composers. They are the ones that find contemporary meaning for the word fugue. Ultimately music hasn't changed much since Mozart and Bach, it is still all about finding coherence and harmony, the only difference today is that we have so much added distortion. The Radioheads out there are the ones that find a solo for that distortion.