In These Dark Times, Radiohead Has Taught Me to Embrace My Sadness
In the final throes of 2020, my partner and I were talking about how sad we were both feeling. We attributed our low spirits in part to seasonal depression, in part to pandemic fatigue. We had been listening to Radiohead, a band whose sound is so reliably melancholy, that a data analyst recently used quantitative methods to determine the “gloom index” of each of their songs. In an attempt to manage the overall gloom index of our afternoon, I changed the music to something more uplifting.
Understandably perhaps, at the end of an objectively dreadful year, I could not bring myself to sit quietly with my sadness. But on my walk home that day, I wondered why our first instinct is so often to push our feelings to the side. I decided to give gloom another chance and, through my earphones, I heard Thom Yorke airily lament that he would laugh until his head came off.
I am extremely late to the Radiohead party. So late that no one really remembers what music sounded like before it was reinvented, multiple times, by five weirdos from Abingdon. We are living in a post-Kid A world.
Why did I resist one of the greatest bands in the world for so long? It certainly did not help that in my early twenties I was cheated on and dumped by a super fan. For years, I wrongly believed that Radiohead made music for annoying, privileged men whose anguish was performative, and who might have become incels if they didn’t have such a good relationship with their mother. But now I know that the main reason I ignored their music was because I was afraid of what it might awaken in me.
Like a lot of people, I have long struggled with my mental health. At my best, I am incredibly pessimistic about nearly every aspect of the universe, at my worst, I battle intrusive negative thoughts that loop around my brain on an exponential spiral. As a precaution, I have taught myself to be wary of open invitations to feel. I have switched off sad songs and selected blockbusters with predictable plots over more contemplative cinema. When I am in a bad place, my main strategy is to run from anything that might disturb the unstable balance of my internal life. Radiohead’s sound is so singularly devastating that, for a long time, I didn’t want anything to do with them.
But anyone who has tried, consciously or not, to repress their feelings knows that such attempts at self-regulation are dangerous. Emotions, when they are squashed, tend to burst into the world at the worst possible time, creating long-lasting blemishes on their way out.
I have learned this the hard way. To keep my sadness under control, I have resorted to classic but taxing stratagems: I work too much during the day and stay awake drinking, or doomscrolling through Twitter at night. This constant activity creates a loud and continuous buzz which, on a good day, drowns out anything simmering below the surface. On a bad day however, the buzz is no longer loud enough, and I begin to spiral. I lie awake in my bed thinking about how terrible it would be to have a long-term illness. I picture unwavering fatigue and pain. I imagine inconclusive medical results and ceaseless cycles of hope and despair. “If this were to happen”, I tell myself, “if I were to become, for whatever reason, chronically ill, my friends would abandon me”. Seamlessly, “if” becomes “when”: “When I inevitably become ill”, I think, “I will fail professionally, no one will want me, everything will be lost, I will be utterly alone”. Ironically, as I torment myself with made up illnesses, it doesn’t occur to me that I am already suffering from a very real disorder called chronic anxiety.
I have come to realise that my anxiety is just another way of busying my brain with noise. This is not to say anxiety isn’t deeply distressing and exhausting (it is), but it keeps me securely above the surface of my own self. There is no risk of experiencing meaningful emotions when anxiety-fuelled adrenaline is pumping through my system.
This has been my life for as long as I can remember. But, recently, through weekly therapy sessions, things have started to improve. After the first session I felt hopeful. Perhaps there was something to be done about this. My therapist gave me tools to challenge my fears and reconnect with my emotional self. After a few weeks, I started catching glimpses of inner peace.
And then something incredible happened. A friend sent me a video of Radiohead playing their 2007 album In Rainbows live. Halfway through the first song (“Weird Fishes/Arpeggi”), I started crying and the noise in my brain stopped. No amount of opaque music journalist jargon would give me the words to articulate my emotional response to the hour-long performance. I hesitate to call my experience mystical, and yet it felt like unspoken truths were being revealed to me through Jonny Greenwood’s jittery guitar technique.
Spiritual awakenings aside, I believe I had a breakthrough that day. The true revelation was that it is OK to let my sadness breathe sometimes. Contrary to what I had repeatedly told myself, I did not disintegrate after allowing myself to sit with my emotions, but the anxious buzz in my brain did. I felt melancholic, I also felt calm, warm, and safe.
I rapidly developed a Radiohead addiction. I asked my connoisseur friends which albums I should listen to in priority (“everything except Pablo Honey and The King of Limbs” was the consensus). I listened to it all several times, solo albums and side projects included. I dissected videos of their live performances. I pondered over the possible meanings of Thom Yorke’s weird tweets of 2018. It has now been several weeks, and I still do not know if I will ever be able to listen to another band ever again. I have become a Radiohead-head.
On subreddits dedicated to the band, I learned that if you want to really irritate a Radiohead fan, all you have to do is suggest that their music is “too depressing”. True Radiohead-heads (yes, it will catch on) like myself, know that these tired clichés do not tell half the story. Radiohead do not simply make sad songs. They decorate sadness with beautiful, alien, mind-expanding sounds. They present sadness in a way that is enjoyable and engaging, and in doing so they provide us with a safe and aesthetically pleasing space to feel our feelings.
Back in 2003, Yorke hit back against accusations that his band only dealt in gloom:
“The reason I find it offensive,” he told an audience at a Q&A, “is that to me it implies that to suffer from depression is like being subnormal. It’s a stigma, which it shouldn’t be (…). I suffer from it and a lot of people suffer from it. It should be something that’s openly discussed and accepted.”
Almost two decades later, as we face one of the darkest periods in recent memory, mental illness is still a taboo. Despite the best efforts of mental health activists, we tiptoe around depression and make those who suffer from it feel ashamed and alone. Too often, instead of genuine support, we offer platitudes that ultimately minimize and discredit authentic emotional responses (“Never give up!”, “You’ll get over it!”, “Good vibes only!”, “Your music is too depressing!”). But there is no reason to always look on the bright side of life. Sometimes we need to acknowledge how bad things are, or how bad they have been, in order to heal and move forward.
Thom Yorke understands the dangers of toxic positivity. I have been thinking a lot lately about something he said in a recent interview:
“You know you’re in trouble when people stop listening to sad music. Because the moment people stop listening to sad music, they don’t want to know anymore. They’re turning themselves off.”
I will no longer turn myself off. I want to feel all my feelings. This will no doubt be scary and uncomfortable at times, but I believe doing so will teach me important emotional survival skills for whatever fresh hell 2021 holds in store.
