The most important thing to keep in mind when approaching this album is that 100% of what you read about it (including this) is of no value whatever, and is, in fact, downright antithetical to what Radiohead are trying to do. Preconceptions are worse than useless when dealing with a work of this nature; it's like having an art critic describe the "emotional texture" inherent in a Rothko or a Pollock. My opinion, or Robert Christgau's or Nick Hornby's or anyone else's is useless in terms of what you, the listener, are likely to get from this album. And this is, ideally, how it should be.

Like Kid A, Amnesiac requires listeners to approach it on their own terms, and what they bring away from it depends much more on what's inside them than what notes or words constitute the songs. There is no concrete meaning to these songs, and there isn't supposed to be; they operate, instead, on the level of an aural Rorschach test. The fact that Radiohead refuses to do all of the work in the band/audience relationship doesn't indicate a lack of energy or effort on their part. However, the fact that it is seen as such by many listeners signifies, instead, a growing tendency toward laziness on the part of the public.

Amnesiac's songs don't tell you how to feel. They don't operate as giant neon signposts that say "happy," "sad," etc., and this is anathema to the majority of modern rock audiences, who have been trained to sublimate their imagination and creativity in exchange for a thuggish, cartoonish approach to emotion and "meaning" (are you listening, Bono?). The best records, films, paintings - anything - are those where one has to struggle for words in order to convey just how and why it has affected them. "High concept" is all well and good - quite often entertaining, in fact - but very, very rarely touching or enduring.

What Amnesiac does for me, personally, is take me back to a time in my past when the innovative was the rule, rather than the exception. When melancholy and promise were present in equal amounts, and standing in the clear suburban air with a head full of acid made the world seem as enormous as it really was. Listening to this record, I can almost dismiss the cynicism and unwanted awareness of life's negative aspects I've accumulated in the intervening years, and reawaken the sense of wonder with which I regarded music and the part it could play in my life.

All this, of course, means nothing to anyone but myself. And it shouldn't. Because everyone's reaction to this album (be it positive or negative) is by necessity individual, and it is neither Radiohead's job nor mine to tell you what that reaction should be. This reluctance to explicate things is not - on the part of either the band or myself - an example of nonconformity for its own sake, or of being willfully difficult. Rather, it is the expression of a hope that there are individuals enough in the world that retain the ability to think, reason and feel for themselves.

-Keith Brammer

Milk
04.07.01