The Best of the 90s: The Bends

If you're on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, you may know that Thursdays have been reduced to a meaningless hashtag "#tbt," otherwise known as "Throwback Thursday." Although I'd normally give an exasperated gasp when scrolling through these feeds, I'm pleasantly surprised by the treasures that can be found after some good retrospective digging. My generation grew up in the 90s, a decade I've written about before and am decidedly biased towards for the extraordinary amount of good music it produced.

Today, my #tbt is aimed at Radiohead's sophomore effort, 1995's The Bends.

This album is never at the top of the critics list, nor does it include any of the best songs the band has written. It lies awkwardly between their debut Pablo Honey, most famous for their single "Creep," and OK Computer, often named by fans and critics alike as one of the greatest albums ever made. For a die-hard Radiohead fan like myself, their first album represents all that was wrong with record production and the business of the music industry. It is also unfairly associated with its hit single, which remains Radiohead's most well-known song (I mean come on, both TLC and Stone Temple Pilots had a hit song called "Creep!").

Although the band wrote the song "My Iron Lung" and its follow up EP to describe the success of the song and the frenzy of touring in America, they remained busy creating an even more expansive collection of songs. Thus the band gave us The Bends, both a cue to the horrors of decompression sickness experienced by deep-sea divers and the unwanted excess of becoming celebrities in America. The album was released two years after Pablo Honey, and in that time the band had grown from a fad of the moment into a group with some serious artistic credentials to throw around.

The result was the way I fell in love with Radiohead as an 18-year-old kid. I remember listening to Jonny Greenwood's screeching, angular guitar work on the title track and identifying with how much I was ready to move away from Roseville. In high school, I was (like all of us) hungry for some form of affirmation in my confusion and insecurities. I did not yet know that God would find a place for me in college and beyond (through InterVarsity, of course!), but I was old enough to know that I preferred the close, dirty confines of the urban living to Roseville's manicured and convenient throughways. That guitar line, along with Colin Greenwood's lurching bass, had punched across thousands of miles and a context totally alien to me to affirm what I was seeking. I wasn't able to name it back then. But now I know that I was just like every other teenager, trying to be understood, and acting out when that understanding created dissonance.

 To be honest, some of the tracks sound overly gushy, even contrived, at least compared with their later, more abstract work. But some part of me continues to find comfort in this music.

What about now? Do I prefer the sonic textures of 2008's In Rainbows? Of course! Do I affirm that OK Computer is a much better piece of music? Absolutely. I've come a long way since then. God has pulled me through enough conflict, anguish, loss, and grief to know that I had an incredibly blessed and perfectly normal teenage life. Now, I deeply appreciate the love of the community of Roseville that I've seen, and am happy to call this place home, at least for their sake.

But today is Throwback Thursday, even #tbt if you wish. And sometimes, you just have to sit down, listen, and remember what it's like, in the words of Thom Yorke, "to be a part of the human race."