Radiohead running through his head

Hipster drivel: Pause the existential crises and play this Ivies mix

“It doesn’t get any better than this,” you whisper into your Solo cup. You won’t be saying this during Logic, but at any other point over our weeklong weekend, the refrain may dance across your lips.
Rites of passage, even vomiting after a beer mile, lend themselves to such thinking. First comes the warm blush of camaraderie (or is that the Natty?), then the icy clench of terror (no, that’s the Natty).
That the best four years of our lives is happening this very instant is the arrogant claim of youth, our burden and our freedom. The question “what if this is it?” gives way to “what better way to spend life than embracing who we are, a cavalcade of preening post-adolescents?”
Crises of unearned nostalgia aside, consider Ivies an analogy for college: suspension in a state of liminal sublime. Dazed and confused, agonized and ecstatic, Apollonian and Dionysian, high and imbibed, we are everything all the time in the threshold of existence. It is either the worst state to capture the moment, or the best.
Whatever we’re lusting after—or fleeing to—let’s do it to music. Instead of curating the songs of the year appropriate for an Ivies playlist, I have culled my picks for the best Ivies playlist of all time.
These songs encapsulate, if not necessarily replicate, the feeling of youth lost and won. Most of them are about drinking, some of them veer towards celebration and others towards resignation, but all them toe the same line as we do: between hedonism and nihilism.
Mark Kozelek will obviously accuse me of selling out to “beer commercial lead guitar shit,” to which I’ll gesture toward my Fender and PBR. We are half formed, maybe, but brimming with life nonetheless.
“The Night of Wine and Roses” by Japandroids
This is the sound of a pregame condensed into four minutes, complete with fireworks, melt-your-face drumming and a raucous chorus. If you can shout “woah oh oh” then you can sing along. It comes from an album called “Celebration Rock” (which contains a song called “For the Love of Ivy,” another contender), so lyrics about “downing drinks in a funnel of friends” and “burning our blunts down the end” feel inevitable and appropriate. But really, it’s the opening lines that carry this song to greatness: “Don’t we have anything to live for? / Well of course we do, but until they come true, we’re drinking.”
“This Heart’s on Fire” by Wolf Parade
Japandroids’ fellow Canadians bring us to the dance floor, and command that we leave everything we’ve got on it. Sometimes, it’s the brute force of a hook that sets our souls aflame, and sometimes it’s the friction of sparking libidos. Learn to live on fire, and we’ll burn together. In between the sweat and the tears, maybe we’ll believe the chorus that proclaims, “it’s getting better all the time.”
“First Night” by The Hold Steady
Really any song from these barfly troubadours could have sufficed. There’s “Party Pit,” about a staggering college student (or maybe I’m projecting) who recounts meeting a girl in the mosh pit and boasts “I’m pretty sure we kissed” but ultimately resolves to “walk around and drink some more.” Or “Stuck Between Stations,” about the horror-guised-as-boredom of youthful drinking culture.But neither can compare to the poignancy of a piano ballad about Holly, who’s “not invincible / In fact she’s in the hospital,” and both “inconsolable” and “uncontrollable,” all because “we can’t get as high as we got...on that first night.” We’ll play it as we contemplate our own decay after dusk, cigarettes in our hands.
“The City” by The Dismemberment Plan
Five years before Kelly Clarkson, Travis Morrison shouted “since you been gone” from his rooftop and into the empty streets of some desperate city. “You” probably refers to a partner, but it may as well be Morrison, trying to figure it all out, but never quite feeling himself in his own skin. The scene he describes from his haunted perch sounds like the post-Ivies devastation of campus: barren and silent, even as “something seems to happen somewhere else.” After a night of recklessness or restlessness, we might also turn inward for refuge. And, like Morrison, we’ll be “not unsympathetic” to those of us who’ve left the city, striking out for elsewhere. It’s the collapsing of choice and necessity, a bittersweet refrain as we close the door and exit this threshold of our lives: “all I ever say now is goodbye.”

Hipster drivel

Radiohead running through his head

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

May 1, 2015

I was on the prowl for pasties in Oxford's indoor market. The Office of Off-Campus Study will tell you it's the intensive tutorial system that lures Bowdoin students into spending Michaelmas at the world's oldest university. I'll tell you it's the cheese-filled balls of dough whose stench is heady enough to convince tourists to languish in queues for the whiff.

In one such queue, I jostled a gentleman striding by—the height of poor comportment in a country where etiquette is sovereign. “'Scuse me,” I tried to dither out in my best Oxonian-American, before the impish figure in a bowler hat and trench coat knocked the words straight back down my gullet to mingle with esophageal perfection. I, a bumbling foreigner, had backed into Thom Yorke, resident of Oxford and frontman of Radiohead.

My friend Christopher introduced me to Radiohead in tenth grade. I must have said something morose, using words I didn't really know to describe feelings I didn't really feel. He must have wanted to channel my pubescence out of English class rants about Sartrean nausea and into the private realm of Radiohead, lords of sob. In the computer lab we logged into Windows XP. I pulled up 2009-era YouTube. He pulled out 2009-era earphones. “Listen to 'Idioteque.' You'll like it.” I didn't.

I've forgiven myself, and not simply because my music taste in early high school could have been outpaced by an evolutionarily stunted prokaryote. Radiohead challenges, and I didn't like to be challenged. Radiohead also rewards, and I thought the reward was overstated. To be fair, one of the first reviews of the band's seminal 2000 record “Kid A,” which houses “Idioteque,” described hearing the music as “witnessing the stillborn birth of a child while simultaneously having the opportunity to see her play in the afterlife on IMAX.”

My thinking is that listening to Radiohead—a band bigger than the band bigger than Jesus—for the first time is like losing your virginity to your best friend in the back of your brother's jalopy on the eve of graduation. Which is to say: uncomfortable, exciting, terrifying, and world-historical. The bleating squalls of “Idioteque” were the sounds of evocative fiction, the kind that provoked the dismissive “hm” I gave Christopher only to guide me to study abroad in Oxford in search of the music's authors.

Radiohead shouldn't exist. They rocketed to fame on the same combustive consumption of American self-loathing that fired Kurt Cobain's shotgun. “What the hell am I doing here?” misbegotten Yorke pleaded in 1992, after Jonny Greenwood's signature squawk sent the band to assured one-hit-wonder-dom with “Creep.” Radiohead's debut “Pablo Honey” is not good, but only because it caters to the lowest common denominator of disaffected asshole-aesthetes. When they became uncompromising in 1995 with “The Bends,” they apotheosized as guitar heroes who could will modern alienation into transcendent celebration. When they heralded technological apocalypse with 1997's “OK Computer,” they became nothing short of prophets.

Where does the best band in the world go after releasing the best album of the decade? They enter a new decade and do it again. I'm too young to remember Y2K, the residual paranoia from Damocles' ballistic missiles, but I imagine “Kid A” disintegrating into the desperation of a billion electrons. Which is what happened to the chimerical album-as-art—diced into compressed data, scrambled into .mp3s, teleported from servers to earbuds, first through Napster and now through Spotify. What if the best album of all time was also the last, arriving on vinyl already vestigial, on compact discs already discarded? “Kid A” issues soothsayings, autopsies, and elegies for the same humanity that died in its creation, at the incipience of the wireless age.

Dylan went electric in 1965, but Radiohead went digital in 2000. I didn't know anything about the band's history, let alone the history of Musical Statements, but I did know that after a night of gallivanting with friends, I had to clamber, boozed and bloodshot, under my sheets to let the descending resolution of “Everything In Its Right Place” wash over me. The notes collapsed into each other while I soared into the barren soundscapes of the title song and “The National Album.” They're cruel but compelling, a disaster and a dawn, stitched from Thom's vocoder wails and flairs of demented brass. The lyrics are dense, unintelligible, and often mundane, like snippets of conversations dredged from data trawlers or the concomitant propaganda that none of this is really happening. But they also suggested a peace beyond the clash of competing cell lines, ineffable and effaced. Loss in the era of hyper-connection wasn't a new idea in 2000, but in 2009 it was innovative to a student trying to piece his world together.

Hence the irony of discovering Radiohead through the jittery opening of “Idioteque” on library computers. The song can't play by command, summoned from the depths of the Internet along with its demons. It unfolds along the infinity of the record's 48 minutes, discernible only in fellowship. For that, “Kid A” is not unhopeful. Its beauty persists if we let it, 15 years later, from the palpitations of surrender of its opening, the cacophony of its uncertainty halfway in, and the ending requiem to “red wine and sleeping pills.”

Because as much as “Kid A” seethes of techno-dystopia, it breathes something else into life. Maybe it's the memory of friends like Christopher, to whom I haven't spoken in years but nevertheless could strike up conversation—even about Sartrean nausea—with affection. Maybe it's the pasties wafting from Oxford's impossible, ancient kitchens. Maybe it's the nights spent in search of love and refuge with the radio on. Maybe it's the humanity embedded in digits by design, the link we have to each other even from our furthest distances. Maybe it's the same hope that Thom kindles at the record's close, whether it turns out merely true or merely comforting: “I will see you in the next life.”

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