When I was younger, I couldn’t fathom growing up.
The idea of being a teenager, let alone an adult, was completely overwhelming and I developed this fantasy from about the age of 9, that I’d stay a little boy forever. I believed, with a reasonable degree of conviction, that when primary school ended my life would reset, like a time-loop and I’d start all over again in reception class but this time with all my experience from the first go around. I thought that eventually, when I finally had enough experience and felt less terrified, then I’d be allowed to progress to the next stage.
Obviously, this didn’t happen.
Big Ideas: Don't get any
I wanted to carry on some of the themes I’d touched upon the last time I wrote here. Namely about music, its potency and a couple tangential things that both mean a lot to me and have been on mind over Christmas and the new year.
A couple of years ago I came across an ancient YouTube video, uploaded in June 2008, while I was still entertaining fantasies of eternal youth. As a budding young Radiohead fan, thanks to an introduction by an ex-girlfriend, I was looking searching the internet for any kind of Radiohead adjacent content, particularly covers of some of my favourite songs. One was, and still is, “Nude” from their 2007 album “In Rainbows”, a song reportedly 15 years in the making.
An alternative title for the song was “Big ideas: Don’t get any”, the title is repurposed into the opening lyric for the release version “Don’t get any big ideas, they’re not gonna happen” A theme that resonated with me as an angsty teen on a surface level, but has rang true on a deeper and deeper level as I’ve gotten older. Even whilst writing this I need to keep reminding myself that it doesn’t have to be Pulitzer winning, it’s my third go for fucks sake but nonetheless something nags at me that it has to be world beating. Thus it’s not the nihilistic, teenage interpretation of the song that means so much to me any more, but an absurdist, acceptant notion of letting go.
If you’ve heard the song before, or would rather just listen to it, skip the next couple paragraphs, they are a somewhat selfish exercise in song reviewing by myself.
The song eerily slides through the opening lyrics, with floating strings and distorted lyrics drifting around the listener before settling into a solid baseline, with nothing but the lyrics and a gentle cymbal rhythm for company. As it insists, “Don’t get any big ideas”. Then comes the release.
The lyrics crescendo “you’ll go to hell for what your dirty mind is thinking” and then, with a minute to go you’re left with the floating vocals from earlier but this time set free, the strings from the opening are reversed, going from creepy to moving in some kind of musical magic trick.
Now we come back to the first big idea I ever had that didn’t happen: my dream of being an immortal primary school student. It was one of the first times in my life that I faced the fact I was going to age, no matter what I did or thought about it. The notion of an inevitable death wasn’t quite there yet, but it wasn’t long away. However, I don’t think of my younger self as foolish or a dreamer or anything like that, I was faced with a terrible truth and invented something better.
The YouTube video I briefly brought up, as you may have guessed, was a cover of “Nude”, but a very special one. The title was “Big Ideas: Don’t get any” and I recognised the lyric immediately. The entire song was played on old 90’s and early 2000’s tech hardware, an old Epson scanner took the baseline, a ZX Spectrum beeped out the melody and a bank of old hard drives eerily scratch out the lyrics in uncanny fashion. The cover was objectively poor, a bastardisation of a very delicately composed song that had taken Radiohead 15 years to get right, but as I sat there watching these old forgotten relics do their best, I wept.
The link to the cover for those who want to listen while they read
I recently showed this to a couple of my housemates hoping they’d be able to help me understand what it was about the video that so moved me. “That is the shittest cover I’ve ever seen in my life” Was the response and I really didn’t have a counter argument, the video even concedes in its own description that “it doesn’t sound good, as it’s not supposed to”.
I found myself grappling with something that was beyond words, I so identified with those little robots doing their best to come together to create something full of soul and life. It felt to me like they were saying “I was here”, we’ve been doing that since the first time someone painted the outline of their hand on the wall of a cave.
Eventually the lyrics end and where Thom Yorke’s gentle vocalisations would normally come in the tech does its best to approximate. However, it’s not the acceptant release, it’s a desperate clinging to this moment of vitality, as if they’ve realised they don’t want to stop now. The melody climbs higher and higher and the scanner baseline groans as if it is straining to keep going. As if the big idea is actually finally happening.
As I wrote in my first piece on here, I have often found myself, in moments of intense beauty or passion, acutely aware of how mortal they seem to be. In the last couple of years I have found these moments to be much rarer. Instead of facing this reality with fantasy as I once did as a kid, I now lean into them, defying the end by simply burning brighter while I’m here. One day I will listen to this cover for the final time and more than likely have no idea but with that in mind, I’m floating along with those little robots every single time I hear it. As I found out on that park bench a few years back, getting big ideas is what separates us from singing machines.