the sweet 16

(3) Radiohead, “creep”
shut down
(15) throwing muses, “not too soon”
349-304
and play on in the elite 8

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The Cool Big Brother: rob hays on “creep”

You’ve never seen a band try harder and attain more to escape the very song that started their success. Radiohead was able to use the song “Creep” to establish an everlasting career where they pushed themselves from the shadow of “Creep” to a career of expanding the boundaries and expectations of what a rock & roll band is and what it can accomplish.
Watching this band in real time during the formative years of my life, they’ve helped me grow and understand music in ways that far outstripped the naivety and shallowness of an inexperienced listener. They acted like a big brother to me by steering me in the right musical directions and helping me as a person to higher levels of thought and appreciation.
When I say big brother here, it’s in the context of the cool, big brother who was making you mixtapes of all the bands he thought you should be listening to, helping shape your thoughts and ideals as a person. Helping you embark on thought explorations that take you to different places that transform the mind and soul.
I did have real big brothers, but not in the transformative, mind-shaping way that I feel about Radiohead. My oldest brother wasn’t really into music, he was more of an athlete, mostly gravitating toward songs that motivated him to work out more. I remember songs like Snap’s “The Power,” or that song that kept sampling the line, “Mars needs women”. My other brother was much more musically oriented and I did appreciate him trying to include me in his musical explorations, even if it didn’t quite mold me the way it did him. He was a big Beatles and Paul McCartney fan. He was listening to bands like Yes, ELO, and Styx. He had a fondness for arena rock.
My brothers and I grew up in a slightly less than ideal setting occupied by machinists, factory workers, truck drivers and low level clerical workers just trying to get by. It was typical blue collar fare, and you were much more likely to hear someone play Lynyrd Skynyrd or Bob Seger than Hüsker Dü or The Wedding Present. More often than not, if you mentioned those bands in my home town you would get strange looks.
A lot of my early musical education came from the radio. Growing up in Cleveland, in the 80s, radio was kind of a big deal. We were constantly reminded of 1950’s Cleveland disc jockey, Alan Freed, who popularized the phrase “rock & roll” and how our local station, WMMS (nicknamed The Buzzard) often broke new artists like Bruce Springsteen, Rush and David Bowie. Listening to these rock staples led to some confused and often eclectic musical listening tastes that would follow me through my years in high school. I remember when Guns and Roses and the Beastie Boys were first making waves and while today’s me would want to tune in, 80’s me couldn’t care less. I was enjoying Huey Lewis and the News (still do) and listening to adult contemporary artists like Billy Joel, and Rod Stewart. It wasn’t till I started working minimum wage joe jobs when I was sixteen that I started having my first meaningful music conversations. It was then, I would bring up said artists and was mocked mercilessly for it, that my feelings toward music were willing to change.
It was during this time that a band I never heard of and wouldn’t care about for some years to come was also finding their musical inspiration.
Radiohead has always had the same line-up throughout their career: Phil Selway, Collin Greenwood, his younger brother Jonny, Ed O’Brien, and singer Thom Yorke. They have known each other since they were at Abingdon School just outside of Oxford, England, in the mid ’80s. They started their band while they were all going through school and would play around town together, even staying together and playing whenever they were on break as they made their way through university. When Thom graduated from Exeter, with his English degree, he started taking the band more seriously.
I used to work the closing shift at a local fast food taco place. There, my real musical education began. I had a manager, who had a side gig as a bassist in a local hard rock band. After closing the dining room at night, he would invite his friends in and they would hook up their guitars and amps and noodle on their instruments while the rest of us were getting orders out for the drive-thru. I was taught to appreciate the work of Ozzy Osbourne, and the brief, inspirational career of Randy Rhoads. Rush was revered, Guns and Roses rocked, but so did Mötley Crüe, Dokken, Ratt, and Poison. These weren’t my only influences during that time, just the loudest. There was also the girl who had all kinds of piercings, who really liked Skinny Puppy and Jane’s Addiction. There were also my nerdy friends from school who preferred rap and were into the likes of Third Bass, DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince, 2 Live Crew, and The Digital Underground.
It was one of those late shifts, working the drive thru, that someone put in Pearl Jam’s Ten for the first time. This was truly an exciting, transformational album. I had not heard anything quite like it before, but my initial reaction to the song, “Alive” was that I was all in. It was my first exposure to the grunge movement, a movement I had no idea would affect me so profoundly. I was ready for more.
In England, Radiohead was initially known as On a Friday, named after the day they could all come together and rehearse. They had a following around town, and eventually gained the noticed of A&R people, scoring a record deal. It wasn’t till they were being signed that they changed the name.
Their first EP, Drill, didn’t sell very well and gained them little notice. It was during those early studio sessions that “Creep” first came into being. In a small independent studio, they were rehearsing songs with their new producers for what was to be their first album, Pablo Honey. Ed O’Brien once described Pablo Honey as “Our collection of greatest hits as an unsigned band.” The songs were heavily influenced by the bands they were most into at the time: the Pixies and R.E.M. The novice members of Radiohead all wanted to be rock stars, but had yet to gain a style and develop a sound that was their own. While in studio, taking a break from the list of songs their producers wanted for the album, they played a song, referred to as the “Scott Walker” song (a solo artist popular in the UK during the 60s and 70s), mostly to just change things up. They had not played the song in their live shows and this was the first time the producers had heard it. They were amazed, and “Creep” came to be.
The members of the band thought of it as a throwaway number, nothing of any real consequence. Initially, when released in the UK in September of 1992, it did not get much fanfare, topping out at number 78 on the UK singles charts. BBC’s RADIO ONE barely played it, saying that the song was “too depressing.” It wasn’t till the end of the year when the song started becoming a huge hit in places like, Israel, Scandinavia, and New Zealand. In America, it first started getting recognition at a small college station outside San Fransisco. It eventually swept across the nation in popularity, with listeners relating to the song’s themes of alienation and self-loathing.
I tried really hard to remember the first time I heard “Creep.” it came in with a number of new sounding music at the time. Nirvana was still a big deal, and Soundgarden was making a name for themselves. “Creep” was just another interesting song coming from the radio. While alienation and self-loathing were not new to my teenage self, I wasn’t ready to empathize with this song in any meaningful way.
The song was first written by Thom early in his time at Exeter University. The actual story behind the song is a little fuzzy and hard to pin down. To hear others tell it, Thom wasn’t very comfortable around women early in his adult life, and the song appears to speak of a time, where he took a fancy to a woman who hung around with a different group of people, and while he liked her, he never felt comfortable talking to her or being around her, and was remorseful for the feelings he was having. In interviews, years later, Thom would remark that he always thought the song was a bit of a joke and disliked the fact a lot of people identified him as the “Creep.”
The song followed a familiar song structure: verse, bridge, chorus, verse, bridge, chorus, mid section climax, verse, bridge, chorus. It was Thom’s heart felt singing and emotional lyrics that had people take notice. It was also the aggressive jabs of guitarist Jonny Greenwood’s prelude to the chorus that helped give the song some of its most distinctive elements. Jonny was derisive about the song and was later quoted as saying, “I didn’t like it. It stayed quiet…So I hit the guitar hard – really hard.” It was often thought of as Jonny’s attempt to sabotage the song. The producers loved it, and made it a point of emphasis for the song. It was even featured on MTV’s Beavis and Butthead.
Cleveland had finally gotten its first Alternative Rock station around this time. They played music for the 90s, leaving behind classic staples like The Who, Led Zeppelin, and AC/DC. All the bands that 80s Cleveland radio had taught me to admire and enjoy.
“Creep” was an okay song, I didn’t mind it when it was on the radio, but my early, totally misguided music tastes had me smack in the bullseye for a band called Candlebox. Their first album was amazing. It had that hard rock edge that my friends at the late night drive-thru appreciated as well as some great guitar hooks and lyrics that spoke to an emerging adolescent brain in a way other songs hadn’t before. It was these alt rock inspirations that prepped me for my musical journey’s to come. For the time being, I was was excited to be rockin’ out to “You” by Candlebox, or “Three Strange Days” from School of Fish, or “Teen Angst” by Cracker. These last two songs inspired me to do album reviews in my local high school news paper. For the first time, I wasn’t just listening to the music, I was “hearing” it.
Meanwhile “Creep”, launched Radiohead to the forefront of the modern rock movement. They toured America and played at MTV Beach House and on Arsenio Hall as well as several other late night talk shows. The song was rereleased in the U.K. where it reached number 7 on the singles chart. Readers of Melody Maker and NME magazines named “Creep” “Single of the Year”. It was the Rolling Stone’s writers, top choice for best song of 1993.
By 1995, Radiohead really started to sour on the song. There were rumors their record company thought of them as one-hit-wonders. The band was growing impatient with the type of audience that was showing up for their shows, where fans would scream for “Creep” to be played then leave immediately after. One band member was quoted as saying, “There was a point where we seemed to be living out the same four-and-a half minutes of our lives over and over again. It was incredibly stultifying.” While they continued to play it, they often would just refer to it as “that song.” The band themselves never thought of it as a good song and were astonished as to how popular it had become. They’ve been trying to move away from “that song“ ever since.
I could relate to those feelings. Early musical fascinations were no longer doing it for me. I once thought groups like Foreigner, Bad Company, and Journey were what music listeners favored, not realizing it was a preference of the working class people around me that I had trouble relating too. I had grown up a certain way and was expected to be into certain music, and I was finding it was leaving me empty. Grunge music hit me at just the right time, helping me expand my musical tastes and inspirations.
For Radiohead, their next album, The Bends, was said to be a tortured affair to make. Thom had a lot of anxiety around trying to prove that Radiohead was more than just “that song.” They had been playing it at just about every show for a couple years and Thom thought of it as playing a cover of some other band’s song. John Leckie, the producer for The Bends, was quoted, “My impression, was they were being requested to do something even better than ‘Creep.’ And they felt they were being asked to better something, where they didn’t know what was good about it in the first place.“
Their first single from The Bends was “My Iron Lung,” a song still very much in the grunge style, written during their fury of touring supporting the Pablo Honey album. It was a response from the band to all the success brought to them by “Creep.” The end of the song contained the lyrics: 

This this is our new song
Just like the last one
A total w.a.s.t.e. of time
My iron lung

It was around this time I first started noticing Radiohead. I was in college, still living high on my enjoyment of Candlebox, and catching them live during their many frequent tours, getting exposure to other bands that would open for them, like Sponge and the Flaming Lips. I was just getting past my latest musical fixation at the time, Live’s Throwing Copper album, and was ready to move on to something different.
I heard Radiohead’s song “High and Dry” and enjoyed the simple melody and the story painted from the lyrics. For some reason, this was all brought more into context by the music video featuring some bizarre Pulp Fiction type narrative in a diner. I wanted more. I picked up The Bends and remembered it to be a more challenging, deeper album. It didn’t have a bunch of instantly likable hits. My brain was still trying to divest itself from all the corporate radio and adult contemporary miasma I had embraced earlier in my youth. I had to think about the music more, I had to dig deeper into songs that stopped following familiar song structures. Songs willing to go in a different direction. The Bends was one of the first transformative records for me, it challenged the ways I had originally thought about music and took me away as a convert.
Radiohead started making changes around this time that would start forming their direction and distinguishing them from other bands. Early on, Thom had written all the lyrics, very much evident on the Pablo Honey album. Except for “Creep,” no one was claiming there was anything lyrically significant about the songs. Thom had a conversation with friends about this where he later explained that he wasn’t really interested in writing lyrics at the time, and it showed. His friends pointed out to him, “Your lyrics are crap, They’re too honest, too personal, to direct, and there’s nothing left to the imagination.” It was during this time that Thom started working more with Jonny and the others, and pushed the band into a different creative direction. Radiohead was evolving.
Radiohead started working with new members of their team that have helped them shape their image and music over the coming years. Nigel Godrich came on as an engineer during The Bends, and he would go on to produce OK Computer and every Radiohead album thereafter.
     Another key addition during this time was artist Stanley Donwood. He worked with Thom Yorke initially on the art work for The Bends and, like Godrich, would contribute in that role for the remaining albums. The addition of these people were key to the band in helping deliver a more consistent sound and a more congruous image which was largely dark and dystopian in nature. Feelings I was much in line with at the time.
After completing a couple years of junior college, I was going away to school for the first time to complete my four-year degree. With my eyes and ears open to new experiences I started integrating into the musical conversations happening around me. There was the prog-metal fan who was in the room across the hall, who really wanted to get me into Dream Theater. There were guys down the hall, who introduced me to 90’s techno in the forms of the Prodigy, Apex Twin, DJ Shadow, and Orbital. Then there was a friend, who loved Frank Black, not just his work with the Pixies, but his solo stuff, like Teenager of the Year. It was these tangential musical discussions that got me excited about music. I joined the local college radio station and while I played a lot of R.E.M. and U2, and occasionally still throwing on a Bob Seger album, I was opening myself up to stuff I wasn’t willing to consider before like The Eels, Buffalo Tom, and Pavement. I was also willing to explore earlier work by bands I already liked; Camper von Beethoven was a treat after enjoying the first couple Cracker Albums. I also started to acknowledge musicians I should have respected in the first place, like Johnny Cash and The Rolling Stones, not so much for their catchy tunes, but understanding their influence on music as a whole.
   By the time OK Computer came around, Radiohead was starting to establish a theme to how they go about their work. They wanted to keep doing something new and had little interest in looking back. Radiohead understood they could put out another album like The Bends and make a lot of money and fans would be happy, but they thought that was boring. They were interested in pushing in new directions. OK Computer brought in more effects and atmospheric sounds, leaving behind the introspective songs that were on Pablo Honey and The Bends and focusing more on society’s modern ills and how they affect us.
     I was starting to feel a bit of regret and disenfranchisement by this point in my college career. I was pursuing a degree in International Economics and Management and was taking an International Business class that did various case studies of business failures. It was my first introduction into the often hurtful practices of capitalism abroad. This usually involved some form of American company A, going to Country B, doing no due diligence on local culture or customs and insulting or hurting the local population in some way with product C. Granted, we were taught to be good, empathetic souls trying to meet the company’s goals, but it was not hard to see how the themes from these case studies kept repeating themselves in various ways.
It wasn’t just listening to the music of Radiohead who also seemed to feel very uncomfortable with the world they were experiencing around them, but buying into the whole message they were sending. I remember getting their Airbag EP and there was a quote from Noam Chomsky in the liner notes telling me not to unknowingly leave the complicated matters of the world to others, to pay attention; the world is more messed up than you think. These just weren’t messages being delivered by Britney Spears, Whitney Houston or other popular musicians of that era. It was thoughtful, intelligent, and pushed the limits of what I knew of the world.
     Kid A would take another step completely to the left of OK Computer introducing a shocking, at the time, mix of guitar and electronica, creating rich atmospheric songs with very abstract lyrics. While the Kid A and the Amnesiac albums were recorded around the same time, each album that came after had its own distinct sound. The songs in them fit together, where you could distinguish specific tracks, but the listening experience worked as a whole. There were no filler songs. Every song would be worked on till the band felt it was good enough to release to the world.
The album was a huge challenge to absorb upon first listen. The songs diverged from the music that came before it. I remember not liking “The National Anthem” with its bombastic horns and discordant rhythms. It took several listens before I could appreciate what was happening. It was moving forward, it was bringing the next big thing. Each song on the album could be found to be beautiful If you just looked hard enough, and today Kid A delivers some of my favorite Radiohead tracks.
“Everything in its Right Place,” the first track off Kid A, was as if Radiohead was saying they were never looking back to “Creep.” The digitized vocals, the dark, haunting synthesizer melody that becomes more driving as the song progresses, the dissonant sampling, mixed throughout. It introduces everything that would change about Radiohead going forward. “Idioteque” is another one. DJ Shadow once sampled it into one of his mixes and left it almost entirely intact. It was so well done, why change it? The song is mostly electronica, a modular synthesizer with a series of beats and effects in loop. Mixing this with the urgency in Thom’s voice as he sings the lyrics that make you feel like the world is falling apart but energizing you at the same time is the kind of thing only music can deliver.
It was around this time when Radiohead first pointed me toward the book, “No Logo” by Naomi Klein, about how our current consumer culture works. Helping me learn about EPZ’s (Export Processing Zones) and desperate factory workers, who endure bad conditions for little money with the promise the work will be better than their rural subsistence farming existence could bring them.
     I abandoned that dream of international business travel and taking capitalism to people in the far reaches of the world.I ended up in technology and now work for a company that, I at least think, is helping better the world in a more positive way. I feel I’m more aware of what’s happening in the spaces around me. I feel more empathetic.
Was it all the evolution of Radiohead, the evolution of myself that brought me to this state? I like to think there was a little responsibility there. I’m no longer listening to Rod Stewart or Candlebox. I find myself listening to a multitude of different types of music these days. I abandoned the tropes of my youth and everything radio said I should be admiring about music. Really, music is never about what everyone wants, it’s about personal connections, and the music you’re interested in is always the most important. I don’t know if I’d have ever gotten to this state if it wasn’t for Radiohead allowing me to see that music can change. Radiohead and I are both different entities since “Creep” was popular. Like that cool big brother, they showed me there can be a different way.      Radiohead would continue to make new albums and “Creep” would continue to be a sore spot for the band. They hardly ever played it after Kid A was released. They’ve come to accept the song and what it is since then, introducing it a little bit more into their concert sets on the A Moon Shaped Pool tour.
Thom Yorke recently married Italian actress Dajana Roncione. This came after the divorce, and not long after passing, of his long-time partner, whom he met while at university. Dajana is beautiful, the kind of girl one could “look in the eye,” maybe “float like a feather in a beautiful world.” This time around, Thom is “so fucking special,” a creep no more.

Rob Hays is a technologist currently residing in the Cleveland area. He spends much of his free time searching for the next band to get excited about. 

HEIDI CZERWIEC ON “NOT TOO SOON”

*Gasp*

There’s a gender gap in grunge.

Despite Hole and Sleater-Kinney and Liz Phair (exceptional, but exceptions, not rule). Despite Lilith Fair.

I know her. I knew it even then. Throwing Muses’ “Not Too Soon” on a mixtape I made myself in ’92 titled Girls With Burly Voices, a cassette full of Riot Grrrls, the word a growl, a girl in babydoll dress or vintage slip with shitkicker boots, walking contradiction, Vamp on my lips as I sang along—sexually-liberated—about blow jobs, my choker necklace an erotic asphyxiation; a time when I plucked my eyebrows and pussy bald as a baby, but insisted I wasn’t infantilized, attended strip clubs not for my own pleasure but to perform transgression, to prove to the guys I was cool with it. Back then I was fearless, desiring to be desired and feared, a bottom and a top, wrapped up like a doll in bad dreams and broken arms.

I know her, Tanya Donelly asserts, and she did. Some sensitive poet dude wrote “woman is muse or she is nothing,” and bandmates Tanya and her stepsister Kristin Hersh threw that right out, rejecting woman as projection for woman as projectile.

And they threw down, nucleus of the feminist punk movement – Pixies opened for Throwing Muses in ’86, and Donelly and Kim Deal would become Breeders in ’89 before Donelly left to grow Belly in ’91, a swelling that birthed girl band after girl band.

But first, I know her in ’92, a girl with a burly voice belting “Not Too Soon,” a song the BBC described as “probably the catchiest song she ever wrote, which is impressive given that the chorus is essentially her clearing her throat.” The singer knows romantic tropes, knows this guy’s a manipulator, and she is not having that shit. She recognizes and declines the role she’s supposed to play: the chorus growls I know herrrrrr before outright sneering, Neer neer-neer neer-neer. The bridge, spoken in hushed, halting tones à lá “The Leader of the Pack,” addresses whoever you is in quasi-romantic rock mode—The last time I saw you, you were standing in the dark—only to coldly mock and reject you: and with a freezing face, I watched you fall apart.

And yet. To return to that chorus, right after she growls I know herrrrr and sneers, her voice dissolves into a soft, girlish baby-babble, punctuated with a *gasp*, words reduced to sound, to silence.

There was a moment in the Nineties, as Riot Grrrls organized and wrote zines and formed bands, when it felt like equality, when I was fearless and loud and unafraid to use my mouth. In my mouth You might as well be dead…if you’re afraid to fall sounds like empowerment, but it’s a weapon in the wrong one. I fell for him. It doesn’t matter which one. He used that mouth to abuse me, he a weapon made of silence I wanted to fill with words. When a woman in another couple got her tongue pierced, he was fascinated. You should do that, he murmured to me later in bed. True, I had tattoos, as well as several piercings, some of which I’d inflicted myself. Why wasn’t I willing to alter myself further? Mark my tongue a tool for his pleasure, a swelling that swallowed my words, jammed with pearls and no nirvana, a clacking behind my teeth, cliché. Reduced to sounds, to silence. I couldn’t look you in the face/ And tell you that it turned me on/ It makes my stomach turn.

That moment may have felt, fleetingly, like equality. Or so we convinced ourselves. When I hear “Not Too Soon” now, I want that girl with the growl again, want the badass back, her gone to history both mine and changing times. But those sensitive slacker dudes, who wounded us with withholding, who led us to believe we were in charge—of saving them, or sexually so long as we pleased them—though they seemed kinder and gentler, still dominated. Since then, we’ve backslid: Gamergate doxing the doxies, gone from Riot Grrrls to Pussy Riot imprisoned and gulagged to grabbing pussies.

I know her. I’m not alone, lots of me in #MeToo.

*Gasp*

Essayist and poet Heidi Czerwiec is the author of the lyric essay collection Fluid States, selected by Dinty W. Moore as winner of Pleiades Press’ 2018 Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose, and the poetry collection Conjoining, and is the editor of North Dakota Is Everywhere: An Anthology of Contemporary North Dakota Poets. She writes and teaches in Minneapolis, where she is an Editor for Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. Visit her at heidiczerwiec.com