Outside, a thunderstorm. 10 minutes before, it had been booming, epic. I had stuck my head out the kitchen window of my 7th-story apartment, to feel the electricity in the dark clouds heading toward us from New Jersey.
But now, the sky sounded dampened, softer. It was over.
I turned on the album I had been listening to on repeat since I had moved to New York: OK Computer by Radiohead. These songs, they sang into me, or mumbled, or roared. The loneliness I felt in moving away from everything I had ever known fissured through me like the lightning bolts I had seen in the distance. Something about the dystopian social alienation depicted in that album, the bifurcation of people as they became more obsessed with consumerism and technology than they were attentive to the humans around them — it helped me to feel less alone.
Radiohead’s OK Computer spoke to me, boomed in my heart, my gut. It kept me mesmerized. After all, I had turned my life upside down, braved the loneliness, and decided to start new. I couldn’t live the way I had been living — comfortably numb.
This album spoke to me.
I turned it on again.
And now, 27 years later, that storm Thom Yorke described is here.
Learning how to regulate ourselves and regard ourselves as human? It’s more important than ever now.
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