Street Spirit, Radiohead

The first Radiohead track to come up on random play is from the era before I got into them.  I noticed - and listened a lot to - OK Computer when it came out in 1997, and then only over the years went back into the two previous albums.  

Street Spirit is a very sad song, with the video sadder still.  I'm sorry to say that I've only watched the video for the first time just now, and it's quite unsettling.  In fact, the only thing that is more melancholic than this song and video is the Peter Gabriel cover, here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhz6jqqOuw4 which links in nicely with my first post in this blog. 

Why watch and listen to something sad?  Don't we see and experience enough sad things in our day to day life?  I know that over the past few years my tolerance for certain things has faded.  My wife watches - and is upset by - programs which deal in extraordinary depth about the emotional impact of the death of a child. I only seem to be able to cope with these if they are in a different language - which is either really odd or really pretentious.  You choose.  (Hint:  Quite likely to be the latter...)

Sad music does lower me, and still I love it and listen to it.  It does alter my mood.  I've got a playlist I've called "Melancholia" which I have to be careful about over indulging in.  I've listened to the two versions of this track three times while writing this and I can feel the effect on me.  But when I go back, one last time to the Radiohead original - which, sorry Peter, is better by a big margin, I can feel something else.  It's the sadness of a big bleak landscape, or a vast dark ocean with surges and currents and eddies but ultimately unchanging.  It's important to have the darkness, and to see the beauty in that darkness; it gives the light something to shine into.  Or, to quote the last line, Immerse your soul in love.