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philosophical phenomenology studies first-person experience itself, experience that has not (or not yet) been parsed, chunked, shaded and spun into the words we use to communicate with others and think our private thoughts. Pioneered largely in the twentieth century by French and German philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger, phenomenology studies experience in its pure forms, before it becomes reflected upon, rearranged, remembered and forced into typical models of experience (such as “good,” “bad,” “romantic,” “exciting,” “boring,” “frightening,” and so on). Coming after the original experience, all this clumsy discourse usually hides experience, or aspects of it, from our subsequent awareness and understanding. Phenomeno-logy aims to unearth, recover, and understand was we either lose or never pay attention to in the first place.

This phenomenological bent may be familiar if you were once grabbed, startled or terrified by Radiohead’s music. Most fans, I suspect, don’t gradually warm up to the band. Instead, the conversion is sudden and drastic. You probably heard OK Computer or Kid A and were struck by something vague yet powerful and real—as if Radiohead presented sounds and rhythms from a hidden, subliminal soundtrack that plays just beneath the surface of life. Before I discovered the band, I thought these sounds were subjective and private—the particular sound of my own brain, I figured, humming, popping, and stuttering through life. But when OK Computer plays, my neurons seem to hum along with music they have always known. However you try to describe it, Radiohead makes sense almost immediately—musically, despite complex time signatures, and emotionally, even though the words are often obscure and drenched in sound. It also makes political sense (and I don’t mean simply “Hail to the Thief”) though I didn’t realize that until reading and editing several of the essays in this book. Do you know that strangely menacing-yet-beautiful, scary-yet-uplifting sound the world makes? You’re not alone.

Creeping toward Phenomenology

If you doubt this phenomenological quality of Radiohead’s music, take stock of what their major albums are not about. Start with their breakthrough hit “Creep” from 1992. “Creep” is about adolescent despair and alienation over a girl. Indeed, there’s no phenomenology here because the song is Radiohead’s rewrite of a song written many times before about an unavailable goddess. She “floats like a feather” and her skin makes Yorke cry. But once she sees him, she runs away (because he’s “a creep, a weirdo”). And that’s it. There’s no “Pretty Woman” change of fortune here. She just keeps running and does not “come walking back” (as she does for Roy Orbison).

With one exception, “Creep” has almost nothing to do with the phenomenological tilt of post-Bends Radiohead.1 In The Bends, they began to move away from pop’s usual concerns with standard, pre-packaged experiences and emotions (romance, sex, peace-and-love (or God), rejection, denouncement, infatuation). And by Kid A, they had entirely abandoned them to explore the original qualities and textures of the world we live in. It was as if they opened a musical trap door, hidden to most pop bands, leading down below life’s ordinary stage—on which the Beatles, Stones and Roy Orbison sang about girls and Roger Waters sang about death, money, capitalism, and madness—where we can see the wires, conduits, and neuronal loops that make it possible for us perceive and have consciousness of anything at all. Down here, the ‘space-rock’ label is meaningless. Words are meaningless.

Standing on the Edge and Looking Underneath

What you hear there beneath these floorboards is often scary and intimidating. A friend of mine says the opening piano chords of “Karma Police” make the hairs on his neck stand up. I know exactly what he means. Radiohead is the only band that matters because their music, so oriented to these fundamental aspects of experience, often points to what is worrisome and foreboding in