The sound of the world running, falling, cascading into the twenty-first century. A millenial masterpiece. There is no artist or group of artists that could replicate this song, let alone approach the strangeness of its aesthetic. Fill a room with the world's greatest lyricists, musicians, and beatmakers, and rest assured they would not come out with a song so exciting, so depressing, so listenable, so danceable, so devastating.
No other song united (and divided) throngs of musicheads more than "Idioteque." For many listeners between the ages of say 21-38, they haven't lived until they've heard this song performed live (yours truly included). Live, you say? Yes, it can be done. The song's spectral power is like watching human mediums channel sounds from some other world. Or maybe the future. Potent, strange, and altogether brilliant.
To this day, The D Man is still trying to figure out how the best guitar band of the Nineties was capable of conceiving and producing this song (and many others for that matter). The only answer: genius. Not genius like "That Star Trek film was genius," or genius like "That funny Youtube clip is genius." But bona-fide, of-the-ages genius. Like Shakespeare. Monet. Mozart. The kind of genius that demands a cognitive power greater than our own.
Women and children first. I laugh until my head comes off. Ice age coming. Let me hear both sides. Take the money and run. Never have such perfectly oblique non-sequiturs been set to such a chilling and moving musical backdrop. The pulsating lynchpin to the decade's most important album, "Idioteque" just may be the sound of the twenty-second century if we ever get there.
Album version:
Studio version:
Live version:
Why listen? We listen, if not frequently and often unknowingly, to find a mind more original than our own. Radiohead is that musical consciousness. This decade the band deconstructed the ego on Kid A and then reinvented the human on In Rainbows. Because "Idioteque" will expand your consciousness by the shear force of its apocalyptic sound and vision, you should listen. To not recognize the astonishing inventiveness of this song is a complete failure to participate in that one nature that sings and listens.
Something else? "There, There," "15 Step," "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi," "All I Need," "Videotape."
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