Apparently Radiohead Controls the Universe

Growing up, I was handed music like the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and Bob Dylan. It was music that furnished every cliché...defining of the era, the fulcrum upon which generations rested and turned, anthems that even a shoddy parent could one day play for their children as they grew up in their specific care.

I don't know which point in my future tenure of fatherhood will be the healthiest for me to begin to play Radiohead for my son or daughter, but when it comes, he or she (or both) will be granted the soundtrack to my generation.

And when I isolate one moment of my music-tending life, it will be the night I saw Radiohead at an outdoor concert in Grant Park before Chicago's skyline. It was the first night of August. It was a major election year and that dominated everything. It was the summer before I wrote my first book. I had recently turned twenty-seven, which in my generation, was still considered young.

I stood with some 80,000 people and watched a band set so firmly in its stead that it played every single track from its newest album (an album fans could purchase by paying whatever they felt like paying)... despite of a widely celebrated catalogue of six other albums.

Radiohead is a band that is exactly where it wants to be and on that night, I felt the exact same way. The heat of the summer had dissipated as they played the hauntingly effusive song Nude --- one of the top four best tracks of their newest album (yes, that is a qualifier, the album is that good) -- and it was indeed the best song to hear while you watch the sun go down over the skyline of Chicago.

During this, a few concertgoers who were too drunk or addled by drugs or sunstroke passed my place in the crowd, and others standing by me actually shouted at them for leaving, telling them that they were making a mistake and that they would regret leaving the show.

The show had more spices of the absurd than this. Beyond the music, the weather, the sunset, and the skyline, there was a gauze of strange camaraderie amid such a large crowd. Anyone who wanted water, marijuana, cigarettes found a happy sponsor; my best friend beside me in the crowd without any effort found the ugliest girl at Lollapalooza and made out with her without conversing with her at all.

Right before Everything In Its Right Place, the first track on Radiohead's groundbreaking Kid A album, fireworks randomly broke out in the sky behind the stage.

The crowd thought it was being treated to some greater choreography by the band and as the fireworks display went on through the first song and into the next song, the ballad (and personal favorite) Fake Plastic Trees, a moment came where the fireworks display hit its grand finale just as the song itself was reaching its sonic climax....which looked like this:

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If you've got the time to spare for the whole shabang, fireworks and music, it's low-resolution (and noisy), but the final moments are great and I'll tell you why.

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It was not choreographed. For weeks after this show, blogs fawned over and lambasted the fireworks. They were a hubristic distraction or the ultimate summer concert augmenter. It was later revealed that the random fireworks display was for something else entirely unrelated, the Chicago Bears Preseason Kickoff Family Picnic or some other such nonsense.

What does this mean? Well, nothing. Fireworks broke out before a song titled Everything In Its Right Place, a song about interpersonal dissonance that was being played by a band as optimistic and proficient as ever. The fireworks set just happened to finish in time for the penultimate moment of the song Fake Plastic Trees , a lyrical exegesis of which would point out that majority of the song's theme -- describing the cumbersome burdens of human experience -- had just concluded and the crescendo of fireworks ushered in the explosive glimmer of possibility that the song's last minute embodies. Watch it if you don't believe me!

Later, during a punk-heavy/James Bond theme-twinged version of the song Jigsaw Falling Into Place a traffic helicopter swirled above the crowd, showering its light on the crowd.

Finally, the song Optimistic finished off the first encore, a fog from Lake Michigan emerged behind us and rolled its way across the sky. It carried through the park, as the second encore began. The cold mess of haze crossed the stage during the song 2+2=5 as the song ended with its soaking indictment:

Oh go and tell the king that the sky is falling in
when it's not
but it's not
but it's not
maybe not.

This is exactly how it happened. Ask anyone else who was there.