"In Rainbows"

15 Years Later and Thoughts on Identity

I have finally started listening to Radiohead. I don’t necessarily think that this fact alone is interesting to anyone. However, I used to know that I hated Radiohead and this album. After hearing snippets of it while my brother, William, first listened to it, I decided that this band was not for me. I would simply never be a person who understood why “In Rainbows” was so popular. This was when I was 11 years old, but the identity stuck until after my 26th birthday.

This is a microcosm of my developing thoughts on identity. Identity is limiting. I thought that I was a person who did not like Radiohead and found myself refusing to listen for 15 years due to this image of myself that I had created while going through puberty.

Another musical identity that I found myself trapped in was “hating” Bluegrass music. I have a faint memory of being in the car William and my mom and William declaring that he hated Bluegrass as it was playing on the radio and my mom agreeing. I held the thought that I was of a family that did not like Bluegrass until I was out of college and had already stripped away some long held ideas of who I was.

Ideas of who we are will keep us from far more things than music genres or albums. Next time that a feeling of resistance to an activity or belief is felt, it should be met with skepticism and a fresher perspective on who we can be, not simply who we think that we are.

P.S. “In Rainbows” is, in fact, quite a good album.