Taking The Leap
Part of the reason I love the band, Radiohead, is that they have a complete disregard for conventional musical norms.
They’ve had numerous hit albums since the early Nineties but none of them have followed any sort of predictable pattern.
For most bands, scoring a massive success such as The Bends - their edgy, alternative sophomore rock album - would have led to a progressive evolution of that successful sound. Maybe a creative push or an adventurous tilt on this or that song, but, in the main, it would have been progressive steps forward, in search of another hit.
Radiohead didn’t do that - they took the path of wholesale change. They junked their entire sound and experimented.
They wrote an album about alienation and the emerging implications of technology to create OK Computer, in 1997. It was a massive risk, in the commercial sense, but also an incredible creative tilt that is now regarded by many as one of the greatest albums ever made.
That doesn’t happen in a Paint By Numbers scenario. It doesn’t happen by taking small steps. It happens in jumps. It happens when you are guided by an ethos more than you are by numbers. It happens when you stop worrying about being liked and accepted and more by a focus on the work.
We all want and aspire to that and we may even be intellectually committed to the idea. But actually taking that step is difficult emotionally.
Because it demands commitment at a very transactional level - it requires action. It demands that we stop intellectualizing and start doing - without any guarantee of a return.
As difficult, it also requires taking the risk of not being accepted. It requires an understanding that what we offer will not be viewed or received in the way we believe it should. And that’s a hard thing to grapple with.
That’s the thing about taking risks, I suppose. You’re doing something out of the norm, and you don’t know what will happen. That uncertainty is part and parcel of the deal.
But, at the same time, it’s also why the potential return (however you want to define it) is so much higher.
