Ex Post Facto: Albums That Your Older Sister Used to Revolt Against the Government With

Radiohead
Pablo Honey
Capitol Records
1993

Radiohead's first album Pablo Honey (1993) is an often overlooked but essential introduction to the Radiohead canon. The venerable Steven Thomas Erelwine wrote in a review of the album for allmusic.com that on their debut, Radiohead "has difficulty writing a set of songs … as compelling as their sound, but when they do hit the mark-such as on "Anyone Can Play Guitar," "Blow Out," and the self-loathing breakthrough single "Creep"-the band achieves a rare power that is both visceral and intelligent." It's hard to build on this excellent Apollonian depiction of Radiohead, except to point out that the more immediate lyrics on the album illuminate the foundation of a compelling political theme throughout the superior pre-millennial albums: nineteen ninety-five's The Bends and nineteen ninety-eight's OK Computer. Seemingly reliable lyrics to all their albums can be found at www.greenplastic.com/lyrics, by the way.

For today's liberal arts student, the two verses of the album's third track "How Do You?" might well seem to be about President George W. Bush. First verse: "He's bitter and twisted, he knows what he wants / He wants to be loved and he wants to belong / He wants you to listen, he wants us to weep / And he was a stupid baby who turned into a powerful freak." Second verse: "He lives with [First Lady Laura Bush], but we show him respect / He's a dangerous bigot, but we always forget / And he's just like his daddy, 'cause he cheats on his friends / And he steals and he bullies, any way that he can." Since the album was written in 1993, however, this almost certainly not the case.

Because Great Britain technically remains a constitutional monarchy, perhaps "How Do You?" is instead about some modern prince, or else the Communist spectre itself, which Gramsci speculated had become "the modern prince." Whether the listener chooses to interpret the "he" of the song as just one horrible man or an entire political-economic system of exploitation (planned centralism, not laissez-faire capitalism in this context) is largely up to you, dear consumer.

Pablo Honey derives its callow (or else laconic?) title from a Jerky Boys' prank call skit in which a male falsetto voice says "Pablo, honey, please come to Florida" over the telephone to an unsuspecting man named Pablo. A clip of this skit is sampled toward the end of "How Do You?" during the guitar solo. Listen for it as you ponder how smart and savvy this British foursome actually is, even in the group's adolescence. Nineteen ninety-three was an adolescent year for many of us, making this album particularly prescient in retrospect.

Other lyrical gems include "Soul destroyed with clever toys for little boys;" "I'm not a veg'table / I will not control myself / I spit on the hand that feeds me / I will not control myself;" "Oh it's inevitable, inevitable, oh aeroplane / A thousand miles an hour / On politics and power / That she don't understand;" and "You're so fucking special / I wish I was special."