The Goldfish Chronicles

One of the comments to the In Rainbows album by Radiohead discusses it against their other albums - Kid A, Hail to the Thief, OK Computer. None of them albums that I listen to (I think I have OK Computer, probably not the other two). I think of myself as a Radiohead fan, but that means I like Pop is Dead, Pablo Honey and The Bends.

I got in the same situation for the Manic Street Preachers. Gold against the Soul, Holy Bible and Generation Terrorists were my favourites. The newer stuff I stopped listening to.

My immediate thought on reading the review as that I was feeling old. Then I felt like one of those people who goes to some band’s concert and complains all the time that <insert early and unknown song here> as their greatest - highly irritating people. So maybe I’m being hypocritical. I guess the saving grace is realizing I’m not a Radiohead fan anymore -it was only the $5 offer on Amazon that made me check out the album’s preview.

All of this is waffle. Much of it is down to the first impression. Favourite Radiohead album? Pablo Honey. First Radiohead album I got? Why Pablo Honey. Same applies for many other situations I suspect. Best programming language? Why the one I first learnt, or first did huge amounts in etc. Why? Because there are pathways in my brain that have been imbued with its style. With the Manics my preference is for any of the first three albums - but again they’re the first three I got, and it makes sense that they’d be the most similar to each other.

I think there are two interesting things in this:

The first is when first impressions overrides logic.  My favourite Queen albums? A Kind of Magic (first one I owned) and then Queen II (second one I owned), with over a decade between them. First impressions itself is the important concept - not the fact that you are syncing with a band at a particular range of their career.

The second is that these things get bucketed. Liking 3 Queen albums appears to stop a 4th one pushing its way in - but it didn’t stop me liking the 1st Radiohead album. I’ve catalogued the albums and limited what can go in that space, while allowing other items to go in other spaces.

The third is that 3 seems to be the size of the bucket Bit sad in the “people can think of 3 to 7 things”, I’m on 3.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 1st, 2009 at 9:07 pm and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.