Will you fight? Or will you perish like a dog?

It seems there's a time in every white, male, middle class, suburban millennial's life where we, usually around the age of 13, fall in love with Radiohead. It's a perfectly natural reaction. Their melodramatic, angst-ridden screeds against vague ideas of corporate evil and heads of state fit perfectly into our newly minted interests in things we can hardly begin to understand. But you don't need to understand much to fully appreciate being holed up in your bedroom listening to Let Down on blast on our iPod alarm clock radio while thinking about your crush in Algebra who looked at you for a full 2 seconds that day. For their part, Radiohead has done well in transitioning these 13 y/os with burgeoning interests in music to transition to less juvenile acts. They've aped Talking Heads, Sonic Youth, Can, etc and thusly led their teenage fans down that road. Fast forward to their latest, 'A Moon Shaped Pool', and Radiohead seem to have given up on appropriating genuinely interesting music in favor of rehashing what sounds like a mishmash of Coldplay's greatest hits. For any well-learned, well-listened educated person the fact that the album is bad is not surprising. Radiohead have never produced a genuinely good album in their careers. But, still, they served a valuable purpose in the lives of music fans by leading them to greener pastures. With their ninth record instead they give them the finger and point to A.M.-radio-Superbowl-halftime-life-insurance-commercial ""rock"" music. Rock in scare quotes because as much as they still retain their love for guitars and drums and bass this is the most flaccid sound ever produced from an ostensibly uproarious art form. I mean, Steely Dan managed to make tepid rock music sound nice by combining it with white-people-jazz and a supreme ear for melody but I can't say anything as redeeming for this heap Radiohead has put out. It's mid-tempo background music for 50 minutes. I almost don't want to call this music. 'Music' has the import of art. This sounds like computer-generated sound for playing in department stores meant to keep young shoplifters out of the store by boring them to tears.

/c/opypasta database[pastebin.com]