Creep

As a kid, the bands I sparked to tended toward the embarrassing and overloved. I skipped class once to go to a Cake concert in Austin. Benjamin Gibbard and Conor Oberst fought for a place in the discman attached to the tape deck in my Volvo 240 DL. I knew who Death Cab for Cutie was pre-Postal Service, and I have the We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes tee-shirt to prove it.

In college, I pretended to hate the music I liked so that the boys I liked would like me back. I didn't understand yet that boys who ask you out because you listen to Gang Gang Dance instead of Mirah are not the kind of boys that anyone should date. For whatever reason, the one group that seemed to find approval across the spectrum was Radiohead. It is my experience that not many people will admit to not liking (or even feeling indifferent to) Thom Yorke. I think this trailer from the Social Network, which, by now, I'm assuming everyone has seen, goes a long way toward explaining why:

I remember sixth grade, a friend of mine reciting these same lyrics mournfully into the phone at four in the morning. The girl he was in love with (a mutual friend) had broken up with him, and my friend wanted to know if it was because he was unlovable, too skinny, not quite witty enough, and so on. Over the course of that six-hour long conversation, I came to understand that self-loathing is, in itself, a particular kind of narcissism. A different strain of narcissism keeps the Facebook engine running, but it's narcissism all the same, something the creators of this trailer obviously get. It's difficult to imagine a more apt soundtrack for the particular elements of the current cultural moment that this film so expertly critiques. There's a reason everyone loves Radiohead, but what the impact of this trailer suggests is that it might not be the reason we assume.