It’s hard not to think about Radiohead’s In Rainbows as a test of one my favorite quotes, from King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp: “Expectation is a prison.” Listeners tend to make assumptions about what will soon be coming from an artist based on their previous experiences. Then they’re disappointed when what they expected is not delivered, rather than leaving themselves open to the possibility of surprise.
Looking back, it’s easy to see that some expected too much when Radiohead announced that they would offer the follow up to 2003’s Hail to the Thief for pretty much any price you were willing to pay – aside from a 90 cent-or-so service fee. Given no other information, I became one of those who expected that Radiohead was thinking along the same lines as I was: We’d get some artwork of some kind, and high-bitrate mp3s.
Alas, for many of us, the reality was a bit of a “let down,” to use a Radiohead song title. The secrecy, it seemed, led many of us to get bigger ideas than Radiohead had planned.
The experience took me back to a project at my first major job, just out of college, where I’d been given free rein with my division’s website. It was all mine to do with as I pleased, and I planned on blowing everybody away with something huge, complex and beautiful. So I kept it all quiet, and when asked in meetings about it I would politely but excitedly relate that I couldn’t reveal much, but that it would be big.
It took a while. Hand-coding the HTML in notepad (because WYSIWYG editors barely even existed at the time), cutting all the images in Photoshop (and these were the days before Photoshop came packaged with tools to help you do anything for the Internet), and a lot of trial and error finally yielded a beautiful website that boasted the company colors (the vivid corporate scheme of blue and white) and many changing photos of the aircraft we proudly built.
The site was gorgeous, with rollover images and all kinds of eye-catching crap all over the place. The team was going to go nuts. I sent out the email announcing the launch. I waited and waited for the praise, but little was forthcoming aside from those I immediately worked with. The proverbial crickets scraped their legs in sympathy at me.
Shortly after this, my manager pulled me into his office and quickly set me straight. “Mr. Johnson, you don’t do this. You don’t surprise people in places like this. What people want is to be informed and to be a part of every decision. It’s a very nice site, but some of the people who work around here feel as if important input has been left out of the final product.”
As frustrated as I was, I would grow to understand what he meant. My ego got ahead of me. I wanted to be the focus of a lot of praise and good attention. Like any young kid out of college, I thought I had all the answers. I was certain of it, and I was equally certain everyone else would know it too. I was wrong.
I can’t help but look at the two situations – Radiohead’s In Rainbows launch and my floundering website – and see something similar. Radiohead kept details about the album quiet because that made it more exciting and mysterious, much as I hoped it would with my coworkers. They believed this mystery would drive people into a frenzy, and they’d want the album so badly that they couldn’t wait to pay something – whatever amount, even if it was a very small amount – just to be a part of it.
And it worked for them. People talked, people speculated, and the news certainly paid attention. Then Radiohead revealed more details a day before the downloads were to begin on Oct. 10, 2007, and many of us balked. It wasn’t the hope-for, speculated, hyped-up, paradigm shift we’d wanted. Radiohead was simply releasing some middlin’ quality mp3s, not the higher bitrates we’d hoped to see.
Expectation is a prison, and it goes both ways when it comes to music. As fans, we shouldn’t ask our favorite artists to turn out exactly what we want, and the artists shouldn’t assume that we’re going to understand or agree with their every move or decision. These expectations can hold us back, preventing us from truly seeing what can be.
Physical editions of In Rainbows arrived a couple of months later. By then, fans had settled in and simply listened to the new music. Based on that alone, it ended up being a great album. After all the pre-release hype, In Rainbows has been in heavy rotation for me, and for many of you, for ages.
Nevertheless, the initial annoyance back then was very real. I didn’t have the notoriety or fame to pull off something big, being just a young web designer at the time – but Radiohead did.
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