This wakes me up at night. They're telling me what it is that I've done with my life, and what I should do next, and that what I think is meaningless. People want to take what I've done that means so much to millions of people and wipe me out. But this is not theirs to take from me - and I don't consider I'm a bad person.
But now an artistic group from Austin, Texas, called Silents Synced and its director Josh Frank are offering a new approach to silent cinema: showing classics to music by established stars. This one, Radiohead X Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror puts Murnau's 1922 vampire classic Nosferatu with Radiohead's Kid A from 2000 and Amnesiac from 2001. But I just couldn't make friends with this fundamentally wrong-headed idea.
Thanks to an unexpected surge in popularity on TikTok, Radiohead now has its fourth-ever song on the Billboard Hot 100: the morosely gorgeous track "Let Down" from the 1997 album OK Computer. "Let Down" never broke through to mainstream attention like Radiohead's "Creep" or "Karma Police," but it's by no means a deep cut, like the Pavement b-side "Harness Your Hopes" that went viral due to a quirk in Spotify's recommendation algorithm.
Their collaboration began in a fairly inauspicious, on-the-hoof style. For the 1994 EP My Iron Lung, they came up with the idea of videoing an actual iron lung and using a still from the ensuing footage.
