I think it's important to remember that over the past ten years, romantic love/lust, usually described in a way that is clearly occurring outside a long term relationship context, has become the main theme, at times even the only theme of Radiohead, and unfortunately, fans' fear of gossip has allowed this radical change in Thom's songwriting method (which may have been purely artistic and nothing to do with his life, at least initially) to go almost unnoticed. Our fear of overstepping the accepted bounds within the anti-gossip indie culture, actually did a disservice to Thom as an artist, because although I don't think anyone would say he is the best lyricist ever on the topic of infidelity, the lyrics of IR and TKOL were a very powerful exploration of the idea of selling one's soul, or trying to recover one's lost paradise, using that metaphor, which was universal and had political and environmental readings as well. We were so fucking scared (for fear of connecting anything to Thom's personal life) of publicly stating the obvious- these albums are about sex, and probably not marital sex- that we neglected to respect the art by analyzing it in the same depth as his earlier, less overtly sexual work.

Something similar is actually going on with my favorite artist right now, Grimes. She isn't talking about romantic desire (she already did that on Visions), but she is talking about another controversial issue that could be sensationalized as mere gossip- her fights with the indie scene and the pop scene over ideology and economics and sexual equality. Sadly, those of us who know about what inspired some of the songs on Art Angels, cannot really talk about it, because we don't want to overstep any boundaries and spread any social media gossip that might hurt her. Only indie fans (which mostly still describes Grimes' audience at this point, as well as Radiohead's core fans) are so careful about avoiding anything gossipy, that we actually end up underselling our favorite artists' work by neglecting to analyze their art in the depth it deserves. Both The King of Limbs and Art Angels for example, have been widely dismissed as having weak lyrics or at least meaningless lyrics (although AA was critically acclaimed overall). This is untrue. They have great lyrics. As a fan of these artists with enough sense of their past (having read every interview etc) to speculate reasonably the type of things they are expressing lyrically, I "know" what these albums are expressing, and that they are expressing something very meaningful (for the culture at large, not just about the songwriter), but I cannot say that, because indeed certain songs are personally inspired, and as a fan I would never want to be the one who breaks that story that gets turned into gossip.

That's why more private ways of sharing interpretations with fans of your favorite artists are essential. I don't want my speculations of who "Flesh Without Blood" is dissing or who "Lotus Flower" could be lusting after, to become some kind of news that ends up hurting the artist (hell, I also don't want to even hurt the person they're writing about). So if I have an idea (please note, I do about FWB but NOT about LF) I won't put that on social media. But sadly it does limit album discussions when we can't feel free to (privately) speculate. Joni Mitchell's Last Time I Saw Richard becomes a more devastating, not less, masterpiece if you are aware that Detroit is where she and her ex husband lived and "Richard" may be her husband Chuck. The song then still seems equally apocalyptic with its riot-suggestive "68" and "Detroit," but add this together with the knowledge it's about the failure of the most ancient social institution that exists, marriage, and there isn't a single sense of pretense left in what might have seemed like merely clever "now I shall satirize bourgeois society" lines about percolators, figure skaters. It's inaccurate to say Joni (or Thom or Grimes') work is "confessional," as if all great art isn't that (knowingly or not) but with truly great art you get a deeper sense of it if you know the background of its creation. We would probably respect King of Limbs (and even Grimes fans would respect Art Angels) more if we could acknowledge some "gossipy" things. But then it's a tossup, do we risk hurting the artist personally, or encouraging the media to dig and do that? No, we don't, cause we're indie fans and we reject gossip. However, the sad thing is eventually (as with Thom and Rachel) the media will dig anyway, and then we'll suddenly realize we're five and ten years late in even trying to interpret a song we were afraid to touch until the media did their gossip thing first and made it okay.

It's not hard to see why Thom doesn't do interviews anymore, and why Grimes rarely says anything about what her songs mean. The best outcome for an indie artist is the "it's up to you, no it's really up to you" attitude toward song interpretation. It will result in a lot of complete nonsense theories but one thing the indie artist can feel sure of is, their fans will not allow any true discussion of what the song is likely to be about (aka, "gossip") and best case scenario, it may take the media years to realize the fans are hiding a juicy truth they could investigate.