Food. Rent. Cigarettes. Booze. All provided for by this innocuous little cd.

Since the 10th of June, my little record store, spiraling into irrelevance, bereft of life, customers and any profit potential it might once have had, has been inundated with sycophantic morons, desperate to spray my hands with the green jizz of commerce. No more are the corners of our dusty basement haunted by the local university's hippy cast-offs, eager to inquire about the latest dick's pick, nor have our local industry burnouts had room to complain about the deficiency of our Zappa selection (a mere 30 titles) during most of the week). No, not a peep. They've been banished by the rabid fans of the only band capable of awakening the sleeping hunger for vinyl and limited edition packaging capable of total disintegration during the car ride home.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the new Radiohead album has well and truly 'dropped'.

I'm sure that you don't need me to acquaint you with much of Thom Yorke and Co.'s history, still less will you have need of a limited description of their current stylings. Chances are, you already own it. And if you don't, ask yourself, does it really make a difference if this is the long awaited return to 'The Bends' style guitar pop? Or if it lives up to whatever album you consider marginally better then the others. Your friends like it, so hand me your fucking money (the paltry sum of $14.69 including tax in this case) and join the ranks of the privileged.

Don't you dare accuse me of dissing a well-liked band on the mere basis of their being well-liked. I've no intention of doing so. While I will confess that the concept of shared alienation for the sake of fashion twists my bowels into pretzels well deserving great gobs of German mustard, that's nothing new, and does nothing to detract from what is, essentially, a very well-made album. I only wish that Radiohead's music served as the proper gateway into the unknown (interesting) elements of modern music that it should be, instead of being the outer-most extreme of the average collector's cd library. And let's face it, anyone who bothers to buy more than a cd or two every six months these days qualifies as a 'collector', that's how sad things have gotten.

While no one knows for sure what daily life might be like on britain's infamous floating nation of the appearance-challanged, Gericault's The Raft of the Medusa provides a likely scenario.

But this is an old argument. The reason my little store struggles today is precisely because owning music is no longer fashionable. People, or 'morons' as I like to call them, will never be driven, en masse, to support artists deserving of their attention unless doing so will enhance their chances of getting laid. The great boom of the early nineties following the grunge explosion is dead and buried. Gone are the days when one's social status was not only enhanced but defined by the size and breadth of one's record collection. The great desperation to unearth the most underground of the underground is now found only amongst the social out-casts who created it in the first place. I don't anticipate a turn-around until the wheels of retro grants the indies another six months of livable wage sometime around 2010.

Radiohead, however, continues to thrive in the current climate. As the world-renowned anti-pop pop-band, they provide easy-access to fashionable depth-without-dedication. Personally, I'm glad they're out there. For ever thousand or so Radiohead albums sold, someone will be led to pick up the latest Pulse Programming album, or at least make the short leap to the Notwist. It doesn't make a scene, it doesn't pay my rent, but it's something.So how do they do it? How do they survive a climate which proves inhospitable to all but the most obvious and cloying of human expressions, yet remain markedly 'artistic'? I'd like to suggest that this phenomenal talent has it's roots in simple aesthetics, which brings us to a theory I call 'the ugly boat'.

Radiohead is a group of uniquely distorted humans. They are ugly, malformed, and bordering on repulsive men. I don't believe for a moment that they're out there in England, going to the grocery store, answering the telephone, or doing any of the dreary tasks most of us associate with living. No, these unfortunate fellows, I'm sad to inform you, were all shipped out to sea on in a small boat without oars or any other means of propulsion sometime in early 92.

Thom Yorke bemoans his wretched fate.

Whilst outwardly following standard western protocol and discontinuing any official sanction of eugenics, the UK still maintains some standards. It appears that following the infamous 'The Who' debacle, and the scores of unadoptable children resulting, certain provisions were put in place. To safeguard against the known stupidity of groupies, any band racking up a certain number of sales within what remains of the British Empire must be rated against a set of standards designed to protect against the 'degradation of proper British physiology'. Radiohead, faced with a failing grade on the part of all members, was driven to forced exile. In an obvious effort to court international favor during the late seventies, the British law-makers wished to avoid the possibility of creating another Frankenstein-nation of Australian proportions, and forbade the exportation of any offending parties to any known nation or landmass. The poorly defined settlement criteria resulting in the creation of several 'floating-nations' populated by a mish-mash of distorted human flesh.

Allowed ashore after a lengthy appeals-process for limited concert engagements and access to a recording studio, Radiohead has become an unwitting accomplice to the great whitewashing of the British government. They show up on dry land often enough to release the odd cd, play the odd concert, and no one's the wiser, save for the odd and alien quality to their music, which has allowed them, in one of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century's great ironies, to maintain an ever increasing hold on the general populace. Next time you sit down to listen to Yorke's mumblings, see if you can't hear the distant echoes of the rolling waves, and hear the wails of the damnably unattractive in the background. it's enough to send chills up your spine.

Fortunately for the ill-fated band members, no where is the Radiohead cult stronger than in the economically-struggling nation of Japan, where an entire generation of disenfranchised-yet-nubile females have found comfort in the sonic stylings of a few British exiles. Given Japan's notoriously shoddy border security, I wouldn't be surprised if Thom and company weren't already planning a retirement knee-deep in sushi.