When I logged in to my old Usenet provider a couple of weeks back, I found all the groups I used to frequent still waiting for me there, most of them showing the maximum number of messages possible. I checked out the religious one (bickering) and the we’re-all-crazy-here one (alt.mindcontrol: I recommend their archive enthusiastically and without reservation), and then I went into alt.music.black-metal to see what I could see. It’s a group that hosts some of the more interesting threads on Usenet, though it’s also home base for a lot of pimply Springer-show hopefuls who’ve got schoolboy crushes on the Waffen SS, making it a potentially very irritating place to be, since people who’ve read too much Nietzsche simply never get tired of arguing the same boring points over and over again. I stumbled rather quickly into a discussion where the name Radiohead was getting tossed around a little, and found one of the more thoughtful newsgroup regulars dismissing Radiohead as Pink Floyd redux, whereupon I picked a fight, accusing the post’s author of having copped his take from mainstream press outlets, since anybody who’s listened to Radiohead at all knows that there are exactly no similarities between themselves and the Floyd. But the guy, whose name is Maarten, didn’t want to fight. Instead he did an amazing thing. Intrigued by my zeal in defending Radiohead against the oft-repeated, never-justified neo-Floyd tag, he went and gave Amnesiac a close, careful listening and reported back on what he’d found.

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