Twenty Years After Pablo Honey

Both Entertainment Weekly and Stereogum had pieces this week about the 20th anniversary of Pablo Honey, which was Friday 2/22. Now, I know I must not be very sophisticated since most of my favorite Radiohead albums were early ones. I think they peaked with OK Computer. But this album had some kind of alt-pop melody that has stuck with me, and being very nearly 17 when it came out, it stuck with me. And "Creep" was the song that most people still remember and associate with Radiohead, and I forever will associate it with Guitar Hero. It was "complaint rock," ala Clueless. Fake Plastic Trees was such a Gen X song. Then came the Bends, and the band eventually became this larger than media Radiohead. 

EW was way harsher, but the album did have some positives. Says Stereogum:

So we didn’t know what Radiohead had in store back then, and listening to Pablo Honey, I get the feeling that they didn’t know either. It’s an album very much of its time — pure alt-pop, full of fuzzy but memorable-enough melodies and extremely early-’90s production choices. It’s a perfectly solid album and at times a very good one. A song like “Stop Whispering” shows that they had festival-ready grandeur in them, though they weren’t ready to show it very consistently. Greenwood’s raggedly melodic, Mascis-indebted guitar solos were some of the best of the era. Yorke’s high notes could raise shiver-bumps. But the whole affair feels slight — and this was in a moment when classic albums seemed to be dropping every month.

Few first albums are perfect, but what they produced back in 1993, when grunge was at its zenith, was pretty lasting. And I do think the album has held out well, and yeah, I'm a fan of "Stop Whispering" and "Thinking About You." And this early fandom led me to one Radiohead concert, infamous in it being a typical Merriweather Clusterf%#&. But it was worth it. Happy birthday, Pablo Honey.