  Actually, apparently not. I previously posted this over on a different blog. But apparently nobody wants a mixtape over there. So they're still just sitting around gathering dust. Come on, people! Who doesn't want free mixtapes?
Listen to them! Trade them! Pass them off as your own to that cute girl from Biology class! I guarantee results! Furthermore, in the interest of something or other, I present this post in an alternate version. A version which I will edit once again when I am not so fucking tired.
The first ten people to urlLink email me with GIMME FREE SHIT in the subject: header* will get themselves their very own free mixtape as composed by yours truly, duplicated and thrown in a mailbox by Saturday afternoon. I guarantee you quality; I do not guarantee you stuff you like or recognize. I reserve the right to fix you up with mixtapes composed as early as 1994. This may involve ska. It may involve Bauhaus. It will involve Mocket.
I also reserve the right to fix you up with mixtapes composed as recently as tomorrow afternoon, probably starting around four p.m. or so after I get back from the RIFIAS library if I'm not too damn tired. Why are you damned people not listening to more Mocket**? They've managed to do your beloved Ladytron, Broadcast, Le Tigre, etcetera one better***, by getting their facts on the ground in a timelier fashion. And they're punk as all hell. Even though more likely than not you'll be getting "First Screening" which while attitudinally punk as fuck, is musically pure stasis. I love "First Screening".
I love it so fucking much that I seem to have some sort of sick compulsion to put it on every mixtape I make. I consider it a personal victory against this particular backmonkey when I convince myself to make do with, say, "Bionic Parts" or "New Maps Of Hell". I must also guard against "Halo". "Halo" is to "First Screening" as methadone is to heroin. For all its supposed virtue all it does is leave you wanting the hard stuff. The genius of "First Screening" lies in three interlocking fields: (the deadpan, monotone, anonymously American vocals) deliver (a nonnarrative of absolute depersonalization) over (a trancelike synthesizer drone).
"Karma Police" partakes of something of the heroic; from the quiet, almost plainspoken introduction it surges into a near-falsetto, tragic chorus: "For a minute, I lost myself". The implication naturally is that the self has been lost, but also subsequently regained. It suggests a setting: The narrator (feel free to picture Thom Yorke in the role; this identification is almost mandated by the logic of the music video as a genre), bloodied but unbowed, his face shiny with the sweat and grime of his struggle, emoting against the Sturm und Drang of the refrain, possibly represented by a black backdrop, or the night sky. The appearance of the actual video is irrelevant here. "First Screening" also suggests a setting: Our narrator wears an ill-fitting new suit (and a Hitler hairdo?). The pulse of outmoded synthesizers suggests a placid interior location, maybe an office.
Certainly the walls of this interior are pastel blue, clinical white, or some such nonthreatening color. The narrator's explicit reference to loss of memory implies loss of self. Rather than rail against this loss of self (which is fundamentally impossible - there would be no self present to comment on its own subsumption) the narrator accepts it as fact, which is the only logical course open to her. "First Screening" exposes "Karma Police" as fascist. Given the nature of Radiohead's career, particularly its relationship to a massive audience, this is unsurprising. Radiohead have failed dramatically in their attempts to subvert their status as "rock stars".
Thom Yorke is an easily-identifiable personage. Most importantly, their attempts to defuse the machinery of rock stardom by issuing gnomic, "political", and "difficult" statements have (from a certain perspective) completely backfired. By commenting as Radiohead do from the bully pulpit of the "arty English stadium rocker" they merely reinforce the idea that a "serious artist" is expected to have "difficult ideas" and furthermore the idea that leaders of culture necessarily have important things to say that must be taken seriously. Radiohead's " Nolo episcopari ", no matter how vehemently clung to on record or in the press, is everything a nolo episcopari ever was: less a denial than a formula of acceptance. Radiohead as a public idea is constructed in large part around the image of Thom Yorke as an individual - the individual who is the source of all of the group's pronunciamenti. As noted above, Radiohead do absolutely nothing to subvert the typical equation made in the modern pop song of vocalist with narrator, either in the songs themselves or in their promotional videos.
This means that through such songs as "Karma Police" and through the overall public presentation that Radiohead have devised for themselves Thom Yorke is posited as an almost generic Romantic hero. You can see where this is going by now, can't you? He is the only man alive who will combat the demons of the modern age, and his ability to resist those demons is superhuman. It's enough to make a person doubt that the lyrics to "Paranoid Android" are ironic. *Just so you know, there is no way in hell I will ever sell or transfer your personal information or any portion thereof to anyone anywhere at any time for any fuckin' reason whatsoever****. Also if your subject header does not read GIMME FREE SHIT I will ignore your message, no matter how bestest of pals we may or may not be.
I don't give stuff to people who are above a little casual cussin'. **I cribbed this locution from Last Plane To Jakarta . ***I cribbed this one from High Fidelity . ****Actually, if you write in with anything remotely resembling moronic "HOW CAN U HAET RADIOHED THEYRR AWSUM" crap you are thereby expressly giving me permission to both (a) sign you up for every single porn and religious spam list there is and (b) write your home and cell phone number on every bathroom stall in North America. 
