Sometimes I get exhausted just thinking about writing about something about which so many other people have already written, or about something so zeitgeisty. This is one of those times. Nothing I say is really going to change the music or sway anyone’s opinion of it or even contribute anything remotely useful. It’s just going to add to the noise.

But my feelings are largely positive, if that counts for anything, so maybe I’m adding to the noise in a positive way. Here is some random noise.

I predict that “How much did you pay for it?” will join such other questions as “Who did you vote for?” and “Where were you on September 11?” in the annals of Big, Loaded, Zeitgeisty Questions. It will get trivialized in year-end pop-culture roundups, and the Onion will do something about it, and it will probably get tiresome way before that. Before it does, I’ll give you my answer: Ten dollars.

I was initially going to pay five dollars. Here’s why I upped the price: By the time I got home from school at dinnertime and sat down at my computer, the servers had crashed under the weight of eleven billion people trying to use them all at once, and I decided to go the ethically gray route of obtaining it via BitTorrent. (By the way, is it really ethically gray, if one has the above-the-board option of paying zero dollars for it? Get on the case, IP lawyers.)

By the time the servers were back up and I decided to purchase the album, I raised my price to ten dollars. (Actually, GBP£5.45 [five pounds plus "transaction fees"], or US$11.12.) Why? Because by then I’d listened to the album about half a dozen times and decided the songs were worth at least a dollar each.

Why did I even bother to pay for it when I already had it? I honestly don’t know. It’s not like the band needs the money. I paid ten dollars for it because it felt important. It felt correct. It felt zeitgeisty.

And another thing: Radiohead albums should only be released in the fall. This dark, claustrophobic sound doesn’t belong in the spring; certainly not the summer. Maybe that’s why Kid A is my favorite. Maybe they should release an album every fall. That’s an agenda I could get behind.

This afternoon I was in my office on campus and I heard loud but muffled music coming from either somewhere in the building or perhaps outside. My officemates heard it too, and after a few minutes I concluded that it must be an In Rainbows listening party because the upper registers sounded like Thom Yorke’s voice. I think the words I used at the time were “the mewling and howling of Tom Yorke’s voice.”

That moment also felt important and correct and zeitgeisty. We hear stories about the listening parties held on the day Sgt Pepper’s came out. That doesn’t happen anymore, for a lot of reasons. I guess I had tiny listening parties for Vs and The Downward Spiral and Change, but they weren’t really listening parties as much as depressed people sitting in a small, dark room. Actually, that sounds pretty appropriate in this context, too.

I don’t know. This band has done something really important and correct and zeitgeisty here. I’m just not sure what, or why, that is.