Radiohead’s “OK Computer” Turns Twenty-Five
When Radiohead introduced their third album, “OK Laptop,” on May 21, 1997, they were being a band that a typical indie-rock lover would know—but probably not effectively. The band’s one “Creep,” from their 1993 début, “Pablo Honey,” invested 50 percent the calendar year on the British charts, peaking at No. 7—and it created them famed. “Creep” was an infectious anthemic ballad of self-loathing with a sing-together chorus. Its pop energy derives from a stark sonic contrast that’s at the heart of many of Radiohead’s most effective music: the aural clash of Thom Yorke’s brittle, ethereal voice against an instrumental clean of noisy menace: “I’m a creep / I’m a weirdo / What the hell am I accomplishing right here? / I do not belong right here.” The song’s level of popularity typecast the band in strategies that they struggled to break no cost from, much as “Smells Like Teenager Spirit” had accomplished to Nirvana previously, and for pretty much seven years, Radiohead refused to enjoy “Creep” at their exhibits.
The 5-piece from Oxford, England (Yorke, lead vocals and guitar Ed O’Brien, guitar the brothers Jonny Greenwood, guitar, and Colin Greenwood, bass and Phil Selway, drummer) experienced declared on their fourth single that “Pop Is Dead” what, exactly, would change it was not nevertheless obvious. But Radiohead’s three-guitar attack, and their penchant for elaborate arrangements and soaring choruses, furnished a framework for the band to make on. Their up coming album, “The Bends,” from 1995, is a much richer and extra self-assured history, but without the need of a significant radio-friendly hit. Had the band called it quits, Radiohead would probably be remembered as a mid-listing act from the nineties who relished a devoted pursuing but for whom commercial good results remained elusive.
Then “OK Computer” arrived. According to Selway, the band’s label was to begin with nonplussed when they listened to it: “When we 1st shipped the album to Capitol, their very first response was, additional or much less, ‘Commercial suicide.’ They weren’t really into it. At that issue, we bought The Concern. How is this heading to be obtained?” Irrespective of the label’s reservations, they put appreciable marketing and advertising muscle driving “OK Personal computer,” shopping for complete-web site adverts in the British new music press. The promotional marketing campaign was served by the album’s exclusive visible style—smudged, generic human figures alongside with airline security-brochure visuals, superimposed on a ghostly freeway interchange rendered in a bleak wash of bone white and pale blue—created by the artist Stanley Donwood in collaboration with Yorke. (That type, and the Donwood/Yorke collaboration, will be on screen at the London gallery display “Test Specimens” later on this month.)
Yorke’s opening strains on the song “Lucky” proved prophetic: “I’m on a roll / I’m on a roll this time . . . ” “OK Computer” was greeted as an quick vintage, and Radiohead was named band of the year by both Rolling Stone and Spin. “OK Computer” can be loosely described as a principle album: a tune cycle unified by the late-capitalist affective landscape that it at the same time mirrors and reproduces in a listener. It’s a document that’s nervous just about to the level of neurosis, saturated in enervated dread with touches of surrealist poetry, whole of the uneasy power that would characterize the best of Radiohead’s subsequent perform. Meanwhile, somehow—miraculously—“OK Computer” also manages to be anthemic, to realize transcendence.
At instances, the album flirts with bombast, strolling ideal up to the edge and from time to time teetering about, which is how rock and pop documents typically obtain true grandeur. The band had accomplished it already in the closing verse of the track “Fake Plastic Trees,” from “The Bends,” when Yorke suddenly drops the mask of the 3rd particular person voice that he has been employing for the rest of the tune and despairs, “If I could be who you wanted . . . all the time.” (In Radiohead’s work, these transcendent moments are usually underwritten by Yorke’s falsetto.) While Yorke sings on “OK Computer” that “ambition helps make you seem very unpleasant,” ambition is a threat that the album can take once again and once more. Radiohead worries a pop audience with genuine musical complexity—and therein betrays its debts to that most ridiculed of pop genres, progressive rock (whose impact the band unconvincingly disavows).
All the things about the creation of “OK Computer” indicates a band building a large statement—from the grandiose preparations to the segués (tracks stream into and overlap with a person an additional in a way that discourages hitting shuffle) and the haunting album artwork. It’s what Alex Ross, who wrote about the band for this magazine in 2001, may contact a Gesamtkunstwerk: Richard Wagner’s “total art perform.” And using over it all is Yorke’s fragile nevertheless insistent voice, seemingly the weakest, smallest voice still loud more than enough to be listened to in excess of the din of a society collapsing on itself—a culture in which the person is much less than the sum of her preferences, desires, and purchases.
The distorted opening guitar chords of the very first observe, “Airbag,” are immediately punctuated by even additional grotesquely overdriven percussion, knocking the VU needle into the purple with an urgent burst of skittering sound. It’s a substantial-strength introduction to an album showcasing a large variety of tempi and sounds. It also introduces a six-and-a-50 %-moment pop epic that has a similarly extensive array of timings and tones. Unless your playback product cheats you, “Airbag” doesn’t pretty conclusion right before “Paranoid Android” starts as an alternative, as the past notes of the 1st tune fade, an audible click-monitor counts us right into the next, with no possibility for us to catch our breath. To hear the customers of the band notify it, “Paranoid Android”—probably their most legendary song—began as a goof it is a music that, in trying to poke pleasurable at the band’s significant-art pretensions, improbably manages to build large art.
“Paranoid Android” is a mini-symphony in 3 parts—cobbled jointly from 3 various music, à la the Beatles’s “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” (in Radiohead’s case, each just one composed by a different band member). It opens with Yorke singing, around a bossa-nova-like accompaniment, about paranoia—the “unborn chicken voices in my head.” A distinctive 2nd segment, starting all over the two-moment mark, mocks ambition and threatens retribution in opposition to the formidable in excess of a inflammation arrangement, ending with a squealing Greenwood guitar solo. At the 3-and-a-50 %-moment mark, the third segment markedly slows items down, ushered in with choral buzzing that is nearly Gregorian. Yorke’s lyric “rain down on me . . . from a wonderful height” manages, even so unconsciously, to invoke the Who’s “Love, Reign O’er Me,” from “Quadrophenia”: the promise and the perils of the concept album are in no way much off.
The upcoming observe, “Subterranean Homesick Alien,” weds the Bob Dylan vibe of its title to a Ziggy Stardust-like narrative. “Exit Audio (For a Movie)”—a keep track of that was created for Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo + Juliet”—starts in a near-whisper and crescendos in screaming it is as chilling and as wonderful as nearly anything the band has at any time accomplished, even if it finishes with Yorke croaking, “We hope that you choke, that you choke.” Sitting close to the center of the album, the spoken-term monitor “Fitter Happier” is a twisted listing of the types of day by day affirmations written by Ben Franklin or Stuart Smalley, adapted for the alienated write-up-industrial subject, read through aloud by Fred, a robotic laptop-generated voice created by Apple.
The album’s icy nadir, “Climbing Up the Walls,” is just about physically unpleasant to pay attention to its temper is designed, in significant component, by Greenwood’s string arrangement, which incorporates sixteen violins, every single taking part in a quarter-tone apart from the other folks. The album’s nearer, “The Vacationer,” is its just one true skip. Without the need of “The Vacationer,” we’d have an eleven-keep track of album with a astonishing uroboros construction, opening on a grateful singer proclaiming that “an airbag saved my life” and closing with his plea to “pull me out of the aircrash.” Now hit repeat.
It is attainable now to see, 20-five yrs following the launch of “OK Pc,” what it opened up both of those for the band and for other ambitious pop and rock acts who would comply with. On a purely useful amount, Radiohead designed sufficient revenue that, ten yrs afterwards, they could release “In Rainbows,” initially devoid of the aid of a label, on the net, for cost-free or a donation. (Bands devoid of the exact same amount of recognition have expressed blended emotions about this electric power go.) It also received them huge artistic independence, evidenced, in component, by the band’s various solo and aspect initiatives. (The Smile, a band fashioned by Yorke and Jonny Greenwood, just dropped their very first album, on Might 12th.) Much more significant, “OK Computer” produced bold albums really feel probable once again. Records as distinctive as Daft Punk’s “Discovery” (2001), Bon Iver’s “For Emma, Eternally Ago” (2007), Janelle Monáe’s “The ArchAndroid,” Arcade Fire’s “The Suburbs” (2010), Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” (2016), Taylor Swift’s “Folklore” (2020), and The Weeknd’s “Dawn FM” (2022) have taken edge of the space for thought albums that “OK Computer” reclaimed.
I initially heard “OK Computer” in the tumble of 1997 on a Sony Discman, working out on an elliptical device in Fike Recreation Centre, at Clemson College, in South Carolina, where I was teaching as an associate professor. A pupil, having sussed out my musical preferences, advisable the album to me I bought the CD, as one did back again then. It totally blew the cobwebs out of my ears, and my brain. A 10 years and a fifty percent of frantic do the job in graduate school and academia had still left me minor time to pay attention to anything new crawling out of my self-imposed anechoic chamber and listening to “OK Computer” convinced me that there was even now audio staying produced that was worth listening to. It’s not, currently, the Radiohead record that I spin the most: that would possibly be “In Rainbows,” in which, a 10 years older, the band introduces much more musical nuance and wide range (even Motown!). But, although “In Rainbows” is now my favourite Radiohead album, I have no question that “OK Computer” is the most essential. To paraphrase T. S. Eliot’s verdict on “Ulysses,” it’s the album that built the fashionable globe attainable for alternate rock.
