20 years on, Radiohead's OK Computer looped soundtrack to millennial life
For the most part, memory works in a couple of different ways. There are the big incidents, the "Where were you when...?" moments: 9/11, the Mumbai attacks, Brexit, Germany destroying Brazil on their home turf in the football World Cup. The day the clown prince became the most powerful man in the world. More recently, the day he decided to (allegedly) reveal classified intel in a casual boast. November 8, perhaps, and how mass WhatsApp messages led everyone to turn their TVs on.
And then there are the developing narratives. Climate change, which, as we all know, is a grand myth, or the migrant crisis in Europe. The massive recession from a decade ago. The slowly-building bovine revolution of India. The vigilante "justice" model. The whitewashing of history, or the increasingly innovative ways in which women can be "shown their place" when they're already somewhere near the bottom of the pecking order.
The global fear of the other - of the unknown - provoking extraordinary reactions in people. The constant shadow of state surveillance. How technology has taken over our lives; how we're physically attached to our phones for the majority of the day. The internet. It's a strange world we live in today and, principally, a horrible one.
OK Computer released to a markedly different world, one where this reality of today was at best a fear. This era-defining album, by English at-the-time-rock band Radiohead, completes 20 years this week. Musically, it's often cited as one of those all-time great rock albums. It took the existing blueprint of alternative rock, ripped it to shreds, and created a postmodern collage of those torn bits, bringing in experiments with jazz, art-rock, progressive rock, and much more besides.
Realistically, it shouldn't have worked; it had no right to. And yet, here it is - the looped soundtrack to the millennial life.
"Exit Music (For A Film)" is an inside-out ballad that sounds nothing like one. "Paranoid Android" is basically three different songs, each one distinct, pasted together with glue and a couple of excruciating guitar solos. The defining element of "Climbing Up The Walls", really, is the resounding sense of fear it evokes. Yet the melodies at the heart of each song - "Lucky", "No Surprises", and "Karma Police" chief among them - caught the fancy of fans and critics alike, catapulting the album to the elevated status it enjoys today.
It also spawned, in earnest, the obsessive cult following Radiohead enjoys today.
But it goes beyond that. The contemporary relevance of OK Computer comes not just from its musical legacy - which itself is formidable - but also the themes that lend the album that whizzing quality of push-pull discord. It is Thom Yorke, the singer, as a young man, somehow - in a George Orwell-like moment of foreboding and prescience - commenting on all the things that could possibly go wrong.
It's both an embrace and a criticism of an increasingly noisy world - a colourful articulation of all the whirring, buzzing, ringing, tinkling, hissing, screeching, fizzing, pinging, and clanging that surrounds us today.
An accompanying soundtrack to the world, as well as a reaction to it. Skyscrapers, fast cars, suburbia, robots, smart devices,airplanes, mundane catchphrases, airplane peanuts, chronic anxiety, outdoor hoardings, advertising catchphrases, nine-to-five, stress, intellectual and emotional angst, floppy disks and CD drives, television remotes, faulty ACs, human despair and disconnect.
Alongside the decay and existential dread of OK Computer runs the fear of technology. The slipperiness of capitalism and consumerism as well as the idea of a millennial shift in human behaviour, which the album confronts, turned out to be far more than fertile grounds for a fictional dystopia. It, sort of like Orwell's 1984 or Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, became practically a prophecy for a distant future.
Well, that distant future is here now, 20 years later. Which is why we're sitting here, talking about OK Computer.
What's fascinating, on several levels, is the subject matter on the album. Rock 'n' roll wordplay has for so long been focused entirely on introspective navel-gazing - the cleansing of inner demons through a public expression of anguish. Here, though, Thom Yorke forgoes the self-examination that even Radiohead's previous album before this, The Bends, had - he talks, instead, of heavy-handed concepts that hadn't yet registered in the psyche of the collective.
OK Computer is most expressly not about a universal condition. It's a futuristic, glum, comic, apocalyptic satire on modern existence. Today, that state of being has only amplified.
The widespread commercial success of the album changed - superficially - the direction in which rock music was heading. The inherent cheeriness of Britpop was replaced by a slightly more complex, supposedly "maturer" sound, which took the surface-level edginess of OK Computer and then systematically watered it down. Alt-rock was filled with copycats trying to recreate the formula.
For Radiohead, the resulting fame almost led to the band breaking down - captured in the documentary Meeting People Is Easy - as the band members, Yorke particularly, became increasingly more cranky and skittish. The weight of the album was one they weren't quite prepared to carry.
Yet, in response to their own past works and discontentment, as well as all the clones, the band went on to create Kid A, the hugely divisive album that nonetheless-revolutionised modern music, arguably.
Also read: A Moon Shaped Pool is Radiohead drowning our expectations, again