Radiohead

“Let Down”
from the album OK Computer
1997

Spin Magazine has named the top 100 albums of the last 20 years. The number one entry follows…

“OK Computer was never meant to be a concept album,” insists Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien, and considering the source, this point is hard to dispute. “It was meant to be a record with 12 great songs on it.” Certainly, that would be one way to describe Radiohead’s 1997 electro-prog masterwork — that it was just a particularly well-sequenced pop anthology from a British rock band that was slighly ahead of the cultural curve.

But that contention only makes sense anecdotally. Through the speakers of a stereo, OK Computer is “conceptual,” but in a way that’s difficult to quantify; somehow, it manages to sound how the future will feel. And as the album ages, that curious sensation doesn’t fade.

“I think it’s one of those examples of where something becomes greater than the sum of its parts,” says O’Brien. “What’s amazing about recording is that you can capture those feelings on magnetic tape.” Part of what makes the magnetic tape of OK Computer so atypical is that it’s not an effortless collection of obvious melodies, nor is it a barricade of esoteric noise — it’s somewhere in-between.

A song like “Let Down” is the ideal manifestation of what happens when you fold semi-experimental aesthetics into mainstream consumer culture: It becomes weirdness inside normality. No upstart musician hears OK Computer and thinks, “Wow, I could do this.” It’s more likely they think, “Fuck, this is impossible.” Radiohead did not make the process of musical creation seem easy; they made it seem hard. And they’re always keenly aware of this. On the single “Paranoid Android,” Thom Yorke notes that ambition makes a person pretty ugly, and it’s possible he’s voicing his own fears; OK Computer was a profoundly ambitious album, recorded in the midst of a decade when apathy was often confused with integrity. It elected to go further than necessary, and the reward was a jarring transcendence.

“That record was sort of a banner that flew over my bedroom, reminding me that everything was not shit, even though there was so much evidence to the contrary,” says Win Butler of the Arcade Fire. “It’s so rare to hear such a soulful record that exists in its own sonic world.” This is the paradox of OK Computer: It’s a mechanical album that always feels alive, even when its words are spoken by a robot (as they are on “Fitter Happier”). In theory, it’s a record about how man’s relationship to machinery is inherently alienating; in practice, OK Computer embraces technology in totality, searching for humanity within the same dystopia it bemoans. OK Computer is Orwellian in the most literal possible context — for Yorke, freedom is slavery.

Not surprisingly, the album (and virtually all of Radiohead’s catalog, really) has been criticized as “pretentious.” People who like rock stars to be stupid don’t like OK Computer. But the word pretentious implies that the album presents itself as something it is not, and this is not the case; OK Computer is supposed to be artful and exploratory and accessible, and that’s what it is. It’s not like Radiohead aspired to be something beyond themselves; they simply wanted to make “a record with 12 great songs.” It’s more like OK Computer extended far beyond their wildest expectations.

And that success impacted everyone who likes popular music, including (weirdly) the kind of people who hang out with the drummer from Rilo Kiley. “A friend of mine said to me, ‘I hate Radiohead. They ruined music,’ ” explains Jason Boesel. “They ruined it in the same way Nirvana ruined music, and in the same way Bob Dylan ruined music. That happens every so often.”

Actually, it does not.
~ Chuck Klosterman, Spin Magazine

Thom Yorke