If that last bit is true, humans don’t have robots to blame. At the end, the machine lets slip that man is little more than a “pig in a cage on antibiotics.” Positioned instead at roughly the midpoint, “Fitter, Happier” is two minutes of a stiff computerized voice spouting self-help slogans.
Radiohead considered opening OK Computer with the track but ultimately thought better of it. The one exception to all of this is “Fitter, Happier,” which actually would’ve been a great starting point for a technophobic concept album. If that song “predicted” anything, it was simply more of the oppressive governing that’s been commonplace since man came up with the idea of choosing leaders. OK Computer even features a killer air-guitar track in the form of “Electioneering,” a cynical look at politics that Yorke has said was inspired by England’s poll-tax riots of 1990. Radiohead Share Unreleased 'OK Computer' B-Side 'I Promise' Whether these “Karma Police” are meant to be forces of good or evil, there’s real menace in the way Yorke’s character sings, “This is what you get when you mess with us.” He even takes it back later in the song: “For a minute there, I lost myself.” Yorke sings from the perspective of a little man (“Why don’t you remember my name?”) who’s disgusted by yuppies yet susceptible to power fantasies of his own (“When I am king you will be first against the wall”).Ī similar ugliness characterizes “Karma Police,” where Yorke’s narrator wants the cops to enforce a form of spiritual justice that, by definition, is supposed to take care of itself. Even without many details from that night, the song is clearly about humans being inhumane to one another. Yorke based “Paranoid Android” in part on a scary encounter with coked-up scenesters at an L.A. It was Radiohead’s version of a joke - no wonder no one got it.
The song name - like the phrase “OK computer” - comes from the comedy sci-fi series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, though Yorke has said he picked it mainly because the image of a pouting robot played into people’s perceptions of him. “Paranoid Android,” the album’s first single, is another example of title dictating interpretation. The echo-y psych-pop backing nods to the narrator’s cosmic longing yet grounds the song in the realm of daydreams. He dreams of being taken up and shown “the world as I’d love to see it,” though he knows his buddies will just call BS and label him crazy. Yorke’s protagonist is an “uptight, uptight” guy on a country lane with some rather quaint ideas about UFO abductions. He details one such experience on closer “The Tourist,” about an anxious vacationer who’s so keyed up that even dogs bark at him.ĭespite its title, “Subterranean Homesick Alien” isn’t an outer-space adventure. That might explain “Let Down,” an incongruously twinkling OK Computer highlight wherein Yorke describes “motorways and tramlines” as tools for shutting travelers from one bad experience to the next. Radiohead recorded the album after four years of touring had left Yorke feeling detached from reality. On OK Computer, when Yorke sings about machines, he’s generally talking about planes, trains, and automobiles - nothing remotely futuristic. “But I was using the terminology of technology to express it.”
“The paranoia I felt at the time was much more related to how people related to each other,” he said. Yorke said as much in a recent interview with Rolling Stone. If someone were to adapt the album for the big screen, it would be a talky psychological drama, not a summer blockbuster. Take away the sci-fi title, and OK Computer plays like a collection of songs about everyday people muddling through the ‘90s.
Singer and bandleader Thom Yorke paints a picture of a pretty gruesome world, and yet it’s one that listeners in the days of dial-up Internet might’ve recognized as their own. Radiohead’s 1997 masterpiece is certainly an album about feeling isolated and dehumanized.