I’ve noticed a nugget of embarrassment buried in the recent avalanche of critical reappraisals and retroactive interrogations of Radiohead’s “OK Computer,” a record that was released in 1997 and is celebrating its twentieth anniversary this summer. Critics (and some fans) approached its reappearance with trepidation—as if we were all about to be strong-armed into reckoning with our pretentious and over-serious past selves. As if someone had just slid an unmarked manila envelope under the door, and it contained photographic evidence of that one time we Scotch Taped a poster of Nietzsche to our dorm-room ceiling, with instructions to await further notice. Even Thom Yorke, the band’s singer, has been nearly sheepish when discussing its legacy. “The whole album is really fucking geeky,” he recently told Rolling Stone.
To mark the anniversary, the band has just released “OKNOTOK,” which includes a remastered version of the original album, plus eight B-sides and three previously unreleased tracks: “I Promise,” “Man of War,” and “Lift.” (In addition, a special vinyl edition, available in July, will offer a hardcover art book, a collection of Yorke’s notes, a sketchbook of what the band is calling its “preparatory work,” and a cassette tape containing demos and additional session recordings.) None of the extraneous material is exactly revelatory—live versions of “Lift” and “I Promise” have been drifting about the Internet for years—though it does help complete a portrait of a band bucking against itself, and learning how to express its fear effectively.
By the time the band started writing “OK Computer,” Radiohead had already released two very good guitar records (“Pablo Honey,” in 1993, and “The Bends,” in 1995), but it was not yet clear that it would be the band to rewire everybody’s expectations of contemporary rock. Still, there was a wildness to the early work. I recall watching the video for Radiohead’s first single, “Creep,” late one night on MTV’s “120 Minutes,” and whispering whatever the thirteen-year-old equivalent of “What in tarnation!” is. The video begins benignly enough—a cluster of lanky, sunken young men, a mopey progression. Then the guitarist Jonny Greenwood raises a bony arm, slams out two scabrous chords, and a maniacal-looking Yorke begins wailing like a person who decided to jog down a hill, only to suddenly discover he couldn’t control how fast his legs were going. “What the hell am I doing here?” he shrieks. I had never heard despair articulated quite so plainly. Even now, “Creep” remains the best song I know about the inertia of unhappiness.
Yorke was twenty-seven when he started working on “OK Computer,” and just coming off several years of touring. (“I was basically catatonic,” he told Rolling Stone. “The claustrophobia—just having no sense of reality at all.”) Though Yorke insists that “OK Computer” was inspired by the dislocation and paranoia of non-stop travel, it’s now largely understood as a record about how unchecked consumerism and an overreliance on technology can lead to automation and, eventually, alienation (from ourselves; from one another).
The disparity between these two things—the idea that everyone has gone on believing that the record is about the rise of machines, when Yorke keeps telling us it’s about how much he hated touring the world in a dumb bus—is fascinating, and at least partially attributable to the record’s fretful instrumentation. (Its lyrics are abstract enough to suit just about any imagined narrative.)
Radiohead came of age in the public consciousness in the citadel of grunge, an era in which rock was more introspective than ambitious; grunge was, in many ways, a fierce response to the bloat of the seventies and eighties, and indulgence of any sort was quickly sniffed out and vilified. (Nirvana, for example, never felt on the verge of incorporating a glockenspiel.) Radiohead wasn’t a grunge band (if anything, it was in danger of being rolled into Britpop), but its insistence on a kind of brainy largesse—on bringing in unexpected instrumentation, approaching rock from an unapologetically cerebral place—felt almost countercultural.
Musically, “OK Computer” was inspired by Miles Davis’s “Bitches Brew,” an aggressive and beautiful jazz-fusion album from 1970. Davis’s producer, Teo Macero, was a student of musique concrète, an experimental French genre in which tape is manipulated and looped to create new musical structures; much of “Bitches Brew” was pieced together after the band had gone home. Accordingly, its paths are not foreseeable, or even particularly human—navigating “Bitches Brew” remains a heady and disorienting experience, in which it is very easy to forget which end is up, or which way is out. “OK Computer” was made mostly live—it was started in a converted shed in Oxfordshire (the band called the space Canned Applause) and finished at St. Catherine’s Court, a stately stone mansion near Bath, owned by the actress Jane Seymour—but Radiohead and its producer, Nigel Godrich, shared Davis and Macero’s yen for disorientation. The reigning sound of the record is panic: darting, laser-like guitars, shaky percussion, moaning.
“OK Computer” was critically lauded upon its release—Spin named it the second-best album of 1997, calling it “a soaring song-cycle about the state of the soul in the digital age (or something),” and a Times piece marvelled at its ubiquity, noting that “although the band’s first video is six and a half minutes long and features twisted animated sequences in which children are shown drinking in a bar and paying women to flash them, it has been in heavy rotation on MTV.”
Still, I’m not sure that anyone really knew how to metabolize its precise disquiet until exactly this moment—which makes the timing of its reissue feel nearly fated. For me, revisiting some of these tracks now incites a bizarre kind of déjà vu—as if I am barely but finally remembering some whispered warning I received two decades back. The second half of “Paranoid Android,” one of the record’s darkest and most popular tracks, features Yorke singing in a strange, ghostly harmony with himself. “From a great height,” he repeats in his crystalline falsetto, stretching the final word until it sounds like some abstract plea. Meanwhile, a second, feebler voice opines, “The dust and the screaming, the yuppies networking, the panic, the vomit, the panic, the vomit.” Is this terribly dramatic? Sure. But if you have ever glanced around a bar—or a subway car, or a coffee shop—and seen a dozen sentient humans all tapping away on a device, forgoing awkward, fleshy engagement for a more mediated and quantifiable digital experience, and felt a deep and intense terror in your gut, then perhaps you’ve experienced some version of what Yorke’s voice is doing here: splintering, dissociating, freaking out. Many other bands have expressed worry about the proliferation of devices and the strange divisions computers have wrought, but I can’t think of another song that sounds as much like a person getting swept into a black hole.
Now, in 2017, the anxieties expressed on “OK Computer” feel comically prescient, though, of course, fear of technology is hardly new. In England, during the Napoleonic Wars, roving bands of so-called Luddites—former textile workers and weavers—rode around setting mills on fire and trashing industrial equipment, believing that their livelihoods were being usurped by machines. (We now use the word Luddite to refer, lovingly, to someone who does not know how to effectively deploy emoji.) In an essay for the Times (written in 1984, of all years!), the novelist Thomas Pynchon suggested that Luddites were acting in response to two stimuli: “One was the concentration of capital that each machine represented, and the other was the ability of each machine to put a certain number of humans out of work—to be ‘worth’ that many human souls.” It’s the latter that seems to preoccupy “OK Computer.”
In certain (admittedly rarefied) circles, it’s become shameful to espouse devotion to any sort of canonized modern rock—perhaps because rock’s history is so plainly riddled with repeated instances of racism and sexism that to vouch for it now, in an era in which many people are working to correct or more properly account for past wrongs, feels unconscionable. But the dread expressed by “OK Computer” is universal. It deserves our attention again, without shame.
