‘OK Computer’: Radiohead’s eerie foreshadowing of today’s digital age
As the 1990s started ending, the music industry was at a crossroads. Although the record industry was still booming, the new millennium was about to deal a body blow to every artist once the digital age kicked in. After a certain point, computers had become the name of the game for most artists, and Radiohead was at the forefront of commenting on what that meant for the future on OK Computer.
Granted, Radiohead were far from the first band to put vague associations to technology in their lyrics. If judging on that metric, surely Kraftwerk would hold all the trademarks to something that sounded remotely futuristic on albums like Computer World two whole decades before Thom Yorke’s exploration in the 1990s.
But OK Computer finds Radiohead talking about the nature of technology in the modern age in a much more realistic way. Most people had become used to software like Pro Tools being the main vehicle for recording, but it was another instance of computers becoming an omnipresent part of everyone’s daily life.
As soon as the album starts, though, there’s already that kind of foreboding energy in the air once ‘Airbag’ starts. Listening through a handful of the tunes, many of them have to deal with mankind’s reliance on technology to get them through their lives, whether it was an airbag saving Yorke’s life on the opening track or looking above and wondering what technology awaits him on the other side of the cosmos in ‘Subterranean Homesick Alien’.
Then again, ‘Paranoid Android’ is the first song on the record to show the detractors of living in the digital age. While most of the lyrics are pulled from Yorke’s experience in a nightclub where people got into a fight, the stand-in android is a comment on what happens when things come to everyone a lot faster. Either they withdraw and go inside themselves, or they give into their most animalistic tendencies, not unlike a pig in a cage on antibiotics.
While that interlude track, ‘Fitter Happier’, was made as a piece of sound design between songs, it’s a lot more foreboding to listen to it these days. With the advent of AI, hearing this disembodied robot voice plot out the existence of someone’s daily life feels like a sad premonition of what can happen if we let that kind of massive technology boom go one step too far and start ruling over us all.
Considering there was nowhere else to go, Kid A was also the first record that felt like an active response to the digital age. Now that they had seen pieces of digital media overtaking the world, writing a masterpiece where the lyrics seem computer generated and every instrument is scrubbed clean is the aftermath of mankind losing and walking through an abandoned cityscape bogged down by technology.
So, what’s the main point behind Ok Computer? Something like that shouldn’t have such a dour ending for the rest of us, so where’s that sense of hope? Well, that comes in the form of ‘The Tourist’, where Yorke talks about everyone moving so fast and pleading with them to slow down for a second. It’s hardly the most intellectual thought that anyone has ever had, but if we all benefited from slowing down and taking in the outside world, we might find a way not to be chained to our devices and start understanding why the humanity behind everything is much more precious than the digitised world.
