‘Karma Police’: Radiohead’s musical reimagining of ‘Taxi Driver’
It’s not uncommon for certain songs and movies to work in parallel lines. No matter how hard someone tries to put out the most original piece of music anyone has ever made, we all get it from somewhere, and that sometimes means looking to the silver screen for inspiration when it comes to writing lyrics. Although there’s no telling whether Thom Yorke was really interested in Robert De Niro’s film Taxi Driver while making OK Computer, the premise seems to be the central theme behind ‘Karma Police’.
When looking at the insane Martin Scorsese thriller and the Radiohead epic side by side, though, many themes seem to crash in on each other. While Radiohead had been known as the art-rock darlings of Britain by the time they made The Bends, this was the moment when they seemed to take all the trademarks of rock and roll and make something that seemed completely desensitised to the outside world.
Across every song on the record, the band don’t talk about apathy as much as they do disassociation. Since many of the lyrics have to deal with machines, Yorke’s point is centred around the loss of humanity to some extent, and Taxi Driver was all about giving in to one’s inner animal.
Throughout the film, Travis Bickle seems to get more and more unhinged to the point where he starts to have zero regard for human life if someone isn’t on the right track. While he seems to be only into violence to talk about what he sees as fair, the lyrics to ‘Karma Police’ could easily have been written on his brain when he lets loose.
While the song itself is a lot more slow and plodding in the beginning, Yorke’s observations about wanting to arrest a man for being too robotic gets all too real when they reach the chorus. There’s a sense of victory that comes with the line “This is what you get”, but when the chord changes to something completely outside of the key, it’s clear that this is a moment that is as tragic as it is triumphant, much like how Bickle assassinates Harvey Kietel’s ‘Sport’ before the cops catch up to him.
But the best parallel between the movie and the song comes in the outro, where Yorke keeps chanting the line, “For a minute there, I lost myself”. Looking at the way that Bickle fantasised about killing those who were unjust throughout the film, hearing Yorke scream out in agony is like him finally realising the error of his ways and knowing that his life has changed forever thanks to what he has done.
As the music builds around Yorke, though, it’s almost like a reminder that the white noise and static behind him is too much for him to really care about anything that he’s done. Yorke is still screaming about the horror that he had put people through for what he thought was the greater good, but the music is so loud that it’s impossible to hear him, leading to the final moments where everything abruptly stops.
While Taxi Driver and ‘Karma Police’ are two worlds apart in both the artistic medium and the time period they were conceived in, both of them are kindred spirits in how they decide to depict the dark side of the human psyche. Most people will do whatever they can to do what they think is right, but it only takes one step over the line for everything to get out of hand.
