The Radiohead songs that predicted the future
It would be hard to argue that the music of Radiohead is anything but serious. Radiohead’s tracks are often dismissed as slightly depressing, but in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the band’s sound was the perfect counterbalance to the laddish lager-laden tracks of Britpop.
Thom Yorke, the band’s frontman, once famously said: “People sometimes say we take things too seriously, but it’s the only way you’ll get anywhere. We’re not going to sit around and wait and just be happy if something turns up. We are ambitious. You have to be”. Indeed, as artists, Radiohead ought to take themselves seriously.
The themes of Radiohead’s albums have always differed but have been united by one thing; the societal state of the world. For instance, OK Computer explored the rise of technology and its subsequent alienating effect on society, Hail to the Thief examined the dangers of spin politics and the pressures of the music industry, and The King of Limbs paid close attention to the increasingly critical environmental concerns of the planet.
In many ways, several Radiohead tracks have actually somewhat predicted the future. Even as far back as 1993, Radiohead predicted the future of pop music with their non-album single ‘Pop is Dead’ as Yorke sang: “Oh no, pop is dead, long live pop/It died an ugly death by back-catalogue”. It seemingly foreshadows the future of the onslaught of Spotify, which Yorke once called “the last desperate fart of a dying corpse.”
When OK Computer dropped in 1997, Yorke foresaw the coming worries of technological advancement and environmental disaster. On ‘No Surprises’, he sang: “I’ll take a quiet life/A handshake of carbon monoxide”, suggesting that the world was becoming polluted, even before climate change was even a hot topic.
Then, in ‘Fitter Happier’, Yorke examined the fact that we would be able to live seemingly perfect lives through technology. A computer-synthesized voice reads out over an eerie instrumental: “Fitter, happier, more productive/Comfortable/Not drinking too much/Regular exercise at the gym”. In many ways, this echoes the fact that we have so many apps available on our phones to direct us on how to live our lives, helping us to sleep better, eat better, and be better.
Then when Kid A was released in 2000, Radiohead subverted the expectations of alternative rock, and we were gifted a beautiful, primarily electronic album that continued to state that societal pressures were going to worsen. On ‘Idioteque’, Yorke gets political with the line: “We’re not scare-mongering/This is really happening”. In many ways, this line explains the discordance between members of the environmental protests and the politicians who actually have the power to make changes for the world yet downplay the need to. It also reinforces the overwhelming sense of dread that is currently felt across the globe.
Elsewhere, Radiohead also predicted the rise of Silicon Valley, a busy urban sprawl where you could hardly breathe and had no time to do the things that you actually wanted. On ‘Palo Alto’, Yorke sang: “In a city of the future/It is difficult to find a space/I’m too busy to see you/You’re too busy to wait.”
Radiohead have always been a band with their finger on the pulse of the world. It’s a sorry state of affairs that even with such prominent artists making such explicit claims that things cannot continue as they are, little has been done to make vital changes, and art has been relegated to mere hearsay.
