Exit Music by Mac Randall

Author:Mac Randall [Randall, Mac]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-85712-695-5
Publisher: Music Sales Limited
Published: 2011-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

NINE

OK Computer

“It’s not really about computers,” Thom Yorke said of Radiohead’s third album a few months after it was released. “It was just the noise that was going on in my head for most of a year and a half of travelling and computers and television and just absorbing it all.”1 The key word here is ‘noise’. Both musically and lyrically, OK Computer conveys a sense of humanity being nearly overwhelmed by audiovisual stimuli, endlessly bombarded with random sounds and images to the point where comprehension is impossible.

Thought of in this way, the album’s title makes perfect sense. Does it directly address a computer? Is it a reflection on technology? A sarcastic depiction of the human brain (more emotional than rational, just an okay computer)? Or any number of other possibilities? There’s no way to know, and that’s the whole idea. ‘OK computer’ is just another fragment of speech in the constant noise barrage. Taken out of context, it’s suggestive but fundamentally meaningless, like a sentence badly translated from another language. As Jonny Greenwood aptly put it, “I think this album is too much of a mess to sum up. It’s too garbled and disjointed, and the title is only supposed to introduce you to the record.”2 It may seem strange to refer to such a finely crafted piece of modern music as a mess, but in terms of what the album’s overall point is, what it’s supposed to ‘mean’, Jonny’s right. The mess is the message.

Yet this doesn’t mean that there aren’t still some identifiable themes sticking out of the muck. Principal among them is the dehumanization of the modern world. As the power of technology grows, it becomes easier for humans to be ruled and potentially destroyed by what they have created. Every day’s pace grows more rapid, leaving us exhausted and increasingly disconnected, both from others and from ourselves. OK Computer is heavy with the presence of machines, all of which pose at least one of two dangers: physical (injury to individuals, contamination of the environment) and spiritual (adding to the perpetual buzz that drowns out life). Cars and planes crash, radio signals cross, and eerie computer voices speak without a trace of emotion. The song titles alone, even the ones that were meant to be humorous, clearly evoke the rootlessness, confusion, and dysfunctionality of late 20th-century society: ‘Paranoid Android’, ‘Climbing Up The Walls’, ‘Subterranean Homesick Alien’, ‘The Tourist’, ‘Let Down’.

Radiohead probably didn’t plan this album to be a Big Statement about the deleterious effects of technology on our lives. At least one hopes they didn’t; that would have been a little pompous. But the fact remains that those suggestions, those evocations, are there in the music. It wasn’t just critics who picked up on them, either. According to Thom, “A friend of mine found this essay on a website that Thomas Pynchon wrote about Luddites, which is hilarious. Luddites were that lot in the last century that went around and smashed up all the weaving looms or whatever it was.

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