1001 Albums Summary

C+, 46% The opening riff of “Airbag” is fantastic because it sounds like a guitar being remembered incorrectly by a machine. Jonny Greenwood hacks out those ugly little chords, Phil Selway’s drums have been chopped and reconstructed into something that lurches rather than grooves, Colin Greenwood’s bass keeps sneaking underneath the arrangement like the only member of the family who remembered to eat, and Thom Yorke starts singing about surviving a car crash as resurrection. Fine. Great, even. This is exactly the kind of technological neurosis OK Computer is supposed to contain, except here the idea is actually embodied in the fucking sound instead of requiring me to read a graduate student’s explanation of alienation afterward. The rhythm has been interfered with. Human performance gets broken apart and turned into circuitry. The guitars retain dirt but have been displaced from the usual rock hierarchy. Yorke’s voice hovers in that permanently distressed upper register where every vowel seems to have just received terrible news. For four and a half minutes the famous masterpiece I have been promised actually appears: late twentieth-century rock music hearing the digital future outside the door and realizing the future is not going to knock. Then “Paranoid Android” starts and I remember that Radiohead are theater kids for people who would rather die than admit they like theater. I do not mean the song is bad. Christ, parts of it are tremendous. The little acoustic figure, the shifting sections, the way Yorke’s irritation keeps changing scale until some asshole at a bar becomes evidence against civilization, Jonny Greenwood’s guitar suddenly sawing through the arrangement like someone trying to amputate modernity without anesthesia. The “rain down” section is gorgeous. Genuinely. Those harmonies arrive with church-music solemnity after all the twitching sarcasm, and for a moment Radiohead’s tendency to inflate discomfort into apocalypse becomes exactly the correct instinct because the music has earned the inflation. Then the distorted guitar returns sounding like Brian May had a psychotic episode inside a photocopier. I enjoy nearly all the individual pieces. I also hear the seams. Everyone else seems to hear a mini-suite revealing the fragmented consciousness of modern life. I hear several good ideas sitting next to each other while wearing a trench coat and insisting they constitute a single tall song. It works because Radiohead are excellent musicians and Nigel Godrich knows how to make transitions feel metaphysically inevitable, but the song’s reputation for compositional grandeur sometimes reminds me of watching men discover that music can have more than two sections and immediately start drawing pentagrams on the floor. This is where OK Computer and I begin having our recurring argument. The record is very good at representing a certain kind of anxiety, but it has spent twenty-nine years being credited with predicting essentially every unpleasant development since 1997, which is bullshit of the finest artisanal variety. The internet got bigger, corporations got worse, surveillance expanded, people became more isolated, algorithms appeared, politics got diseased, phones ate social life, airplanes remained annoying, therefore Thom Yorke saw the future. Come on. People in 1997 already knew corporations were dehumanizing. They knew technology could isolate people. They knew global capitalism treated bodies like replaceable components. They knew advertising was invasive. They knew office work could liquefy a human soul. They knew automobiles killed people, computers were entering ordinary life, CCTV existed, globalization was reorganizing labor, and everyone had just spent decades watching science fiction turn technological alienation into one of the most heavily trafficked metaphors in Western culture. Radiohead did not descend from a mountain carrying a tablet that said SOMEDAY PEOPLE WILL FEEL BAD WHILE USING MACHINES. What they did, much more impressively and much less prophetically, was give the late Clinton-Blair era’s comfortable professional-class dread an extraordinary production vocabulary. That is enough. It does not need to be Nostradamus with a Telecaster. The production is the star, and I mean that in a way that should mildly annoy people who want these songs laminated as sacred texts. OK Computer sounds fucking wonderful. Godrich and the band understand depth. Instruments do not merely sit left and right, they appear at different psychological distances. A guitar can feel like it is pressed against your cheek while a second one flashes from the opposite end of a hallway. Yorke can sound brutally intimate and completely disembodied within thirty seconds. The record uses reverb less as decoration than architecture. There are rooms inside these songs, some enormous, some airless. The guitars are continually being denied their natural rock-star destiny. They ring, scrape, click, drone, shimmer, dissolve, buzz, intrude, retreat. Jonny Greenwood is at his best when he seems actively hostile to the instrument’s conventional beauty, stabbing an arrangement with some noise that sounds like a fax machine being murdered and thereby making the whole thing breathe differently. Ed O’Brien, meanwhile, often supplies atmosphere so effectively that you forget somebody had to physically generate it. There are sounds on this record that became such a basic part of subsequent ambitious rock grammar that hearing them now is like examining the first apartment where mold evolved. That inheritance is part of my problem. I cannot unhear the twenty-five years of bands that followed OK Computer into the cathedral carrying candles and came out with twelve midtempo songs about Modern Life. You can blame the imitators for being shitty, not Radiohead for being imitated, but listening happens forward through history even when records were made backward from us. The album’s solemnity has metastasized. Every falsetto over a delayed guitar, every tastefully distressed piano chord, every video featuring fluorescent lights and a sad man standing somewhere industrial now carries a little Radiohead spore. The original is stranger than its descendants, absolutely, but it also contains the genetic code for a kind of prestige melancholy I find exhausting. You know the mood. Everything is sterile. Everything is alienated. Everybody has a laptop and spiritually works at an airport. Capitalism is terrible, but in an extremely well-mastered way. “Subterranean Homesick Alien” is where that mood becomes both beautiful and slightly ridiculous. Yorke wants aliens to come pick him up so he can see the world from above and explain how fucking weird humanity is, which is basically the fantasy of every intelligent depressed teenager who has ever suspected that being miserable means they have accidentally achieved objectivity. I recognize the mechanism and still want to shake it. The arrangement saves him. Those watery guitars are gorgeous, sliding around one another without establishing a firm floor, and the rhythm section refuses to push. The song levitates because nobody is trying to make levitation impressive. Yorke’s melodic line bends beautifully against the chords, and when his voice climbs, the alien fantasy momentarily stops being the lyrical equivalent of lying on your bedroom carpet and becomes an actual sensation of leaving the ground. Radiohead are always best for me when the music complicates Yorke rather than merely amplifying him. Give him a lyric about isolation and a gloomy piano and we are in danger. Give him something gorgeous, unstable, almost sensually welcoming beneath the isolation and suddenly the contradiction has life. “Exit Music (For a Film)” commits the opposite offense and almost gets away with murder because Yorke can sing the shit out of controlled dread. The acoustic guitar is recorded so intimately you can hear the fingers, the vocal arrives close enough to feel invasive, then the bass eventually enters with that huge distorted underside and the song transforms from whisper to doom. This is excellent arrangement. It understands withholding. The first half does not prematurely announce the emotional size of the second, so when everything expands, expansion still means something. I should love it more. Instead I keep feeling the machinery underneath the heartbreak, the band standing behind the curtain turning the Large Emotional Consequence crank. “We hope that you choke” lands like the line somebody underlined in black ink because they were seventeen and furious, and Christ, at seventeen I might have eaten this thing with my bare hands. At thirty-five I hear the craft before I hear the devastation. The bass distortion is still beautiful. That ugly bloom underneath the vocal, now that is something I believe. The lyric feels like a gesture. The bass sounds like hate. Then “Let Down” arrives, universally beloved, routinely cited as some hidden emotional center despite being on one of the most famous records ever released, meaning “underrated” has apparently lost all semantic content, and I mostly sit there admiring the overlapping guitar patterns while waiting for the transcendence shipment to clear customs. The interlocking rhythms are lovely. The arrangement has that Radiohead specialty where several simple lines produce a shimmering complexity no individual part contains. Yorke’s voice eventually doubles and climbs against itself in a way that should produce the religious conversion people keep reporting. I get a pleasant electrical sensation and no new god. This is not the song’s fault so much as the grotesque burden placed on it by people who discuss “Let Down” like their first child was delivered during the bridge. Still, even stripped of fandom, something about it keeps me at a glass wall. “Crushed like a bug in the ground,” transport systems, disappointment, people becoming objects, yes, I understand. The emotional vocabulary is so generalized that the production has to manufacture specificity from texture. Often it succeeds. Not enough for me to stop noticing the manufacturing. And then the fucking robot voice turns up. “Fitter Happier” is either a chilling miniature about neoliberal self-discipline or a Macintosh performing slam poetry at an open mic where nobody was permitted to leave. Both are true. The synthetic voice listing optimized-life commandments over mournful piano and background noises is the album’s thesis with its clothes off: improved health, productivity, emotional moderation, social compliance, reduced spontaneity, the modern subject converted into a maintenance schedule. It is absolutely clear. Painfully clear. So clear I want to write “YES THOM I FUCKING GET IT” on a Post-it and stick it to the computer. The piece does work historically because the language of self-optimization was only going to become more invasive. Today we voluntarily quantify sleep, steps, food, productivity, moods, attention, exercise, menstrual cycles, screen time, heart rate, fucking everything, turning the body into a badly managed corporation whose CEO keeps receiving push notifications. “Fitter Happier” recognized a real ideological movement, the conversion of wellness into discipline and personhood into metrics. But once the idea has arrived, there is not much left for me to do with the track. It is a conceptual installation placed in the album’s lobby. I look at it, nod, read the plaque, move on. People call it terrifying. My laptop has said worse things to me while installing Windows updates. What follows is more interesting because “Electioneering” commits the grave Radiohead sin of having a pulse without apologizing. Fucking finally. The guitars are dirty, percussion rattles around, Yorke snarls instead of floating three feet above his own body, and the song has the physical stupidity rock music occasionally needs. Radiohead themselves later seemed dissatisfied with it, and of course they were, because this band can make kicking over a chair seem aesthetically suspect unless the chair has been processed through three delay units and symbolizes late capitalism. I like “Electioneering” because it interrupts the album’s immaculate dread with sweat. The lyric’s political cynicism is hardly profound, politicians sell themselves, markets and power are intertwined, congratulations everybody, but the performance does not require profundity. It moves. The guitar sounds like metal dragged across concrete. Selway hits things. For four minutes nobody appears to be contemplating the ontological implications of a motorway. “Climbing Up the Walls” earns the darkness the album sometimes assumes by default. That track is fucking nasty. The percussion is compressed and enclosed, the bass has this blunt predatory motion, electronic noises hover at the edges, strings eventually become less orchestration than infestation, and Yorke sings quietly enough that you have to move toward him, which is exactly where the song wants you before it starts closing the walls. The final scream is ugly in the useful sense, not polished anguish, not a lovely little falsetto tear, but an eruption that briefly ruins the architecture. This is Radiohead understanding horror physically. The song does not merely tell me somebody is psychologically trapped. It takes away air. Those strings toward the end sound like insects gaining union representation. The whole mix becomes hostile. If the album sustained this level of sensory specificity, I would have considerably fewer complaints and several more problems sleeping. “No Surprises” is the song where my irritation and affection crawl into bed together and refuse to tell me which one is on top. That chiming guitar tone is absurdly pretty, essentially a music box, and the melody has the calm simplicity of a lullaby. Yorke sings about exhaustion, domestic anesthesia, work, government, wanting a quiet life, and the whole arrangement smiles while the lyric quietly considers obliteration. Yes, that works. It works almost too efficiently. The contradiction is so clean you could teach it to first-year undergraduates: soothing music plus despairing text equals critique of comfortable alienation. Circle the juxtaposition for five points. And yet the song survives my annoyance because the melody is beautiful enough to become its own argument. There is something about repetition here that feels less like depression performed and more like the actual desire to stop being stimulated, stop being expected, stop having alarms and obligations and somebody else’s systems reaching through the wall. “A handshake of carbon monoxide” is exactly the sort of phrase I would usually accuse of putting on little black eyeliner and waiting to be quoted, but Yorke sings it without theatrical emphasis. The music does not flinch. That restraint is what makes it land. This album is constantly doing that to me, producing something I want to mock and then finding one sonic decision that makes mockery inconvenient. “Karma Police” is the clearest case because I have heard that piano progression so many times that it now enters the room accompanied by its own museum security. The song begins with the sort of chord sequence designed to make a roomful of people immediately decide Something Important is Occurring. Yorke imagines punitive cosmic bureaucracy for annoying people, a man who talks in maths, a woman with a Hitler hairdo, whatever collection of petty grievances has been promoted to metaphysics today. This is funny, intentionally and otherwise. “Karma police, arrest this man” contains all the moral authority of asking your mother to make another child stop touching you in the back seat. But then the closing section happens, the repeated “for a minute there” figure dissolving into feedback and electronic erosion, and again the production discovers something deeper than the lyric. The song begins as judgment and ends in disappearance. The self that wanted everyone arrested gets swallowed too. That is interesting. Radiohead often become profound by allowing their arrangements to destroy the certainty of their own words. “Lucky” gives me the opposite sensation. Everything is present. The guitars swell. Yorke sounds beautifully wounded. The chord changes are stately. The chorus lifts. The production expands with immense confidence. I can practically see the tasteful storm clouds gathering over the English coastline. And I feel nearly fucking nothing. This is the album’s cathedral-rock impulse naked enough for me to identify the smell. The song wants altitude. Radiohead are extremely good at altitude. I simply do not automatically mistake altitude for depth. There are moments when Yorke’s voice hits a certain pleading shape and the guitars spread underneath him and I know, intellectually and acoustically, that the appropriate reaction is supposed to be bodily awe. My body files an objection. Apparently my nervous system has a union. Which leaves “The Tourist,” and I actually prefer the album ending this way rather than trying to explode. The song slows everything down. The cymbals breathe. Jonny Greenwood’s guitar hangs strange little notes in the air. The lyric says, essentially, slow down, idiot, and after fifty minutes of technological dread, traffic, ambition, political disgust, social alienation, psychic surveillance and computers telling everyone to optimize their fiber intake, the advice acquires a nice dumb usefulness. The final bell is almost comic. Ding. Class dismissed. I like that the album’s solution to modernity is not revolution but deceleration. It is inadequate, obviously. So are most things you can fit into a song. Slow down. Fine. Drink water too, I suppose. Call your mother if she is tolerable. Disable some notifications. Marxism will resume Monday. What makes OK Computer difficult for me is that very little of it is incompetent and a great deal of it is impressive, but impressive is not the same neurological pathway as love. Radiohead know too much about what they are doing. Every guitar texture arrives with purpose. Every stereo placement has been considered. Every dynamic escalation knows exactly which vertebra it intends to touch. Selway’s drumming is remarkably free of drummer ego, which suits music built around tension rather than release. Colin Greenwood continually gives songs physical motion while everybody else is busy becoming vapor. Jonny Greenwood spends the record finding ways to make rock guitar sound ashamed of being rock guitar. O’Brien turns electricity into climate. Godrich records all of this with the patience of somebody constructing an anxiety museum where the humidity has been carefully controlled. Yorke possesses one of the most distinctive voices of the era, and he knows exactly how to make a syllable sound like it has been awake for seventy-two hours reading about layoffs. But I do not always like being trapped with him. There is only so much high-functioning despair I can ingest before I start wanting somebody to tell a filthy joke, order bad food, fuck the wrong person, steal a road sign, lose twenty dollars, do anything that proves human beings are not merely anxious nerve endings being transported between corporate facilities. This is not me demanding “messiness” because I think chaos constitutes authenticity. Actual chaos is frequently dull as shit. I have seen enough real human disorder to know it usually involves waiting, paperwork, money problems, someone losing their charger and a conversation that should have ended forty minutes ago. What OK Computer lacks for me is not danger. It is social texture. Its people frequently feel like specimens of systems. Commuters. Consumers. Employees. Politicians. Tourists. Bodies under administration. That abstraction is deliberate, but fifty-three minutes inside abstraction starts making me miss somebody with a weird laugh. Compare this to the records that make alienation sexy, pathetic, funny, embarrassing, bodily. OK Computer rarely sweats. Even when the guitars explode, the album smells electrically clean. Its sexuality is almost nonexistent, which would not matter if desire had not been one of the great available ways of complicating the very systems it despises. Human beings under capitalism still get horny. Usually at stupid times. Often for people who make their lives measurably worse. Desire is inefficient. Desire screws up optimization. Desire makes you miss trains. Desire turns a carefully scheduled day into six hours in somebody’s apartment wondering why you are eating cereal at 5 PM wearing one sock. There is a reason bureaucracies prefer predictable bodies. OK Computer understands the bureaucracies beautifully and seems weirdly uninterested in the cereal. Perhaps that is why its enormous cultural authority has always irritated me slightly. The album became a default object for Serious People Feeling Serious Things About Modernity, and seriousness protects records from useful abuse. Calling OK Computer overrated has itself become such a stale provocation that even saying it feels like completing a CAPTCHA. No, I do not think the emperor is naked. The emperor is wearing an extremely well-tailored coat with phenomenal stitching. I simply keep being told the coat changed my understanding of textiles and I am standing there thinking, this pocket is terrific. The historical achievement remains real. In 1997 a massively successful guitar band followed a breakthrough album not by making the obvious larger version but by disassembling rock’s internal hierarchy, incorporating electronic editing, ambient space, musique concrète-ish interruptions, progressive structures, post-punk abrasion and studio manipulation without turning the result into some academic genre exercise. The band widened what mainstream guitar music could get away with just before rock’s commercial center began collapsing into increasingly conservative forms. And they did it while still writing melodies. That last part matters. A thousand experimental gestures are worthless if I never want to hear the fucking thing again. Radiohead understood pop enough to smuggle oddness through it. The album’s best moments work because the strange shit and the accessible shit are not separate departments. “Airbag” is both. “Climbing Up the Walls” is both. “No Surprises” is both. Even “Paranoid Android,” lumbering sectional monster that it is, has hooks everywhere. But greatness by historical function remains historical function. I am sitting here with the record, not its influence chart. The record keeps alternating between grabbing me by the skull and presenting me with a beautifully printed pamphlet about why skull-grabbing is important. I hear “Airbag” and think, yes, fuck, there it is. I hear the guitar eruption in “Paranoid Android” and wake up. I hear the walls actually start climbing during “Climbing Up the Walls” and the record finally scares me instead of explaining fear. Then I spend long stretches appreciating expensive despair from a respectful distance, admiring chord voicings and stereo placement while wondering whether I have accidentally wandered into the world's moodiest demonstration room. And it sounds so fucking good in there. That is the irritating part. I cannot dismiss OK Computer because the textures keep seducing me back into arguments I thought I had finished. Jonny Greenwood will scrape one disgusting sound across a gorgeous chord. Colin will move one bass note in a way that suddenly gives some floating passage a body. Selway will withhold a hit half a second longer than my nervous system expects. Yorke will stop sounding like the elected spokesman for Alienated Western Man and sing one tiny phrase like an actual frightened person. Then the album becomes immediate again, not prophetic, not canonical, not The Album That Predicted Our Digital Nightmare, just five musicians in 1996 and 1997 fucking around with rooms, tape, samplers, guitars, computers and dread until they found a sound nobody quite knew what to call yet. I wish I could stay inside those seconds. Instead the monument keeps growing back around them. By the end, I am not crushed beneath modernity. I am mostly tired of hearing about modernity from a man with a very beautiful falsetto. Then that little bell goes ding, and I laugh, because after all the paranoia and traffic and computers and karma and unborn chickens and people being crushed like bugs, Radiohead end their masterpiece by basically telling everybody to stop driving like assholes. That part I can use.