OKNOTOK

A few days ago I read an article written by Amanda Petrusich from The New Yorker - The Whispered Warnings of Radiohead's "OK Computer" Have Come True. As a long-time fan of Radiohead, I read it, and Petrusich's insight about the album motivated me to listen to it once more, this time digitally remastered with b-sides and renamed OKNOTOK. Upon listening, though deeply moved, I kept my cool for most the opening tracks, but something about the track (I don't know if anyone would even really call it a song) Fitter Happier And More Productive tipped me just a little over the edge and down came the few but powerful tears.

Petrusich writes:

"The disparity between these two things—the idea that everyone has gone on believing that the record is about the rise of machines, when Yorke keeps telling us it’s about how much he hated touring the world in a dumb bus—is fascinating, and at least partially attributable to the record’s fretful instrumentation. (Its lyrics are abstract enough to suit just about any imagined narrative.)"

My own imagined narrative from this album is not so much about a fear of the rising machines, or being trapped, but instead about the mechanization of individuality. Having previously been a floundering, outgoing, free-spirited human being, this album's whispered warning to me was about the strangling pressure to conform. But conformity, for many, in it's distilled form, is necessary for survival. And this is what I had to do, this is why I'm still here. But that is the sad thought, the reality of that thought brought upon by listening to OKNOTOK, that made me cry. Radiohead's robot says:

fitter, happier, more productive

And I am.

While "OK Computer" was not subversive for me in those wild and carefree days (it was soothing art which I could interpret but not feel), it is so much more so now. It is because of the very fact of self-reflection, of self-examination in the 21st century, which is apparent in both the musicality and lyrics. Petrusich writes:

"Radiohead wasn’t a grunge band (if anything, it was in danger of being rolled into Britpop), but its insistence on a kind of brainy largesse—on bringing in unexpected instrumentation, approaching rock from an unapologetically cerebral place—felt almost countercultural."

I will listen to OKNOTOK again, and will probably focus on the second half of it, which is a bit more uplifting. 

I'll just leave this lyric-less rendition of "Let Down" by the pianist Christopher O'Riley right here.