OK Computer Prophesied the World We Live In

Something is in the air because I listened to Radiohead’s OK Computer album yesterday, only to randomly discover that today is the 28th anniversary of its release. This is the kind of eerie coincidence befitting the uncanny world of a Radiohead song.

The explanation is probably simple: I reliably turn to Radiohead’s music as one of the few things that helps me process the nightmare that is the 21st century. That means that I listen to it an awful lot. If anyone was the prophet of our world, it was Radiohead.

OK Computer came out in 1997, at the height of the 90s “end of history” doldrums. The economy was booming, the world was mostly peaceful with genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda recently ended, and the nuclear fears of the Cold War were a bad memory. This was the year that Mikhail Gorbachev, onetime leader of the communist world, appeared in a Pizza Hut ad. The world was coming together and on the surface, we all should have been feeling good. So why weren’t we?

The Cold War was over, “we” had “won,” but it was a hollow victory. 1997 came amidst the apotheosis of neoliberalism, when a Democrat like Bill Clinton could embrace the deregulation of broadcast media via the Telecommunications Act of 1996. It was a time when mass media saturation and homogenization reflected a general lack of necessary friction in society. It was time when it was cringy to care about anything. The 90s ironic hipster pose, associated with a supposed counterculture, only reinforced the feeling that nothing mattered.

When OK Computer came out people talked about it like it was a concept album, but had a hard time pinning the actual concept down. The title confused many who assumed this was going to be a direct anti-technology narrative. The songs are less about computers (even ones called “Paranoid Android” and “Fitter, Happier,” voiced by a computer) as they are about the incompatibility of humanity with modernity. “No Surprises” takes the point of view of someone shellshocked by the overstimulated nature of our daily lives. “Electioneering” references how the triumph of democracy after the Fall of the Berlin Wall was illusory, the province of manipulators and odious social climbers.

The opening song, “Airbag,” makes it clear that this album is about the larger structures that trap us, and offers no escape. In this song the narrator almost dies at the hands of modern technology in a car crash, but their life is saved by the modern invention of the airbag. Technology saved the narrator, but only from a different technology. We see further glimpses of our current world in “Karma Police”’s description of the paranoia borne of constant surveillance. “Fitter, Happier” skewers the mania for “efficiency” and “productivity,” which promises health but delivers an experience akin to being “a pig in a cage on antibiotics.”

I recently rewatched Meeting People Is Easy, the 1998 tour documentary of the band that is unrelenting in its claustrophobia. In the film Radiohead is trapped by the same forces of modernity described in their songs, giving endless, meaningless interviews to countless media outlets and traveling city to city with hours spent in the sterile, lifeless environs of train stations and airports. My favorite part may be when Thom Yorke lets the crowd sing the first verse of “Creep” instead of him. He holds his mic forth not in triumph or communion, but in defeat, knowing that he no longer has control over his art. The entire film implies that it is extremely difficult to maintain one’s humanity when a person has been transformed into a media figure.

While all of this was happening at a time when most normies spent very little time online, the film and album show that the spirit behind our fraught times was there before we had the technology to make it truly hegemonic. The logic of late capitalism was already in place, it was in the 21st century that we gave it the tools to dismantle the human spirit more comprehensively.

Two songs from the album resonate with me the most, one out of despair, and one out of hope. “Subterranean Homesick Alien” has gorgeous, sweeping sounds behind it that are both sublime and frightening. The narrator, feeling lost in a world they have been thrown into, imagines space aliens watching him. They are not messengers, merely tourists, “making home movies.” Nevertheless, he longs for them to take him away, to see something truly beautiful, which he cannot find on this planet. It is a song of overwhelming longing, and implies there’s no escape possible in this world. There is no alternative, indeed.

Radiohead gives one moment of hope, however, with “Lucky.” It starts grim and foreboding, but builds to a gorgeously transcendent guitar figure soaring like a rocket to the sky while Yorke asks “pull me out of the aircrash/ pull me out of the lake.” It’s a song about love and recovery, of overcoming the pain of this broken world. Not for nothing, it first appeared on a benefit album for the victims of war in Bosnia. This note of hope reflects our times as much as the more common overtones of unease and despair. Listening to the song I think, in its words, “my luck could change.”