These aren’t the rock-and roll-heroes of yore, casting off the chains of society and hitting the road these are regular people leading, as Henry David Thoreau described their existence, “lives of quiet desperation.” “The Tourist” finds an average citizen experiencing some sort of breakdown without being able to say why, casting off sparks and frightening dogs on the street. The protagonist of “Subterranean Homesick Alien” can’t stand his life in a backwater town, and longs for aliens to take him away from this dull world. They live in the same world, bombarded by the same advertisements.Īll throughout the album, we hear from characters feeling lost in the modern world, unable to connect to others. There’s the sense that the band, as much as they live the life of rock stars, see themselves as not that different from mid-level office workers. But OK Computer portrays suburbanites with something like sympathy, and not just as an exercise in human kindness. Historically, rock has been devoted to excoriating those know-nothing squares for their empty lives of plenty and compromise, finding in rock music a different path of rebellion and subversion. A synthetic computer voice, much like the one used by Stephen Hawking, intones strange little koans about suburban mediocrity: “A patient, better driver/ A safer car, baby smiling in back seat/ Sleeping well, no bad dreams/ No paranoia.” It’s depressing in a way that’s sure to appeal to moody teenagers, that’s for certain, but the way it relates to middle-class malaise is unusual for rock music. Perhaps the most succinct statement on the impersonal forces that atomize individuals is “Fitter Happier,” a spoken-word track that comes right at the album’s midpoint. Like many of the critiques of contemporary life that I find most resonant, it wasn’t personal. Rather, it was skeptical of the forces-economic, political, cultural, sexual-that molded human beings to fit into cubicles and mid-size sedans. It viewed suburbs and office jobs with suspicion, but not because it tried to define the band and its fans as superior to their staid ambitions. That’s what was so compelling about OK Computer. It sounded forced and dated, like trying to fight the cultural skirmishes of Woodstock all over again.
That stance never really appealed to me, however. Those are the squares, the normies, who can’t handle living life on the edge. Much of rock music has a distrust of middle-class life and those who aspire to it. I would get out of my small town, move to the city and become a writer, creating stories and characters that, like the best Radiohead songs, pointed toward the nearly imperceptible forces that dictated their every movement and choice. This is what my life would be, I thought. I loved tracking conspiracies and cover-ups, tearing at the edges of everyday life, pulling them back and seeing what was really going on beneath. The lyrics depicting loners and depressives trapped in vast, impersonal systems of intimidation and control mirrored The X-Files and Thomas Pynchon, two of my other favorites at the time. Combine that with the fact that I was a bookish kid in a small town and you have a recipe for obsession. When OK Computer came out, I was fifteen, an ideal age for falling under the sway of the album’s moody, paranoid grandeur. Now that I’m an adult and know a little something about pain and disappointment, I can appreciate what the album is saying. This is what I feel when listening to OK Computer today.
Who hasn’t winced upon hearing the anthem of their youthful rebelliousness in an SUV commercial? Sometimes, however, you’ll listen to the music that defined your adolescence with wistfulness, as if your teenage enthusiasm prevented you from hearing what it was really about. But watching the groundbreaking cultural touchstones of one’s youth become historical artifacts is one of the universal experiences of our media-saturated culture. But do I feel old? Depends on the day, honestly. I’ve since experienced a sharp existential pang regarding my own mortality. This summer marks the twentieth anniversary of the release of OK Computer, Radiohead’s epochal album about technology and alienation a reissue of the album, OKNOTOK 1997 2017, was released this past June.