‘A Pig in a Cage on Antibiotics’

S omething tells me that “Your Home May Be at Risk If You Do Not Keep Up Payments” would not have been a great title for Radiohead’s third album. It was apparently one in consideration, along with the slightly more appropriate “Ones and Zeroes,” referring to the binary language on which computers run. But the alternative-rock band went with something else: “OK Computer,” borrowed from a radio adaptation of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke considers it a “a really resigned, terrified phrase” that “refers to embracing the future, it refers to being terrified of the future, of our future, of everyone else’s. It’s to do with standing in a room where all these appliances are going off and all these machines and computers and so on . . . and the sound it makes.”

There are a lot of machines and a lot of sounds on OK Computer, released 25 years ago this month. Fresh off the well-received alt-rock opus The Bends, Radiohead had already begun to transcend (to the band, and to Yorke especially) the oppressively omnipresent legacy of its first hit, “Creep.” But instead of making something like its last record, Radiohead attempted, in a somewhat paradoxical move that helps to define the album’s many tensions, to use the best production techniques and technology available in 1997 to capture a mood of intense, technology-driven unease. As Tim Footman wrote, “The musicians and producer are delighting in the sonic possibilities of modern technology; the singer, meanwhile, is railing against its social, moral, and psychological impact.” The result was an unexpectedly successful album — drummer Philip Selway said the record company thought what ended up being a multiplatinum album would be “commercial suicide” — that sounds like it could have been recorded yesterday, and that anticipated the social and cultural anxieties of today.

It’s possible, though it would be incomplete, just to listen to OK Computer for pure sonic enjoyment. The album shows a talented, meticulous group at the peak of its fastidious powers. Acoustic, electric, and digital sound mixes flawlessly; not a note is wasted or out of place. In the span of a single song, such as “Exit Music (For a Film),” one goes from a single acoustic guitar carried by Yorke’s plaintive, almost whispery voice to a soaring crescendo of mellotrons, guitars, and near-screams. Or one song can literally be several, as in “Paranoid Android,” Radiohead’s worthy entry into the multipart-suite pantheon. Tempos, styles, and instruments shift expertly within and between songs, in service of the musical mastery for which Radiohead has become famous.

As gifted as the band is at producing licks and bits that get stuck in your head, however, it’s just as crafty at disrupting it all quite willfully. OK Computer is also replete with record-scratch effects, distortions, reverb, and other tricks that contribute to the album’s atmosphere as much as the more straightforward competence. Even those unable — or unwilling — to pay attention to the lyrics of “Climbing Up the Walls” can detect that they’re not exactly supposed to find the dissonant violins and ominous drumbeats very soothing. And “Karma Police” may begin with a “Sexy Sadie”–esque piano riff, but it ends by circling a digital drain and dragging listeners into it.

It leads perfectly into the next “song” on OK Computer, perhaps the most important one even if it can barely be called that: “Fitter Happier.” In two minutes that sound like a self-help robot having a mental breakdown, or maybe an algorithm’s attempt to describe “late capitalism,” we get a series of soulless consumerist platitudes: “Pragmatism not idealism.” “No more microwave dinners and saturated fats.” “Enjoy a drink now and then.” It culminates in the dawning of horrifying self-awareness: “A pig. In a cage. On antibiotics.”

“Fitter Happier” is, in my view, the key to understanding OK Computer. The band has resisted labeling the record a “concept album” (that is, a work with deliberate narrative cohesion), but it’s indisputably about something, and it’s never clearer what that something is than on “Fitter Happier”: a profound sense of discontent with modernity. Or alienation, in the appropriately literal interpretation of the song “Subterranean Homesick Alien” (my favorite on the album, for obvious reasons). In this spacey, etheric number, a narrator trapped in a society full of “weird creatures who lock up their spirits/drill holes in themselves/and live for their secrets” wishes that he would be abducted by aliens. Alas, even if the aliens would “show him the world/and the meaning of life,” his friends would never believe him; they’d just think that he’d “finally lost it completely.” And then there’s the drastic dichotomy of “No Surprises,” the most pleasant-sounding song on the album, yet one that appears to depict someone giving up on life. So while OK Computer may not be a concept album by the classic definition, it has a clear thematic through-line, down to the level of even the instrumentation and production, of tension between the real and the fake, the organic and the technological, how we should feel and how we do feel, and how things should be and how they are.

Radiohead’s politics are not my own, though this is a reality that conservatives long ago learned to accept about popular culture. It’s pretty transparently left-wing politics that are being embodied in songs such as “Electioneering,” which complains about the International Monetary Fund and the futility of modern politics. And sure, I could — and will — complain that the band used its talents, by Yorke’s own admission, to try to bring Noam Chomsky’s ideology to a wider audience. (One wonders what he thinks of Chomsky’s view on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. . . .) But even if I would quibble with Radiohead’s diagnosis of what ails society and why, I would not dispute the profound sense of dislocation and anomie so many feel these days. That the band produced OK Computer before so many of the events and phenomena that have only exacerbated this unease has served only to increase the relevance and quality of an album that was well-received in its time and that seems only to grow in favor as time goes on.

The portrait OK Computer paints of a person, or a series of people, trying desperately to cling to something, anything, amid a rapid onslaught of stimuli, repression, oppression, and dislocation isn’t exactly uplifting, though it makes for great listening. So what does it offer in terms of moral value, if any, aside from pure critique? There may be something. The last song, “The Tourist,” is languid and relaxed, punctuated by a simple refrain: “Hey, man, slow down!” It was supposedly inspired by the sight of American tourists in France running around trying to check all the most important sites off their to-do lists. Coming at the end of semi-nightmarish hellscape of overstimulation and modern anomie supplied by the other songs, it sounds almost like a desperate battle cry against the forces seemingly beyond our control that — even more so now than then — are transforming our lives into digital blurs. (It also, in a kind of cyclical trick, links to the album’s first song, about someone moving too fast in a car who is saved by an airbag.) It may not be much, but if Radiohead is telling us to say, “Okay, computer, enough,” then maybe it’s worth giving it a try every once in a while . . . if we can manage.