Radiohead’s OK Computer Side A (1995-1997): Please Could You Stop the Noise?
Beyond having a generally decent understanding of composition, I have a good understanding of the kind of emotion music puts me in. It may not put you in the same mood, because there’s no music in the world that everyone will equally connect with, so take anything I say with a pinch of salt and take a listen to the album yourself when you have a chance and see if what I say connects with you emotionally as well, and get the opportunity to feel it yourself. Also, relatively sensitive content warning.
Here is a Table of Contents to each of the songs in this part.
The Bends, Radiohead’s Tone, and Grunge - Airbag - Paranoid Android - Subterranean Homesick Alien - Exit Music (For a Film) - Let Down
During the early 90s, grunge became both increasingly popular and increasingly stale and generalized, defined as somewhere between punk rock and metal with a heavy, harsh guitar focus. A small group from England called On a Friday, a group of friends from school, would manage to put together their first studio in 1993 when the genre was at its most popular. They changed their name to Radiohead, after a Talking Heads song. Finding success by the skin of their teeth with the popularity of “Creep,” a song on their first album, Pablo Honey, which to this day remains one of the most recognizable songs of the 90s, they went on to make their second studio album, The Bends, in 1995, trying to prove to the world they weren’t just one-hit wonders.
Radiohead back in the Pablo Honey era.
The Bends, Radiohead’s Tone, and Grunge
The Bends, while having a few commercially popular songs like “High and Dry” and “Fake Plastic Trees,” as well as being a monumental step up from Pablo Honey and one of their most underrated albums as far as I’m concerned, didn’t have the same standout popularity of “Creep” alone despite still being a critically acclaimed album when it released. This sophomore album had a lot of the same grunginess of the first album but was much more complex musically, being composed of more advanced melodies and layering of instrumentation with songs like “The Bends”, and “Just.” More than that, though, the band began to establish a tone.
The Bends, while on a surface level quite pop-like and not necessarily what I’d call sad from its instrumentation alone, is the kind of album that gets better, and darker, the more you pay attention to it. Songs like “Fake Plastic Trees”, “Bulletproof… I Wish I Was,” and “Street Spirit (Fade Out)” are some of my favorite songs they’ve made, but I didn’t really initially enjoy them that much as compared to some of their more immediately catchy songs. As I came to listen to them more and more and get an understanding of their lyrics though, I very quickly fell in love with this album.
“Fake Plastic Trees” is a song primarily about consumerism at its core, but looking and listening into it deeper, it feels more like a depressing song about exhaustion for life and the slow fading of passion as life goes on, wishing to escape the monotony through love or hobbies, on a quest to find happiness in a fake, plastic world, believing you’ll soon take a leap of faith to get it. “Bullet Proof… I Wish I Was” is still quite an instrumentally sad song, but lyrically it reflects a near-suicidal urge to feel anything emotionally and feel stronger, life hitting like a loaded gun. “Street Spirit (Fade Out),” I would argue, is the most depressing song Radiohead has ever produced. A raw, emotional song carried by a simple, quiet, but deeply saddening guitar and light drumming, as well as lead singer Thom Yorke’s astounding vocals, the song is about hopelessness at its most pure. There is no warmth, no comfort, in “Street Spirit”, as the song is purely nihilistic, reflecting on the only certainty in life: its end. When we fade out, death comes for us all.
This dismal tone is often criticized by people who don’t like the band, as it carries throughout most of their discography, which is understandable. Some of their especially heavy music can be difficult to listen to when you’re not in the best mood as is, but I, and I would think a lot of other people, find a bit of comfort that there’s music that captures an exact feeling you may have felt at one of the worst times of your life, which may or may not be the time you’re living through currently. I discovered the band myself at a point like that, and their third album, OK Computer, was what got me hooked.
After The Bends’s relative commercial success, a third album became inevitable. At the time, however, rock music was going through its grunge-induced lack of identity, as well as suffering from the growth in numbers of hip-hop artists and the rapid rise in popularity of West Coast Rap, which was a lot less about having a good time and a lot grittier and gang-related, replacing the edgy sadness of grunge with something much more traditionally hard and masculine. Rock had sort of been straining to find a place, and by the mid 90s, some declared it a dying genre, more of a reaction to the growing popularity of other genres than anything, with some exceptions of ‘96 being Tool’s Ænima, The Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, Foo Fighters’ first, self titled album, and Mad Season’s Above (none of which would be considered predominantly grunge).
Instrumentation and pretentiousness were two of the most heavily criticized facets of 90s rock. Many cited that all grunge sounded the same, with the similar sounding heavy guitars and drums. Admittedly, that isn’t really an invalid criticism; the most distinguishing feature of most grunge bands was their vocalist, like Soundgarden's Chris Cornell or Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, but the actual instrumentalists often went overlooked unless they were exceptional. Then, of course, when it came to lyrics, a lot of rock (even to this day) is seen as a bit edgy, or self-important.
While “sticking it to the man” and anti-capitalist sentiments had been popular in music since the late 70s, 1992’s Rage Against the Machine (the band’s self titled first album) really pushed it forward in the 90s mainstream, being an odd mix of rap and rock, and many grunge albums of the early 90s, including The Bends, had an underlying theme of anti-capitalism, which, in a heavily capitalistic country like America, came under criticism by some of its more patriotic residents. Along with this, many of the vocalists were heavily depressed, tortured individuals (again, like Chris Cornell or Kurt Cobain, or Alice in Chains’ Layne Staley), and they put a lot of that raw sadness into their lyrics that wasn’t really taken seriously until, tragically, they died, criticised for being unsubtle, and depressing for the sake of being depressing, until it was too late to realize how serious they were.
The Bends does escape a lot of the instrumental criticism since it isn’t really grunge as much as it’s more alternative rock for the most part, and as previously mentioned, has some fantastically complex pieces of guitar work, but falls deep into the pretentiousness criticism. Lyrical sadness, anti-capitalism, and a hatred for success defined 90s Radiohead, especially The Bends, so of course for their next album, wanting to stray away from being as soul-searching as The Bends was, they went even further with experimenting, both taking advantage of the digital revolution, and foreshadowing the monotony of life that revolution brought with it. OK Computer, resultantly, is a much more grandiose, but melancholic album that doesn’t wallow in its sadness as much as Bends, but identifies more general, relatable emotions and runs with them into some of the greatest pieces of alt-rock ever, and the band’s first dive into integrating electronics into their music.
Cover art.
Airbag
The album opens with the song “Airbag,” which from its opening riff doesn’t sound terribly dissimilar from a number of songs from Bends, but listening carefully and then hitting the 15-second mark very quickly separates it completely from any songs that came before it. That opening riff, almost unnoticeably, is marked with jingle bells, bassy strings underlying the main melody, and then another, subtle guitar kicks in around the 10-second mark before the song kicks off at 15. The song, while not really one of my favorites on the album, and one that’s vastly overshadowed by its follow-up (which, believe me, we’ll get to), is still a fantastically complex and well put together piece of music. A lot of the song is intentionally annunciated or repetitive, such as the memorable drum, which wasn’t actually played live but instead used an Akai S3000 sampler, which, as the name suggests, sampled drummer Phillip Selway’s rhythm and looped it, with this beat underlined by an offbeat, simple bassline. Layered into the drums and guitars as the aforementioned jingle bells and strings are the elements that truly determined the future of the band, and what set the band apart from the rock of its time, electronic experimentation.
Whereas the former two albums were still somewhat unfocused, OK Computer has a consistent sound throughout almost its entire runtime, a sound that “Airbag” sets. It takes all of The Bends’s musical complexity in its guitar work and layering and glosses it over with a new, digital sheen. “Airbag” plays around with drums loops, distortions on the guitar, and many different effects most likely achieved with a synth, my favorite being an underlying effect around the middle of the song that sounds a bit like screaming or howling, adding a very small air of creepiness to the song. These small digital effects are scattered throughout the album, enhancing the near-perfected guitar work of Jonny Greenwood and Yorke’s creepy, high-pitched vocals.
“Airbag,” again, isn’t really my favorite piece on the album, but as the first track on the album, it has a ton of merit. It paints the picture of a soldier during a war getting in a car crash and being knocked out, but then seemingly being brought back to life in an “interstellar burst”, as if he was brought back by a divine, celestial being, but then he realizes, to his disbelief, an airbag saved him. This song is something of an anecdote from Yorke himself, having gotten into a car crash and having survived by virtue of his car’s airbag. Thematically, it seems to represent the irony that technology nearly killed him just as much as it saved his life, and the instrumentation climbing an almost heavenly sounding climax back to the intro riff seem to be reflective of the luck of surviving, Yorke referencing the rush of life one feels after a near-death experience.
All around it’s a great opener, setting the theme of a reliance yet disdain for technology, as well a strong sense of mortality. Car crashes are, after all, quite a common cause of death. It blends the musical and lyrical darkness in a natural without feeling like one is in contrast with the other. However, whereas “Airbag” sets the tone, the next song, in my opinion, is the magnum opus of Radiohead’s discography: “Paranoid Android.”
Paranoid Android
"Paranoid Android” is a 6-minute and 24-second long, 4-part piece, and the first OK Computer single. The song was named after the character Marvin the Paranoid Android from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (along with the title of the album being in reference to the quote “Okay, computer, I want full manual control now). It was the result of each member of the band composing a song each and then fitting them together with lyrics, inspired by Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” and the Beatles’ “Happiness is a Warm Gun.”
Marvin, the Paranoid Android.
On the left is his depiction in the British miniseries, and on the right is his depiction from the film.
Instrumentally, the song’s opening segment is melancholic and a bit nostalgic-sounding, longing and desperate. Soft, warm, but still oddly depressing, the first part has a weird sort of eeriness to it beyond just its lyrics, like something is really off but you can’t quite tell what. An acoustic guitar carries the melody while an electric guitar coming in at around the 11 second mark subtly plays a few distorted notes scattered throughout the first minute or so until the bass kicks in during the first chorus, following and adding on to the quiet bassline throughout the rest of the first segment as it continues its distorted note pattern. Backing up the guitars are a simple, repeating drum pattern and a cabasa. This slowly leads into an insanity-building bridge, before the entire song explodes, with the drums intensifying, and the distortion of the guitar only increasing as it hits the screaming 4/4 and 7/4 solo, much of the distortion throughout the song created using a Mutronics Mutator.
The third segment is beautiful, slowing down from 84 to 63 beats per minute. It’s mostly carried by the vocals as well as the lowkey drums and acoustic guitar slowing to the pace of the almost choiric, layered singing of Yorke. The ethereal tune of this segment is heart-wrenching, conveying a hopelessness not unlike “Street Spirit”, but in a more peaceful sense, almost like an acceptance of the end. As it ends in the fiery solo again, it has such a different feeling from the second segment, almost reflectively frustrated in a way, which I’ll get to more in the lyrics. It finally comes to a finish in the motif of a four note downward scale, leaving you heavy, somber, but acceptant and fulfilled.
The lyrics are nothing short of the writings of a madman. The opening is at first just as somber as the music; a man (I’ll refer to him as Robin, the character from the music video) begs “please could you stop the noise, I’m trying to get some rest”. The song was actually based on an experience Yorke had in an L.A. bar where everyone was high off of cocaine and surrounding him, feeling as though everyone wanted something out of him, and he was especially frightened when a women became furious over someone spilling her drink, being the “kicking, squealing, gucci little piggy” described in the second segment, and he couldn’t get any sleep thinking about the horrifying look in her eyes and the voices of the people hounding him. As it continues from longing into the first chorus, it becomes more psychotic as Robin begins having delusions of grandeur: “When I am king, you will be first against the wall, with your opinion, which is of no consequence at all,” which is a bit of a dark joke in that really, Robin doesn’t even realize the inconsequentialism of his own existence.
Following into the much angrier second segment, and the bar incident, much of this segment is a spiral deeper into his megalomania. A voice seems to mock him, “Ambition makes you look pretty ugly, kicking, squealing, Gucci little piggy”, or maybe he’s mocking those around him. Before long, he demands to have someone’s head be cut off just for forgetting his name, manic over the lack of recognition. Insanity overtakes him, and as he gets his wish as the third segment slowly comes in; “Rain down, rain down, come on, rain down on me, from a great height, from a great height” is repeated over and over, which, according to Yorke, is a wish to wash all the sins of the world away in reference to Noah’s Ark. As it comes to a close, we get the final reflection of Robin’s mentality as the world is washed away. All he hears and sees is panic and vomit, dust and screaming, the crackling of the burning of all those beneath him in his mania, all the yuppies he sees in his day to day life continuing on with their lives as he realizes how inconsequential he really is, and the song descends back into Jonny’s seething, rage-filled solo and four-note ultimatum.
I see it as a song about a complete spiral into the depths of one’s own personal hell. Feeling desperate and alone, seeking attention and recognition, pretentiously acting like you’re the only person in the world who understands how awful life can be, and finally giving in to a life of resent and hatred for the world around you and yourself. In the end though, what do you even matter in the grand scheme of things? Your opinion is of no consequence at all, which I find relatable in an odd sort of way. Depression and anxiety can make you feel isolated and psychotic, like the world is collapsing around you. Despite having friends, family, and people you love, you feel alone anyway, and so you come to accept that that’s simply the way things are. The world goes on, uncaring how you feel, and you go on as just another insignificant speck in the grand scheme of things, another yuppie networking your empty life away.
“Paranoid Android” is a hauntingly magnificent song in every way, reflective of both the complex beauty of Radiohead’s instrumentation and their skill at crafting powerful pieces of music, as well as the sheer power of Thom Yorke’s lyric writing, which landed it a position as the highest a Radiohead song has ever been in UK charts at #3 and their 2nd best selling single. Its music video (a befitting and surreal animated piece) was also played heavily in rotation on MTV. Take my interpretation of the song with a grain of salt; the real power of “Paranoid Android’ is how subjective its emotional resonance is. It was my first, and will always be my favorite, Radiohead song, and currently stands as my favorite song of all time, a song that resonates with me in a way I can’t even begin to describe.
That being said, with all the heaviness of the first two pieces, “Subterranean Homesick Alien” takes things much more softly.
Subterranean Homesick Alien
“Subterranean Homesick Alien” (Jonny originally wanted to call it Uptight, but Thom won) is comparatively a much simpler song, emotionally at least. Named after Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” and musically inspired by Miles Davis’ album Bitches Brew, it’s as spacey and serene as the name suggests. With the use of a Space Echo tape delay and a Boss RV-3 reverb pedal, the song is given this sort of floaty vibe to it, the sort of comfortable warmth of listening to music during a rainy day.
The synth on this track is also a lot heavier, which, again, adds to a lot of its cosmic magic; three layers that never really follow along with each other gives it a sense of oddity as well, with the twinkly synthesizers, soft electric guitar, and the peaceful bassline (as well as the drums keeping a steady tempo) always going off in slightly different directions, but never feeling discordant. Rather the opposite, none of them really belong together, but sound fantastic anyways, building a lot into the song’s themes.
Based on the first school essay Thom ever wrote, the prompt for which was “you are an alien from another planet. You have landed, and you are standing in the middle of Oxford. Write an essay about what you see. How would you see these people?” as well as an experience of accidentally hitting a bird on the road and thinking about alien abduction, the song follows a boy (assuming this is based on Yorke himself) living in a small town with aliens observing them, which only the boy notices.
The aliens don’t really understand why humans do the things they do (“drill holes in themselves and live for their secrets”) and record videos to show their families back at home how uptight people are. The boy wishes that the alien would abduct him and show him the beauty of the universe, but realizes his friends would never believe him even if he knew the meaning of life, and would likely have him locked up. He doesn’t mind though; they’re all uptight anyways.
This song, and a lot of the songs on this album, are heavily themed around isolation and escapism, with “Subterranean Homesick Alien” being the most obvious and the least dark, which makes it a pleasant listen. The boy in the song seems to not really connect to anyone, even those he considers friends, and would rather go with the aliens and see the stars than stay back in his home. It’s a relatable theme, feeling a bit disconnected from those around you, even those you care about. Individuality makes everyone special, but for a lot of people, it feels more lonely than anything else. Preferring to escape to another world (through music, games, art, movies, etc.) is, I’ve found, a common method of coping with the loneliness of feeling like you don’t belong anywhere, and with the analogy of aliens, it’s given the fantastical vibe of true escape.
The next song though, “Exit Music (For a Film),”, is a much more literal escape, as one of the most legendarily powerful songs in the history of Radiohead.
Exit Music (For a Film)
“Exit Music (For a Film)”, as the name might suggest, was originally written for a movie, 1996’s Romeo+Juliet. The director, Baz Luhrmann, asked Radiohead to make a song for the credits of the movie on their tour, and after being shown the last 10 minutes of the movie, notably the part where Juliet points a gun at her head, they were ecstatic to write the song. It’s almost like an alternate reality take on the story for the first half, since Yorke “just couldn't believe why Romeo and Juliet, after they had made love, didn't run away together. Romeo should have packed his bags, jumped out of the window and eloped with her!” while the second half is a horrific turn back to the reality of the story, Romeo and Juliet dead, as if it was all a pre-death delusion.
Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio as Romeo and Juliet.
Musically, it’s mostly a simple enough song, with a single acoustic guitar and Thom’s vocals carrying the entire first half of the song. It’s quiet, sort of peaceful, but nerve-wrackingly… wrong sounding. During the second verse, as Yorke practically whimpers out “Breathe… keep breathing. Don’t lose your nerve…. I can’t do this alone.” a ghostly choric sound kicks in using an old keyboard instrument called the Mellotron, which used replaceable audio tape loops for its sounds as an early sampler. As the third verse crawls in, so does a creepy ambience that almost sounds like blood rushing through the ears and quiet whispers, before the drums kick in and the climax begins.
The rise and climax of “Exit Music” is the most chillingly powerful peak the band ever reaches in my opinion. The hard, heavy, dramatic hits on the toms and cymbals, the shrill, distorted guitar, the ridiculously buzzed bass, and the Mellotron kicking in as Thom reaches the song’s euphoric pinnacle was the moment I truly fell in love with Radiohead, as much as I love “Paranoid Android”. While it’s not as complex or emotionally resonant, it feels like a sheer course of power through the veins.
Inspired by Johnny Cash’s album At Folsom Prison, the vocals are disgustingly raw. A pure, passionate, angry wail to all the people of Verona in the story, but in this moment the song extends far past its source material. It’s a cry, a howl, a vengeful decree to choke on the rules and wisdom of uncaring adults, to those that mocked and laughed and only have a corpse to apologize to, I see it as a song about teenage suicide, both literally and metaphorically.
As the last few songs have made clear, the world can be a lonely, cold place, and for a teen going through the most significant developmental point in their lives, a painful reality makes the future seem like it may not be worth it. In the case of Romeo and Juliet, they were two teens who seemingly had fine lives until they discovered true passion in their love for each other. When the world around them told them they couldn’t have it, when they thought they lost each other, they lost all hope for the future. In the end, as the parents have a funeral for their deceased children, they feel nothing but regret for a preventable tragedy.
In the case of reality, many people I know, myself included, feel a lack of understanding from a parent in the lowest point in our lives can be infuriating at best, and the tipping point at worst, the latter of which was the case for me personally. “Exit Music” is, consequently, a song that reflects a feeling of pure hatred for what could have been post-mortem sympathy had an attempt on one’s life succeeded, but instead, having survived, remains a bleak reminder that those feelings could have been prevented. It’s been a deeply meaningful song to me even before I knew it had anything to do with Romeo and Juliet, and it’s a song that means even more to me now knowing I’ve made it past the worst part of my life, that that Shakespearean tragedy didn’t end the way it could have, but a feeling of spite I can never afford to forget.
“Exit Music” is an astoundingly powerful song, again, despite its simplicity. A lot of people state OK Computer more as an album about a dystopian future, but I see more of a theme of a complete downward spiral, and nowhere does it absolutely reach both the highest peak and the deepest depths of that spiral than in “Exit Music”.
While it would never quite be topped, the song did, interestingly, start off its development as part of a song from the 2001 album Amnesiac, “Life in a Glasshouse”, which explains the similarities between “Exit Music” and the acoustic version of the aforementioned song featured in the 1998 documentary Meeting People is Easy following Radiohead on tour. It was later revealed in a version of the song on MiniDiscs [Hacked], a compilation of early versions of songs in development for OK Computer, that the two songs were one and the same at one point, with completely different lyrics, before being split into two different songs at some point in 1996.
Following a song about surviving going below rock bottom is a song about inadequacy, an appropriate complete loss of passion, ending up as a complete let down.
Let Down
If there was ever going to be a more depressing song than “Street Spirit (Fade Out)” from The Bends, the best thing, of course, would be to create a song just as lyrically bleak, but with the desperate longing of “Paranoid Android”s opening. “Let Down,” incase the title didn’t clue you in, is an immensely melancholy song, so much so that it’s one of the few Radiohead song I have trouble listening to, along with “How to Disappear Completely” and “Nude” from the albums Kid A and In Rainbows respectively. More in line with “Airbag” than the last three songs, thematically at least, the song was inspired by the loneliness of public transportation, watching the world passing by as a collective of people rather than as an individual in the crowd.
It’s probably the most musically complex song on the album in terms of production (Otherwise, “Paranoid Android” is significantly more complex in terms of composition and I’d say a lot more profound, compared to the relatively straightforward message of “Let Down”), to the point where it’s nearly impossible to recreate live, leading the band to almost never play it. Using a Wall of Sound technique (essentially creating a dense, layered sound created by doubling up on instruments and vocals, a digitally created effect), the song sounds very full, almost as if a full ensemble was performing it and symbolically giving the feeling of a crowd, and yet the gorgeous instrumentation leaves it feeling soul-crushingly lonely, which is exactly the point.
Most of the song is comprised of several guitars, the bass, a synth for many of the songs' twinkly sounding effects, the subtle drums, and a tambourine, being similar to “Subterranean Homesick Alien” in its separate, but never discordant, instruments. It sounds almost sleepy, perfectly capturing the song’s theme of an exhaustion with life, and the feeling of being completely alone and yet a mere part of something you have no effect on, calling back to “Paranoid Android”’s “no consequence at all.”
Like “Exit Music”, it has a climax, but it feels more like despair than it does anger, as Yorke cries out, “You know, you know where you are,” as the backing layer recites “One day, I am gonna grow wings, a chemical reaction, hysterical and useless,” like the collective thoughts of every lonely person on that lonely public transportation are connected. Yorke’s vocals in this song are hauntingly pretty. Intentionally monotone for most of the song, adding on to the effect of a depressive group, the second layer of his voice belts out, “You know where you are. You know where you are.” It’s a heart wrenching moment of realization, a cry of hope in the collective, a hope for individual happiness, a hope not to be let down any more.
“Let Down” is an accumulation of all the songs before it. It's complex, beautiful, sad, but, I find, kind of hopeful. Beyond the personal resonance of the last three songs, “Let Down” is a whole other beast. It’s a song that reflects the mediocrity of life, the lack of satisfaction life presents, people coping however they can. Life can be a let down, and you know it, but you’ll grow those wings eventually. You’ll escape, and you’ll find the happiness you so desperately crave. As bad as things are, as much as you may feel like you don’t know who you are, that voice will cry out that you do.
It’s a song, again, I find hard to listen to, but that’s just how powerful it really is, like an inversal of “Exit Music”. With a song so wistful and sad, something back to pure insanity and anger was much needed, and as such, we got one of Radiohead’s biggest classics, “Karma Police.”
Karma Police
“Karma Police” is arguably the most universally known Radiohead song other than “Creep” and “Fake Plastic Trees” and it's easy to see why. The second single, charting at #8 in the UK, and their 4th best selling single, was not quite as popular as “Paranoid Android” or the later “No Surprises” at the time. Its music video is certainly one of their most recognizable though, as a man runs from a car chasing after him as Thom sits in the back, drunkenly muttering to himself, before the driver stops and backs up, giving the running man a chance to set the car on fire through a trail of leaked oil.
Originally a running joke among the bandmates, whenever someone would act like “an a-hole,” as Ed O’Brien, the supporting vocalist and guitarist, (who suggested basing a song around the phrase) put it, they’d be called out with one of the others saying “The karma police will catch up with him sooner or later.” Using a chord progression and a similar drum beat to The Beatles’ “Sexy Sadie” (the second song The White Album inspired on OK Computer), Karma Police is a lot more pop-ish than most of the other songs on the album, a lot more excitingly paced, but not necessarily upbeat.
Starting off with a piano and acoustic guitar, the song kicks into full gear with drums, bass, and lyrics at around the 25 second mark, the catchy melody repeating for the first minute and 15 seconds, Yorke calling on the Karma Police to arrest people he finds mildly annoying to look at or listen to, before he crones in the chorus “this is what you get when you mess with us” as the karma police storm a girl’s party for simply having a bad haircut, returning to just the piano and guitar and taking advantage of the Mellotron again to create an eerie choric sound before the second verse.
The second half of the song goes down a much darker path, as the choir kicks in, much more distorted this time, backing up all the other instruments, the perspective changes as someone tries to reason with the karma police, saying he’s given all he can and yet is still on the payroll, before assumedly being taken away as the second chorus, nearly the same as the first, chants out once more that he deserves it. Finally, in the outro, the first man reels in regret, realizing what he’s done is wrong, having lost himself as the music distorts using a AMS DMX 15-80S digital delay, which, by turning up degeneration and turning down delay, allowed O’Brien to play distorted notes into the machine and then let the machine play itself, allowing them to record all the weird noises it made (which all likely sounds like gibberish). Thom wails into the distortion: “I lost myself.”
It’s a fairly simple and straightforward song, but it makes up for that not only with its captivating melody, a contribution to the themes of insanity and losing oneself. Being caught up in criticizing the world while never even trying to be introspective is a miserable lifestyle, one where you’ve satiated only yourself short term while pushing everyone around you away. It also creates an interesting world similar to that in George Orwell’s 1984, with the karma police (comparable to the novel’s thought police), acting as totalitarian enforcers in a world where individuality is a death sentence, which leads into a secondary theme, a loss of who you are as the world around you seems to insist you don’t matter if you aren’t contributing anything, another song reflecting insignificance, life as just another cog in the machine.
Karma Police is a great, iconic song despite its relatively simplicity as compared to the heavy, complex themes and instrumentation of the previous five songs, but maybe that’s what the end of the first half of the album needed anyways, a summary of the themes of the album without being a punch in the gut like “Let Down” is. “Karma Police” stands as one of Radiohead’s greatest hits, a legendary rock anthem, and definitely one of OK Computer’s most unforgettable tunes, even if it's not one of its most poignant.
Now, to separate the first and second halves and to dive as far into surreal melancholy as this album goes, is one of the most overlooked songs, if you can call it that, in Radiohead’s history.
