Radiohead’s OK Computer Side B (1997-2017): A Handshake of Carbon Monoxide
Here’s a Table of Contents to all the songs in this part.
Fitter Happier - Electioneering - Climbing Up the Walls - No Surprises - Lucky - The Tourist - Legacy, OKNOTOK (B-sides and Unreleased Tracks), and Conclusion
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.
Fitter Happier
“Fitter Happier” is a weird song. It’s just under two minutes, featuring nothing but a piano track (later titled “A Piano Lies Down in the Middle of the Road”), an eerie sounding orchestra sample, audio from the film “Three Days of the Condor” recorded off of Thom’s TV, and, most importantly, Apple’s old text-speech program (specifically the voice “Fred”, the same one Steven Hawking used) spouting what seems like a checklist, which, technically, is exactly what the song is.
Thom was having writer’s block, keeping lists of things to write about but never being quite able to put them together. According to him, he found the inspiration, through “hysteria and panic” to simply put the words into the computer and have it read out, which he found sounded better than having himself read it due to the computer’s neutral voice.
“Fitter Happier” serves as the ultimatum of OK Computer, a perfect summary of everything it is, read out by the only thing that holds no judgement, a machine, another begrudging reliance on technology. The computer reads out normally at first, advising getting exercise, getting along with people, trying to be calm while driving, etcetera., but soon spirals more into suggestions of being as average and restrained as possible: fond, but not in love, not afraid of midday shadows (since that would be childish), and not crying in public (leading to less chances of sickness).
As the computer continues, it begins to suggest much more dystopian options, like working at a slow and calculated pace with no chance of escape, being concerned as a citizen but powerless to change anything, remaining sensible and logical rather than having any sort of hopes or optimism, and having the ability to laugh at weakness, like a cat with a stick tied to its tail. It seems to briefly break character, having a memory of a baby strapped in a backseat and suggesting tires that grip in the wet, perhaps suggesting something happened to the child, crying after a good film and kissing with saliva, before ending off stating that you’re nothing more than a pig in a cage on antibiotics.
A late 90s Macintosh computer, the singer of “Fitter Happier”.
I don’t really know why I like “Fitter Happier” as much as I do. I think of it narratively as not a literal computer reading out the lyrics, but someone who’s completely lost touch with who they are and is no more than a robot now. It warns to take care of yourself, to stay in your lane, to know your place, to never show weakness and mock those that do, and to never, ever, forget that you’ll never be more than you are. It once was more, it once loved, and cried, had a child and a lover, but that’s all gone now. The shell of a human left believes they’re fitter, happier, and more productive.
Apathy and a lack of identity is something I’ve struggled with a lot. After a certain number of years being clinically depressed, it can be difficult to be hopeful. You always hope for better, but there comes a point where you get into a cycle of being unable to even try making your life better, an acceptance that things just are the way they are. You feel things, but that nagging feeling of pointlessness never leaves you. Being fond but not in love, keeping yourself informed but never wanting to take action, getting along with people but never getting attached, eating and exercising decently enough not to feel disgusted with yourself but not enough to be happy, it can become an odd stockholm syndrome effect of being comfortably numb in the mediocrity of your own existence.
At a point, I find, it can be difficult to remember what it was like before settling into your apathy. You learn to live with it, but you’re constantly aware something is different now. It wasn’t just an instant switch, you know that much, you might even know the starting point, but you can’t for the life of you remember what it was like to feel fulfilled. You’re not the same person you once were. You remember that baby, smiling at you from the backseat, kissing with saliva, watching good movies, it’s all there in your head as a good memory, but the feeling is gone. That’s what “Fitter Happier” is to me, as well as OK Computer as a whole. A disgustingly lukewarm, apathetic existence where you become no different from the computer you sit in front of.
Somehow, I find it more depressing than even “Let Down”. While it’s not stare-death-in-the-face dismal like “Street Spirit,” it’s a hopeless song. This is a song of insanity, loss, depression, a loss of individualism, a hatred for how life’s turned out for you, a wish for something more, but ultimately, needing to conform to get by. Love can lead to nothing but pain, crying will get you sick, being afraid is childish, and any single step out of the line keeps you from being the empowered, informed member of society the machine forces you to believe you are.
It’s astounding all that is packed in a 2-minute song read out by a 1997 Macintosh computer, but that’s how incredible this album is. I’m in the minority that really loves “Fitter Happier” but I think it's worth really listening to this little intermission. After this otherwise subtle and overlooked song is, however, the most unsubtle track on OK Computer, and what I believe is easily its worst.
Electioneering
How “Electioneering” got on the album and not a number of B-sides off of “Paranoid Android”’s run as a single, I have no idea. It’s not even a bad song, I’d argue quite the opposite, it’s one of the most catchy, headbanging songs Radiohead’s ever made, but it just doesn’t fit on OK Computer. More in line with their first album, Pablo Honey (but with the complexity of a Bends song), it’s pure, angry grunge.
Inspired primarily by the Poll Tax riots of 1990, as well as reading the work of Noam Chomsy, this song is easily the most blatantly political they’ve ever made (down to the name, electioneering meaning to work hard on a campaign). It follows a politician, campaigning, putting up a facade of trustworthiness, fake middle-grounds, and voodoo economics and stating all of it is just business to get a vote, and that’s really about it.
The Poll Tax Riots of 1990.
Most of the song is composed of a jangly guitar and a more roaring background guitar, a great bassline, tambourine, cowbell, and drums, and is pretty consistent for the entire song, with the only real change in melody being the chorus, with Thom yelling “when I go forwards, you go backwards, and somewhere we will meet,” and the very ending, blaring into a final, ripping guitar solo with heavy cymbal hits.
There isn’t really much to say about it other than it’s about politicians being deceitful, which is fairly common knowledge at this point. It’s such an odd song in what, so far, has been a relatively cerebral, emotional album, to be straightforward in its politics and not really saying a whole lot else is just a weird choice. It’s a fantastic song with some great guitar work, as well as a great climax (although early versions of the song with Ed and Thom dueting and chanting “Doin’ it all” did sound a little better in my opinion), it’s just not a good song for what OK is going for thematically, which may be a popular opinion, but it's popular for a reason.
Again, I really like “Electioneering,” and I don’t think its instrumentation is much of an issue. The most frequent argument I see for the song is that it’s a wakeup call after the relatively slow and serene first half of the album, which I completely agree with. As much as I think the next track would have been a better transition after “Fitter Happier”, “Electioneering” serves as a much needed, high energy rock tune; I really just wish it had lyrics that were more befitting of the albums much more personal motifs. It would have made a great B-side or a perfect track for Radiohead’s 2003 album Hail to the Thief, which is their most political album.
“Electioneering” isn’t a bad song, and it’s not really musically the worst track on OK Computer, but it’s one I find myself skipping almost everytime I listen to the album because I wish it was a different song. It’s definitely made up for by the next couple songs though, the next of which is probably the most musically dark song on the album.
Climbing Up the Walls
“Climbing Up the Walls” is an interesting song, standing as one of the most unique-sounding and genuinely somewhat unnerving songs in Radiohead’s discography, let alone on OK Computer. Like “Let Down”, it’s a song wrapped in production and distortion, making it quite hard to recreate live.
Much of the song is layered in effects and reverb, giving an otherworldly vibe to it, but where “Subterranean Homesick Alien” is comparable to E.T., “Climbing Up the Walls'' hits a lot closer to The Thing in its cold, echoey paranoia. Using heavily distorted radio noises for creepy background noises, a deep, rippling, distorted guitar, drums featuring a metallic sounding unsnared snare drum, and 16 violins, composed by Jonny (who’s mastery of auxiliary effects is incredible on this song), creating an eerie string section in the choruses and into the climax, with a secondary guitar kicking in after the first chorus.
The climax of this song is both an inversal and a parallel to “Exit Music,” both standing as a plea to take mental illness seriously before it causes a preventable tragedy, but whereas “Exit Music” is a furious wail, a cry of conviction and rage, a demand to be heard, “Climbing Up the Walls” feels more like the moment someone is pushed over the edge, a desperate, insane fight for one’s own sanity before, in a genuinely terrifying scream by Thom, the beast called fear overtakes you, crawling on the inside of your brain, under your skin, in every orifice. No matter how much you scream, you’re bound to be friends till the end.
It’s incredible. While I wouldn’t say it’s as effective emotionally as the climaxes of “Exit Music” or “Let Down,” or the end of the third segment of “Paranoid Android”, simply because the vocals in those songs are unbearably, heart-wrenchingly powerful, it’s easily the most musically impactful moment on the whole album. It’s a disturbing, distorted roar of sheer cosmic power, like the musical equivalent to an Edgar Allan Poe or H.P. Lovecraft story with the overtaking of one’s mind by the physical manifestation of paranoia.
The creepy theremin, haunting violins (Jonny wanted to create a string section as far from the use of strings in rock for the last 30 years, such as in The Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby, and closer to Krzysztof Penderecki’s “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima” from 1960), and the still going dark guitar and drums, leading into the aforementioned scream and resolution, lead to a sound like a mind being ripped asunder. It’s one of the most unnerving endings to a song I’ve ever heard, and feeds well into the disturbing inspirations for the song as well.
Thom, when he was younger, worked in a home for people with severe mental illnesses, and one night one of them escaped (Thom stated he was “perfectly harmless, but he was really ill”), which stuck with him. He also remembered reading about how most mass murders in American history (at least at the time, around 1995) were “males between 30 and 40, who had just lost their jobs or been recently divorced,” inspiring the line “behind the crack of a waning smile, 15 blows to the back of the skull.”
The song is written from the perspective of a monster, living in the brains of the mentally ill. It keeps your deep, dark basement locked, it makes things appear out of the corners of your eyes, and it always hides in the one place nobody can ever find it: climbing up the walls of your head. The second part of the song especially seems to be the most inspired by the aforementioned statistic of mass murderers, most of which were simply normal people who snapped. Make sure to lock up your kids at night, because you can never be sure if that man is being invaded by the same monster you suffer from, fear itself.
“Climbing Up the Walls” is an interesting take on mental illness in a time where it wasn’t taken seriously; many of the lyrics seem to clue into this. No matter what alarms you sound off, nobody will believe you. People, at the time, weren’t taken care of like they should have been, and were often locked up in a home or were simply dismissed as sad and nothing more until they reached a breaking point, and that’s hugely relevant in today’s world with all the terrible mass shootings in the last couple years, especially in America.
With such a dark song, it’s no wonder the next song is one of the lightest and saddest on the album, and another all-time classic.
No Surprises
“No Surprises,” the third and final single off of OK Computer (if you don’t count “Lucky,” which was only featured in France), is nearly as popular as “Karma Police”, and actually charted higher at #4 in 1998 and sold just a little less than “Paranoid Android”. Its music video, a single shot, depicts Yorke’s head in what looks like a glass bowl, slowly fading out of the dark with lights timed to the song. The lyrics of the song are displayed on the helmet, reversed to look like it's reflected on the glass. The glass slowly fills with water and Yorke is completely engulfed, before it eventually drains and Yorke takes a breath, fading back out into the darkness and twinkles of timed lights. It’s a neat video, just as creative if not quite as cool as the “Karma Police” and “Paranoid Android” videos.
While not having as specific an inspiration as a lot of the other songs, “No Surprises” was actually the first song created that ended up on the album, presented by Yorke while they were touring with R.E.M. in August of 1995. Like “Exit Music,” though to a lesser extent, “No Surprises” had very different lyrics, leaning more into the personal sentiment of The Bends than the grander scale of OK Computer. Completely acoustic, the song was much more quiet and soft, with Thom’s singing being a lot higher, and near the most beautiful it’s ever been. It’s about a couple, a tired man with a broken clock (with no alarm), and a woman who’s been hiding her self-harm in the bathroom, which the man is seemingly aware of (tired of her excuses as to why she hides them from him, but not wanting to be insensitive), but doesn’t want to bring it up, maybe to try not to make her worry even more. It’s a gorgeously sad song and it bums me out a little that the original was never finished, but the version we got is just as phenomenal.
After how nightmarish “Climbing Up the Walls” is, “No Surprises” serves as a sort of lullaby. Wanting a sound similar to Louis Armstrong’s “Wonderful World” or Marvin Gaye, as well as The Beach Boys’ album Pet Sounds, the song is slow and sentimental sounding, sounding sort of nostalgic in some indescribable way; the best way to describe it would probably just be ‘“twinkly,” with Yorke describing it as child-like, instilled with a sense of innocence. The main acoustic guitar is kept from the early version, but accompanying them is a glockenspiel and a very high-pitched, but soft electric guitar that adds into its whimsical sound, which makes sense as to why it was the tone-setter for the album; it’s a fairly musically simple song in terms of instrumentation, but it's just pouring in the same melancholy of “Subterranean Homesick Alien,” “Let Down,” and the first section of “Paranoid Android,” just with a slightly more pop-ish chorus than a lot of the other songs.
With its relatively upbeat instrumentals though, the lyrics offer a pretty heavy juxtaposition. Carrying over a lot of the peaceful sentimentality from the earlier version and setting it on a much larger scale to fit in with the album, with Yorke singing in a deeper, much more monotone voice to fit with the now much darker lyrics. The song describes a person who seems to have disabled his carbon monoxide alarms on purpose and is slowly dying, death being preferable to their empty, unfulfilling life, with an awful job, a loveless existence, and permanent emotional bruises and scars.
As the carbon monoxide fills their home, they hallucinate a beautiful house with a beautiful garden, before they finally begin to fade into silence, a voice cheering, or wailing depending on how you look at it, that they’ve finally managed to escape from a cold, dark reality layered over the repeating “no alarms and no surprises, please.”
It’s odd having such an otherwise pleasant melody hold such a dark underlying theme, but with the inspirations it makes sense, with a lot of 60s and 70s pop music having a lot of dark lyrics, such as Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Alone Again (Naturally)”, while still sounding quite cheery. It’s a song fairly similar to a lot of the other earlier ones, especially “Let Down,” a song about feeling completely like life has become empty and meaningless, so what’s the point of keeping on an alarm? Not waking up might be preferable than working your 9-to-5 until the day you die anyways. It’s not as subtle as a lot of the other songs, but it’s definitely fitting.
It’s definitely not hard to see why “No Surprises” is so popular. It’s the most easy-to-consume song on the album, an upbeat sounding, light-hearted song on a first look, and a good look into the melancholy mentality of OK Computer upon closer inspection. I’d say it’s sort of the “Creep” of this album in terms of it being not a fantastic representation of the band’s talent, but definitely one of the best songs to get you into the band.
The next song, though, is what I feel is easily one of the most underappreciated songs in Radiohead’s discography, and OK Computer’s most hopeful.
Lucky
“Lucky” is an incredible song and it’s a crime that it isn't often mentioned as one of the greats of the album. Put together only a month or so after “No Surprises” in September of 1995, it was the song where the album’s development really began according to the album’s producer, Nigel Godrich, and I feel much more closely hits all the staples of OK Computer’s sound. Originally though, it was officially recorded after it had been played on tour as a conceptual song in a single day for The Help Album, a charity album created to raise funds for the War Child charity, which helped the children of countries suffering from wars, before it was eventually put on OK Computer and then released as a single, but only in France.
The instrumentation stemmed from Ed O’Brien strumming the strings above the guitar nut, which made a soft, but high pitched noise, and the rest of the song was developed from there. Starting off slow with just the strumming, a bassline, and a secondary guitar, the song kicks into a powerful chorus before building up the second verse, in which the Mellotron is used again for that glorious choir noise and Thom’s vocals crescendo as the chorus kicks in again, before the outro and one last utterance of “we are standing on the edge.”
“Lucky,” as one would guess from the title, is actually a very positive, hopeful song. Following an airplane pilot being pulled out of a wreck as he thinks of his lover, Sarah, he thinks about when he’ll likely be called in by the Head of State, likely to be sent out for another dangerous operation, but he can only think of Sarah, and being her superhero. It’s a glorious day for him.
I think at its core, “Lucky” is a sort of conclusion to the ultimatum of “Fitter Happier.” You may feel like you’ve lost all sense of who you are, you may be living in a cycle of mediocrity, of being sent out in an airplane with the risk of getting in a crash, only to be sent back out the next day, but you can never lose sight of the best life has to offer. If you can find it within yourself to believe the next day could be glorious, despite all the pain you might be in, then you haven’t given in to the machine just yet.
In an album full of despair and pessimism, I’m really glad one of the last songs has such a genuinely uplifting message, and I think that’s a big part of Radiohead that often isn’t discussed. For every “Street Spirit,” there’s a “Fake Plastic Trees,” a song that reins back the darkness and gives you a little hope. For all the hopelessness and inevitability of a return to dust, there’s always a reminder that if you just take a run and take that grand leap of faith, that love you’ve so desperately earned will look and taste like the real thing, no longer fake and plastic. “Lucky” is OK Computer’s “Fake Plastic Trees”.
I mentioned in “Fitter Happier” that I sometimes find it hard to remember what it was like before I was depressed, but at this point, I wouldn’t change a thing. As some hokey movie has probably said before, the light shines brightest through the darkest dark. I’ve met so many great friends, mentors, and fallen in love at the absolute lowest point in my life, and had some of the best experiences of my life right after some of the worst, but that’s something I frequently forget, trying to look towards the past instead of trying to enjoy the present. It’s important to remember that even though things may seem rough, like you’re being pulled out of the wreck of an airplane, you’re loved. Behind you lies a fiery crash, but in front of you is a glorious day. Never forget that.
I really love “Lucky” in kind of the same way I love “Fitter Happier,” just on two opposite ends of the spectrum. “Lucky” is representative of true hope, a hope that things will get better despite poor circumstances, and I think the album really needed that, along with just generally being a pretty badass song taken as face value.
Setting a positive note for the end, the album finally comes to a close with a slow, beautiful tune.
The Tourist
“The Tourist” was the last song recorded for the album. Conceptualized as the band was just about finishing up as a closer, Jonny Greenwood came up with the idea for the song after a trip to France (and is really considered his brainchild, surprising him when it got on the record). Seeing American tourists scrambling to see as much in as little time as possible, he thought they really ought to slow down to see the beauty of the country for a while, just taking it in a little at a time.
The slow pace of the song was designed directly in contrast to the rapid pace of the tourists it talks about. Beginning and ending with a calm drum and gently plucked guitars, Thom comes in, his voice cushiony and comfortable sounding, layered, before the sweeping, but still serene chorus comes in, as the Mellotron choir sounds off one more time. The guitars briefly take off, as if the song is being propelled deeper into its spacey surroundings, drifting off back into its casual second verse, and finally into a long, beautifully spacey guitar solo as Yorke cries out, but not in a hurt-sounding way like the other climaxes, before coming to a soft end with the tap of a triangle.
The lyrics follow the inspiration of the song, following a person who seems to be rushing around so fast he’s practically a blur, with people urging them (or them urging themselves mentally) to slow down a bit. The person tries to explain they just get overcharged, but they continue to rush around anyways, people wondering what the rush is as they once again try to get him to slow down. Thom’s vocals on this track are fantastic, giving this somehow really soft, but bombastic and uplifting performance, which reflects the song’s sort of spacey cry to stop and smell the roses.
“The Tourist” is a song about enjoying life as it comes rather than trying to do and see everything, or simply getting caught in the “Let Down” loop. You get anxious sometimes, thinking that you have to get as much done as possible or you might not get to experience things later, and rush to do it all, but that means you might miss out on the things you already have around you. I find a lot of people around me, especially at the point of my life I’m at where getting into colleges is presented as this huge life-or-death situation, a lot of people don’t take time to live as the age they are. You only get to be at any given point in time once, so you better savor it. Enjoying being a child, a teen, a young adult, middle-aged, old, because you will not have the opportunity again. Experience every moment of life rather than trying to be two steps ahead at all times, or you’ll miss out on living.
As Jonny himself said, “It sounds like the last song on the album.” “The Tourist” is probably the most perfect final track I could’ve imagined for OK Computer. It isn’t quite as good as “Street Spirit” or some of the later closers, but it’s perfect in the context of the album it’s closing out. A sweet, sentimental song about taking it easy in tough times, it’s the perfect closure to the downward spiral.
From car crashes, crippling anxiety, existential crises, and depression, not fitting in, teenage suicide, a collective emptiness, hatred for the world around you, a loss of identity, a lack of trust in our leaders, the breaking point in any human’s mental state, and succumbing to the numbness life has to offer, ending with a cry to have hope and look at what you have, despite all the misery, and torment, and suffering the world may have handed you.. Just slow down for a minute, and let yourself take some time to see what good the world may have to offer as well. Don’t be a tourist on the path life presents you, just slow down a little.
Legacy, OKNOTOK (B-sides and Unreleased Tracks), and Conclusion
In a discussion of the best rock albums of the 90s, it’s difficult to find any argument that OK Computer is up there, if not at the top depending on who you ask. Today, the paranoia it presented is discussed in the context of the digital age, a stark reminder of how automated our lives have become and how widespread the feelings of a mediocre existence are spread in our societies, somehow more relevant now than it was in 1997. The album celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2017, and a reissue of the album, called OK Computer OKNOTOK 1997 2017, was released, and was dedicated to Yorke’s ex-wife, Rachel Owen, who died of cancer a few months before its release.
OKNOTOK, along with included remastered versions of all of the original songs, included all the B-sides off of the three singles, as well as three as-of-then unreleased tracks that the band had been playing live since the development of OK Computer, but had never been able to fit into albums. The B-sides (“Lull,” “Meeting in the Aisle,” “Melatonin,” “A Reminder,” “Polyethylene Parts 1 & 2,” “Pearly*,” “Palo Alto,” and “How I Made My Millions”) range from pretty good to even better than some of the songs that got onto the album. “A Reminder”, “Polyethylene”, and “Pearly*” are definitely my three favorite, with “Polyethylene Part 2” being one of my favorite Radiohead songs, being the kind of harder hitting stuff (instrumentally and vocally) I would have loved to see on the album instead of “Electioneering”, fitting a lot more with its general sound.
The three unreleased tracks, (“I Promise,” “Man of War,” and “Lift”) are pretty good too, although “Man of War” (otherwise known as “Big Boots” communally) is pretty overwhelmingly better than the other two, which makes sense considering how much demand there was for its official release since the 90s. “I Promise” is a fully acoustic guitar driven song with a marching snare beat, “Man of War” is a spacey, reverb-coated, much more classic rock tune with an awesome climax, and “Lift” is a light, simple song with some cool use of what sounds like a theremin and synth strings.
All around, definitely a worthwhile collection of songs, and what I’d consider the definitive way to listen to the album, with the special edition including a vinyl copy, an art book, Yorke’s notes, a sketchbook by Yorke and Stanley Donwood, the cover artist, as well as a cassette with early recordings and demos of a number of songs, both released and unreleased.
OK Computer is an undeniable masterwork of emotion. It set the bar for most contemporary rock, and the band would continue to innovate with their next album, Kid A, take a turn to the fully political with Hail to the Thief, and change the whole industry with the pay-what-you-want In Rainbows. Radiohead may have began as a tiny, insignificant grunge band from Oxford, but a meager group of creeps and one particularly paranoid android managed to become so much more with the talent they have together. If I had to rank the songs, it would probably be “Paranoid Android,” “Exit Music,” “Lucky,”, “No Surprises,” “Fitter Happier” (sue me), “Climbing Up the Walls,” “Let Down,” “Karma Police,” The Tourist,” “Subterranean Homesick Alien,” “Airbag,” and then “Electioneering” from most to least favorite. There isn’t a bad song on the album, some songs are just more perfect than others.
