Against Suicide Rock

R eleased a quarter-century ago this spring, Radiohead’s OK Computer remains one of the most acclaimed landmarks of the 1990s in any medium. Stephen Dalton of LouderSound.com calls it “An epochal album” as well as “beautiful, mysterious, romantic, anguished, baroque and thrillingly experimental.” OK Computer is innovative, brilliant, and unforgettable. The only problem with it is that you can’t actually listen to it. It’s hectic, clanging, nonsensical, disturbed, and depressing. It’s like getting dragged into an argument with three shouting madmen and a sound-effects board.

Thom Yorke & Co. don’t seem to grasp that music has to fit in someplace, to play some purpose. It goes with walking (the Beatles), working (Bach), shirking (Yacht rock), driving (the Eighties station), imbibing (country), getting up (pop), getting down (R & B), working out (hard rock, rap), and possibly even dancing (I wouldn’t know).

What is OK Computer for? Brooding? Sulking? Planning a tri-state crime spree? Wondering how that shiny cool Schick would feel against one’s wrists? I feel confident that the last thing Van Gogh did before he cut off his ear was listen to “Paranoid Android.” Only one song on OK Computer is even OK. Mostly it’s a vial of ear poison, tunes that make everything worse. Once in the late ’90s, I listened to OK Computer when I was on a long train ride, stewing about some girl, but matters did not improve. Fortunately, I was not driving the train, or I certainly would have derailed it.

Unlike Radiohead’s earlier breakthrough hit, “Creep,” with its meticulous build to a thunderous payoff and even an ironically catchy chorus, OK Computer’s songs never stay on the course you want them to take. They keep skiing off-piste, into the treeline, and off to the emergency room. As soon as they get going again, they set about crashing again. The closest thing to a well-designed rock song is “Let Down,” which has a fantastic hook it returns to twice but then comes unglued for two dizzy minutes in the middle before returning desultorily to the initial pattern and dissolving at the end. “Karma Police” opens with a lovely strummed acoustic guitar playing off a piano, starts to get exciting when the drums kick in, then meanders and sputters to nowhere, offering nothing resembling a climax.

Even the album’s fans don’t seem to enjoy listening to it very much. Yorke: “It refers to embracing the future, it refers to being terrified of the future, of our future, of everyone else’s.” Fun! In Spin’s review, Barry Walters wrote (in a rave) at the time of the release, “Most of the time it’s nearly impossible to hear what this tortured dweeb diva . . . is going on about. The first single, ‘Paranoid Android,’ piles on tempo changes, messes with dynamics, and withholds a conventional refrain, like ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ without the operatic bits.” The New Yorker’s Amanda Petrusich frets that considering the album today is as if “someone had just slipped an unmarked Manila envelope under the door, and it contained photographic evidence of that one time we Scotch Taped a picture of Nietzsche to our dorm-room ceiling.”

“A pig in a cage on antibiotics,” goes the headline of my colleague Jack Butler’s appreciation. The album, Butler writes, uses “the best production techniques and technology available in 1997 to capture a mood of intense, technology-driven unease.” Intense unease? I think I’d rather have the mild variety, if you don’t mind. Come to think of it, I think I prefer ease. Guys, check out this album! Its effects include headache, disorientation, and mild projectile vomiting!

The most famous songs on the album share the same vexing habit of not properly developing their promise. The opener, “Airbag,” has a kickass guitar riff, joined by a lively rhythm section, but after a couple of verses, just when you expect a brilliant hook, we instead get (at 1:19) a watery, inferior reprise of the opening chords. And that’s pretty much it. The rest of the song is mostly repetition and aimless technobabble instrumentals. The song never does give us anything like a hook.

Right after that, “Paranoid Android” begins brilliantly and seems like it’s climbing the mountain to a major revelation, then powershifts into a thrilling new gear (at 0:50). But then, at 1:10, the clutch slips, and “Android” starts repeating itself. Where’s the big payoff? At 2:45 the guitars finally get wicked, promising something great, but instead, at 3:37, everything resets for what seems like it’s going to be a final push for glory. The rest of the song focuses on warmed-over bits rather than locating a peak. By the time “Subterranean Homesick Alien” starts up, again with a promising beginning that yields only a sort-of hook; suspicion starts to sink in that nothing on the album is going to punch through with an ecstatic or sublime moment.

That suspicion is the Radiohead prophecy that comes true. “Climbing Up the Walls” links a fearful high-pitched whine, a drumbeat, and some chilly sound effects alongside a drippy guitar part. Everything proceeds ominously to . . . more spacey sound effects, a primal scream, and some guitar sounds so fuzzy they might as well be white noise. “No Surprises” begins with a promising la-la melody reminiscent of the Velvet Underground’s “Sunday Morning,” starts to form into a conventional rock song, then gets stuck repeating its introductory motifs without delivering a hook before coughing as politely as a butler and excusing itself. “Lucky” has a nice Pink Floyd–ish hook at 1:11, repeated at 2:44, but they aren’t attached to anything. All of the composition on both sides of the hook is flotsam.

“The Tourist,” another mopey no-hoper, never leaves its depressing bedsit. “Fitter Happier” is a creepy speech by a depressed robot. “Electioneering” sounds like it started as a jaunty Oasis tune that was in danger of becoming fun, so the boys crumpled up the tune and dragged it through sewage. Edgy.

I’m not even going to get into the lyrics, a swamp of fear and fever and angst and pain and . . . oh just shut it, lads. Yorke and friends create music as though someone told them it was their solemn duty to paint the world in techno-despair. In a recent Rolling Stone interview, Yorke says he has one piece of advice for his younger self: “Lighten the f*** up.” OK Computer is about as useful as angry youth, and, to both, I say good riddance.