RADIOHEAD | OK COMPUTER

Quindici anni. Una parte importante della vita del rock. Quindicianni anni e resistere ed affascinare ancora. Non facile per un disco rock. Un disco solo forte nel senso che è completo, sia in creatività che originalità, sia in comunicazione che in commercialità, solo un disco con queste caratteristiche può resistere tutto questo tempo ed inserirsi prepotentemente nell’Olimpo dei migliori dischi di sempre. Da quindicianni questo disco si trova al fianco dei capolavori di gente come Rolling Stones e Beatles, e nessuno ha alcun dubbio che trattasi del vero capolavoro degli ultimi 15-20 anni. Un disco che ha cambiato la storia, non solo del rock da allora fino ad oggi, ma che ha anche cambiato la storia personale dei Radiohead.
La premessa è stata forse un pò lunga, ma fare diversamente era impossibile per presentare correttamente “Ok, Computer” dei Radiohead.

Quindicianni anni fa fu l’ultimo “umido e piovoso” Giugno che la memoria ricordi. Wimbledon fu falciato dalla pioggia e anche gli Ashes furono rallentati. Temporali e freddo ricordavano a tutti che questa è “l’estate inglese”, e a Glastonbury i balli sul fango erano la cosa più interessante per la stampa di quei giorni. Il secolo stava per finire ed io stavo progettando un cambio importante nella mia vita.
Nessuno poteva realmente pensare che le cose sarebbero state cosi diverse in soli pochi anni.
Nessuno poteva immaginare che quella fu l’ultima estate inglese e che dall’anno dopo le estati sarebbero diventate sempre più mediterranee. Nessuno poteva pensare che proprio in Giugno, cinque ragazzi di Oxford con due album medio-buoni
alle spalle avrebbero distribuito un disco con canzoni dalla durata “irresponsabile” e dai suoni inusuali. Quando X-Fm fece sentire Paranoid Android, molti capirono che qualcosa di inusuale stava passando alla radio. La paura della casa
discografica di fare uscire un singolo inadatto per le radio (specie per i tempi, oltreché per affinità con gli spot seguenti), venne fugato in pochi istanti. Ancora molti alla radio ricordano la marea di telefonate di gente che aveva perso la presentazione del disco e agganciò la canzone a metà, ed era curiosa di sapere di chi si trattava.
Ok, Computer fu una specie di “chiamata alle armi”. Il miscuglio di suoni progressive, campionamenti disco e jazz, rumori da cinema alternativo e il pop-rock di ballate tipiche british, furono sicuramente un azzardo, una novità, e nello
stesso tempo la “formula vincente”.
A distanza di dieci anni il disco assunse ancora di più l’essere una pietra miliare del rock.
Quanti (dopo) si sono ispirati ai Radiohead è un calcolo che mette in crisi qualunque calcolatore elettronico. Mentre Ok, Computer apriva una strada, i Radiohead chiudevano una storia.
Da quel giorno i Radiohead cambiavano strada e percorso. La popolarità del disco è stata talmente grande che gestirla non era facile per nessuno. Ma loro l’hanno gestita diventando “un altro gruppo”.
Quando nel 2000 usciva Kid A, i tanti imitatori rimanevano sorpresi e loro mettevano il timbro sulla loro creatività e genialità con un disco che è importante e basilare esattamente come lo è stato OK, Computer. Una variazione simile in un gruppo rock non è mai esistita. Nessuno ha mai fatto un passo cosi enorme dopo un disco di successo. Nessuno ha mai scontentato la propria casa discografica. Quando dico nessuno dico che proprio neppure i piccoli gruppi indie hanno fatto variazioni tanto radicali dopo qualunque loro disco.
Molti l’hanno fatto gradualmente ma mai cosi radicali. Forse l'unico che mi viene in mente è David Bowie, e non mi viene in mente casualmente.

Questo dimostra che OK, Computer e i Radiohead stessi sono giustamente oramai nella leggenda, nel mito e nell’osservazione attenta che solo ai geni si può concedere.
Thom Yorke è chiaramente uno dei dieci grandi geni del rock e lo è nel senso che dicevo prima, lo è come lo è stato Syd Barret, e forse questo è il paragone più corretto e più vicino alla realtà.
Ci sono tanti artisti che ammiro, ci sono tanti di cui “non posso fare a meno”, ma i Radiohead hanno l’irregolarità che ha segnato anche la mia vita, hanno avuto (ed hanno) il coraggio di lasciare le cose sicure per le cose insicure mettendo a rischio se stessi. Un po come ho fatto e come continuo a fare anche io. Sarà forse anche per questo che oggi, dopo dieci anni, la mia vita è completamente un’altra, cosi come la storia artistica dei Radiohead, come i vostri ascolti di tutti i giorni che da Ok, Computer sono influenzati e a lui devono rendere conto.
Sarà... e forse è per questo che Ok, Computer, anche in questo 2013, merita di essere ancora una volta ricordato e celebrato.


Track 1 | Airbag

Opening track "Airbag" was inspired by DJ Shadow and is underpinned by an electronic drum beat programmed from a seconds-long recording of Selway's drumming. The band sampled the drum track with a digital sampler and edited it with a Macintosh, but admitted to making approximations in emulating Shadow's style due to their programming inexperience. The bassline in "Airbag" stops and starts unexpectedly, achieving an effect similar to 1970s dub. The song's references to automobile accidents and reincarnation were inspired by a magazine article titled "An Airbag Saved My Life" and The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Yorke wrote "Airbag" about the illusion of safety offered by modern transit, and "the idea that whenever you go out on the road you could be killed." Music journalist Tim Footman notes the song's technical innovations and lyrical concerns demonstrate the "key paradox" of the album: "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. ... It's a contradiction mirrored in the culture clash of the music, with the 'real' guitars negotiating an uneasy stand-off with the hacked-up, processed drums."


Track 2 | Paranoid Android

"Paranoid Android", split into four distinct sections, is among the band's longest recorded studio tracks at 6:23. The unconventional multi-section song was inspired by The Beatles' "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" and Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody", which also eschew a traditional verse-chorus-verse structure. The song's musical style was also inspired by the music of the Pixies. The song was written by Yorke after an unpleasant night at a Los Angeles bar, where he saw a woman react violently after someone spilled a drink on her. Its title and lyrics are a reference to Marvin the Paranoid Android from Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series.


Track 3 | Subterranean Homesick Alien

The use of electric keyboards in "Subterranean Homesick Alien" is an example of the band's attempts to emulate the atmosphere of Bitches Brew. The title is a reference to the Bob Dylan song "Subterranean Homesick Blues", and the science fiction-inspired song describes an isolated narrator who fantasises about being abducted by extraterrestrials. The narrator speculates that, upon returning to Earth, his friends would not believe his story and he would remain a misfit. The lyrics were inspired by a school assignment from Yorke's time at Abingdon School to write a piece of "Martian poetry", a British literary movement of works that humorously recontextualises mundane aspects of human life from an alien "Martian" perspective.


Track 4 | Exit Music (For a Film)

William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, particularly the 1968 film adaptation, Initially Yorke wanted to work lines from the play into the song, but instead the final draft of the lyrics became a broad summary of the narrative. Yorke compared the opening of the song, which mostly features his singing paired with acoustic guitar, to Johnny Cash's At Folsom Prison. The synthesised sound of a choir and other electronic voices are used throughout the track. The song climaxes with the entrance of drums, and this section prominently features distorted bass run through a fuzz pedal. The climactic portion of the song is an attempt to emulate the sound of trip hop group Portishead, but in a style that bass player Colin Greenwood called more "stilted and leaden and mechanical". The song concludes by fading back to Yorke's voice, acoustic guitar and the synthesised choir.


Track 5 | Let Down

"Let Down" contains multilayered arpeggiated guitars and electric piano. Jonny Greenwood plays a guitar part in a different time signature to the other instruments. O’Brien said the song was influenced by Phil Spector, a producer and songwriter best known for his reverberating "Wall of Sound" recording techniques. The song's lyrics are, Yorke said, "about that feeling that you get when you're in transit but you're not in control of it—you just go past thousands of places and thousands of people and you're completely removed from it." Commenting on one of the song's lines, "Don't get sentimental/It always ends up drivel", Yorke said: "Sentimentality is being emotional for the sake of it. We're bombarded with sentiment, people emoting. That's the Let Down. Feeling every emotion is fake. Or rather every emotion is on the same plane whether it's a car advert or a pop song." Yorke felt that skepticism of emotion was characteristic of Generation X and said that it informed not just "Let Down" but the band's approach to the whole album.


Track 6 | Karma Police

Critic Steve Huey said the structure of "Karma Police" is "somewhat unorthodox, since there doesn't seem to be a true chorus section; the main verse alternates with a short, subdued break ... and after two cycles, the song builds to a completely different ending section." The first portion is centred around acoustic guitar and piano, with a chord progression indebted to The Beatles' "Sexy Sadie". Starting at 2:34, the song transitions into an orchestrated section with the repeated line "Phew, for a minute there, I lost myself". The song ends with guitarist Ed O'Brien playing feedback using a delay pedal. The title and lyrics to "Karma Police" originate from an in-joke during The Bends tour. Jonny Greenwood said "whenever someone was behaving in a particularly shitty way, we'd say 'The karma police will catch up with him sooner or later.'"


Track 7 | Fitter Happier

"Fitter Happier" consists of sampled musical and background sound and lyrics recited by a synthesised voice from the Macintosh SimpleText application. Written after a period of writer's block, "Fitter Happier" was described by Yorke as a checklist of slogans for the 1990s, which he considered "the most upsetting thing I've ever written". The track was considered for the album's opening track, but rejected because the band considered the effect off-putting. Steve Lowe called the song "penetrating surgery on pseudo-meaningful corporations lifestyles" with "a repugnance for prevailing yuppified social values." Among the loosely connected imagery of the lyrics, Footman identified the song's subject as "the materially comfortable, morally empty embodiment of modern, Western humanity, half-salaryman, half-Stepford Wife, destined for the metaphorical farrowing crate, propped up on Prozac, Viagra and anything else his insurance plan can cover." Sam Steele called the lyrics "a stream of received imagery: scraps of media information, interspersed with lifestyle ad slogans and private prayers for a healthier existence. It is the hum of a world buzzing with words, one of the messages seeming to be that we live in such a synthetic universe we have grown unable to detect reality from artifice."


Track 8 | Electioneering

"Electioneering", featuring cowbell and a distorted guitar solo, is the album's most rock-oriented track and has been compared to Radiohead's earlier style on Pablo Honey. "Electioneering" is also the album's most directly political song, and expresses a cynical attitude about political affairs. It was partly inspired by Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent, a book analysing contemporary mass media under the propaganda model. Yorke likened its lyrics, which focus on political and artistic compromise, to "a preacher ranting in front of a bank of microphones." Regarding its oblique political references, Yorke said, "What can you say about the IMF, or politicians? Or people selling arms to African countries, employing slave labour or whatever. What can you say? You just write down 'Cattle prods and the IMF' and people who know, know." O'Brien said the song was about the promotional cycle of touring: "When you have to promote your album for a longer period, in the United States for example, you fly around from city to city for weeks to meet journalists and record company people. After a while you feel like a politician who has to kiss babies and shake hands all day long."


Track 9 | Climbing Up the Walls

"Climbing Up the Walls", described by a critic as "monumental chaos", is layered with a string section, ambient noise and repetitive, metallic-sounding percussion. The song's string section, composed by Jonny Greenwood and written for 16 instruments, was inspired by modern classical composer Krzysztof Penderecki's Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima. Greenwood said, "I got very excited at the prospect of doing string parts that didn't sound like 'Eleanor Rigby', which is what all string parts have sounded like for the past 30 years." The combination of Yorke's distraught vocals and the atonal strings was described by one critic as "Thom's voice dissolving into a fearful, blood-clotted scream as Jonny whips the sound of a million dying elephants into a crescendo." For the lyrics, Yorke drew from his time as an orderly in a mental hospital during the Care in the Community policy of deinstitutionalizing mental health patients, and an article in The New York Times about serial killers.


Track 10 | No Surprises

"No Surprises", recorded in a single take, is arranged with electric guitar (inspired by The Beach Boys' "Wouldn't It Be Nice"), acoustic guitar, glockenspiel and vocal harmonies. With "No Surprises", the band strove to replicate the mood of Louis Armstrong's 1968 recording of "What a Wonderful World" and the soul music of Marvin Gaye. Yorke identified the subject of the song as "someone who's trying hard to keep it together but can't." The lyrics seem to portray a suicide or an unfulfilling life, and dissatisfaction with contemporary social and political order. Some lines refer to rural or suburban imagery. One of the key metaphors in the song is the opening line "a heart that's full up like a landfill". According to Yorke, the song is a "fucked-up nursery rhyme" that "stems from my unhealthy obsession of what to do with plastic boxes and plastic bottles ... All this stuff is getting buried, the debris of our lives. It doesn't rot, it just stays there. That's how we deal, that's how I deal with stuff, I bury it." Critics have said the song's gentle mood contrasts sharply with its harsh lyrics; Steele said, "even when the subject is suicide ... Ed O'Brien's guitar is as soothing as balm on a red-raw psyche, the song rendered like a bittersweet child's prayer."


Track 11 | Lucky

"Lucky" was inspired by the recent conflict in Bosnia, and Sam Taylor said it was "the one track on [The Help Album] to capture the sombre terror of the conflict", and that its serious subject matter and dark tone made the band "too 'real' to be allowed on the Britpop gravy train". The song was originally more politically explicit, but the first draft was pared down from "pages and pages and pages of notes". The lyrics depict a man surviving an aeroplane crash and are drawn from Yorke's anxiety about transportation. The musical centerpiece of "Lucky" is its three-piece guitar arrangement, which grew out of the high-pitched intro played by O'Brien. Critics have compared the style of the guitar-playing to Pink Floyd and, more broadly, arena rock.


Track 12 | The Tourist

The album ends with Jonny Greenwood's "The Tourist", which he wrote as an unusually staid piece where something "doesn't have to happen ... every 3 seconds." He said, "'The Tourist' doesn't sound like Radiohead at all. It has become a song with space." Greenwood wrote the music as a reaction to seeing hurried tourists in France, and Yorke contributed lyrics later while on vacation in Prague. Yorke said it was chosen as the closing track song because, "a lot of the album was about background noise and everything moving too fast and not being able to keep up. It was really obvious to have 'Tourist' as the last song. That song was written to me from me, saying, 'Idiot, slow down.' Because at that point, I needed to. So that was the only resolution there could be: to slow down." The song, an "unexpectedly bluesy waltz", draws to a close as the guitars drop out, leaving only drums and bass, and concludes with the sound of a small bell.


Credits

Studio album by Radiohead
Released 21 May 1997
Recorded July 1996 at Canned Applause in Didcot; September 1996 – March 1997 at St Catherine's Court in Bath
Genre Alternative rock
Length 53:27
Label Parlophone (UK), Capitol (US)
Producer Radiohead, Nigel Godrich

Track listing

All songs written by Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, Ed O'Brien, Colin Greenwood and Phil Selway.
"Airbag" – 4:44
"Paranoid Android" – 6:23
"Subterranean Homesick Alien" – 4:27
"Exit Music (For a Film)" – 4:24
"Let Down" – 4:59
"Karma Police" – 4:21
"Fitter Happier" – 1:57
"Electioneering" – 3:50
"Climbing Up the Walls" – 4:45
"No Surprises" – 3:48
"Lucky" – 4:19
"The Tourist" – 5:24

Personnel
Radiohead
Thom Yorke – vocals, guitar, piano, laptop, programming, illustrations
Jonny Greenwood – guitar, keyboards, piano, organ, glockenspiel, string arrangements
Colin Greenwood – bass guitar, bass synthesiser, percussion
Ed O'Brien – guitar, FX, percussion, backing vocals
Phil Selway – drums, percussion 

Additional personnel
Nigel Godrich – production, engineering
Jim Warren – production, engineering
Chris Blair – mastering
Stanley Donwood – illustrations
Nick Ingman – conducting

A special thanks to Massimo Usai