Timeline of Sounds
This Is What You Get
On Radiohead, climate, and Steve.
Update 6/7/22: Level has a new home. You can read this article and other new articles by visiting LEVELMAN.com.
If you don’t believe that the world will ever get better, another option is a firm belief in the fact that it will get worse. Slowly, but without much resistance from an outside entity. I wish I didn’t feel like OK Computer was pointing at any disastrous future, and I don’t know if it was when it was made twenty years ago. I am supposed to say something here about machinery, or how the album — particularly in its opening moments, signals the future in sound and melody, the way ”Paranoid Android” first sounds gentle and then becomes mechanical, robotic. First gentle and then slowly more violent, like an open palm closing steadily into a fist.
If we are being honest it is possible that Thom Yorke knows something about the end of the world that we don’t. Ok Computer was about despair in a lot of ways, but not any shared or communal despair. Rather, much of it was Thom Yorke, laughing in the face of some inconspicuous end. Ok Computer is, in some ways, one big joke, spread out over nearly an hour of a sparse but brilliantly constructed sonic landscape of choppy, technical sounds. This is what the future was to be, and the future was to be…
