The dude in “Airbag” is on a high after nearly dying in an automobile accident, a rare example of technology being a good thing: “In a fast German car / I’m amazed that I survived / An airbag saved my life.” “Climbing Up the Walls” was a good ol’ fashioned domestic drama, a portrait of a bad marriage coming apart at the seams. The narrator of “Subterranean Homesick Alien” is so tired of life on Earth that he’s desperate to be taken away by extraterrestrials. Technology was the background hum, a silent but consistent irritant contributing to the despondent characters’ downward spiral. In other words, Radiohead were singing about a very old rock ‘n’ roll lament - the travails of life on the road - but adapting it to modern concerns.įor the most part, though, the album’s grappling with information overload was buried within the songs’ panic attacks, outbursts and general disillusionment. That’s what I had to write about because that’s what was going on, which in itself instilled a kind of loneliness and disconnection.” Everything I was writing was actually a way of trying to reconnect with other human beings when you’re always in transit. But I was using the terminology of technology to express it. “I was getting into the sense of information overload, which is ironic, really, since it’s so much worse now,” he told Rolling Stone in 2017, later adding, “The paranoia I felt at the time was much more related to how people related to each other. Yorke wasn’t so much freaked out about Y2K as he was computers and the web in general.
#Ok computer radiohead timeless movie#
Y2K seemed like a disaster movie waiting to happen - at last, we would pay the price for our reliance on machines - and while few at the time really worried that global paralysis would occur at the stroke of midnight… well, not a lot of folks I knew were gonna risk flying on New Year’s Eve, either. Added to that was a growing concern about Y2K - which, essentially, was an anxiety that crucial computer programs keeping society functioning would implode because they weren’t equipped to handle the shift from flipping from 1999 to 2000, causing calamitous disruptions on, say, airplanes or power grids. Whether it was something great (like Terminator 2: Judgment Day) or truly dopey (like Johnny Mnemonic), 1990s movies played on our fear that tech was out to get us. This fear was already being reflected in popular culture - often, in cheesy thrillers like The Net in which ordinary characters are imperiled because of this scary new bogeyman known as the World Wide Web. The lyrics drew from some very 1990s alt-rock themes - alienation and the fear of being a fraud because of your commercial success - which ended up dovetailing nicely with another anguish of the era, technology encroaching into every aspect of our lives. Catherine’s Court, a mansion out in the middle of nowhere in Somerset that was owned by Jane Seymour, to record what would become OK Computer. It was backwards-looking, and I didn’t want any part of it.” As a result, in a story that’s been repeated millions of times, the group decamped to St. “The whole Britpop thing made me fucking angry,” frontman Thom Yorke later said. But Radiohead weren’t interested in competing with their contemporaries. The Britpop revival, spearheaded by Oasis and Blur, was huge in their homeland, although Radiohead’s second album, 1995’s The Bends, had proved that they weren’t just “Creep” one-hit wonders. In the mid-1990s, Radiohead weren’t even the most popular band in the U.K. Were we losing part of our humanity in the process? Were we turning into machines? And what might happen at the end of the century? Was Y2K going to destroy civilization as we knew it? Sure, the decade had mostly been a breeze, but maybe we were just setting ourselves up for a global catastrophe. Everybody had started getting computers, and the internet was becoming a thing, and we weren’t sure what all of that meant. Well, we did have one thing that kept us up at night: technology. (I mean, there were, but we Americans didn’t pay attention.) Yep, everything was pretty chill. Man, the 1990s were so great, there was nothing you had to worry about back then.
Come for the Chumbawamba, and stay for the return of the Mack.
Twice a week over the next 12 months, we will take you back to the winter of sheep cloning and the summer of Con Air.
It was an ear-biting, Pierce Brosnan-loving, comet-obsessed world, and we’re here to relive every minute of it.
2022 marks the 25th anniversary of the year that everything happened - 1997.