As with “Airbag,” the song cackles at the ridiculousness of life, but unlike with “Airbag,” its laughs are of disgust. Of course, “Paranoid Android” is among the most revered Radiohead tracks not simply because “kicking, squealing Gucci little piggy” is a fun coinage. And ‘Paranoid Android,’ there's a kind of serious message in there, but it’s kind of cartoon-like.” The lewd animated music video confirms that point. This year, guitarist Ed O’Brien told Rolling Stone, “People thought it was prog, but prog always took itself so seriously. When a 1997 interviewer asked Yorke if it was okay to laugh at the multi-part epic about “unborn chicken voices” and “the yuppies networking,” Yorke replied, “Absolutely, you’re supposed to.” He added that the song title was chosen as “a joke,” meant to satirize popular perception of him a creep, weirdo, and/or loser. The Real Roots of Midlife Crisis Jonathan RauchĪ nastier comedy routine begins with track two, “Paranoid Android,” which the band has always maintained was a lark. Yorke sounds 100-percent sweet and naïve as he gives a TV-ready testimonial about the wonders of human engineering: “An airbag saved my life!” The song’s musical bulbousness is inherently funny, which suits Yorke’s concept of LOL-ing in euphoria after a brush with death. “Airbag” lumbers in with cello and guitar that sound like how it feels to get up from the dinner table after eating too much, but quickly there’s mocking contrast in the form of chiming, pastoral guitar figures. The playful vibe arises in OK Computer’s very first moments. Their wit shaped both the album’s lyrics and instrumentation, rendering pessimism as a wry delight. But Radiohead, crucially, communicated their despair with a wicked sense of absurdity. Yes, Radiohead is perhaps the modern pop-rock act most described with the word “gloom.” Yes, OK Computer ’s lyrics touch on car crashes, plane crashes, crushing disappointment, suicide by poison, and “a cat tied to a stick driven into frozen winter shit.” Yes, you may weep at the middle third of “Paranoid Android” and at the bridge of “Lucky,” and it is possible you have heard “Climbing Up the Walls” playing in at least one night terror. In Rolling Stone’s recent cover story on the 20th anniversary of Radiohead’s OK Computer, singer Thom Yorke says that if he could go back to 1997 he’d tell his younger self to “lighten the fuck up.” But I don’t know-to listen to the newly reissued OK Computer is to be struck by the one aspect of the album that’s still somehow underrated: its humor.
0 kommentar(er)
