Radiohead and the Resistant Concept Album: How to Disappear Completely

2. Back to Save the Universe: The Reception of OK Computer and Kid A

28 Back to Save the Universe 2 The Reception of OK Computer and K id A To better position Kid A, it is important to look at the analysis and reception of its predecessor, OK Computer (1997), Radiohead’s third album, which is not only the band’s best-selling album to date but has retained its popularity long after its release. Reviewers have called OK Computer “the greatest album, like, ever,” and “one of the most hysterically praised releases in rock history.” It was voted “best album of all time” by Q magazine readers in 1998, and, significantly, again in 2001, after the release of Kid A and Amnesiac. In 2008 OK Computer was number 3 on Q magazine’s 50 Best Ever British Albums, beating out the Beatles’ Revolver, Sgt. Pepper, and Abbey Road. OK Computer was ranked number 1 on Spin’s Best Albums 1985–2005, not for being a document of its own decade, but because it “uncannily predicted our global culture of communal distress.”1 Rolling Stone gave Kid A the number 1 spot on its “100 Best Albums of the Decade” list, stating that “only 10 months into the century, Radiohead had made the decade’s best album—by rebuilding rock itself, with a new set of basics and a bleak but potent humanity.”2 OK Computer has also received a great deal of analytical attention from music scholars, many of whom have treated the work as a concept album, at least in part. James Doheny argues that the track sequence rather than just the subject makes this album a song cycle (that is, a “cohesive focused group of songs with an underlying theme”) and compares it to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.3 OK Computer’s Back to Save the Universe · 29 theme of technological alienation is articulated throughout such songs as “Karma Police,” “Paranoid Android,” and “Climbing Up the Walls.” Doheny suggests that the album has both a “positive stream” and a “negative stream” that interlock and vie for supremacy; the positive stream loses strength as the negative gains it, and the negative stream wins out in the end, when the album ends on a weakly positive song (“The Tourist”).4 Nadine Hubbs likewise calls OK Computer a “concept album that immerses the listener in images of alienated life under techno/bureau/corporate hegemony. . . . [A] vivid flavor of alienation and disaffectedness . . . is built up by layer over the course of twelve album tracks.” Rather than presenting a straightforward plot with characters , its lyrics are, Hubbs says, “already oblique in their written form” (that is, before any studio distortion) and “are often intelligible only in fragments.” Because of Thom Yorke’s treatment of the words as “vowel and consonant sounds . . . molded, shifted, stretched in shadings of the texture-color,” the “audible effect of these songs [is] one approaching pure musicality.” Hubbs also notes the alternating moods of the songs, but designates them as “violent embattlement” and “dreamy resignation ” instead of positive and negative.5 Along with the label “concept album” have come the inevitable comparisons with progressive rock. Hubbs cites the evocation of “a state of alienation into which actual aliens figure . . . along with androids” as well as the “neo-prog-rock grandiosity” of “Paranoid Android,”6 with its layers of vocal counterpoint. Edward Macan lists “rich vocal arrangements ” as a characteristic of at least English progressive rock, further stating that they “can probably best be explained in the context of English music history,” that is, as stemming from the medieval and early Renaissance periods of English vocal arranging.7 Even prior to the album’s release, Radiohead had been aware of the potential for comparisons with prog. During the tour before OK Computer, when the band was still working out the songs’ arrangements, one of the members had stated after a performance of “Paranoid Android” (eventually the album’s first single): “Ignore that. That was just a Pink Floyd cover.”8 Allan F. Moore and Anwar Ibrahim note that OK Computer “gain[ed] its ‘age-defining’ status through a combination of both musical and sonic exploration, with lyrics concerning the themes, simultaneously universal and personal, of alienation, information overload, and fear 30 · R adiohead and the Resistant Concept Album of an imminent new millennium. It is both a timely and a timeless record, unmistakably Radiohead but still managing to express sentiments shared by people in all walks...