Thom Yorke barks out orders like a fire captain in Fahrenheit 451, punctuating each with a chorus of 'This is what you get when you mess with us.' The ominous music turns tender when he chokes on his own conscience: 'For a minute there, I lost myself.' An electronic tsunami takes over to wash him away, leaving only the proto-text-to-speech interlude 'Fitter Happier' in its wake, which Yorke once described as the most 'upsetting' thing he'd written to date.Ĭapturing all the complicated emotions and tones of this sequence simply wouldn't be possible with just analog instruments, and the Oxford quintet knew they had to tap the dark magicks of the computers they warn against to achieve their goals. You can hear the anxious friction between the two on 'Karma Police.' The regally spun webs of piano are eventually subsumed by waves of a feedback loop.

The album enacts a musical war between the artificial and the organic.

The karma police put artificial intelligence on trial for crimes against its makers, and at times you side with the machines. And not only that, they had something to say through this transformation: OK Computer's lyrics, package design, and overall aesthetic demanded to know what technology's role in dystopia would be. After 1995's The Bends, Radiohead became something else entirely, and OK Computer pointed the way to that, beginning a love affair with circuitry and artificial sonics that rendered their 'rock' status completely up for debate.

Pink Floyd set an obvious precedent for that record, both with the patchwork of looped sound effects they crafted on Dark Side of the Moon and the metaphorical device of fascism they employed on The Wall, but they were never anything other than a rock band. But in 1997 they were still paranoid, guitar-wielding androids donning electric sheep's clothing. Radiohead's songs walked the tightrope of the living and the made, and it wasn't long before they lost their balance and fell almost completely into electronic sound, a world they understood better than perhaps any other alternative rock band to date. But where Nirvana's relationship to the zeitgeist came from their spirit, power, and connection to the disenfranchised tenor of post-Reagan youth, OK Computer expressed the same brand of desolate alienation through its embrace of technology. Radiohead's OK Computer is now 20 years old, and its importance cannot be understated, rivaled in the '90s only by Nirvana's Nevermind.

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