I’ve noticed a nugget of embarrassment buried in the recent avalanche of
critical reappraisals and retroactive interrogations of Radiohead’s “OK
Computer,” a record that was released in 1997 and is celebrating its
twentieth anniversary this summer. Critics (and some fans) approached
its reappearance with trepidation—as if we were all about to be
strong-armed into reckoning with our pretentious and over-serious past
selves. As if someone had just slid an unmarked manila envelope under
the door, and it contained photographic evidence of that one time we
Scotch Taped a poster of Nietzsche to our dorm-room ceiling, with
instructions to await further notice. Even Thom Yorke, the band’s
singer, has been nearly sheepish when discussing its legacy. “The whole
album is really fucking geeky,” he recently told Rolling Stone.

To mark the anniversary, the band has just released “OKNOTOK,” which
includes a remastered version of the original album, plus eight B-sides
and three previously unreleased tracks: “I Promise,” “Man of War,” and
“Lift.” (In addition, a special vinyl edition, available in July, will
offer a hardcover art book, a collection of Yorke’s notes, a sketchbook
of what the band is calling its “preparatory work,” and a cassette tape
containing demos and additional session recordings.) None of the
extraneous material is exactly revelatory—live versions of “Lift” and “I
Promise” have been drifting about the Internet for years—though it does
help complete a portrait of a band bucking against itself, and learning
how to express its fear effectively.

By the time the band started writing “OK Computer,” Radiohead had
already released two very good guitar records (“Pablo Honey,” in 1993,
and “The Bends,” in 1995), but it was not yet clear that it would be the
band to rewire everybody’s expectations of contemporary rock.
Still, there was a wildness to the early work. I recall watching the video for Radiohead’s
first single, “Creep,” late one night on MTV’s “120 Minutes,” and
whispering whatever the thirteen-year-old equivalent of “What in
tarnation!” is. The video begins benignly enough—a cluster of lanky,
sunken young men, a mopey progression. Then the guitarist Jonny
Greenwood raises a bony arm, slams out two scabrous chords, and a
maniacal-looking Yorke begins wailing like a person who decided to jog
down a hill, only to suddenly discover he couldn’t control how fast his
legs were going. “What the hell am I doing here?” he shrieks. I had
never heard despair articulated quite so plainly. Even now, “Creep”
remains the best song I know about the inertia of unhappiness.

Yorke was twenty-seven when he started working on “OK Computer,” and
just coming off several years of touring. (“I was basically catatonic,”
he told Rolling Stone. “The claustrophobia—just having no sense of
reality at all.”) Though Yorke insists that “OK Computer” was inspired by the
dislocation and paranoia of non-stop travel, it’s now largely understood
as a record about how unchecked consumerism and an overreliance on
technology can lead to automation and, eventually, alienation (from
ourselves; from one another).

The disparity between these two things—the idea that everyone has gone
on believing that the record is about the rise of machines, when Yorke keeps
telling us it’s about how much he hated touring the world in a dumb
bus—is fascinating, and at least partially attributable to the record’s
fretful instrumentation. (Its lyrics are abstract enough to suit just
about any imagined narrative.)

Radiohead came of age in the public consciousness in the citadel of
grunge, an era in which rock was more introspective than ambitious;
grunge was, in many ways, a fierce response to the bloat of the
seventies and eighties, and indulgence of any sort was quickly sniffed
out and vilified. (Nirvana, for example, never felt on the verge of
incorporating a glockenspiel.) Radiohead wasn’t a grunge band (if
anything, it was in danger of being rolled into Britpop), but its
insistence on a kind of brainy largesse—on bringing in unexpected
instrumentation, approaching rock from an unapologetically cerebral
place—felt almost countercultural.

Musically, “OK Computer” was inspired by Miles Davis’s “Bitches Brew,”
an aggressive and beautiful jazz-fusion album from 1970. Davis’s
producer, Teo Macero, was a student of musique concrète, an experimental
French genre in which tape is manipulated and looped to create new
musical structures; much of “Bitches Brew” was pieced together after the
band had gone home. Accordingly, its paths are not foreseeable, or even
particularly human—navigating “Bitches Brew” remains a heady and
disorienting experience, in which it is very easy to forget which end is
up, or which way is out. “OK Computer” was made mostly live—it was
started in a converted shed in Oxfordshire (the band called the space
Canned Applause) and finished at St. Catherine’s Court, a stately
stone mansion near Bath, owned by the actress Jane Seymour—but Radiohead
and its producer, Nigel Godrich, shared Davis and Macero’s yen for
disorientation. The reigning sound of the record is panic: darting,
laser-like guitars, shaky percussion, moaning.

“OK Computer” was critically lauded upon its release—Spin named it the
second-best album of 1997, calling it “a soaring song-cycle about the state of the soul in the digital age (or
something),” and a Times piece marvelled at its ubiquity, noting that “although the band’s first
video is six and a half minutes long and features twisted animated
sequences in which children are shown drinking in a bar and paying women
to flash them, it has been in heavy rotation on MTV.”

Still, I’m not sure that anyone really knew how to metabolize its
precise disquiet until exactly this moment—which makes the timing of its
reissue feel nearly fated. For me, revisiting some of these tracks now
incites a bizarre kind of déjà vu—as if I am barely but finally
remembering some whispered warning I received two decades back. The
second half of “Paranoid Android,” one of the record’s darkest and most
popular tracks, features Yorke singing in a strange, ghostly harmony
with himself. “From a great height,” he repeats in his crystalline
falsetto, stretching the final word until it sounds like some abstract
plea. Meanwhile, a second, feebler voice opines, “The dust and the
screaming, the yuppies networking, the panic, the vomit, the panic, the
vomit.” Is this terribly dramatic? Sure. But if you have ever glanced
around a bar—or a subway car, or a coffee shop—and seen a dozen sentient
humans all tapping away on a device, forgoing awkward, fleshy engagement
for a more mediated and quantifiable digital experience, and felt a deep
and intense terror in your gut, then perhaps you’ve experienced some
version of what Yorke’s voice is doing here: splintering, dissociating,
freaking out. Many other bands have expressed worry about the
proliferation of devices and the strange divisions computers have
wrought, but I can’t think of another song that sounds as much like a
person getting swept into a black hole.

Now, in 2017, the anxieties expressed on “OK Computer” feel comically
prescient, though, of course, fear of technology is hardly new. In
England, during the Napoleonic Wars, roving bands of so-called
Luddites—former textile workers and weavers—rode around setting mills on
fire and trashing industrial equipment, believing that their livelihoods were
being usurped by machines. (We now use the word Luddite to refer,
lovingly, to someone who does not know how to effectively deploy emoji.)
In an essay for the Times (written in 1984, of all years!), the novelist Thomas Pynchon suggested that Luddites were acting in response to two stimuli:
“One was the concentration of capital that each machine represented, and
the other was the ability of each machine to put a certain number of
humans out of work—to be ‘worth’ that many human souls.” It’s the latter
that seems to preoccupy “OK Computer.”

In certain (admittedly rarefied) circles, it’s become shameful to
espouse devotion to any sort of canonized modern rock—perhaps because
rock’s history is so plainly riddled with repeated instances of racism
and sexism that to vouch for it now, in an era in which many people are
working to correct or more properly account for past wrongs, feels
unconscionable. But the dread expressed by “OK Computer” is universal.
It deserves our attention again, without shame.