Think you can escape all this? Get in the car and drive? The joke’s on you. But the laughter is several shades of bleak. Surely no-one can take the prog-baroque gabber of “Paranoid Android” with an entirely straight face. There’s so much damn noise (and remember, OK Computer was made several years before Wi-Fi, smartphones, and social media turned us all into twitching, overloaded fools), and sometimes the excess is amusing. All those painterly, semi-abstract sounds-guitars that ping and squawk and melt, the wavering Mellotron choir, the glockenspiel, the shimmering cymbals, the quarter-tone violins-create a sense of a world in which human beings are irretrievably tangled inside systems of our own making. But it seemed clear even in 1997 that it was also-or more so-an album about infrastructure, both the physical infrastructure of “motorways and tramlines,” as Yorke hymned it on “Let Down,” and the more elusive, “soft” infrastructure of global logistics, surveillance, finance, and banking. The standard gloss on OK Computer, both at the time of its release and in the 20 years since, has been to call it an album about technology. Yorke’s lyrics, a deadpan simulation of advertising slogans, self-help mantras, and political doublespeak, undercut the grandeur of the music at every turn, and this tension between transcendence and routine grants the album an anxious and enduring power. Turner, in its musical scope and texture, with instruments smeared across the stereo field-and also a deliberately banal one. It is a beautiful record-there is something very capital-R Romantic, very J.M.W. OK Computer captured this cheapening of our environments and imaginations in a way that felt revelatory at the time, and still feels resonant now. For clearly some declension in the character of travel has occurred over the centuries, and we sense it, wedged into an economy class airline seat, or stuck bumper-to-bumper on another ugly freeway, the billboards blaring at us from all sides.
The history of human transport is also a history of new ways to die, and OK Computer joins this sublime, speed-induced terror together with a very modern jadedness.
“Pull me out of the air crash,” sings Thom Yorke on “Lucky,” a song that takes place in the slow-motion seconds after realizing that you’re going to die in a manner abrupt and possibly a bit stupid. Even now, nearly 240 years since the first aeronaut piloted a hot air balloon above Paris, the view afforded to us by flight can feel like a breach of mortal perspective: too vast, too glorious, and much too close to death. For the longest time flight was a wondrous thing, an attribute of the gods and their messengers, the domain of witches, dragons, and birds.