A reader took in my series on how technologies that will allow the metaverse are already leading to cyberpunk culture that workplaces must address.
She then sent me this NPR podcast on Radiohead’s groundbreaking albums Kid A and Amnesiac.
She observed that Radiohead really deserves a place in the cyberpunk series. Like U2 in the early ’90s, Radiohead issued a cry of warning about the global, always on, immersive, high-tech system we had created.
She’s right (thanks, Jen!). So:
In the mid-1990s, I took a political science class and read Francis Fukuyama. He had recently penned “The End of History and the Last Man” (1992). His thesis (over-simplified): Since the USSR is now defunct, the West’s liberal democracy has been proven the best form of government. It is only a matter of time before it sweeps the globe.
About the same time, I was enjoying Radiohead’s second album, 1993’s The Bends. To this day I love it. But it in no way prepared me for the coming masterpiece, 1997’s OK Computer.
OK Computer is a perfect album. It was a critical and commercial success. It made the band superstars.
The album added to guitar-based rock beautiful sounds–glockenspiels, harps, synthesizers–to paint scenes of real tension: Tourists rushing past the very things they came to see. Employees fed up with awful bosses. A couple preparing to elope from domineering parents.
The NPR podcast points out that the band saw that tension globally. There did not seem to be an “End of History.” There were genocides and environmental disasters and governments unable to address tragedies.
I remember reading the band’s blog at the time. They were concerned about the unknown health effects of cell phone towers. Perhaps the science has proven that concern a non-issue. But you could see how the band felt powerless to fight a faceless corporation.
Or a faceless media conglomerate: The documentary “Meeting People Is Easy” chronicles the world tour and promotions after OK Computer’s release. The band reaches the breaking point dealing with endless, banal media appearances. They are treated like a commodity–which, from the perspective of cable channels needing an endless stream of content, they were.
No wonder OK Computer’s penultimate track repeats, “We are standing on the edge.”
Critics in the press missed all these cues.
They expected Radiohead to follow up OK Computer with a sequel.
Radiohead did the opposite: They released two albums about as un-OK Computer as possible.
Both albums came from the same recording sessions in 1999 and early 2000. When Kid A debuted later in 2000, the press panned it as depressing, self-indulgent noise experiments masquerading as art.
But Kid A and (a year later) Amnesiac took OK Computer’s tension to its logical conclusion. Guitars faded into the background, and all the beautiful sounds came to the front, painting scenes of tension and downright tragedy: mental breakdowns, divorce, ice ages “really happening,” people treated as “dollars and cents” commodities.
The fall of the Berlin Wall ushered in the 1990s. The fall of the Twin Towers ushered in the 2000s. So did smartphones and social media. History had not ended. I submit that slowing down to embrace the classical approach to development can help save us from the mess we’re in.
Here’s Amnesiac’s final track. About two decades have passed, and our understanding of the chorus’s concern has only heightened:
Well of course I’d like to sit around and chat
But someone’s listening in
Radiohead helpfully recorded the song as a New Orleans Second Line dirge, so I can include it here on Horn Sections Make Rock Better.