Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [110]
19.
Fitter Happier Rolling a Large Rock Up a Hill
LINDSEY FIORELLI
When I first heard OK Computer, I was (of course) working at my computer. It was 2005 and I’d heard it over and over: “Radiohead is the best band in the world.” So I decided to give this band a chance, starting at the beginning of their discography. Pablo Honey didn’t sound too different from other alternative rock of the early 1990s. But The Bends impressed me more, partly because of “High and Dry” and “Fake Plastic Trees,” and partly because I could hear a different band emerging. Some of their harder songs were giving way to more subtle, acoustic melodies, and I could hear Yorke’s voice more clearly.
I expected their third album to move in the same direction, perhaps a little farther. But, something—a couple things—happened. With most great albums, I stick to my favorites, that handful of songs that makes them great. But with OK Computer I couldn’t find any favorites. I loved them all. Day after day I played it, let go of my other favorite bands, and let Radiohead take center stage. When my friends asked what was going on, the only reply I had was: “You just have to listen to them. I can’t explain it.” And I couldn’t even explain it to myself.
Up Above, Alienation Hovers
Now that OK Computer has dominated a good part of my listening life, I have a better idea of why and how it captivated me. It seemed, first of all, that each track had something different—and important—it wanted me to hear. At the same time, these messages seemed to belong together, to make sense together. What I found as I investigated further was a striking link to Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus. For Camus, the world is meaningless and isolating, a view that also seems to be replicated in OK Computer. But what is the connection in play here? What exactly do Radiohead and Camus find so alienating, and how does each respond to it?
Back to Pablo Honey and The Bends: Here, Radiohead takes on isolation head on: “I’m a creep; I’m a weirdo; what the hell am I doing here?” “Black Star” talks of the alienation that comes with separating from a lover. “My Iron Lung” and “Fake Plastic Trees” look at the artificiality of life and relationships. In OK Computer, however, Yorke wasn’t writing about separation from other people—he’s separating from the world itself. Take “Subterranean Homesick Alien,” in which he sings about a stifling town where “you can’t smell a thing”—a town that threatens to fall apart, as people who “lock up their spirits” watch the ground for emerging cracks. Instead, Yorke looks up, to the sky, longing for a spaceship to take him onboard so that he can search for the “meaning of life,” a meaning that he cannot find in the world he inhabits.
What has sucked meaning from the world of OK Computer is technology. The world has become as monotonous as it is structured, as empty as it is electronic. Dominated by the Internet and electronic communication, industry and modern transportation, the world has no place for human spirit. And this is what Yorke screams out in various tracks—how technology alienates us from ourselves.
“Fitter Happier,” perhaps more than any other track, makes this conclusion inescapable. It isn’t Yorke’s voice we hear. It’s robotic and lists all the ways in which this unhuman being will better his life and find ways to fit in with humans. He’ll get along with his employees; he’ll get more sleep; he’ll get rid of his paranoia (maybe). He’ll belong. But, to belong, he must become a pig “in a cage on antibiotics.” To be human, the track seems to say, you must be inhuman, technological, artificial, or android. Otherwise, all this universe offers is isolation and emptiness.
Yet becoming a part of the technological world, becoming a paranoid android, doesn’t seem attractive. No one wants to be trapped