Ned
Ludd’s Radiohead
By Christopher
Stratton
In
the year 1811, a man named Ned Ludd sent intimidating
letters to various textile employers in Nottingham,
Great
Britain. The complaint? Machines were taking over too many
tasks typically handled by craftsmen. The workers were
uniting, and they were not happy. With their income at
stake, they feared that the increasing industrialization
of British factories foreshadowed an end to their livelihood.
Incensed, they took matters into their own hands and destroyed
many of the new shearing frames that the textile employers
had purchased to increase output. The uprising, led by "king" Ned
Ludd, gathered a following over the next five years and
the angered workers came to be known as "Luddites." Eventually
they were lionized as the counter-revolutionaries of the
Industrial Age, and their moniker applied to anyone who
resists technology’s advance.
Fast-forward about 186 years. It’s July 1, 1997,
and Radiohead, an English band many critics wrote off as
a one-hit-wonder (cf. “Creep”),
is releasing its third album titled OK Computer. The band’s
first album was a critical dud. It had a few solid songs and a big grunge hit,
but no coherent
voice. At that point in their careers, band members clearly didn’t know
who they were musically or what they wanted to say. Things started to change
with the release of their well-crafted second album, The Bends. Scoring
an alternative radio hit with the sing-along single “High and Dry,” The
Bends put Radiohead on the map. No longer in jeopardy of a flash and burn,
their
new music was original, technically brilliant and quickly gathering an underground
following. Widespread critical success continued to elude the band, however,
until they released OK Computer.
OK Computer is
a sprawling work that departs dramatically from Radiohead’s
previous two albums. Lyrically and sonically it feels disconnected from the
times. The musical structures are often atonal and dissonant, with clicks
and buzzes, loops, samples and computerized voices
all thrown in to make the listener
feel not quite at home in the musical space. The arrangements seem literally
infected with neurasthenia. One surmises that if post-modern man breaking
down made a sound, OK Computer would be it.
Critics and fans weren’t initially sure what to make of the album. It
garnered comparisons to works like Pink Floyd’s psychedelic album Dark
Side of the Moon, but fundamentally it was different. This was not an album
for the drug culture. The musical experimentation on OK Computer served a
larger point. Many interviewers asked if it was a concept album. The band
refused
to define it. To them they just made the best third album they could make.
Like all good work, it flowed naturally out of what they were feeling and
thinking at the time. Critics and fans took note.
What makes OK Computer such a groundbreaking album on all levels is that
it’s
infected with Luddism--not textile worker angst, but human and ethical alienation
in the computer age. From the first track on, the album takes ironic jabs at
technology by tongue-in-cheek embracing it and impersonating its sounds. In
doing so it speaks volumes about the excesses of modern technology and how
our inventions tend to threaten our essential humanity. The album has a visceral
quality that imbues the listener with the feelings of a person crumbling beneath
the weight of too much input and too many demands. The monotony of airplanes
taking off and landing, tramworks, motorways, antibiotics, airbags, treadmills,
fridges buzzing, detuned radios, carbon monoxide, landfills, everything is
here for the loathing. The subtext: this stuff is killing who we are. This
is why Radiohead’s work strikes a chord. The band taps into something
distinctly unique to the post-modern condition. More importantly, they
are trying to eek meaning out of what it is to live in the computer age,
with
all its chaos and requirements of the human psyche. How does one say yes
to the
computer age and not lose what is meaningful about being human? Throughout
the album, the narrator ponders this question. His fears are palpable as
he continually bemoans his plight and begs for relief, for something human:
Please could you stop the noise, I’m
trying to get some rest
From all the unborn chicken voices in my head
What’s that...? (I may be paranoid, but not an android)
What’s that...? (I may be paranoid, but not an android)…."Paranoid
Android"
Shell
smashed, juices flowing
wings twitch, legs are going,
don’t get sentimental, it always ends up drivel.
One day, I’m gonna grow wings,
a chemical reaction,
hysterical and useless
hysterical and
let down and hanging around,
crushed like a bug in the ground…. "Let Down"
The documentary filmmaker Grant Gee extends the album’s sense of paranoia
and disconnectedness in his film about the band, Meeting People is Easy. The
film chronicles the promotional tour for the album in a very unconventional
way. Not only the substance, but the actual form of the movie put the viewer
into an emotional state that borders on a breakdown. At one point we are treated
to a litany of sound bites for radio stations. “Hi, this is Thom Yorke
of Radiohead and you’re listening to KKJE.” “Hi this is Thom
Yorke of Radiohead and you’re listening to KQRX.” Over and over
again for 10 minutes, different cities, same messages, and you literally watch
the band members falling apart under the monotony and repetitive meaninglessness
of it all. By the end of the film you feel yourself falling apart, you just
want it all bloody finished. You want to be left alone. You need space to reconnect
to what makes you human, and what makes life valuable, and you suspect that
it has nothing to do with technology.
Neil Postman wrote a book in 1985 called Amusing
Ourselves to Death. The premise of the work is that television, with
its truncated sound-byte format, can shrivel public discourse
to the point at which it destroys what it means to be truly
human. He says we are controlled by what brings us pleasure
and the quickest form of satisfaction, a point bolstered
by his analysis that George Orwell had it partially wrong
when he wrote 1984. According to Postman, “Big Brother,” Orwell’s
famous threat of oppression from outside, never really
materialized, and we all congratulated ourselves. But what
we missed is the threat from inside that Aldous Huxley
warned us about in his futuristic novel Brave New World.
Postman sheds light on this distinction when he explains
Huxley’s point.
People
will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies
that undo their capacities to think. What
Orwell feared is
those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that
there would be no reason to ban a book for there would
be no one
who wanted to read one... Orwell feared we would become
a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial
culture, preoccupied with the equivalent of the feelies,
the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy." (Postman)
When
Thom Yorke sings the lyric, “kicking and squealing,
Gucci little piggy” in the song “Paranoid Android,” I
wonder if he has read Postman. For Yorke, the disconnected
human is a pig in a cage of its own making, captivated by
the triviality of Gucci status. This paranoia and loathing
isn’t something to come, it’s already upon us,
and Thom Yorke is like a psychosomatic lightning rod for
its expression. It’s little wonder then that the tour
shirts for OK Computer bore the simple phrase, “You
Are a Target Market.” It was as if the band were trying
to say, “Wake up, this is happening, whether you know
it or not.”
In a sense, this makes Radiohead the musical prophets of
our potential demise as a culture. They stand in line with
the best of the cultural critics like Orwell, Huxley and
Postman. In this day and age, our lives are in danger of
being controlled and dictated by our pleasures, by marketing
departments, by technology that doesn’t give us time
to think and reflect. Most people are not conscious of
what is happening to them in the computer age, but many
can resonate deeply with the work of Radiohead at an unconscious
level. It’s not too far a stretch to think of the
band’s music as a form of going to church and Thom
Yorke as akin to a reluctant preacher… but is anyone
really listening?
The paranoia expressed by the work of Radiohead is not
limited to a secular world-view. The questions the band’s work brings to the surface are fundamental
questions for spiritually minded human beings as well. As people of faith, we would be wise to take note of the ways in which technology,
mass marketing
and the lightning fast pace of our culture tend toward the deterioration of
the human spirit. When approaching advances in technology and science, we ought
to stop and ask ourselves what type of end these sorts of means may bring about.
As we rapidly turn into a culture that takes in whatever is being fed to us
through the technology we use, we should not forget to engage those advances
critically through the eyes of faith. Now more than ever, it is increasingly
important for us to follow the Biblical maxim, “Be still and know that
I am God.” Only time will tell how the human spirit responds to the siren-call
of the Computer Age. We owe a debt to the work of Radiohead, and others, for
showing us that blindly embracing the age can often lead to an evisceration
of the spiritual life, and for that warning, we should be grateful.
George
Orwell once said that, “at a time of universal
deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” The
members of Radiohead, by virtue of their art, are revolutionaries.
The band may not be Luddites in the 19th Century sense of
the word, but they could be unwitting prophets sounding a
wake-up call to a culture in peril. To quote another famous
Briton,
As the Liberty lads o'er the sea
Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood,
So we, boys, we
Will die fighting, or live free,
And down with all kings but King Ludd!….Lord Byron
Copyright ©2005
Christopher Stratton
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