Ned Ludd’s Radiohead
n 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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