The Case For Paranoid Android As The Best Song Of The 1990s
Radiohead’s Vicious And Tragic Epic Saw Past The Superficiality Of The Decade And Found Something Worse. Mostly, It Was Ourselves.
Tristan Young @talltristan
It’s such a contentious thing, trying to anoint a song as the best of even a single a year. But a whole decade, and one so omnivorously manic as the 90s? Where does one even begin? Such a pursuit is a veritable minefield of considerations, counterfactuals, and opinions that some would consider as emblematic of the decade, while others would consider heretical. The genre smashing hits- Smells Like Teen Spirit, Window Licker, California Loving, are right there to be considered, glaring in their obviousness. Selections along those lines are close to borderline forgone conclusions that it seems oddly un-self reflective and clichéd to make decisions so egregious in their banality. But how could one over look such iconography in favour of what, deep cuts, or B sides? Especially now that the 90s are so far removed that the impact of certain songs is baked in. Under appreciated gems that render the 90s through a different lens may indeed carry a more granular degree of critical insight, but such an angle is marred by an intrinsic pretention and ambivalence towards what was truly important in 90s music.
What, then was truly important? Grunge, pop electronica, gangsta rap, gendered super groups, all of this yes. The aesthetics of the 90s must also be taken in to account and how artists incorporated that into their work. Social grievances as manifested through anti establishment invectives permeated a great deal of music to critical acclaim. On the other hand, artists who were problematically unacknowledged at the time beyond their monetary gains mined a great deal of depth and nuance through superficial maximalism. We deride bubble gum pop and the bangers as frivolous exigencies of a decade of excess, not always cognizant of the pure audacity and liberation behind pure emotion. We have to look back to the 90s therefore not just by observing what mattered then, but what aged well; what exists comfortably beyond the mercurial yet unmistakable parameters of 90s music and culture. Nostalgia, I would argue, is a poor vector to make such an assessment. What parades as universality and ubiquity is often just an extrapolation of our own insular anecdotes and interiority, shaped by what we wish something was, or wish it meant. You have to be a touch more analytically severe, understand the times but not revere them. You have to see the opportunity for growth in the time as it was. The 90s was a chaotic period of genesis and oblivion, a zero sum game of competing cultural relevance, to borrow a parlance from the Cold War that ostensibly ended that very decade. A song representative of the era needs to also be one that transcends it, emblematic of its most indelible traits while also an apostasy to them. Something that canonizes an artist as one that evolves with the times, and even maybe just a little, guides them. That’s why it has to be Paranoid Android.
One can debate the merits of Radiohead’s debut album Pablo Honey. Creep, with it’s intoxicating mixture of obnoxious bravado and rueful lonerism, was the kind of cross over hit that proved just as salient among the introverts as the karaoke auteurs. The rest of the album was a blithe and alienating exercise in general mainstream contempt as rendered through mainstream dynamics. Which is to say it fit comfortably in the expanding spectrum of Brit Rock. Within this oddly combative and quarrelsome sub genre groups like Oasis and Blur fought for dominance. Republica and Elastica had their hits, with hooks built around the schematics of snarls and dry wit. We all remember The Verve. It seemed like Radiohead would simply be part of this decidedly English musical taxonomy, more so after their depressed and ruminative follow up The Bends. In retrospect this appears pathetically unambitious, but for a time Radiohead basically seemed like little more than a worthy enough inclusion to an enclave of rock music whose primacy in the mid 90s was beginning to supplant grunge rock.
It was nice while it lasted. In 1997 Radiohead released what would only be their first opus OK Computer, and it essentially ended Brit rock, or at least blunted its ascending cultural momentum. If a British band could release a rock and roll album so far removed from the pop hook parameters of Brit rock, something so much better than anything that ecosystem had ever produced, what was the sub genre’s utility moving forward? OK Computer was anathema to many things in music and the world of 90s. It redefined what rock and roll could sound like, what messages could be affixed to it, what atmospherics it could operate within. Its existential doom covered cynical politics, market capitalism, mental instability, regret and guilt; it romanticized none of it, twisted it into knots and forms that were gothic and beautiful, but carried the gravitas of inevitable decay. The interstitial fibres between its various themes were that of entropy and apathy, observing the world was moving in the wrong direction and that we only knew how to make it worse. Genre evolutions can usually be traced backwards with memetic markers moving from one form to another to create a timetable of shifting patterns and trends. But this album came out of nowhere, fully formed, like nothing ever before but already cascading with implications of where rock and roll could go from here. Where it should go now that Radiohead proved what was, if not possible, at least palatable.
Paranoid Android is the undisputed zenith of OK Computer, and it just might be the best song of the 90s. It is irreverent and insolent, ominous and foreboding, but also ecstatic in its transgressiveness. You could say the very same thing about the decade itself. It is a Greek tragedy, a Dickensian novel, and a Hollywood blockbuster all at once. It’s so supremely confident in how to integrate its wild tonal and instrumental shifts into a coherent, perfect gestalt. With algorithmic and antiseptic repeating tones, it starts off as sterile and detached, emblematic of the counter culture youths that were slowly but surely permeating the 90s in response to its neon hedonism. Johnny Greenwood’s melancholic and forlorn acoustic guitars crawl with the candour of a population that is not just disaffected, but exhausted. Drained from the superlative bombast of Madonna, Britney, and N’Synch, Thom Yorke is begging, “Please could you stop the noise? I’m trying to get some rest”. The 90s were luxuriated and overflowing with stimulation, inundating us with hyperbolic expressiveness like no other. Paranoid Android is sullen in its confession of how depleting that can be, mentally, culturally, and spiritually. His voice is wallowing in its fragility, the register of someone in a perpetual state of decay. There’s an underbelly to the buoyant vividness of the 90s, the comedown in the waiting. Yorke captures it perfectly.
Ed O’Brian’s spectral guitar chords are smoothed with a marbled glossiness to them, lending themselves almost to synaesthesia with the rarefied visuals they conjure. It creates an entangled intrigue as Yorke moans with growing, lavish charisma, “What’s that”. Below, we can hear the monotone utterance, “I might be paranoid, but I’m not an android”, stalking the background- the subliminal struggling for clarity. This is a song about depression, about being anathematized from being able to feel, about mourning that crucial loss of humanity. Did the decade, for all its alleged superficiality, do that to him, or is he looking for something easy to blame? You begin to get the sense that maybe Yorke’s character is not fully deserving of the empathy his haunted visage appears archetypal of. “When I am king you will be first against the wall/ with your opinion which is of no consequence at all”, Yorke wonders, scornfully twisting those last few laborious syllables. Here the subtext slowly rises to text, in that even those discarded, abused citizens that could never fully acclimatize to the 90s cultural paradigms- they too can be the villains. They’ll jump at the chance even.
It’s with these sentiments that the minstrel and wandering acoustics give way to one single forbidding, remarkable ping- and everything changes. Its echoes reverberate until most of the instrumentation recedes to the background just for a brief moment. They dissolve away while a whole new guitar sequence supplants it. One that is more pressuring, more ostentatious, and more comfortable in its casual misanthropy. That fleeting instance of a melodic swing, precipitated by one single ringing key is one of the best rhythmic and tonal switch ups ever in a song. It goes from a ponderous drama to a horror movie. Yorke spits with a casual enmity, “ambition makes you look pretty ugly, kicking squealing Gucci little piggy”. Yorke is carefully, procedurally morphing from a powerless malcontent, into someone with far too much of it. “You don’t remember, why don’t you remember my name,” he erupts in to paroxysms of vitriol as Greenwood and O’Brian’s guitar ignite like a live wire, screeching into rapturous invocations of chaos and melody. The modular pulses, alien pedals, and cacophonous serration of the guitar is other worldly, like the descending judgement of a higher power. It’s fitting that Paranoid Android’s analogy to religious awakening is rendered through something so prodigious and vehemently unholy. If god was dead in the 90s, there was plenty out there to replace him. Call it greed, call it envy, call it the natural order of things. It’s terrifying in its inevitability. He speaks to this inevitability by suggesting a person will remember his name only after Yorke has cut his head off. Were people like Yorke pushed too far? Did the times do this to him? Are his actions warranted in the face of such unspeakable antipathy towards the moral decay that some say was endemic of the 90s? If his actions are this extreme how can he claim to be an exemplar of corrective ethics? He can’t and he knows it; he embraces his villainy not as a tragedy but as his metamorphosis into someone that can finally thrive- at least in the decade at hand. Those eruptive guitars are celebrations just as much as they are hypnotic shock and awe.
That aforementioned come down eventually does come. Once the guitars exhaust themselves of their schizophrenic monomania, all that is left is to ponder the implications of this epiphany. The people that didn’t fit in anywhere in the 90s, the ones who couldn’t assimilate into any kind of clique or find themselves in grunge or pop or rap or whatever; they all scorned those who navigated the times with more clarity simply because they couldn’t. Paranoid Android hypothesizes that these people too would abuse their cultural power, should they stumble upon it. One could observe this as a depressing revelation, but perhaps it suggests a universality among us all that was obscured by the sectarian partitions of 90s culture. In the vacuumed and hollowed chambers of the deflated melody, the only remaining rhythmic structures are a loose diaspora of haunting wails and vapours. It’s here as he observes the rain falling on everyone, the yuppies and him alike, Yorke finds parity with those he claimed to despise on moralistic grounds. In the coldest and most scathing of ironies, once we all admit and embrace our malfeasances and malignancy, only then are worthy of the line, “god loves his children, god loves his children ya”.
The 90s showed us in a way at our ugliest. Our social stagnation, racial oppression, economic ruination, and hubristic foreign adventurism all glossed over by the super star epoch of film and music. Yet Paranoid Android is less a scathing critique of the 90s than it is of those that thought they were somehow morally superior to the decade’s surreal iconoclasms. Its thematic core is that to chastise the 90s as a superfluous and shallow time is in of itself a superficial and shallow critique. The true wickedness lay not embedded in the cultural dressings of the era, but as foundational and systemic attributes in ourselves. We built the institutions that reward the most rote of carnal expressions; we designed the systems that applaud corrupt politicians and religious leaders. We operate the machine that we feign to rage against. Paranoid Android understands this, that’s why when it does in fact let loose its rage one more time, those writhing pulses of furious guitar, they target nothing. The melodic pathways dissolve giving way to pure instinct and id. No machines left, just paranoia. The song ends at an uncomfortable intersection between loathing and extravagance. Not unlike how the 90s did.