mrshl | blog

OK Computer’s one bad song

Lots of people call OK Computer their favorite Radiohead record. The Bends is my fave, but picking Computer is a choice I can live with. Its depressing proggy brilliance is acknowledged the world over, and I bought it the day it came out. Ten years later, my love is unabated.

OK Computer might be the greatest album of the last 20 years or the greatest of the 1990s. But OK Computer isn’t flawless. This morning I’m asking you to remember my least favored Radiohead song, “Electioneering.” Among the sophisticated, elegiac laments that dominate the record, Radiohead just had to insert a mediocre rocker that’s dumb as a bag of hammers.

What’s wrong with it? You could point to the shrieking repetition of its bleating guitar hook, or the too-obvious ascending/descending bassline that makes it sound like the tossed-off jam session it probably was. Meh, I’ll go with the lyrics: a first-person, fourth-grade critique of globalism and American-dominated world politics:

I will stop, I will stop at nothing.
Say the right things when electioneering
I trust I can rely on your vote.
When I go forwards you go backwards
and somewhere we will meet.
When I go forwards you go backwards
and somewhere we will meet.
Ha ha ha
Riot shields, voodoo economics,
it’s just business, cattle prods and the I.M.F.
I trust I can rely on your vote.
When I go forwards you go backwards
and somewhere we will meet.
When I go forwards you go backwards
and somewhere we will meet.

At least I think that’s what it’s about. The song does little more than namecheck a few specific evils before getting back to its braying chorus. Elsewhere on OK computer, singer Thom Yorke does a great job weaving these kinds of images into a nightmarish landscape in which our lust for technology and withering attention spans has reduced human kind to a droning, impotent wreck.

Unlike “Let Down” or “No Surprises,” Electioneering doesn’t contain the kind of wistful compliance that makes the nightmare seem so frighteningly plausible. It’s OK Computer’s “Ignoreland“; a shrill idiot protester marring an otherwise masterful gathering of sad-bastard musics. But, like REM, Radiohead was smart enough to sequence their dud at no. 8, leaving them four more songs to recover and save the record from derailing.