We hope that you choke

This is about Radiohead, again

I recently moved into a new apartment and have been trying to rename the wifi, as it’s currently named “MyAltice” followed by a random string of numbers and letters. The password is similarly algorithm-generated; this is how the router came configured from the company. I would like the name and the password to be something else. 

Every time I have had naming power over wifi networks — so far four times — I have chosen something evocative of Radiohead for the simple reason that I like Radiohead, they make me think of computers, and wifi is for computers. 

At my most recent apartment in Chicago the network name was OKNOTOK, which is the title of Radiohead’s 20th-anniversary re-release of OK Computer from 2017, and the password was “firstagainstthewall,” as in “when I am king / you will be first against the wall” from “Paranoid Android,” track two on OK Computer. 

I think about OK Computer almost daily. Last winter, I told one of my editors, who also happens to be a close friend, that someday I hope to write an OK Computer, which is to say that someday I hope to write something that is so complete, so finished, so held tight by its own logic that it is just undeniably good. So good I won’t care if no one likes it or buys it. So good it deserves to be out in the world just because it’s good and not because it’s responding to something topical or making a useful argument.

OK Computer constantly threatens to become bad but never does. One time I asked someone what he thought the best song on OK Computer was, and he said “Fitter Happier” as a troll, but now I think maybe he was right. The spoken-word robotic-ness of that song coming on the heels of “Karma Police” — the record’s most popular song, the single, the hit, the one that everyone at every Radiohead show knows by heart even if they’ve only heard the latest album — is a way of saying let’s see how close we can inch up to the line between great and awful without crossing to the other side. “Fitter Happier” is the record in a nutshell. And then after it, after I feel like it’s forced me into a trance, “Electioneering” comes in to pull me out, a galloping aggressive raucous mess, and that feels great, even though my heart rate doesn’t — simply can’t — reach resuscitated levels until the very end of the track.

Every transition on OK Computer is like this: jarring, unsettling, uneasy. There is never the pleasure of one track bleeding into the next, no stretch of ballads like there are on The Bends, no three-song arcs to keep the energy going like on Pablo Honey. Every song can stand on its own and has to, meaning every song is both a very good and a very bad neighbor, asking you to notice everything about itself but also reminding you of what you’ve just heard and how different it was and pointing to whatever might be about to come, ratcheting up the tension. The experience of listening is of always thinking will what comes next be what I think it should be? Of course not. 

The ultimate case in point here is “Let Down,” wedged between “Exit Music (For A Film)” and “Karma Police.” We’ve covered “Karma Police,” you know what the deal is, and even if you’ve never listened to OK Computer, I know that you have heard “Karma Police,” felt the sweet release of the confession “for a minute there I lost myself.” Meanwhile “Exit Music” is a pent-up wad of frustration, a taunt, a threat, a hidden dagger, a mounting toward a release that never comes, in its place a death wish: we hope that you choke. And then, like a skylight slamming open, “Let Down” glitters in with its bright guitars and slow layering of percussion and its forever-hopeful refrain, one day I am gonna grow wings. You want to ride the wave of hope upward, but thanks to “Karma Police” that won’t happen. This is what you’ll get when you mess with us. 

I used to think it was stupid that people would name their wifi networks after things they really like, because shouldn’t you stand in reverence all the time to those things, instead of objectifying them and reducing them and bastardizing them and cheapening them by using words that evoke them to name a network that allows for the wireless transmission of internet data via radio waves inside your home.

But now I don’t think that at all. I want to be constantly surrounded by the things that I find to be good and genius and amazing, and I want to think about them all the time, and I want to have a reason to think about them that comes as if by accident. I want to click on the little wifi symbol on the top-right of my computer screen and remember that in 1997 five dudes from England made a record that makes me feel like humans are capable of achieving almost anything.