OK COMPUTER

I'll begin this one with the obvious namecheck to Pink Floyd. Every time I hear this album philosophized about, someone mentions Pink Floyd, even if only to go so far as to point out that they aren't going to compare Radiohead to Pink Floyd! There. I've said the name three times. We'll move on. Has anyone seen the show "Dream On," where the main character's thoughts are all connected to the TV shows he (and we) grew up watching? This is that concept in aural form. The world has become one of pop sound-bytes and collective inside jokes ("D'Oh!") "In the next world war/ in a jack- knifed juggernaut/ I am born again. / In the neon sign/scrolling up and down/I am born again/ in an interstellar burst/ I am back to save the universe".so the album opens, lyrically. Discard the lyrics, for the most part. They are but the notes on the instrument of Thom Yorke's voice.doing what the rest of the band is doing, creating audio landscapes with the gleeful precision of a demented Rohrshack-card painter meticulously displaying his own abstract nightmares. Read that again.it might make sense. He and the band have decided to regurgitate half-digested bits of our culture and pop music in a form unique and exciting. The opening of "Airbag" could be the riff from any Blues/Metal-come-lately band, but you ask yourself, "Christmas bells?"."Cello?" Extra points for naming two Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy references and one (probably imagined by me) "Dream On" reference. This is rock music ripped apart by big cats, and put back together by little psychiatrists and the album itself does not ignore the irony of a band birthed in post-punk England putting together the best nouveaux-prog rock album of the nineties. Those who call this band "whiney" are complaining about the cataract roar of the chainsaw, not praising the delicately dripping genius of the ice-sculpture. The big hit from this album, "Karma Police," is the defining moment: a useless, impotent rebellion, the narrator complaining and commentating about what he sees, but hoping that karma will take care of it for him, so he can (presumably) keep on anonymously complaining. Even he admits at the end that he "lost himself for a minute there." Every time I listen to this album I hear something new.and every time I get lost in it I seem to hear the laughing of a madman with a paintbrush in the distance.perhaps the same laughing madman looped into the beginning of Pink Floyd's "Dark Side." (Oops, four times.) Trust nothing, and remember that this is the band that has disowned "Creep." Try to forget also that Chuck Berry did "My Ding-A-Ling" and that Blue Oyster Cult was once famous as the band that did "Godzilla." This is the real deal. Listen to "Creep" and The Offspring and Spike Jones if you want a belly laugh. Listen to this one if you want a pensive, nervous chuckle.