Radiohead's OK Computer and "sophistication": a semi-technical listening guide

I'll do just that MO!
Just had Chezi around for a chat, 'er indoors is watching crap on the box, had a barney with my eldest daughter ( tumble driers aren't free you know ! ) and so i feel a good headphone sesh coming on. Perhaps an immersion in Radiohead is just what I need.

Dom,
I'll play 'Lucky' first , now then eeny, meenie, miney mo......

 

Argh! Seeing this thread resurface, I just realised I completely forgot to finish and post my response to Graham's comments - though Graham doesn't get let out of the RAH until the end of the week anyway, so if nobody tells him I should get away with it.

I must admit that your reading of the rhythm never really occurred to me. I'd agree that the guitar marking out the first, second and fourth beats (skipping the third) gives it a slightly uneasy kind of lilt (the "missing" third beat is filled in by the cymbal when it appears at 2' 35'' BTW ), but I've never really heard the "verse" rhythm as especially ambiguous - certainly not by the standards of Radiohead's really serious exercises in trick rhythm which I've mentioned above (namely Pyramid Song from Amnesiac and Sail to the Moon from Hail to the Thief).

Something of a Radiohead signature - phrases are quite often just a little longer or shorter than you expect, part of their structural attention to detail and refusal to use musical cliches.

Yes, you're quite right - I should probably have picked up on this in the first place. I can only point to my get-out clause about not presenting a full analysis as a convenient excuse for interesting things I didn't spot .

Not the dominant actually - it's slipped down a tone from B minor (well, the previous phrase finishes on a B major) to A minor, with the resultant darkening of the tonality.

I'd agree with you if it had moved out to the relative (D) major, which would be rather a bland and anodyne progression comparatively speaking - but that chord has actually taken us from B minor up a tone (into C sharp major), which is rather an alarmingly remote key from anything we've heard so far and hence (to my ears at least) marks a considerable tightening of the thumbscrews, harmonically speaking.

AFAICT and FWIW, the whole sequence from 2' 50'' runs B minor - C sharp major - F sharp minor 7' ("spineless") - G major (at 3' 01'', "...laugh") - C major (3' 10'') - F sharp major 7' (the dominant 7th suspension you describe fittingly as "orgasmic" above, with the 7th in the vocal line on the word "choke") - then the crashing resolution onto B minor at 3' 21''. The whole sequence is rather unusual, with tritones and all sorts of other weird relations between the chords, but it works. (I'd need to check that sequence at a keyboard before I could swear it's right, so please don't quote me on it. )

As I originally said, a (slow) rondo of sorts. On reflection it's perhaps surprising that we don't hear more pop songs in recognisable classical forms - the classical forms are of course only classical because they work and are satisfying.

To be honest, I don't instinctively think in larger-scale structural terms like that - I could perhaps have told you that one phrase was longer and the other one shorter but I wouldn't have made any connection between the two. Interesting point though.

 

I'd beg to differ on that one, but each to his own. I'd certainly not try to suggest that musical cleverness alone is anything like enough to make a record enjoyable, but I think in this case the "sophistication" is used as a means to an (expressive) end.

Firstly, the songs aren't "pretty much all downers", as I've tried to point out on the way through, unless your normal frame of reference is something along the lines of Aqua on amphetamines. Secondly, are you saying that being "all downers" would make it "fairly pointless"? One of my all-time favourite pieces of music is Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, which TBH makes Radiohead look like Aqua on amphetamines .

I'd honestly echo MO's suggestion to let the album speak for itself - my original post was only intended to point out some of the musically technically interesting features and you'd be far better off ignoring it at least until you've got to know the album (and probably thereafter too ).

 

"Ok Computer" a downer.... to a an extent maybe but then you should try a whole album by Mogwai!