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9:10 · 1,453 words of transcript · watch on YouTube
- The context is a band worn down by four years on the road, with their first hit having thrown them into the spotlight and the follow-up pushing them further in.
▶ 00:00:43
- Thom Yorke's sense of disconnection from a rapidly changing world, with the internet about to reshape it, is the raw material the album is built from.
▶ 00:01:22
- The guiding light for the whole record was a song written in a matter of hours for a Brian Eno charity album the year before.
▶ 00:01:41
- They self-produced it with Nigel Godrich and deliberately avoided professional studios, ending up in a 16th-century house in the English countryside for six weeks.
▶ 00:02:01
- The video places it alongside two other albums that disrupted music outright, The Strokes' debut in 2001 and Arcade Fire's Funeral in 2004, but notes this one came from a band that had already proved itself and then dismantled every expectation anyway.
▶ 00:02:18
- The thematic claim is that it is among the first albums to foresee an age of technology and what adult life inside it would feel like, which is why the title sounds ordinary now and did not then.
▶ 00:03:16
- The opening track comes from Yorke nearly dying in a car crash and being saved by the airbag, which sets up the album's irony about technology both threatening and preserving us.
▶ 00:03:35
- Paranoid Android is the structural centrepiece, four distinct parts welded together with key changes, odd metres and tempo shifts, closer to progressive rock than to anything on the radio then.
▶ 00:05:46
- The borrowings are specific: DJ Shadow's distorted drum samples, the atmosphere of Miles Davis's Bitches Brew, the instrumentation of Pet Sounds, and the dark blues of Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison.
▶ 00:06:05
- Their own label believed the record was commercial suicide, and within months it was being voted the best album of all time in readers' polls.
▶ 00:06:55