History tells us of the rise of grunge music under the leadership of low-born, minimalist noise-savant Kurt Cobain, who took the profession of music back from the strident guitar soloists a la Van Halen, the garish echo production of the hair metal poster-pretties, the big-dumb-sex show of the Guns and Roses big units - and gave it to the common people in the form of songwriting that loved melody and oddness, saying it was okay for the musical performance to be raw, album production even rawer. The rawness was the sincerity. The sincerity was the sale.
And then Bush and other post-1994 groups proved that most people could be fooled into believing that overcharged guitars and throaty vocals were the same as rawness. The sounds of sincerity were being rebooted to suit guys with pectorals of eerily similar development to the hair metal guys who had only just recently been supplanted. These guys wore goatees like bandit masks on their big chins.
What new sound could sincerity learn to make?
A few artists who had started out in the heavy music business in the grunge era began to point the way. Here in the States, Beck ditched the fuzz of "Loser" and delivered Odelay. But Odelay, for taking a direction away from rock, still kept grunge's low-fi ethic.
Meanwhile in Britain, Radiohead, another band with a grunge-era heavy guitar hit, were in the midst of a transformation of far more profound impact than even Odelay.
Radiohead's idea rested on something almost as lucky as the Beatles stumbling onto the scene during the rise of professional-quality multitrack tape recording devices. Radiohead's idea rested on the rise of digital audio as the new primary recording technology. Digital audio provided such radical sound clarity that someone, if properly insane, could add track upon track in one-centimeter layers out to the horizon, and all these layers could be audible and contribute to a hyper-intricate texture.
Thom Yorke was properly insane.
For Radiohead's third album - OK Computer - Yorke and his group decided to cast away all remaining grunge-era niceties about rawness as sincerity and went resolutely in the opposite direction. They decided to make one of the most sonically accomplished albums ever produced at that time, something shimmering in its clarity and beauty, something mind-bending in its endless sonic depth, something frightening in its worship of utter, infinitesimal perfection.
"Paranoid Android" is the only two heavy songs on OK Computer, the band's last smoldering ruin of that style. But it's unlike every type of heavy song that preceded it. First of all, only the second half of the song is heavy. The rest of the song is based in acoustic guitar, impressively melodic bass guitar, a tiny drum part, and a shaker. And when the heaviness punches in, the guitar work is just as abstract and unhinged as the best Nirvana, but it is EQ'd and mixed to exquisite balance. There far more going on than a raw attack.
"Paranoid Android," above all, is the centerpiece example of how Radiohead, in OK Computer especially, began to write songs that were the audio equivalent of those wild designs that reveal hidden pictures when you stare at them and let your eyes relax. In the multi-vocal finale, as the guitar solo fades and the oohs and aahs begin, let your ears relax to hear the scores of sounds combining. Do you hear the organ deep down in the low end? Your ears can let go, and go and go.
I see why the perfectionism of Radiohead became so popular. I hold their music so dear. But in it I also see an obsessiveness that has come to hover like a helicopter parent over all our current endeavors. Perfectionism has robbed many of us of action - or even opportunities for action. Rawness is castigated as lack of "professionalism." And yes, I do literally see the popularity of OK Computer as contributing to this societal trend. Sometimes I think about how "Paranoid Android" is something Kurt Cobain would've had neither the ability nor the inclination to produce. That doesn't make one right and one wrong. It's more about opportunities.
I'd as soon blame Kurt Cobain for Nickleback.
All theories aside, "Paranoid Android" is one of the most unique, impressive songs I and a whole lot of other people have ever encountered. I can only imagine what people 100 years from now will think of it. And will those people be perfect? Or will they have heard the song's actual warnings?