The lead track off the paranormally superb album Point:
The expanse of sounds in use...
The delicate development of ideas...
The patterns...
The staccato...
And the legato...
The harmonies...
The chimes...
The drum-drum-drum-ming!
The infinite possibilities of free sound!
This song was OK Computer before Radiohead made that album. Listen to the depth in the recording, the number of things happening together at once, the beautiful sound quality making such layering possible - straight out of the OK Computer playbook.
The massiveness of this song makes me drunk.
After the breakup of Soundgarden, Chris Cornell recorded an outstanding solo album that nobody bought. So instead, he pretended like that never happened and formed Audioslave.
Doesn't it drive you mad when an artist you love doesn't properly acknowledge their own work because it didn't get popular enough at the outset?
Listen to "Pillow of Your Bones"! It's one of many notable songs on that solo record: Euphoria Mourning. Those chord formations are bonkers! The drumming by Josh Freese is poised; his fills re-entering the song after the middle interlude are some of my favorite. Chris Cornell doesn't go totally out of his mind vocally, but his control is fantastic; he winds a soulful melody through some very challenging changes.
He should still be providing renditions every night to packed houses.
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?
"There's a good life
right across the green fields.
And each generation
stares at it from afar.
But we keep no check
On our appetites.
So the green fields turn to brown
Like paper in fire."
Some day we'll know what those lines really mean.
I love the melodies in this song, the harmonies, the electric guitar tone, the fiddle cue, the roots chord progressions reimagined and aggressive. But this song is not getting off the ground without the drumming of Kenny Aronoff, who has the sense to stay pretty much out of the verses other than a shoestring of a rim shot line over a humming 4-beat kick. Then his full entrance in the chorus is explosive, full of accents, fills, and voicings of such personality.
I feel the pure indignation of this song, and of small-town Indiana John Mellencamp in general in this period, his most relevantly righteous, right there in the midst of Reagan's '80s and the American farming decline.
The song is probably not for everyone, probably insultingly moral to some on both wings, but I see it as the work of a poet who worked with both sounds and sense, an FM radio Hesiod.