OK Computer, and it's quite an odd one. When making it, the band took inspiration from songs like Happiness is a Warm Gun by The Beatles and Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen, songs that are known for their left field moves and unconventional structures. As a result, Paranoid Android became a song that went from fast to slow and from complex to simplistic in ways that are quite unexpected to the listener, avoiding many of the cliches that we often hear in typical songwriting.

Lyrically, vocalist Tom York communicates an off-putting experience he had in a bar in Los

Angeles, and Johnny Greenwood and Ed O'Brien paint this experience in vivid colors with their guitars, using a wide range of effects, techniques, and dynamics. All the members play an important role in the song, but in this video I'll specifically focus on the lyrics and the guitar riffs.

How they work individually, how they complement each other, and what effect they have on the listener. This is how Radiohead avoids songwriting cliches. A deep dive into the lyrics and guitar riffs of Paranoid Android.

Please, could you stop the noise? I'm trying to get some rest, from all the unborn chicken voices in my head. From the very beginning of the song, we hear about this troubled person. Notice I'm not referring to York, since he's mentioned that much of the song is not about his personal life, at least not all of it, but I'll expand on that in a minute. This person in the lyrics wants to rest from the so-called unborn chicken voices in his head. He's finding himself in a very noisy and unpleasant environment. Maybe York is describing this bar in LA that I mentioned in the introduction.

In the intro, verse, and throughout the song in general, you hear this acoustic guitar in the background, adding a nice layer of broken chords and melodic phrases. It functions like a melodic skeleton for the vocals and guitarist to build upon.

In the foreground, you have the electric guitar leading the melody forward.

But it's not always doing that. You'll very quickly notice that the vocals and the guitar, they kind of switch the role of being the leader of the melody, and so one starts where the other ends. I think the pauses in between each vocal line give the listener some time to think and digest what is being said in the song. Now what's interesting about the guitar, specifically the tone of the guitar, is that it has this flanger effect. So if I'm strumming an A, basic A chord, you'll hear that it kind of sways back and forth, and that's the flanger effect, and it kind of makes the whole sound of the song sound more psychedelic and fluid in a way.

When creating the riff for the song, Greenwood decided to use the pedal point technique, or pedal point lick. It's basically where you repeat one or a handful of notes throughout the melodic passage. So what he's doing is he's repeating the D note throughout the entire riff, and around that you play A sharp, you play A, and then you play G.

It almost sounds like something's trying to hold on to something, but still it's fading away. It's a super simple technique, and it has a really interesting effect on the listener in my mind.

What's that? I may be paranoid, but not an android. The first line in the chorus only has two words.

What's that? It's a question that leaves the listener hanging. To me, it has the same effect and function as a cliffhanger in a thriller series. He also drags out the second word.

What's that? It's almost as if he stops time and slows down the song by doing that. You get curious.

Did the person in the song find something so deeply unsettling that he froze and couldn't finish the sentence, or did he quite literally just ask someone to repeat something he couldn't hear? Lead guitar wise, they're using the pedal point technique again, and this time they're referring to another set of notes. It's D and E, so you can hear these two notes throughout.

Again, this is a super simple technique, but a very interesting one that has been used in countless guitar riffs over the years. Some well-known examples are Is This It by The Strokes and Blackbird by The Beatles. In the chorus, it feels like we're descending into this dark space even faster. Why? Well, one idea is that there's no space in between the guitar and vocals here, like there was in the verse. The soundscape is more complicated and dense.

There's more stuff to take in, which creates this claustrophobic feeling.

It should also be noted that the notes E and Ab are not a part of the key that the band is using in the segment. And in the G minor scale, we find the notes G, A, Bb, C, D, Eb, and F.

The E and the Ab are nowhere to be found in that scale. What that basically means is that the band decided to mix keys in the segment, and that really adds to that eerie and strange feeling we're getting from the song.

Now, just when we think we're about to enter the dark cave of the dragon, so to speak, the band draws the curtain to reveal nothing. Many of the instruments are removed. We step into this very calm, stripped-down part of the song, but the questionable feeling is still there, lingering.

Ambition makes you look pretty ugly. Kicking, squealing, gucci little piggy. So this is what

York is singing in the beginning of the first bridge. The first line is probably a distaste for entrepreneurs, capitalists, and yuppies, as he refers to them later in the song. Ambition, in my mind, is a good thing, but to the narrator, it seems more like a negative trait. Throughout the song, we get the sense that the character we're following has a distaste for the modern world, and feels out of place in it. Which, by the way, is a theme that we hear throughout the entire album,

Okay Computer. The second line is even more interesting, though. York vividly remembered in an interview with Q Magazine back in October of 97, that he was in a bar in LA. He found himself in company with people that had ingested their fair share and possibly combination of substances.

During one moment that evening, someone spilled their drink on this woman. She apparently reacted in an angry and violent way that made a lasting impact on York, to the point where he couldn't sleep. Hence, kicking, squealing, Gucci Little Piggy. When transitioning from the chorus to the bridge, the band decided to use modulation, and that's basically a fancy way of saying that they're switching keys, they're selection of notes. In the verse and chorus, they play in the key of G minor, but when they arrive at the bridge, they play in A minor.

This makes the song a little bit more exciting, because the listener notices that, oh, okay, there's something new coming, there's something exciting on the way. The acoustic guitar is still playing in the background at this point. There's also all these small percussive noises that kind of keeps you enticed.

The amount of detail in this passage is just crazy, and there's also this slapback guitar coming in. Basically, this very sharp and distinct echo that is repeated right after you strum a string. You hear that riff coming in a couple of times, and it's kind of foreshadowing what we're going to hear later on in the bridge.

The curtains are not just drawn, they're ripped apart. The cliffhanger turns into a cliff jump fall. A heavily distorted guitar just erupts into the song and plays that melody that I talked about earlier. There's this chaotic and disorienting feeling to the way that the song is being played, and that is partly because of the distortion, the amount of gain that is put on his amp.

But he's also using a kill switch, something that's killing the signal from his guitar, and that adds that little extra level of grit and chaos to his playing style.

I'm talking about this part right here, where he's kind of bending the string and then he's sliding upwards and he's killing the signal.

On my guitar, I can turn off the volume on some of the pickups, and that explains how I'm able to do it. I'm switching between the treble pickup and the mid pickup, and I have turned the mid pickups off, and that basically mutes everything once I'm switching between the toggle.

This move is something that really reminds me of something Tom Morello from Rage Against the

Machine or even Jimi Hendrix would do. These unexpected alien effects.

All of these sudden changes in tone and playing style perfectly represent the vocals and lyrics.

You don't remember, you don't remember, why don't you remember my name?

Off with his head, man, off with his head, man, why don't you remember my name?

I guess he does.

The person in the lyrics reacts to this man who doesn't remember his name, or does he?

Like a military officer from the French Revolution, he frantically sings off-key, and then he starts to sing with his head.

Like a military officer from the French Revolution, he frantically sings off-key with his head.

A connection, perhaps, to what York sang previously in the verse, when I'm king, you'll be the first against the wall.

We get the feeling that, similarly to the event at the bar, the narrator is having a drunken fit of rage.

The guitar solo is perhaps one of the most fun and chaotic solos I've ever learned.

There's just so much going on here.

You have that slide with the very frequent picking pattern, and the kicking off the entire thing.

Then you have those bends.

My favorite part is probably where he's doing that very chromatic playing from the 7th to the 11th fret on the B string.

A simplified way of explaining it would be to say that it's a selection of notes that deviates from the typical scale structures.

Chromaticism essentially just makes the solo sound more off-putting and edgy.

This is again followed by a very slowed down passage.

Like I mentioned earlier, they were inspired by Bohemian Rhapsody and

Happiness is a Warm Gun.

And you can hear that in the dynamic nature of the song, since this is the second time they decide to strip down the amount of instruments.

Rain down, rain down, come on rain down on me from a great height.

York proceeds to repeat these lines a few times.

And when I read them, what first comes to mind is Noah's Ark, the story from the Bible in Christianity.

How God cleansed the earth with a flood.

Next, he follows up with phrases that might flesh out the narrative even more.

That's it, sir.

You're leaving.

The crackle of pigskin.

The dust and the screaming.

The yuppies networking.

As I mentioned earlier on, in the bridge of the song, he sings kicking squealing Gucci Little Piggy as a reference to this violent woman he saw in the bar.

The crackle of pigskin here is a reminder that the violence is still going on.

That's it, sir.

You're leaving.

And the panic and the vomit further describe what York perhaps remembers from this time at the bar.

Notice how easily he paints a very vivid and detailed picture in the listener's mind without using that many words.

The rest of the song is apparently not very personal.

There's not so much emphasis on meaning in the lyrics, rather an emphasis on words and themes that merely sound and feel interesting when combined.

About his writing process, York once said, when I'm rooting around ideas and stuff, it's like a child playing with Lego.

I'm just making stuff.

I lay it all on the counter for display and see which one he likes, you know?

And then we focus on that.

Thank you so much for watching.

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