lyrics to karma policsongs list ok computer radiohead

(An influx of industry cash thanks to the CD boom did not hurt-the clip’s budget was around $200,000 at the time, a generally unheard-of sum for a video nowadays.) And Glazer was among a generation of music video auteurs, including Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, and Mark Romanek, who helped to turn an inherently craven medium into something genuinely inventive. Making its debut on MTV’s “ 120 Minutes ” on September 21, 1997, the “Karma Police” video came along in an era when vanguard bands and directors were encouraging each other to push at the format’s limits on a regular basis. Filmed on a desolate road in Cambridgeshire, England, the video’s ambiguity-it begins in medias res, and it’s impossible to know who to root for-lends itself to endless interpretation, and to timelessness. Along for the ride is Yorke himself, who plays the angel-or devil-singing from the blood-red backseat most of the video is shot from the driver’s point of view, making each and every viewer complicit in the unfolding terror. But perhaps the most trenchant visual to come from OK Computer is director Jonathan Glazer’s menacing parable for “Karma Police.” In it, a grizzled man is slowly stalked by a 1976 Chrysler New Yorker, before fortunes are flipped amid a blaze of fire. And the one-shot stunner “No Surprises,” in which Thom Yorke nearly drowns for our voyeuristic pleasure. There was the animated insanity of the “ Paranoid Android ” video, which imagined a surreal dimension filled with politicians in barbed thongs, humping rats, and a drunk dude with a head coming out of his stomach.

But instead of scoffing at the worst of MTV, they took advantage of the channel’s reach to challenge, warp, and fundamentally reorganize millions of impressionable teenage minds. With their music growing stranger and more critical of the capitalist enterprise around OK Computer, they could have simply opted out of such glorified television commercials and their attendant pomp and flash. Radiohead could have stopped making videos.

Lyrics to karma policsongs list ok computer radiohead