Song of the Day 2/19: Radiohead, “Paranoid Android”

The Media Freakout of the Week is … drum roll, please … no, not spy balloons, that was last week … Chatbots! (cymbal crash)

A lot of tech journalists have interacted with Microsoft’s new AI-powered Bing search engine, powered by ChatbotGPT, and have reported that we should be afraid, very afraid, of the coming Chatbot Armageddon. Already, horror stories about what it’s told people are legion. I’ll grant the hand-wringers this: It seems like a more valid concern than weather balloons.

Radiohead’s Thom Yorke somehow saw all this coming. Back in 1997 the band released its third LP, “OK Computer.” It’s considered one of the greatest albums ever — it’s in the National Recording Registry at the Library of Congress, and they’re not even Americans — in part because it seemed to capture our current century’s sense of alienation and dread.

Many people consider “Paranoid Android” the highlight of the album. New Music Express in 2011 proclaimed it “the best song of the past 15 years.” Yorke said its title, a reference to the depressed robot Marvin the Paranoid Android in the sci-fi epic “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” was his sarcastic response to fans who thought he must be depressed all the time because he sang about alienation. Its abrupt musical shifts, inspired by “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” drew comparisons to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

The strangest track on the album is “Fitter Happier,” which distilled Yorke’s angst into two minutes of what he called a checklist of slogans for the ’90s, interspersed with what sound like self-improvement resolutions — all read by “Fred,” the computer-generated voice that came with the Macs of the day. The band decided it was too alienating to serve as the opening track, so they set it in the middle of the LP.