Radiohead have always had an odd relationship to vehicles. Most vehicles are modern, and so they don’t sit in essential categories. Walking, running, maybe swimming, are essential categories because you don’t need anything to do them, just your human body. You need to be at a point in history where the vehicle in question has been created, however, to drive, to ride a train, even to ride a bike. This is important to Radiohead because OK Computer, which “Man of War” was left off of originally, defined an era because it felt (and I can’t quite know this, but it felt) like computer-dominance and technological paranoia stopped being categories and started being what most modern people were feeling at all times. So crashing in one machine (a car), and being saved by another (a seatbelt), became something weird because it felt like man being bounced around by machines had become an essential category.

And yet, not quite, because the pre-requisite for dystopian-technological-urban fictions, like OK Computer, is that the knowledge lingers that we have done this to ourselves. So it’s an album made in an age of transition, and things like neon signs and trains and cars hover around the lyrics. Essentially, Radiohead are not nearly being as simple as saying “break away from trains because they put you on tracks, man, be individual and fuck the machine”, it’s more like “this technology makes me feel just a little more emotionally disconnected”. Radiohead tend to use bleeps and bloops and tech sounds in their songs not as enemies to the narrator, but as proxies for human emotional disconnection. In a rough sense technology is impersonal and inhuman, but that’s more a symptom of increasing inhumanity post 1995 as Thom Yorke may have seen it. Man vs the Machine, much like Man vs Fascism, tellingly, is not entirely black and white across Radiohead.

So what happens in the Man of War video? A man walks around some London looking streets, and as the scene flips from day to night he gets chased by a group of people to some train tracks, where he collapses, then gets up when they catch up to him, and ambiguously continues walking along the train tracks with them. Is this a basic “fall in line or be hunted down by the Karma Police” sort of narrative? To me it’s more about paranoia and the ambiguity of paranoia. As good as any Radiohead song from the OKC era it makes the point that paranoia very often means being scared of nothing. Before the threat is overt this is communicated brilliantly because we have no idea what’s going on, and neither does the man. We are all a little bit more scared walking at night, but not for any good reason. Then he reaches the point of highest panic, as we all do, in a rhythmic kind of way, and then he, and us, sort of have to move on. Are they taking him down the line to kill him? In a fatalist sense, yes, but isn’t he more happy and less panicked for not running? The video poses the question of whether technological paranoia is all in our heads or not, or whether this is not technology’s fault, but yours, whether or not your contrarianism is genuine or paranoid.

I think that’s why Radiohead were never really punk, and why their personal commentary feels like social commentary, and why that social commentary doesn’t tire. It’s never as simple as “watch your back”, even on Hail to the Thief. The overtly punk songs like 2+2=5 get gaslighted by the calmer songs on the same album, as if it can never be all that bad. There’s a question of excess and overreaction, there’s a dampening of the punkness. Why it speaks to me, and the rest of this is all a personal point, is because I often feel that kind of flitting from the day feeling to the night feeling, as portrayed in the video, and I often feel like I don’t want to be told to calm down, or be told that my morning commute doesn’t mean anything because everyone has a morning commute. No one, me included, likes to have their personal narrative taken away from them. In the opening shot the man is calmly writing a crossword, then in the night shot of the same thing, it’s like he’s figuring out a code, like he knows that everyone is coming to get him, like he knows that the events of his life have transpired to have people chase him.

I never feel like anyone is ever coming to get me. I feel pretty calm all the time. But looking out the window coming into Victoria Station every morning, and seeing all the other tracks that all meet up at the Station, while listening to OK Computer, I often felt like there was some way in which trains did and didn’t speak to the lyrics and to the experience of the album, like it would make sense that it would all come together on the train tracks, with the vague threat of a train running you over from behind, the vague idea of everyone being cattle-carted to work, while knowing full well that none of that was true, that it was just a bunch of people going to work. There’s a kind of flitting effect created by that sort of self narrative, like the flitting between day and night in the video- paranoia, simple narratives of totalitarianism and resistance in daily life and being chased, are all weighed against their realities: the relative safety of modern life, the truth of choosing a career which imprisons you, the seeing of shadows. For me those oppositions, which may have to eventually be thrown away as childish things, or perhaps not, are all at the heart of OKC.

Being told to calm down is more scary, more ambiguous and more enduring than a resistance narrative. Walking along in the day, feeling like you’re walking at night, wondering if any of it is real, but not being affected strongly enough to point out a problem, and not having enough potency to attack a vague idea. I do think I’m right about this, but maybe I don’t quite have the words to describe the OKC feeling. It’s not sleepwalking or daydreaming, but it’s like waking up into an imperfect future, but it being half your fault and half not-so-bad, and therefore being unable to do anything about it. There are no matrix-pods to smash, because it’s real life, but you might just get hit by a car, and then saved by the machine in that car, and then realise that we have all come too far, but also that there is no sense in going back, that something weird is happening and a huge price has been paid, the glimpsed sense that an enormous eternal category has been shifted, that life itself as a human has changed, but only really being able to gesture at how you feel, to feel more disconnected without gaining potency. That’s not how you have to feel about modern life to enjoy or to agree with the album, it’s not what anyone but silly people fully believe, but it’s the glimpsed sense that the album arises from, and I think that’s where Vaporwave as a genre comes from as well. Vaporwave is so distant and weird and posits so many alternate realities because there was always a sense garnered from Windows 98/ME, and from old graphic design programs, and from Muzac, that new and whole utopian realities for humans, like the ideal of the modern technological utopia which we are notionally moving towards, had been created too inhumanly.

I like the Man of War video so much because 20 years after the album release it seems to match my feelings about listening to the album while staring out of a train window, the same train window as hundreds of times before, and knowing that other people both do and don’t get it, that you are and aren’t special, that maybe falling into line is pretty good, that there’s something weird and non-essential about iron lines being welded into the ground which carriages of people pass over, but then you share that idea and someone either entertains it or laughs at you, and then you move on again.