Radiohead's OK Computer: Airbag

Airbag [Elation]

“Airbag” opens with a swirling, distorted guitar figure and a crashing drum loop like Mack trucks rumbling past on a motorway; and bizarrely, sleigh bells. It’s a grim and slightly menacing sound alleviated only by some angelic-choir synth. The guitar lead flexes up and down a middle-eastern mode, sounding like a call to prayer.

in the next world war
in a jack-knifed juggernaut.

It’s a diabolical scene, a postmodern-ordinary apocalypse: the freeway car/truck crash.

In a voice that is dreamy and unreal, Thom Yorke tells a mini-narrative of a quasi-religious experience: the feeling of elation you get when you almost die in a car crash. It is an unlikely scene for an epiphany: the modern motorway is a soul-less no-place from which nature has been erased; a not-anywhere-really, a place for flesh and blood to be ground down by steel and rubber; where the natural sounds are the shriek of brakes and the suck of tyres.

As the music builds, soaring wordless monk-chant vocals come in, adding to the sense of a new beginning of spiritual dimensions.

I am born again.

It’s a moment of sheer grace. The buzz of adrenaline creates a feeling of that life is new. This is consciously religious language: but in the dark asphalt world of the song perhaps that is as good as it is ever going to get. Yet Thom howls triumphantly:

In an interstellar burst I am back to save the universe!

His brush with death makes him feel impregnable and immortal. For a moment, he forgets the vulnerability of the human body before the whizzing masses of the mechanical monoliths, and feels superhuman, capable of might feats.

I’m amazed that I survived/ An airbag saved my life.

Technology is one of the great themes of OK Computer. Here at least technology is a life-saver: his face instead of beating the steering wheel of his fast german car plops gently into the inflating airbag, and he walks away from the accident. The technology may have created the danger, but also saved his life.

It’s faintly ridiculous, of course. The scene for this exhilarating experience is banal and dispiriting. The salvation is only momentary. But for a moment, life is precious and delightful: ironically, it takes a flirtation with death to fill us with an appreciation for life.

But it isn’t a moment of grace: it is only luck.