I guess you could let it stand for a symbol of your own alienation from the world. If this came out in 1989, say, I might have felt that way about it, at my age then. But as I said recently, even though this album perhaps thinks it's The Wall, it's really The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway with a marketing degree. Thankfully the degree was top notch.
It actually took me a long time to love this album, actually. I liked it and got it shortly after it came out, mind you, as I had enjoyed Radiohead well enough over the years, though I did not worship them. A couple of songs stood out initially, but it wasn't only until much much later that it all finally connected, and when it did, well. I haven't been able to hear it as anything other than through and through great since then, though I resist utterly the idea that this is an actual concept album per se, comments above notwithstanding. No unified story, that's for sure, and if the whole thing is about death, surviving it or avoiding the slow creeping end that life in the Modern Post-Industrial World apparently must mean for us all -- again, apparently -- then hey, I've heard worse. Tales from Topographic Oceans was based on a goddamn footnote from some swami's autobiography.
So setting aside whatever Thom Yorke is sometimes not very clearly singing about, lose yourself in the arrangements, and what the three various guitarists come up with, Yorke and Jonny Greenwood and Ed O'Brien. Greenwood is actually the real reason everything is so frigging great, frankly -- apparently he's got an utter horror of yer typical guitar-wank rock god, and does his best to feed, process, loop and otherwise abuse what he does in order to get other sounds out of it. Sort of like what would happen if Tom Morello had a brain, if you like.
And so weird sounds and noises creep in here and there and everywhere, and if this isn't, say, Phil Spector blowing Brian Wilson's mind or the Bomb Squad screwing with everyone's head, the collection of odd and even and out and in becomes a gamely confused and spot-on mess. "Paranoid Android" may be "Bohemian Rhapsody" in lyrical and musical reverse, but the anti-production production therefore make it fun. "Subterranean Homesick Alien," which could have been written for my former abode Irvine, California, frankly, has odd keyboards making noises they're not usually supposed to, given their sixties sound, "Electioneering" isn't pure white noise but makes a game semi-effort, and on. Whether or not you want to nail yourself up to Yorke's various tales as they go is your own business.
All this said, sometimes the anthems work just right. "Exit Music (For a Film)" is perhaps the most spiteful and fake suicide song since the Smiths' "Asleep," sure, but damn, revel in the false choir and whalesounds! "Climbing Up the Walls" is one of those things that actually is as freaked out and fucked up as it pretends to be, and I remember one friend describing "Let Down" as what would have happened if U2 finally got it right. Interesting. Do I agree? I'll get back to you on that.
Friend Karen once wondered if 'kicking squealing gucci little piggy' referred to the five members of the Spice Girls by pertinent quality. Why not?