28 years after its release, ‘Let Down’ has entered the Billboard Hot 100 at 91 this week. This comes after the song has gone viral on TikTok with people tapping into the raw unfiltered emotion behind Thom Yorke’s voice and lyrics.
The irony of this is that ‘OK Computer’ is an album which plays on many themes, one being the feeling of technology moving too fast to keep up with. How captivating it is, that this very thing has recycled ‘Let Down’ into the Hot 100 once again.
TikTok is fast moving, constantly updating and changing, possibly leaving many in society in a grey area about the current trends or the channels through which something becomes popular. The title of the album itself is a play on words, it suggests that there’s a false narrative that computers make things ok, but the album dives deeper and leaves you feeling the opposite.
Speaking to The Rolling Stone in 2017 Yorke spoke about writing the album “I was getting into the sense of information overload…Which is ironic, really, since it’s so much worse now.”
The 90s music scene was dominated by positivity. The rise of Britpop, bands like Oasis, Blur, Pulp and Suede echoed the changing of the times with bouncy tracks to get people on their feet and celebrating life. Radiohead were different. It was the opposite for the band from Oxfordshire, they instead thought life was going too fast, spiralling out of control. Listening to Radiohead you aren’t told to roll with it, instead you’re the person looking through the window from the inside out, windows big enough to see out of, but small enough hat people can’t see you within. The band are highlighting an imperfect existence in what Yorke thought was an overwhelming reality. Instead of looking forward to waking up in the year 2000, there’s this idea of worry and anxiety about what form the next century will assume.
‘Let down’ itself is a beautiful track, a journey into melodic intimacy, oscillating through the toils of the 90s as the person who spectates as life passes by. The opening line of the song “Transport, motorways and tramlines” immediately delves into the overwhelming abundance of transport options, it’s significant that this comes first, as a listener you’re being thrown into the deep end immediately, bombarded with routes of travel.
The song is calm in its melody but builds and builds, until the floor collapses and you’re falling, crushed like a bug in the ground. The single glimmer of hope on the lyric sheet “one day i am gonna grow wings” is buckled by Thom Yorke’s melancholic tone.
Today’s younger generation are connecting with the song and the band, likely because of the relation to not knowing what direction to turn next, or feeling a lack of significance in such a fast paced society. The song was also featured in hit Disney Plus series ‘The Bear’, during a scene centred around confessing feelings. This further introduced it to an unexposed generation of Radiohead fans in waiting.
Radiohead’s last music success came in 2016 with their album ‘A Moon Shaped Pool.’ The band don’t currently have any plans to go back on tour, but after a surprise release of a live album this month, maybe we can all hope to see ‘Let down’ live on stage again soon.
