Radiohead’s song Let Down from their 1997 classic OK Computer is having a moment on TikTok. Why? Perhaps its gloomy, existential mood is reflective of the current zeitgeist, or perhaps it's just a case of algorithmic serendipity. Whatever the reason, it’s a good excuse to revisit this enduringly popular tune.
Coldplay modelled their entire sound on this track. Let’s dig in and find out what Chris Martin and the youth of TikTok hear in it.
The song begins with a duet for electric guitar and Fender Rhodes electric piano, both played by Jonny Greenwood. The guitar and Rhodes arpeggiate an ornamented Amaj7 chord. This chord is nominally major, so it should be “happy”, but it also has a wistful quality, because it contains a hidden minor chord. The chord includes the notes A, C-sharp, E and G-sharp. If you ignore the A, you’re left with C#m. That duality between major and minor gives major seventh chords their smoky ambiguity.
The ornamental notes in the intro figure are D, F-sharp and B, which together spell out a Bm chord. So you could think of the intro as Amaj7 with Bm overlaid on top. Between them, those two chords include every note in the A major scale. There’s nothing unusual about building a song around the major scale, but you don’t usually put the entire scale into your first chord.
The rhythm in the intro is very strange. The first seven notes are a syncopated pattern that takes up one measure of 4/4 time. Syncopation is to be expected in a rock guitar part. But then the notes start coming in groups of five. You can count a steady “one two three four five” along with them, or just repeat the word “hippopotamus” starting on every accented note. This implies 5/8 time, which is more typical of Balkan music than British rock. After six times through the “hippopotamus” pattern, there are two extra notes to make everything round out to six even measures of 4/4. That is hip!
Jonny Greenwood is not a typical rock guitarist. He studied classical music at Oxford Brookes university, and has composed several film scores when he isn’t busy being a rock star. His sources of inspiration frequently emerge from the classical world. In an interview with The Times, Greenwood explains that the rhythms in Let Down are heavily inspired by the minimalist composer Steve Reich, best known for his phasing techniques.
Think about the windshield wipers on a bus. The one on the driver’s side goes back and forth faster than the other one. They go in and out of sync with each other in a pattern that can be hypnotic (especially back when we were riding the bus before smartphones existed.) Reich applied this idea to music, having simple patterns repeat at different speeds or with different lengths to create phasing. The intro to Let Down is a simple version of the idea, but if you want to hear a more sophisticated example of phasing, listen to Greenwood perform Reich’s Electric Counterpoint.
Normally you would need multiple guitarists to perform this, but you can also cheat and use a digital looper like Greenwood does. If you’re a fan of Little Fluffy Clouds by The Orb, you will recognize the fast part.
You can hear phasing even more clearly in Reich’s Piano Phase, where two pianists repeating simple patterns gradually go in and out of sync with each other.
Let’s continue breaking down the track. At ten seconds into Let Down, the bass and drums enter. There’s a measure of regular 4/4, four more passes through the “hippopotamus” pattern, and four leftover notes to round out four even measures of 4/4.
At the twenty second mark, the first verse begins, and the rhythm settles down into a more typical rock 4/4. The guitar and electric piano are still arpeggiating the chords with lots of extensions and ornaments, though the basic chords are simple: Amaj7, E7, F#m, E7, then those four chords again, all standard A major stuff. Thom Yorke’s vocal melody walks down the A major scale from A down to E, with almost nursery-rhyme simplicity.
The chorus continues the same basic feel as the verses, but with different chords: D, E, A, F#m. The harmonic rhythm is odd; half a bar each of D, E and A, and then a bar and a half of F#m. This figure repeats two more times, but the third time the F#m only lasts for half a bar before being replaced by a bar of E7. Rock choruses are almost always two, four or eight phrases long; three phrases is unusual outside of the blues, and this is very definitely not the blues.
Are they just messing with us at this point?
After the chorus, there’s a four-bar break, a variant on the intro: four notes, five times through the “hippopotamus” pattern, and three more notes. This is followed by the second verse and chorus, same as the first. Then there’s a second break, just the guitar, playing yet another odd arpeggiated Amaj7 pattern: seven beats, eight beats, seven beats, ten beats. Are they just messing with us at this point?
The band re-enters and plays a more conventional 4/4 groove. The guitar arpeggio stays in 4/4 for eight bars but then the pattern becomes chaotic, sounding more like raindrops on a roof than like an organized rhythm. While the intro pattern was an odd length, the notes were still arranged on the metrical grid. In this break, Jonny Greenwood is off the grid, playing an intuitive version of the conflicting tempos of Steve Reich’s Piano Phase.
This groove ends with a single measure of the chorus before the band makes a left turn into still another textural groove. There’s a new timbre here, a retrofuturistic bleeping. This sound is coming from an extremely retrofuturistic piece of gear, an early ‘80s vintage ZX Spectrum. This computer’s sound system consists entirely of a “one-bit beeper”, a piezoelectric buzzer that produces a beep with a single parameter: on or off. You can program it to produce square waves and do some pulse-width modulation synthesis, and that’s about it.
The bleeping continues over the song’s third verse and chorus, and then there’s a serene ambient outro with high bleeping, low bleeping and acoustic guitar arpeggiating Amaj7. The bleeps are not tempo-aligned, once again evoking the destabilizing effect of Steve Reich’s phasing.
So what does this song mean? In Rolling Stone’s oral history of OK Computer, Thom Yorke says that Let Down “came from being in the bubble and looking at things as they passed by me.” The lyrics effectively convey the experience of being in a touring band for people who don’t like travel: a lot of numbed-out, dissociative sitting around in planes or buses or cars, or sitting around waiting to sit around in planes or buses or cars. I have not done much touring, but I’ve done enough to know that it’s a tough way to live, and it’s an easy way to start resenting your fellow humans – and yourself.
In a 1997 interview with Humo magazine, Jonny Greenwood explains further: “Andy Warhol once said that he could enjoy his own boredom. Let Down is about that. It's the transit-zone feeling. You're in a space, you are collecting all these impressions, but it all seems so vacant. You don't have control over the earth anymore. You feel very distant from all these thousands of people that are also walking there.”
Ed O’Brien adds, “It's about the lack of control. You feel more sad than angry. But why Thom sings 'crushed like a bug in the ground', I don't know.” Thom Yorke then says perhaps the most Thom Yorke thing imaginable: “I am fascinated by the sound that insects make that are being crushed. Wasps especially make a strange sound when you crush them.”
Radiohead recorded most of OK Computer in St. Catherine’s Court, a huge Elizabethan manor house in Bath, England owned by the actress Jane Seymour. (It would make a good location for a Downton Abbey episode.) The band recorded Let Down in the grand ballroom at three in the morning.
Thom Yorke laid down his vocals in the orangery, a kind of stone greenhouse with nice natural reverb. Stanley Donwood, the designer of Radiohead’s album covers, said in the Rolling Stone piece: “All the old houses in England are haunted. I think it’s the law.” This makes sense, because OK Computer is a deeply haunted album.
I respect Radiohead very deeply, but I don’t exactly enjoy their music. My baseline emotional state is haunted enough without needing further reinforcement. But the point of Radiohead songs is not to help you feel good. For that, I recommend the Easy Star All Stars.
But if Radiohead isn’t supposed to make you feel good, what is their music for? To validate your not-so-good feelings? Or to take those feelings and use them to motivate their musical and technical explorations? Perhaps the content of the music itself doesn’t make you feel good, but the sense of possibility that it gives you does. Wherever the source of its charms lies, Let Down has introduced Radiohead's adventurous musicality to a new generation of listeners.
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