Fridge / Radiohead

Fridge Brilliance

• "Fitter Happier" has what might be a subtle bit of You Bastard! in its lyrics. The line "Like a cat, tied to a stick, that's driven into frozen winter shit" might raise a giggle — if not at the mental image, then at least at the fact that the only swear on the entire album was just delivered by a text-to-speech program. Then the very next line is "The ability to laugh at weakness", which is exactly what you'd be doing.
  • A subtle You Bastard! might also appear in "Nude." The song title may already conjure less than savoury thoughts in the listener's mind, and the song in general sounds very suggestive. One might get used to this idea as the song continues, but then Thom sings "You'll go to hell for what your dirty mind is thinking..." in the bridge and snaps you out of it. Then you take a look at the lyrics and realise that he was doing this for the whole song.
• There are certain musical similarities between "Creep" and The Hollies' "The Air That I Breathe"... Enough so that songwriters Albert Hammond and Mike Hazlewood sued for plagiarism and are listed as co-writing "Creep" alongside the band members. If you compare the lyrics of the two songs, "Creep" could almost be an Answer Song of sorts — both are about being in love, but while the narrator of "The Air That I Breathe" is perfectly content because he's already with the object of his affections, the narrator of "Creep" can't even bring himself to talk to her because he thinks of himself as being too inferior.
• It's generally accepted that "Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box" is about the monotony of a 9-to-5 job, specifically the commute to and from the job. But what may not be immediately obvious is that the song is actually designed to sound like this commute:
  • During the breakdown, grinding, atonal guitars are Gratuitously Panned to either side and alternate between each other... they're supposed to sound like car horns honking.
  • The chopped-up, echoing Studio Chatter in the background is supposed to be people talking over each other, possibly on the radio or at work.
  • The "nasal, depersonalized" sound of the vocals (thanks to Autotune) is to emphasize how deadening this process is.
• There's a reason◊ why it's called "Pyramid Song," according to Reddit.
• "Daydreaming" gets a special level of brilliant when you discover that in the music video, Thom walks through 23 doors. He was with his wife Rachel Owen for 23 years. And it's also been 23 years since Pablo Honey was released.
  • Additionally, the first three piano notes are D-E-A. When you play them over and over, you get D-E-A-D-E-A-D-E-A...
    • Another one is the voice at the end which has turned out to be Thom saying "half of my life". When the song came out Thom Yorke was 46 years old. Thom literally spent "Half of my life" with her.
• OKNOTOK, the 2017 reissue of OK Computer, was promoted with the release of two music videos, "Man of War" and "I Promise". A paranoid man is the protagonist of the first one, while the second features (the head of) an android.
• The video for "Lift" opens with Thom getting in a lift on the 18th floor, shortly followed by a woman and a girl. As the two get off on the floor below, the girl hits all the buttons forcing Thom to meet all sorts of people on his way down, who are all Mythology Gags to earlier songs and videos. The brilliance kicks in when you realise that the girl is Thom's daughter, and she's basically making her father revisit his past, which is appropriate for a single taken from the reissue of one of Radiohead's most beloved albums.
  • Moreover, the woman accompanying the girl is Thom's current girlfriend. Following all of the recent heartbreak, culminating in the passing of his ex-wife, the three of them coming together from floor 18 (as in 2018; the video was released in September 2017) could be seen as asking for hope from the future.

---