Karma Police by Radiohead

“Karma Police” music video
“Karma Police” live performance

The Beatles recorded some weird stuff.

There’s “Revolution 9” made up of sound clips, tape loops and reverse sound effects and the Indian-inspired “Tomorrow Never Knows.” Both of these songs represent the musical experimentation that was prevalent throughout the Beatles’ career.

The musical legacy of the Beatles is as much in songs like “Yesterday” as it is in their more progressive work. The Beatles continue to influences musicians combining musical ideas from the Beatles with their unique perspectives. While most bands draw their inspiration from songs like “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” Radiohead’s music grew out of the less popular and more progressive songs like Happiness is a Warm Gun.

Radiohead is not a mainstream band in the sense that you hear their music played on most radio stations. However, they have an enormous fan base and receive great admiration from critics and other musicians who recognize the high level of musical invention in their music. Many of their songs feature complex meters, adventurous harmonies and song forms that are both inventive and original. Radiohead continue the Beatles musical experimentation for future generations pushing popular music to new creative heights.

For many people, including myself it was “Karma Police” that introduced me to Radiohead. In 1997, I was a freshmen in high school and my daily dose of music videos from and MTV provided entertainment but didn’t musically challenge my ears. So when I saw the music video for “Karma Police” for the first time I was stunned.

First off the music video plays like a David Lynch film. The video starts with someone getting in a car and chasing a person down a road. The lead singer Thom Yorke is in the back seat, barely mouthing the words of the music as the car continues to chase this man. After a while, the man falls down, turns around and like a scared child the car backs up revealing a trail of gas from the car's broken gas tank. The man lights the trail of gas on fire, the car speeds backwards and we are in the car as it is engulfed in flames.

Yeah, that made for some messed up dreams for about a week.

The song itself is similar in form to later Beatles’ songs like “Hey Jude." In “Hey Jude” there are two distinct sections, the “Hey Jude” part and the “Na, Na, Na, nanana Na” section. There is some transition between these sections but it’s pretty abrupt and unlike a verse chorus form the music from the first section never comes back. "Karma Police" does the same thing building up slowly to the second section providing a sense of arrival and release.

“Karma Police” is a dark song. The bare piano, the plodding guitar and Thom Yorke’s vocal performance all create a feeling of despair. This song feels like walking into an abandoned apartment building and it’s within this feeling that Yorke sings with devilishly sarcastic tone accusing others of crimes that are never revealed.

The first section of the song is a call to the “karma police” to arrest a man and a girl for messing with the narrator. His descriptive of the man who “buzzes like a fridge” and the girl with “her Hitler hairdo” are slightly demented, a little funny and depict our narrator as being psychologically unbalanced.

“This is what you get, when you mess with us” builds into the second section, which features one line that is repeated: “and for a minute there, I lost myself.” This man realizes how caught up he was in revenge that he wasn’t acting like himself.

I don’t really like dark music, but there is revelatory about “Karma Police” and much of Radiohead's music. Through the bleakness there is true human emotion that wallows in the depths but often reaches grand heights. The music takes us somewhere and even though you may not want to go to the place the music leads, being part of the journey is amazing experience.

Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy, The Vampire Slayer in this interview talked about how he never really liked “reset” television. Shows that end exactly in the same place where they start every week. A lot of music is similar where nothing changes within the narrator from the beginning to the end of the song. Often the same sections in the beginning of the song return and are exactly same. Sometimes this is great but other times our soul thirsts for more.

Like the Beatles' more experimental work, Radiohead does not always create the most accessible music, but I encourage you to give this band a try. If you dive into Radiohead and let them take you away, you may hear sounds that aren't pretty and you may hear words that are disturbing but I promise you that it will be an unforgettable journey and you will be amazed at the places that you will go.