The classical piece buried in OK COMPUTER 

Use this track as your morning alarm. There’s a decent chance you don’t make it in to work.

This song is actually the core of OK Computer for me. It's not the same record without it. The music is beautiful, but for me it's the disassociation... it's like the voice in the head of the narrator of the record. The computer voice is used in Paranoid Android as well, and he's drowned out there by the music, but now he's finally expressing why he's paranoid and the music is drowned out, as he tells us why he disassociated. All the themes of the record are here.

Dreadful though this, I’m now middle aged and I make vows like “drink more water”, “sleep seven hours a night”, “eat more fruit and vegetables” in the hope I be fitter, happier, more productive. My fourteen year old self is currently horrified that a version of this song would become real for him.

Not only do I always listen to this track, sometimes I seek it out on its own. To me, this captures so much of the anxiety and dread of the album. This computer voice dictating almost like an infomercial how to be a perfect human. The voice droning over the hopeless sounding piano and landing with that punch of this life being like a pig in a cage on antibiotics….it gives me chills each time. I absolutely love it!

I always consider Fitter Happier to be the album's palette cleanser before the last half of the album. I reason 'Treefingers' from Kid A to operate in a similar function.

I don't think I ever skipped this one. I love the melancholy. It's a very special song to me.

It is the aesthetic centerpiece of the album as an entire experience if you are listening straight through.

The G flat made me go upstairs and record a computer voice saying "I'm offended" over some minor scales

Keep going with the radiohead stuff. Brilliant analysis

It gets better the older you get

Hearing the piano isolated from the robotic voice sounds a lot like Thom Yorke’s score for Suspiria (2018]. Give that a listen if you haven’t already!

I just can't stop thinking about the 'climbing up the walls' analysis... I need it so bad just because it is one of the most iconic songs from Radiohead 🥲

I never skipped it. In fact, I personally like what could be viewed as the "filler tracks" at times because that's often when something interesting occurs. "Fitter Happier" is no different. Funny enough, a forthcoming work I've done ends up venturing in the harmonic minor at times and for those reasons =D

I always considered this one of the top 3 "songs" of the album. Haunting and depressive, with that drone on top. The percussive qualities of the text-to-speech generator is also very interesting. Like a cat. Tied to a stick.

I never skip it. I really like the robotic voice and the music in the background.

I used to skip them, but tracks like this and Treefingers and especially Hunting Bears have become highlights over time.

I never realized until this analysis that it’s a riff on Let Down!

thank you so much for this analysis ! i love this song ! that's funny bc i never heard the lyrics as things we're supposed to do, but rather as things the "narrator" thinks about himself ("still cries at a good film"), just before realizing, at the very end, that he's no longer a human being. thanks for your contents, they are so great

You are so brilliant and endearing. Thanks for what you share. You’re a great teacher, and as a fellow music nerd it is nourishing to follow you.

Also Mendelssohn's "Hebrides Overture" is in "Paranoid Android" vocal melody "from a great height"

I love your analysis, and I was really looking forward to this one! Everything on 'OK Computer' is incredible, even this transitional "instrumental" song.

First: I love OK Computer. Good, sentimental, nostalgia for a long gone friend. You talk about, "tension" and "resolution" in chord progressions, and I HEAR it. Like, I FEEL it. It's the primary reason we feel anything from music. Those chord progressions and the feelings we perceive from them turn the simple, "sympathy" we can feel from the lyrics into EMPATHY. We, the listener, feel it too. I am not a musician. I don't understand a lick of the theory you are so expert in, but I love getting to peek into the window of the science of music. So I have a science question. Anthropology maybe? Where does our mutual understanding of those emotional chords come from? No one ever taught me. Is it a product of their audio frequencies and how they relate? Is it cultural? (probably) What do other cultures hear in these songs? Are harmony and dissonance universal? I am a visual artist and I know how gestalt groping principles can have an effect on the viewer. It's why we like rhythm as humans. It's why we beg for and rush to complete an incomplete shape/phrase. I know there's science there about our perception of audio--derived from our evolution as a species. I just can't quite make it to how and why music tickles us. I wonder if it's an evolutionary advantage coming from mutually experiencing and sharing emotionality with our tribe. Connectivity. It's going to take a slick, wicked smart, and astute musical poet as yourself to work that science out.

Always loved this song as much as I love every other song on this album.

Never skip this track! It's the intermission, these short "filler" tracks are essential on dense albums to break things up and prevent fatigue. Boards of Canada use these short vignettes a lot also. Love your analyses ixi music!

Binging all your videos rn ❤

I can’t recommend highly enough: Easy Star All Stars covering OK Computer. It revealed so much to me even as unaware as I was.

A pig in a cage on antibiotics. - I always found Fitter Happier to be a profound moment in the middle of one of the greatest albums of all time. We are pigs in cages.

I had (have?) OK Computer on cassette, and this track provoked me to basically only listen to the first side.

This is one of my favorite songs on the album, thank you so much for covering it! Excited for Electioneering!!

Hey, that was unexpected. But I loved it. It took me years to appreciate this song too.

I and I am sure Thom and Jon are all very happy that you discovered this song after passing over it all of this years.

The voice is the Fred voice from the early apple OS on a iMac.

Congrats on the 50K subs

An incredible breakdown of the entire album "The Downward Spiral" & now I find you're covering one of my other favorite albums of all time? Yes please!!! I bought this album in 1999, two years after its release, when I was 18 years old. OK Computer & NIN TDS are the only two albums I ever had to buy multiple times because I wore out my CDs (read: scratched up), & I had to replace them both TWICE. 😆 I never skipped this song when listening to this album, I adore this song. There is not one weak song on the entire album, just like TDS. I love these videos, in so glad I subbed to you! I majored in music (guitar) my first two years of college, then switched majors, so I spent a lot of time learning to play much of this album. Many of the songs were hits at campfires, especially when you sing & have solo guitar arrangements for the tracks in their entirety. What a beautiful album. And by the way, Exit Music is one of my favorites to play & sing, particularly because the end is vocally quite challenging (at least for me). Anyway, this is all to say hell yeah I love this stuff!!! 😀

Once again, despite everyone saying Radiohead's central theme is depression, it's actually anxiety. It doesn't get more obvious than Fitter Happier, which is just a shopping list of anxieties.

Love this entire album.

:: kitten antics :: is a good band name

Hey 50 thousand subs! Yaasss!

Love this track. I don't quite know how it fits but it fits perfectly. To me, it sounds like a warped version of the opening melody in Let Down. Partly, it reminds me of the "I may be paranoid but not an android" refrain in Paranoid Android (which I think refers to Marvin from Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy, as does the "first against the wall" lyric). And the transition into Electioneering is just *chef's kiss* perfect. Great video as always. Cheers!

You are fantastic.

Personally I love this song. So creepy. Great analysis!

Amazing.

When I listen to this album I NEVER skip this song. And I always noticed the piano in the background. And the vocals of the pilot in the plane going down. It has such a dark and depressing mood to it that shapes the album... but I usually skip Electroneering. I hate that cowbell.

Thank you! I don't blame anyone for focusing on the Stephen Hawking voice reading the bleak poem, it's pretty crazy, but I always wondered about this part in the background. That piano part was so damn sad!

I wouldn’t say it’s a classical piece buried within the track. To me it always reminded me of a distorted, through the mirror darkly version of “Windmills of your mind” by Michel Legrand.

I never skip this track. I occasionally skip ‘Electioneering’. But never ‘Fitter, Happier’. Because to me ‘Karma Police > Fitter, Happier > Climbing up the Walls’ (with the 8th song on the album skipped) is the emotional core of the record, which always hits deep, to this day.

I normally don't skip it when I listen to it in a way with the superalbum theory and 10 seconds crossfade on spotify. Because it almost serves like a prelude to "Faust Arp". Both of the songs gives me similar atmosphere and I find it very filling to do in that way hahahaha. But anyways, great analysis!

Thom eventually did get fitter, happier, more productive.

A piano lies down in the middle of the road

First? Also love this series thank you so much for these analyses!

Hard mode!

Harmonic minor is my home

I was like, "why does it sound like someone's writing a story on an old typewriter in the background???" I think it was just your fingernails on the keyboard keys.

Listen 6min40s in to Revolution #9 by the Beatles. It's pretty much identical.

Have you ever come across a keyboard sound that emulates a female voice? Does that even exist? That’s what I’m trying to find. This channel would be the only one that would know. Cause you know what I’m talking about.

You don't have to love all of Radiohead. Some of it is not for everyone.

I think the word you are seeking is "sinister."

To skip this song while listening to this album is like skipping the tunnel scene in the original Willy Wonka

hi are you going to do the same content for the album in rainbow ? it would be amazing

Love ixi...like several Radiohead songs....abhor this track....it, to quote my favorite asexual alternative morose crooner , makes me feel old inside

One of the weird audio samples in the background is from George Lucas' THX 1138.

Sinister ? Instead of evil

You skipped this track??? Wow. I love it. So sad

You should analyze We Suck Young Blood 😎

Very surprised to hear that you general skip this track

It's a skipper sometimes because it's too much truth at once for me.

SKIPPED fitter happier 😳

7:42 you mean D7/F# or F#dim6?

I didn’t realize until a month ago .ok computer concept was a computer playing a guitar . Ok computer play the guitar . That explains the feel of a lot of the guitar work on this album . Ok computer is my favorite album of all time . The Downward spiral is 2nd

I'd rather listen to this than Electioneering.

Have you ever heard 65daysofstatic ? Like Drove Through Ghosts To Get Here or Taipei? If you haven't PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE