Liminal Wordsmith

Marshall McLuhan once said, “the medium is the message.” What he meant is that what really matters about media isn’t just the content but the atmosphere it creates around us. Radiohead has been shaping those kinds of atmospheres for decades.

Take Everything in Its Right Place, the opener on Kid A. The words cycle like broken circuitry and Thom Yorke’s voice stretches until it feels less human, more ghost. The song doesn’t just talk about disorientation, it is disorientation. McLuhan would call it a whole new sensory environment, one that mirrors the way digital life scrambles our perception.

You can hear the same thing on OK Computer. Let Down layers delicate guitar lines under lyrics about being crushed by motion and noise. It is a perfect snapshot of McLuhan’s point: technology ties us together but somehow leaves us hollow. No Surprises flips that around. Its lullaby sweetness hides an exhaustion, a craving for quiet after too much stimulation. Both tracks show how media rewires us and leaves us searching for balance in the middle of the noise.

Radiohead doesn’t lecture or explain. They build rooms for us to walk into, places where we feel the shifts McLuhan described. The message isn’t only in the lyrics, it is in how the music makes us inhabit dislocation, emptiness, and the fragile calm that follows.