Easily one of my all-time favorite videos, "Paranoid Android" premiered during a prime MTV-watching year for me, 1997. Everything just kind of stopped when this video came on, and you always hoped it would be next in the rotation.
As many times as I've viewed this one, I just learned a whole lot from a little wikipedia research, such as:
-The song title refers to the depressed robot, Marvin the Paranoid Android, from Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (I always kind of suspected...)
-The fat guy who cuts off his arms and legs is supposed to be Boris Yeltsin
-The main character comes from a cartoon series called Robin, which Radiohead members enjoyed
-At 2 minutes, 35 seconds, the band makes a cameo as the group of people watching a man dancing on a table with a face coming out of his belly button
-The line "The blood and the screaming" may be a reference to George Orwell's novel 1984, which was a major influence on OK Computer as a whole
-Radiohead has talked about this song as 3 songs in one, getting the idea from The Beatles' "Happiness is a Warm Gun"
-The guitar solo was ranked #34 by Guitar World readers in a list of the "100 Greatest Guitar Solos"
...and so much more.
For those watching at work, this is most certainly the unedited version that MTV would never show (see the mermaids at the end, and you'll know what I'm talking about.)
Now presenting 6+ minutes of deranged, animated joy.
P.S. - My old roommate Erica and I do a badass karaoke rendition of this, if I may say so myself. It's not even a duet, but somehow, we work it out.
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