It’s quite common for certain songs and movies to run parallel to each other. Sometimes inspiration comes from various sources, including films. While we can’t definitively say that Thom Yorke was influenced by Robert De Niro’s film “Taxi Driver” while creating “OK Computer”, the premise appears to serve as a central theme in “Karma Police.”
When Martin Scorsese’s intense thriller is compared with Radiohead’s epic song, many themes seem to overlap. By the time they released *The Bends*, Radiohead had already established themselves as the art-rock darlings of Britain. This was the moment they took the conventions of rock and roll and transformed them into something that felt entirely detached from the outside world.
Across every song on the record, the band doesn’t talk about apathy as much as they do disassociation. Since many of the lyrics have to deal with machines, Yorke’s point is centered around the loss of humanity to some extent, and Taxi Driver was all about giving in to one’s inner animal.
Throughout the film, Travis Bickle seemingly gets more and more unhinged to the point where he starts to have zero regard for human life if someone isn’t on the right track. He seems to be only into violence to talk about what he sees as fair, the lyrics to ‘Karma Police’ could easily have been written on his brain when he lets loose.
While the song starts off slow and plodding, Thom Yorke’s observations about wanting to arrest a man for being too robotic become increasingly relevant when the chorus hits. There’s a sense of victory in the line “This is what you get,” but when the chords shift to something completely outside of the key, it becomes evident that the moment is as tragic as it is triumphant—much like when Bickle assassinates Harvey Keitel’s character, ‘Sport,’ before the police catch up to him.
The strongest parallel between the movie and the song appears in the outro, where Yorke repeatedly chants, “For a minute there, I lost myself.” Reflecting on how Bickle fantasized about killing those he deemed unjust throughout the film, Yorke’s anguished cries suggest a realization of the error in his ways. It signifies that his life has been irrevocably changed by his actions.
As the music builds around Yorke, though, it’s almost like a reminder that the white noise and static behind him is too much for him to really care about anything that he’s done. Yorke is still screaming about the horror that he had put people through for what he thought was the greater good, but the music is so loud that it’s impossible to hear him, leading to the final moments where everything abruptly stops.
While Taxi Driver and ‘Karma Police’ are two worlds apart in both the artistic medium and the time period they were conceived in, both of them are kindred spirits in how they decide to depict the dark side of the human psyche. Most people will do whatever they can to do what they think is right, but it only takes one step over the line for everything to get out of hand.