My Brain Does Not Compute

In 1997 British indie rock band Radiohead released their seminal album OK Computer. The concept for the album was to talk about and highlight the ever increasing social alienation and emotional isolation felt by the then Gen-Y-ers in an age of rampant capitalist consumerism, fuelled by the onset of the digital age and a growing reliance on technology. As such it included tracks like Subterranean Homesick Alien and Paranoid Android which put into words and sounds how the modern generation was feeling whilst also heralding a shift in songwriting style and technique not just for the band itself but for a lot of music and musicians which came after.

Now, in 2023, we have My Brain Does Not Compute, a three and a half minute music video accompanying a rap song which was in part created with the help of the N-Track Studio app. During the track the rap artist talks about how his brain is not like a supercomputer and continues to list myriad ways to illustrate why this is true, all the while trying to get across the refrain that “We do not compute”.

There are no credits attached to the music video so it can be quite difficult at first glance to get any idea of the background to the music or the film, or to get a sense of how, where or why the content creator has chosen to express themselves with this particular song and video in this way. With just a little bit of digging though we can find that writer/director, Henry has published My Brain Does Not Compute through his own YouTube channel which he has called HG3 TV Computer Brain Channel and that this track is part of a series which runs in a very similar vein and includes other tracks such as My Brain Does Not Have Circuits and I Hate Being Not A Computer.

The video for My Brain Does Not Compute is in itself unfortunately not very good. It consists entirely of the artist/creator, Henry holding his phone in his hand and filming as he wanders around his house, mostly in his kitchen but sometimes meandering into other rooms, as he goes round and round in his head and in his movements as he tries to come to terms with not being a computer. There is a lot of bright red lens bleed at the top of the frame as the camera gets shown around from room to room, which may well be an added effect, but which could also be from the fact that Henry's phone is broken. Also, there is the encroachment into the frame throughout of Henry's ubiquitous finger which hangs on the top left of the shot and rarely removes itself from the scene.

There is really nothing else to the video, and while the rap track from Henry does show a lot of promise in his songwriting skills, as well as the whole enterprise being an interesting view into the repetitive journey of a mind that is trying to deal with not being a supercomputer, there is nothing in the skill and the talent of the film being shot to recommend it to the viewer.