Radiohead - Subterranean Homesick Alien

In 1997, Radiohead released one of the best albums of the nineties (and maybe "ever"), OK Computer. The album undoubtedly is one of THE milestones of rock music. Songs like Paranoid Android, Exit Music and Karma Police set examples for many artists that would follow.
The third song on the album is a clear wink to Bob Dylan. The song is called "Subterranean Homesick Alien". The lyrics are about us human beings and show a negative side of the lonelyness and uptighteness of people who live in the cities and lock themselves away in their homes at night. The singer dreams about aliens flying over our heads who are investigating these "weird creatures". He gets swooped away on their beautiful ship and can see the world like they aliens see it.
The song itself has absolutely nothing to do with Dylan as far as I can tell but the title most certainly is a reference to Bob Dylans' song "Subterranean Homesick Blues".

Sick and tired of Maggies Farm

An unusual song when we're talking Bob Dylan is Placebo's "Slave To The Wage". The lyric "Sick and tired of Maggies Farm" suddenly appears. A very obvious reference to the Bob Dylan song Maggies Farm.
It's a very simple song. It's about saying goodbye to the boredom of leading a normal life. It's about escaping from work, habit and the shackles of society. The songs says that "all it takes is lots of guts and little vision" to wave those worries goodbye.

Maggies Farm by Bob Dylan more or less is about the same thing, only Dylan succeeds in writing a somewhat more complicated song than Placebo. When Bob Dylan sings "I ain't gonna work on Maggies Farm no more" he also implies that he's sick of the routine of working for somebody else.
As a song, Maggies Farm is by far Dylan's best song but the songs gets a whole new meaning when you know the history about it.
Originally the song was written for his 1965 album Bringing it all back home. Until then, Bob Dylan was a folk singer who performed solo acoustic songs.
When he hit the stage of the Newport Folk Festival in the summer of 1965 he burst out this song with a full electric band. The crowd was shocked and booood at him, but Bob Dylan continued to play electric and changed the way people thought about music forever.

Below, you see the video of Slave to the wage. The lyric about Maggies Farm comes at 1:47.



And next you find the 1965 performance of Maggies Farm at the Newport Folk Festival by Bob Dylan.