"Airbag" is a song by the English rock band Radiohead. It is the first song on their 1997 album OK Computer and the final single to be released from said album on 24 March 1998.

The song is inspired by a car crash involving Thom Yorke and his girlfriend in 1987. This event damaged his girlfriend's cervix, but Yorke was unhurt. He said, "Has an airbag saved my life? Nah ... but I tell you something, every time you have a near accident, instead of just sighing and carrying on, you should pull over, get out of the car and run down the street screaming, 'I'm BACK! I'm ALIVE! My life has started again today!' In fact, you should do that every time you get out of a car. We're just riding on those things - we're not really in control of them."

The song was first performed in 1995. It was originally titled "Last Night an Airbag Saved My Life", a reference to the Indeep song, "Last Night a D.J. Saved My Life". Guitarist Jonny Greenwood said, "'Airbag' is a classic example of Colin and Phil saying, 'Let's make it sound like DJ Shadow.' But unfortunately – or fortunately – it does not, because we missed again. It's that thing of lumbering around in the dark, but still being excited by what we do. We're discovering these things for the first time rather than getting the pros in to show us how to do it."

In 2016, Thom Yorke auctioned the original draft of lyrics for "Airbag", written inside a copy of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience, with proceeds going to Oxfam.

The song begins with a guitar riff by Jonny Greenwood and the same riff closes the song. The song was inspired by the music of DJ Shadow, and is underpinned by an electronic drum beat programmed from a seconds-long recording of Selway's drumming. The band sampled the drum track with a digital sampler and edited it with a Macintosh, but admitted to making approximations in emulating Shadow's style due to their programming inexperience. The bassline in "Airbag" starts and stops unexpectedly, achieving an effect similar to 1970s dub.

...
Wikipedia