1) Airbag; 2) Paranoid Android; 3) Subterranean Homesick Alien; 4) Exit Music (For a Film); 5) Let Down; 6) Karma Police; 7) Fitter Happier; 8) Electioneering; 9) Climbing Up the Walls; 10) No Surprises; 11) Lucky; 12) The Tourist
Pre-millennial angst that changed things forevermore. You know this.
Key tracks: "Let Down", "No Surprises", "Lucky"
I'd like to think I'm good about not letting the wider critical world affect my own amateur reviews. Rather than saying this or that is overrated or underrated, or making parallels about my opinions vs everyone else's, I prefer looking at things within my own bubble - after all, it's my opinion that matters the most to my listening habits and I imagine someone would read my thoughts to learn what I personally think. With some records that's harder than others. There's a number of albums that are so universal that they form a part of our collective consciousness even if we don't care about them: albums which have been discussed and analysed so often and in such great detail due to their importance and place in the canon that there is literally nothing new to say. Most of the time, I can still comfortably get by. Enough time has passed from The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and other sacred cows that the old canon narratives are actively being argued against while new ones are established and there's a wider variety of opinions challenging the old classics, and somewhere between those lines I'm able to place my own opinion without feeling like I'm better off just linking to the relevant Wikipedia section. Not to mention that for most iconic records, I'm too much of a natural contrarian to hold them in the highest of pedestals in the first place.
OK Computer is a curveball for me in this regard. It's a landmark album, and even I agree with that - to a degree that it feels like an actual challenge to start dissecting it apart. You're not going to find unique angles to view this album through from me, is what I am saying. It's my generation's Sgt Peppers, and I'm saying that without a single ounce of hyperbole. It's a cultural milestone that has affected so much of the other music I enjoy, inspired countless other musicians and shifted genre trends. To this day it causes so much discussion, analysis and over-analysis that we are all absolutely sick of it. We can all recite from memory the story of Thom Yorke & co becoming increasingly fatigued by society and music industry at the same time as they felt their ambitions limited by their early sound, and in turn exploding in fame and finding themselves even more fatigued through the record they made to channel all of that frustration and ambition through. And if you don't, you're pretending - because OK Computer transcends any genre barrier knowledge if you're even remotely passionate about music. It's omnipresent.You can't avoid it, no matter how much you want.
Even now, OK Computer is a prime example of a band reaching for their lofty ambitions and realising the breadth of their own skill set, and taking a boundary-breaking leap within their own path. Comparing Pablo Honey and The Bends to it is practically pointless because the change is so vast: there's enough hints on both albums, particularly The Bends, to point out where OK Computer came from but the narrative is loose, the familiarities superficial at best. OK Computer effectively re-introduces Radiohead from scratch: the urban angst of grunge-era guitar walls has evolved into pre-millennial apathy and depression, and the band are musically thinking outside their own box to the point that the tropes introduced here are now aspects the band are forever associated with. Not just that, but they're also elements that are echoed within the particular kind of rock music that followed in OK Computer's wake. You can trace a direct genealogy from it to nearly everything that has been happening in indie and alternative rock since. You think of angst-laden, introspective guitars and you'll be able to trace them here.
Like all the very best progenitors, OK Computer still sounds like its own thing even now. Despite how many times its tricks have been repeated, there's nothing that combines them quite like here. Part of it is due to Radiohead's own uniqueness, the very specific traits its members have: Yorke's falsetto wailing (oft imitated, never bettered) and characteristic lyrical style most obviously, but also Jonny Greenwood's flourishes inspired by modern classical and Phil Selway's razor-sharp drumming. There's also the neurotic flair that OK Computer is powered by that has never really been captured by its followers in quite this way. Yorke was very obviously not having a good time, the band as a whole found inspiration through it and traces of it are all over the album, whether it's the resigned exhaustion of "No Surprises", the anger of "Electioneering" or the downright crippling paranoia of "Climbing Up the Walls". OK Computer frequently sounds like its suffocating within its own four walls creeping closer together, only to push them periodically away to reveal something hopeful for a fleeting moment.
OK Computer isn't Radiohead's best album. I understand why "Paranoid Android" is iconic and as admirable as its multi-suite progression is, I've never seen it as a particular discography highlight and its first part towers above the others to the point I wish it was the blueprint for the entire song, and "Electioneering" meanwhile is basically an attempt to re-do R.E.M.'s "Ignoreland" but quite simply not as good. They're good but neither are songs I could say lifts the album for me. I also just think that Radiohead started to get really interesting after they decided to deconstruct and reassemble themselves in OK Computer's aftermath, which is when their skitterish neuroses found a sound that perfectly suited it. But, I understand why it's such a revered album, and it wouldn't need a great stretch to make me into a true believer too. After all, many of their best songs are here. "Let Down" is in some days is in fact the best song they ever wrote, period, making the world-weary desire to disappear into the most gorgeous thing when in its final minutes the song jumps off a cliff and soars into the sunset on the wings of its layered vocal parts and intensifying instrumental section. "Karma Police" is one of Radiohead's most haunting but bottles a quietly churning rage, and it twists that dagger deeper with each new section it offers. The finale for "Exit Music (For a Film)" is like that bottled rage finally breaking through, igniting into a wall of distressed sound of the like the band's rarely tried since.
The final stretch of the album is also probably one of the all-time best closing runs: "Climbing Up the Walls" makes an orchestral section sound distressingly claustrophobic (it's phenomenal, by the way); the simple but endlessly beautiful "No Surprises" is the other big contender for the band's best song and in fact its quiet but powerful fragility is what converted me into thinking there's something to this band after all; "Lucky" is as atmospheric a rock anthem as the band would ever do and the second verse's introduction of the simple keyboard texture is one of my pet favourite moments of simple instrumental additions making a real difference; and "The Tourist" achingly floats in its own world, giving the paranoia of the album a calm breathe out in the end. OK Computer has throughout its length hit with some big punches and overall high quality miserablist rock, but it concludes like a real iconic moment in music history.
Furthermore, OK Computer still feels just as relevant as it always was as well, maybe even moreso in this modern society that's growing more cynical and fatigued by the month. It's just as evocative and its songs are still impactful, proving their strengths despite every single one of them having been picked to their bones over the years; including the "Fitter Happier" interlude, which genuinely has its own important slot in the overall flow and Greater Thematics of the album. OK Computer is a truly great album, often stunningly so, and very audibly a moment where a band realised their own capabilities towards greatness and made them a reality. That so many people in the world agree with me, a lot of them way more passionately than I do, is a happy coincidence. This is all to say that out of all the albums in my collection, OK Computer is probably the one record I find the most difficult to discuss, but you're in luck: in a matter of seconds you can find thousands of reviews, articles and in-depth essays that say what I'd likely think anyway. This must be what Beatles fans feel like.
It's not one of my personal all-time greats but its place among the canon is more than justified.
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