OK Computer is widely agreed to be one of the best albums of all time. Thousands of articles, dozens of podcasts, and several books have been written about it by the editorial staff of Rolling Stone alone. (ha ha) Released in 1997, the album captured the mood of the world around the corner, a less sunny, post-Britpop world of social alienation, political disenfranchisement, political doublespeak on grotesque scale, technology too advanced for its inventors, and lots and lots of weird guitar effects. It wasn't Radiohead's first masterpiece (their 1995 meditation on anger and depression, The Bends, is a perfect piece of work from start to finish, if I ignore "Bones"), but it was their first truly experimental album.
The sonic palette that Thom Yorke (vocals, guitar), Jonny Greenwood (principally lead guitar and ondes Martenot), Ed O'Brien (textural guitar, singing EEEEEEEEEEDDDDD), Colin Greenwood (classic bassist material, google him), and Phil Selway (the actual best drummer in modern rock music) created for OK Computer was not the organic, five-kids-in-a-practice-room sound that took them through the heroically uneven juvenilia of Pablo Honey and the beautiful The Bends. People more educated than I will explain to you what they did and how they did it. What I can say with as much confidence as an eighteen-year-old boy is that they created a soundscape of whites and greys and pale blues, a chillingly antiseptic, techy-but-not-techno noise that leaches sentiment out of the lyrics, throwing Yorke's lyrical ruminations on society into a relief as beautiful and fragile as a freeze-dried clump of Martian soil. The world they paint is ours as it is, not as we want to see it, but not as depression kitsch either. The characters behind the lyrics have been numbed by overstimulation and now drift "from ocean to ocean", as it's put in B-side "Man of War."
I'm not going to do a categorical track breakdown of OK Computer. I don't feel remotely qualified to explain the amount of musical complexity that lies in those twelve tracks. Truth be told, I didn't feel qualified to write about OK Computer at all, but the amount of intimidation I felt when asked to made me think it'd be good for me. So here we go.
I fell in love with Radiohead last October, the middle of a special fall that, whatever colors it's famous for, I'll always remember in tones of red, purple, and black. (I don't quite know why. Don't ask me to explain color-memory synesthesia, or whatever I have.) It was a very difficult fall for me, for reasons I probably shouldn't go into on a public blog. Suffice it to say I was suffering, day to day, for many reasons, most of them my own fault. I found solace in my outdoor work at Sleepy Hollow Ski & Bike Area, when it was just me and a stretch of trail to heave rocks off of, rake even, lop free of stray roots, and seed for the coming spring. And thanks to a pair of headphones and a phone that held its charge, I could fill my head with music.
In spite of the mental pain that held me--or because of it, I dunno--last autumn was exceptionally beautiful in my eyes. I felt things more, and more purely, than I had during the mental fug of high school. The fall colors swooped up to the sky joyfully and with an audacity that sometimes made me laugh out loud. I fell in love with the fall. I even started enjoying cold drizzle: it seemed like the most honest weather, somehow, and the grey in the sky above and the air around me made the green and orange and red stand out more complexly.
The world of music, always somewhere I visited, became my home last fall. I listened to albums the way twelve-year-old me would read books: voraciously, recklessly, going through good ones two or three times in a row, taking in media outside my comfort zone. My catalogue expanded plenty last fall, and I discovered two artists (look Baba, your favorite term for musicians :P) that became especially meaningful to me: Kate Bush, for her expressive voice, pure, uncynical lyrics, and folk-maximalist arranging style; and Radiohead.
When I was very young--like, mid-period Illinois young--I picked up my dad's CD of OK Computer, by Radiohead. I thought the cover was scary and the band name unfriendly. I decided I didn't like this Radiohead, and I didn't listen to them for another eleven years. Then one day in September I asked Eli Enman (hi Eli!) for some music recs. He said he really liked listening to Radiohead, so I downloaded their first four albums (having no idea that the story of these albums was no Beatlesque slow-burn development) and went out to resurface the excavated Hinesburg Hill loop.
OK Computer isn't my favorite Radiohead album (that'd be The Bends, Kid A, Amnesiac, or A Moon Shaped Pool depending what day you ask me), but it is the first Radiohead album I loved. I think the first song that held me, before I appreciated the gritty fuzz of "Airbag" or the panoramic brilliance of "Paranoid Android", was "Exit Music (For a Film)." I knew Radiohead's reputation as a sad band, and this song did have sadness in it, but it had so many other things, too! Love, fear, rebellion, spite, tiny hints of comedy; emoted by only a perfectly mixed combo of acoustic guitar and lead vocals (until the world's heaviest-ever bass and drums kick in for the last verse), it was Shakespearean in its scope. It came as no surprise when I learned that the band had recorded the song for Baz Luhrmann's 1996 Romeo + Juliet. When Thom Yorke was twelve, he'd read Romeo and Juliet and wept in anger that they hadn't run off when they could've; that they stayed long enough to lose the chances of a happy ending. In "Exit Music", they do run away together. That has nothing to do with anything else in this blog post, but I wanted you to know that.
For a while, "No Surprises" was my favorite song from OK Computer. It's one of the finest examples of a very nasty compositional trick; the ol' happy music, dark lyrics trick. A gentle O'Brien guitar arpeggio, punctuated by Jonny Greenwood on the celesta, sets you up for...something, I'm sure, but not Thom Yorke's lyrics about a slow death by ennui in suburbia, about a midlife crisis that will never go away, about contemplating a permanent escape via the route of carbon monoxide. The fun thing is, you can listen to the song without understanding what Thom is saying--indeed, this is the default mode of listening to Radiohead, the man sings consonants with his mouth wide open--and get the fun lullaby hit; or you can get a compelling reminder not to take the well-traveled roads.
With this album, the last album Radiohead would make before changing their own sound and the pop world at large's sound with the triumph of genre stew that was Kid A, the five men from Abingdon painted a tapestry of beauty and horror, covered with a thin layer of whitewash so you can look at it without your eyes falling out. It is really, really...something. I'm very grateful it exists; we'd send it to the aliens as a testament to what our species can do, but they're already listening in.
P.S. There's a reggae cover of "Let Down" somewhere on the internet. It's absolutely perfect.
The sonic palette that Thom Yorke (vocals, guitar), Jonny Greenwood (principally lead guitar and ondes Martenot), Ed O'Brien (textural guitar, singing EEEEEEEEEEDDDDD), Colin Greenwood (classic bassist material, google him), and Phil Selway (the actual best drummer in modern rock music) created for OK Computer was not the organic, five-kids-in-a-practice-room sound that took them through the heroically uneven juvenilia of Pablo Honey and the beautiful The Bends. People more educated than I will explain to you what they did and how they did it. What I can say with as much confidence as an eighteen-year-old boy is that they created a soundscape of whites and greys and pale blues, a chillingly antiseptic, techy-but-not-techno noise that leaches sentiment out of the lyrics, throwing Yorke's lyrical ruminations on society into a relief as beautiful and fragile as a freeze-dried clump of Martian soil. The world they paint is ours as it is, not as we want to see it, but not as depression kitsch either. The characters behind the lyrics have been numbed by overstimulation and now drift "from ocean to ocean", as it's put in B-side "Man of War."
I'm not going to do a categorical track breakdown of OK Computer. I don't feel remotely qualified to explain the amount of musical complexity that lies in those twelve tracks. Truth be told, I didn't feel qualified to write about OK Computer at all, but the amount of intimidation I felt when asked to made me think it'd be good for me. So here we go.
I fell in love with Radiohead last October, the middle of a special fall that, whatever colors it's famous for, I'll always remember in tones of red, purple, and black. (I don't quite know why. Don't ask me to explain color-memory synesthesia, or whatever I have.) It was a very difficult fall for me, for reasons I probably shouldn't go into on a public blog. Suffice it to say I was suffering, day to day, for many reasons, most of them my own fault. I found solace in my outdoor work at Sleepy Hollow Ski & Bike Area, when it was just me and a stretch of trail to heave rocks off of, rake even, lop free of stray roots, and seed for the coming spring. And thanks to a pair of headphones and a phone that held its charge, I could fill my head with music.
In spite of the mental pain that held me--or because of it, I dunno--last autumn was exceptionally beautiful in my eyes. I felt things more, and more purely, than I had during the mental fug of high school. The fall colors swooped up to the sky joyfully and with an audacity that sometimes made me laugh out loud. I fell in love with the fall. I even started enjoying cold drizzle: it seemed like the most honest weather, somehow, and the grey in the sky above and the air around me made the green and orange and red stand out more complexly.
The world of music, always somewhere I visited, became my home last fall. I listened to albums the way twelve-year-old me would read books: voraciously, recklessly, going through good ones two or three times in a row, taking in media outside my comfort zone. My catalogue expanded plenty last fall, and I discovered two artists (look Baba, your favorite term for musicians :P) that became especially meaningful to me: Kate Bush, for her expressive voice, pure, uncynical lyrics, and folk-maximalist arranging style; and Radiohead.
When I was very young--like, mid-period Illinois young--I picked up my dad's CD of OK Computer, by Radiohead. I thought the cover was scary and the band name unfriendly. I decided I didn't like this Radiohead, and I didn't listen to them for another eleven years. Then one day in September I asked Eli Enman (hi Eli!) for some music recs. He said he really liked listening to Radiohead, so I downloaded their first four albums (having no idea that the story of these albums was no Beatlesque slow-burn development) and went out to resurface the excavated Hinesburg Hill loop.
OK Computer isn't my favorite Radiohead album (that'd be The Bends, Kid A, Amnesiac, or A Moon Shaped Pool depending what day you ask me), but it is the first Radiohead album I loved. I think the first song that held me, before I appreciated the gritty fuzz of "Airbag" or the panoramic brilliance of "Paranoid Android", was "Exit Music (For a Film)." I knew Radiohead's reputation as a sad band, and this song did have sadness in it, but it had so many other things, too! Love, fear, rebellion, spite, tiny hints of comedy; emoted by only a perfectly mixed combo of acoustic guitar and lead vocals (until the world's heaviest-ever bass and drums kick in for the last verse), it was Shakespearean in its scope. It came as no surprise when I learned that the band had recorded the song for Baz Luhrmann's 1996 Romeo + Juliet. When Thom Yorke was twelve, he'd read Romeo and Juliet and wept in anger that they hadn't run off when they could've; that they stayed long enough to lose the chances of a happy ending. In "Exit Music", they do run away together. That has nothing to do with anything else in this blog post, but I wanted you to know that.
For a while, "No Surprises" was my favorite song from OK Computer. It's one of the finest examples of a very nasty compositional trick; the ol' happy music, dark lyrics trick. A gentle O'Brien guitar arpeggio, punctuated by Jonny Greenwood on the celesta, sets you up for...something, I'm sure, but not Thom Yorke's lyrics about a slow death by ennui in suburbia, about a midlife crisis that will never go away, about contemplating a permanent escape via the route of carbon monoxide. The fun thing is, you can listen to the song without understanding what Thom is saying--indeed, this is the default mode of listening to Radiohead, the man sings consonants with his mouth wide open--and get the fun lullaby hit; or you can get a compelling reminder not to take the well-traveled roads.
With this album, the last album Radiohead would make before changing their own sound and the pop world at large's sound with the triumph of genre stew that was Kid A, the five men from Abingdon painted a tapestry of beauty and horror, covered with a thin layer of whitewash so you can look at it without your eyes falling out. It is really, really...something. I'm very grateful it exists; we'd send it to the aliens as a testament to what our species can do, but they're already listening in.
P.S. There's a reggae cover of "Let Down" somewhere on the internet. It's absolutely perfect.
Oh whoops I don't have an account on here, it's Camille!! Nice work. So how are we getting your dad to teach Radiohead music theory?
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