moebius
06-15-2007, 02:59 PM
Tomorrow (June 16th) marks the 10th anniversary of the British release of Radiohead's OK Computer, considered by many the best rock album of the 1990s.
Use this thread as your chance to look back at Radiohead, but especially to look back at a very special album.
I got into Radiohead my sophomore year of college, which was the first year MP3s were widely available, and a year after OK Computer had been released. I was a big grunge fan (of the Nirvana school) and I had dismissed them as one hit wonders after I heard Creep a million times.
Listening to the Bends and OK Computer was musically a transformative experience. I had grown up on Kurt Cobain screaming and teenage angst and three-chord punk progressions, so it was amazing to hear a band making complicated music with subject matter and an aesthetic that didn't come off sounding like something my father would listen to (though years later I would find both in his CD collection...he is a musician, after all). So I went out and bought both, and I think they were the 4th and 5th CDs I every owned (my odd jobs money had always gone to comics and D&D).
I listened to one or the other every night for a year. Radiohead became the first band that I actively tried to get tickets to see in concert, and the only band I've gone to see multiple times. They passed Nirvana to take the mantle of "favorite band" sometime around 2001, and they haven't surrendered the title yet.
And while my two favorite Radiohead songs are still both from The Bends (The Bends and Fake Plastic Trees), I've always considered OK Computer the better album, both musically and as a concept, and Airbag, Paranoid Android and Let Down were just as important in getting me interested in music as more than a way to annoy authority figures.
In fact, I think I'm going to go put it on right now...
Use this thread as your chance to look back at Radiohead, but especially to look back at a very special album.
I got into Radiohead my sophomore year of college, which was the first year MP3s were widely available, and a year after OK Computer had been released. I was a big grunge fan (of the Nirvana school) and I had dismissed them as one hit wonders after I heard Creep a million times.
Listening to the Bends and OK Computer was musically a transformative experience. I had grown up on Kurt Cobain screaming and teenage angst and three-chord punk progressions, so it was amazing to hear a band making complicated music with subject matter and an aesthetic that didn't come off sounding like something my father would listen to (though years later I would find both in his CD collection...he is a musician, after all). So I went out and bought both, and I think they were the 4th and 5th CDs I every owned (my odd jobs money had always gone to comics and D&D).
I listened to one or the other every night for a year. Radiohead became the first band that I actively tried to get tickets to see in concert, and the only band I've gone to see multiple times. They passed Nirvana to take the mantle of "favorite band" sometime around 2001, and they haven't surrendered the title yet.
And while my two favorite Radiohead songs are still both from The Bends (The Bends and Fake Plastic Trees), I've always considered OK Computer the better album, both musically and as a concept, and Airbag, Paranoid Android and Let Down were just as important in getting me interested in music as more than a way to annoy authority figures.
In fact, I think I'm going to go put it on right now...