Radiohead: A Moon Shaped POLL

i was 14 when i heard ok computer, and it definitely blew my mind. i had very few musical favorites before that, but i believe my listening diet was mostly:

- classical (cheap beethoven and mozart CDs, not For Dummies! but on that level) - especially beethoven's Eroica, over and over.
- the offspring, smash
- green day, dookie
- rush, 2112
- queen, a night at the opera
- pink floyd, dark side

i bought ok computer because they were on the cover of an issue of spin that i bought at wal-mart, thinking "i can look for some new music groups to check out here". yes, i really thought like that. pre-internet, weird.
ok computer blew my mind. i listened to it one million times. every single song blew my mind and was perfect and could not be skipped. if i absolutely only had time for one radiohead song at the time, i would maybe skip to lucky. or let down. or karma police. or exit music. if you're going to listen to paranoid android, you might as well just start it off with airbag so you can get that cool lead-in. you could skip to SHA, i could see that.

immediately afterward i listened to smashing pumpkins, placebo, ben folds five, dave matthews band, and dream theater.

if i experience an erection lasting more than 4 hours, i may contact my personal healthcare provider

it was around then that i met banaka

OKC a good gateway into dave

in that same year, i grew from 5'0 to 5'9", and grew this one INCREDIBLY LONG PUBE, it was like the ur-pube

god, i love radiohead

Fitter happier
More productive
Comfortable
Not drinking too much
Regular exercise at the gym (3 days a week)
one INCREDIBLY LONG PUBE
At ease

It’s not how OKC sounds which made it a classic album, it’s how it feels and how well its themes resonated at the time.

And yeah, stuff like “climbing up the walls” and even “fitter happier” sounded like nothing else I had ever heard in my life.

You’d have to be a HUGE music nerd if OKC sounded like something else you heard before if you were in your early teens in the pre-internet age.

I am actually a bit enraged at the suggestion that an album can’t change your life if it’s “nothing new”.

but the joke is on you - some of my best old friends always used WOAH and continue to WOAH, so in a way your post and the decisions that you've made are making me nostalgic for a simpler time

― Zach_TBD (Karl Malone),

I have caught myself using WOAH outside ilx a couple of times recently so it seems the joke is indeed on me. I just never knew there was another way, you've opened my eyes Karl Malone.

Time alone will tell if you've changed my life. Could be, could be.

Anyway I don't think I said it was nothing new? I said it conformed to expectations of what makes music "good", or what makes a "good album", and did so expertly, maybe better than any other record I've heard to date. That's not really the same thing but I already acknowledged that post hit a bum note, you know?

getting into "uptown music" (Babbitt disciples like Charles Dodge and Mario Davidovsky)

Funny you should mention these guys – when I found out about the 'Idioteque' / Paul Lansky connection, I looked up Mild und leise and was woefully disappointed. At the time I was firmly in the 'early electronic music suxxx!' camp – much like Afx when he said Stockhausen should 'stop making abstract, random patterns you can't dance to' (which is somewhat ironic since I was too shy to dance in my teens). So yeah, you were definitely ahead of the curve there.

It was propinquity, or serendipity, or both. I grew up in a neighborhood adjacent to Columbia University and had neighbors who worked with those guys. They knew I liked weird music- one of them gave me a CD of 'Philomel' for Christmas when I was 15!

I was nerdy in the pre-internet age only in the sense that I listened to middling 60's and 70's bands like Paul Revere and the Raiders at age 9 or 10 instead of Green Day and Nirvana. Kind of parochial. Def not too cool :)

I was into Luc Ferrari around the time of Kid A but didn't know about any of the associated musique concrete stuff at all which is... baffling.

Were there samples or references to other EA compositions than mild und leise?

They sample arthur krieger's 'short piece' from the same 'elctronic music winners' album. That title!!!

*kreiger

Oh wow, they were winning pieces in the first ISCM competition!

Ha!!! I didn't know.

What's the etiquette around sampling two consecutive tracks off the same record in a song? I was under the impression that sort of thing was frowned upon at the time.

i think one is ok, two is definitely frowned upon, but if you do it three or more times it becomes something that is categorically different and maybe even better

relate to people upthread who say OKC felt like a pivotal life moment. it's not like i hadn't heard amazing, ambitious music by that point. i was already a fan of the bends. but OKC came out at exactly the right point: literally the day i finished my GCSEs, just as Britpop's shiny naivete was starting to fade. it felt right

xp You just keep sampling more of it like you're jamming and it'll look like you meant to do it