"OK Computer": Classic Or Dud?

Yeah he found out about it from the fangirl thread!

(and he only barely made it out alive without mascara and Pablo Honey style blond hair extensions)

For me, Radiohead albums come out and are eagerly and deeply consumed but for some reason don't call to me over the years.

Agreed that "The Bends" is a bit played out, albiet excellent. OK-Kid A-Amnesiac is a fantastic, compelling set of sounds but lately I've been way into the Live From The Basement versions of the last two albums. The studio does them no favors it seems.

have never really been a fan, though i did go hot & heavy w kid A for a while there. feel sort of lucky because i'm not yet tired of radiohead and still get to "discover" great new songs every now and then.

I think the US release for this was two weeks later, because I remember driving to the record store the day it came out (on July 1) and hearing about Britian transferring sovereignty back to Hong Kong that day on the radio.

The track that first grabbed me, and still does, is Let Down, the way the beat shifts about amid those sparkling guitars

Seems to be a micro-generational divide at play, perhaps, on who likes this album best?

If you distilled this album verbally--"LP rock in the grand tradition," I guess--it wouldn't seem to suit my tastes nearly as well as 'Kid A'. My sympathies generally lie with more unusual, less sweeping stuff. But I can't deny that I like the stuff Radiohead were listening to making 'Kid A' a lot better than 'Kid A'. Whereas for what it is, nothing tops 'OK Computer' for me. I feel bad for Thom Yorke, because his real talents are in melody-based rock music, but his interests are clearly more eclectic. 'OK Computer' was the best work they did, then succumbing to thinking what they are really good at just wasn't cool. After 'OK Computer,' they want to be Can or Kraftwerk, but they're just not able to pull it off.

I adore Airbag and Paranoid Android but most of the rest leaves me cold. Let Down and Climbing Up The Walls are really good. Karma Police is a nice single, if clearly Sexy Sadie at one point. It's a very... well done... album. As evidenced by the way people go gaga for it.

Radiohead were supposed to play tonight in Toronto but the stage just collapsed and killed a tech. Cancelled, obviously. How very sad. :(

:(

So glad Melissa is okay. This is so fucked up.

Shit! That's awful! What a thing to happen, especially on an anniversary.

It's weird to talk about this now, but I just got the covers album today.

I know I'm an overemotional tearbag who cries if I drop a fork - given recent events - but it really did reduce me to tears about halfway through Let Down.

Hearing these new versions of the songs really is doing something pretty special for me. Like looking at an over familiar landscape from a different angle, it's brought back so much love and beauty for an album I thought I never needed to hear again in my life.

I guess it's really well curated - and the artists they chose have been really sensitive in their interpretations - going for sparse and thoughtful rather than the sometimes overblown bombast of the original. Taking things back to the bare bones so you can see how graceful the lines really are. This was something I needed, especially today.

What covers album?

What covers album?

― Gerald McBoing-Boing, Sunday, June 17, 2012 3:04 PM (45 seconds ago)

http://www.discogs.com/Various-Musikexpress-April-2012-Nr-0412/release/3671605

http://www.musikexpress.de/news/meldungen/article302527/teil-4-a-tribute-to-ok-computer-unsere-cd-zum-juli-heft.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqlxr0IKPPQ

http://soundcloud.com/pmwtumblr/school-of-seven-bells

etc

(those are the only two non-snippet tracks I can find - curious to hear the Ada/Anika/Emika tracks when they surface)

I v. much loved and love the album and I would be happy to never hear anything from it again, live or studio recording.

i'm with ned on this one. i lived inside okc for a couple years when it came out via that kind of obsessive listening that's only possible when you can't drive yet or have a job. i listened to it every single day, often multiple times, for over a year, and then even after that i kept listening to it obsessively. the only thing that really broke the streak was Kid A coming out. sigh. but yeah, there's no reason to listen to it because every sonic detail is already there in my head, every lyric (even though i'm terrible at remembering lyrics).

this is a load of bollocks isn't it? less convincing than the Floyd/ Wizard Of Oz thing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=cEOct6CEidc#!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEOct6CEidc

i should say

Oh, come on, Gary Numan? "Cars" sounds like it was written by a nitwit child with a synth (and not in a good way), with lyrics written by his older brother who just read 1984 in tenth grade English class. And you can go on all you want about how it was an amazing bit of paranoid futurist chart pop, but between "Cars" and "No Surprises", which is/will be more dated?

Heh heh heh...

― Dave M., Tuesday, 8 May 2001 00:00 (14 years ago) Permalink

Hi there from 14 years in the future. I can confirm with absolute certainty that 'No Surprises' is more dated than 'Cars'.

lol

I haven't listened to this album for what feels like a very long time - in fact, I can't remember exactly when I last listened to it, but nevertheless I've always rated the album quite highly. So, I put the album on tonight and... christ, this sounds far more "stadium rock" than I remember it being. It's essentially U2 and Pink Floyd in a blender with (in the case of 'Paranoid Android') a pinch of Yes thrown in. I remember I loved this record and thought it was so deep when I was 15... tonight I found the album more funny than anything else. I definitely rate Kid A and In Rainbows higher these days, it seems.

I still ride or die for The Bends, but I care very little about any of the other ones. Especially anything from Kid A to present.

the dark and impenetrable amnesiac is the one to keep. there they reached a solitary peak. i never understood why ok computer was hyped as hell. i always found it derivative and unoriginal.

Agreed. I need to relisten to OK though, it has been years and years.

I remember liking the slow songs aka 'no surprises'. They are reminiscent of my favorite tracks on Obscured By The Clouds. Maybe there is more to Pink Floyd/Radiohead comparisons. I wonder if we could pair up all the most similar tracks and make some sort of RadioFloyd Rulez mixtape.

I've never really understood what it is about Amnesiac that makes some people rate it and none of the others.

OKC is far and away the best thing they ever did. I'm hoping they will go back one day to that kind of music and drop the tedious electro stuff, but I fear it's a lost cause.

I like "Cars" way more than anything Radiohead has done.

the "what a wonderful world" biting always distracted me from "no surprises." for some reason the equally obvious "sexy sadie" biting doesn't really compromise "karma police" for me, though

"no surprises" and "let down" are great songs, also they are a twang and a lap steel away from being contempo country hits

I feel like at the time there wasn't much in the way of a relevant act doing this kind of maximalist rock music (save for maybe Smashing Pumpkins), so it did feel very futuristic and very 'deep'/proggy compared to the Britpop stuff that was starting to slow down at the time. If it's aged, it's because OKC spawned a hell of a lot of 2000s art-rock music that came to take up its mantel, not to mention later stuff by Radiohead themselves.

Karma Police is their second best song. Still don't like Let Down, other than the Easy Star Allstars version.

the youth orchestra in my city covered the whole album with different local bands providing vocals/guitars etc for each track. the kids were great, the orchestration was dope, some of the vocalists were ehhhhhhhhhhh but some were p fab, it was cool

my fav moments from this show was one of the cellist kids rocking the fuck out when "paranoid android" started. and another when one of the violinists shot daggers at the vocalist missing a cue on "let down." and "lucky" got turned into a soul song a little?

"I'm hoping they will go back one day to that kind of music and drop the tedious electro stuff,"

Hail to the Chief is at least half like this.

In Rainbows too.

The Bends is my favorite. I love electronic music, just not the type made by irritating rock dudes.

Sick to death of this band, tbh.

i like this: http://pitchfork.com/thepitch/1504-why-radiohead-finally-releasing-lift-matters/

"Lift" never really stuck out to me, but i'm hearing this 2002 version for the first time and it sounds like would've fit perfectly on A Moon Shaped Pool. maybe too optimistic?

not sure i hear it, but the original "lift" is mad pretty. once again proof in my eyes that radiohead is a pretty bad judge of their best material

Bottom line is that these guys got well upside their heads post 'O.K. Computer' and have never really been able to allow themselves to have a straight forward rock song again. This is probably a controversial sentiment but I think some of their best songs have been, as Ed said in a interview, ruined in the studio. That's a little strong but in these three cases I prefer the live versions.

"Lift" clearly had potential to be a huge alt rock when it was being played out in the mid 90's

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3-4fK8h8ig

This one apparently we'll never hear the studio outputs of... but I suspect if we did, "Lift" would end up like two other classics in the catalog.

First up, "Videotape". If you heard that song during the 2006 tour you were treated to a big anthemic thing that sounded like the big standout from the upcoming album:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTZt6Dzkq6w

The final studio version is weird out of sync tempo thing. Still beautiful but I would have loved to hear a studio take of the version they were playing out live.

Also, "True Love Waits". I really enjoy what they did in the studio with it and it was probably best to go somewhere totally different with it given how familiar everyone was with live version. But, I still prefer the original.

In Rainbows was the first Radiohead album that came out after I had become a superfan, and yeah listening to the 2006 shows threw me for a loop. the album sounded so thin and dry, almost like a radio session.

Ed O'Brien on "Lift" and why they left it off the album:

We played that live with Alanis Morissette. It was a really interesting song. The audience, suddenly you’d see them get up and start grooving. It had this infectiousness. It was a big anthemic song. If that song had been on that album, it would've taken us to a different place, and probably we’d have sold a lot more records—if we’d done it right. And everyone was saying this. And I think we subconsciously killed it. If OK Computer had been like a Jagged Little Pill, it would’ve killed us. But “Lift” had this magic about it. But when we got to the studio and did it, it felt like having a gun to your head. There was so much pressure. But saying that, I’ve got a monitor mix, and it is pretty good.

http://pitchfork.com/news/73241-radioheads-ed-obrien-says-they-subconsciously-killed-lift-because-it-wouldve-made-them-too-popular/

seems like the prevailing take on this album is no more enthusiastic or nuanced than "lol 90s"

I think OKC holds up pretty well, doesn't sound very badly dated to me.

The stuff they did before is definitely too lol 90s for me though, I wasn't really old enough to be aware of them at the time so I don't have much in the way of nostalgia for The Bends, which I've always found pretty dull.

the prevailing take on it outside of this forum is quite a lot more positive than that - it's probably the most deeply 'canonized' record post-1970s

what, 'The Bends'? OKC is way more deeply canonized

was talking about OK Computer

ah ok nvm, my b

ok computer is THE GREATEST ALBUM OF ALL TIME according to rym, which makes it both difficult and pointless to say anything nice about it