"OK Computer": Classic Or Dud?

Don't even get me STARTED on how great the Replacements were. Let's just say you had to be there.

xpost -- yeah, I forgot about that. 9/11 CHANGED EVERYTHING MAN.

Were I to be limited to one Radiohead album for the rest of my days, I'd go with The Bends.

...even though this album perhaps thinks it's The Wall, it's really The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway with a marketing degree. Thankfully the degree was top notch.

good point, Ned.

I like the Lamb lies down on Broadway a damn sight more.

then why listen to an album with "Paranoid Android" as a single?

Ned, what do you mean by this? I haven't heard Lamb, not sober and paying attention at least, so maybe it would make more sense if I had. I know you don't really like The Wall and do like some Genesis (and like this album) so I don't think this is supposed to be a dis.

There's lots of great stuff on this album. I really like the sprawling riff in "Airbag", and the delayed guitar sounds and electronic bits all over the record. The first six songs are flawless, the next three are junk, and by then I'm not usually in a mood for the remainder. Albums are too long anyway.

It isn't. If I had to break it down to individual elements I suspect that my head would hurt but if I had to try and spell it out a bit more off the top of my head, The Wall is strictly internalized angst that begs for a conflation of narrator/creator (ie Mr. Waters) whereas Lamb, while pushing for some sort of narrative connection, feels more fragmented and more self-consciously divided, separating Gabriel from the chosen role of his Nuyorican lead figure. Inasmuch as I've never identified Yorke directly with his subject matter -- I've NEVER thought he was specifically the figure 'telling' the songs, when I've cared to focus in on that aspect -- I think it bears comparing there, say. Similarly I also get much more of a sense of a band creating Lamb in the way that a band created OKC where The Wall is One Guy and his obsessions translated for the reduced-to-session-musicians folks to record -- with the exceptions notably being Gilmour's efforts (and unsurprisingly "Comfortably Numb" is my favorite song from the album for that reason).

The marketing degree bit is mostly acknowledging that if there is a thematic obsession on OKC and Radiohead at that time in particular, it was the whole busines of buying/selling/commodification, not that that's alien to a lot of what else they've done. But the whole two figures shaking hands and the trashed/altered celebrations of airports and travel and 'business' and everything else in the artwork, etc. It was all VERY carefully conceived and then sold, and all the reflexiveness in the world on the band's part (or Yorke's in particular if one likes) -- thus Meeting People is Easy as well -- doesn't change or hide that. Which is obvious, granted.

Still, I'd have to relisten to Lamb again to see if they tried to do something as ridiculously and yet wondrously obvious in terms of Waters Floyd cramming a DISCO number into their two disc slab o' pain (and scoring a massive hit as a result!).

Radiohead have turned into one of those bands where I actually think each new album of theirs is better than the last one.

I agree with this completely, though, with each new album, a better Radiohead is further from what I need

I find seeing them live I'm utterly impatient with most of the OKC and earlier songs -- one or two exceptions aside, like "Fake Plastic Trees," they could just play stuff from Kid A onward and I'd have a great time.

This was me. But now I've come to realize that OKC is a great pop record just to listen to, not as some Panacea For Post-Modern Blues.

i've barely touched any rock music in a year now, and still i spin "ok computer" when needed.