"OK Computer": Classic Or Dud?

8===D

That's a really fine line to draw, Melissa! Could you explain that further, because I admit I don't see that distinction as functional.

xpost -- Amazing!

It's the difference between going to a restaurant because everyone says the chef is the best in the world and that everyone who is anyone has to go, and going because they're serving tuna steak and happen to be three blocks from your house.

xposts galore

Ned and Melissa both otm really. 13-year-olds now getting into Radiohead may not be swallowing music crit/reviews no, but Radiohead get plenty of press and even a one or two paragraph article on In Rainbows will usually say "critically-acclaimed rock band Radiohead..." or "experimental rock band Radiohead" and it's this sort of thing that feeds that classic-album-status train of thought when it comes to Radiohead, and OK Computer in particular. and as far as the artist recommendations go, they're still often mentioned in the same line as "If you like Coldplay... " or "If you like Muse..." :P

i like meeting people is easy. thom yorke said in an interview that there was just as much footage of them having fun on the tour, but the miserable stuff made a better movie.

very large x-post.

...yeah, Melissa, but tuna steak surely isn't an adjective. :-D

(Yes I am beating this into the ground. But the question of language and reception interests me. Also I admit I am far too tickled by the idea of haunting tuna steak.)

re meeting people is easy. It is totally boring and they all whinge the whole time.

Well, very few writers tend to write about music purely in objective terms, so I have to take "haunting" as "usually indicates tuna steak".

And Roz puts it better than I could. If I've made it seem like the whole idea is simply that of 'what rock critics say' -- perish the thought -- then that's my mistake, but as I've been saying, maybe not very well -- there's a big *big* world of context out there that's shaped how any number of acts are received, and Radiohead's a stellar example of one such act.

ned if you could only take one type of steak with you on a desert island, which would it be??

I have to take "haunting" as "usually indicates tuna steak"

I intend to use it in this sense from now on. ("Dragging" will indicate "will only provide water when asked.")

ned if you could only take one type of steak with you on a desert island, which would it be??

Salmon, lightly braised for its acid-folk qualities.

"The Tourist" alone gives me more pleasure than all but maybe one tuna steak I've ever had, and maybe not even that one.

there's a big *big* world of context out there that's shaped how any number of acts are received, and Radiohead's a stellar example of one such act.

While I wouldn't argue that context plays no role at all, I guess I do feel pretty absolutely that there's no context in the world that could get me to enjoy or not enjoy the taste of a meal.

And thus with Radiohead, and thus with music in general.

My enjoyment of particular chord progressions and textures, etc. is far too visceral for that.

I want to just hear this album again without thinking about how it’s been nailed up there now, crucified, used by everyone, those anthropophagi blood-drunk on their own idiot communion. FOR FUCK’S SAKE. How many bands stopped here, cloned it and made it awful precisely because they made it so dully tasteful? How many fans? How many writers? How many polls? How many of them listened to this album, had their breakdowns, thought rock and roll had come to save them again, then decided that when the later albums came out that all that could be done was to play this album again instead?

-- Ned Raggett, Sunday, 10 August 2008 17:22

This is really what I think is getting your goat the most, though, isn't it? Not the hype or the loss of appropriate context, but a great album spoiled by terrible imitations.

I mean, Bob Dylan gets a similar amount of hindsight hype, but without the cheap imitations, there's no loss of the original classic album's impact.

Also, I'm right with you, John, Airbag is the winner. I like Paranoid Android but could live without the rest.

I'd say the biggest effect of context/hype for me is the annoyance I feel when someone assumes that just because, say, OK Computer is my favorite album of the 90s, that means I haven't heard a lot of music and it comes from a position of ignorance or mere parroting.

yeah I would say it comes from a position of ignorance tbh

Oh, fuck off.

this fuckin guy

wilter has not yet been all the way around the block.

This is really what I think is getting your goat the most, though, isn't it? Not the hype or the loss of appropriate context, but a great album spoiled by terrible imitations.

It gets my goat, certainly, but not as the sole or prime point. If anything John's observation -- "If you have grievances against classic rock, then this album is kind of a goad in your side." -- is more apt, and this has less to do with the perceived quality of classic rock as music (or its terrible imitations) than with its suffocating nature as a concept.

this album was exciting, because prior to it i'd written them off as being in the same minor leagues as bush. people do remember "creep," right, and thom's died hair? around the same time a friend told me about on avery island (a way more inventive album), he insisted i check out okc, and, well, "paranoid android" is still as thrilling as, say, a kansas song, and "let down" is like a 90s "dust in the wind." it's strange though that people front like what's great about ok computer, kid a etc is how innovative they are, like they've never heard magma, harmonia, and aphex twin or whatever

hahaha

I adore Dust in the Wind, btw.

Ah ha! I see. Honestly, I thought y'all was talking about classic rock, like Lynyrd Skynyrd.

... and now, it seems, we are.

in what wierd universe are people still pimping for this record? i thought kid a was the one that "changed everything"

I've never heard a connection b/w Magma & OKC! Interesting point.

in what wierd universe are people still pimping for this record? i thought kid a was the one that "changed everything"

no, Kid A was the one that set new benchmarks for fail

xxpost the same universe where Q readers vote OK Computer "BEST ALBUM OF ALL-TIME" god knows how many years in a row.

What is it with this stupid premise that one day the voice of History will tell us how "wrong" or "right" our musical tastes were?

oh, britishes universe. it was a sincere question
xpost

in what wierd universe are people still pimping for this record? i thought kid a was the one that "changed everything"

-- velko, Monday, August 11, 2008 3:41 AM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

i know that before i'd heard kid a, based purely on the discourse, i was expecting something muuuuuuuch more *out* and experimental. When I finally heard it I was really disappointed! I'd been expecting Ornette Coleman on a laptop, instead I got a poppy Aphex record (in hindsight what I really wanted was this)!

I say this to say that (to me at least) the discourse about Kid is still that it's very *experimental* and *out there*, not a *bona fide undeniable accessible rock classic* like OKC.

Music is pretty.

i am young enough to have been the type to absorb rock crit as a young teenager ca. 'kid a' release so i see a lot where ned's coming from. at the time i was very much steeped in the tradition of liking Serious Records Made By Great Artists and music was as much about reverence as it was about enjoyment (in a lot of cases, more of the former than the latter).

i think radiohead (kid a in particular) was a good transition for me cos i listened the shit out of that record so i definitely had some genuine pleasure but it still fit in with the notion of Great Artistry that was important to me at the time. i revere 'kid a' a lot less than i did, obv, but i think i appreciate it more now that i've heard a lot of the influences. like i can listen to them as songs that i love and that have flaws and not as part of some trajectory of era-defining music.

Very. I've rapidly grown to hate lists. My best-of votes over the last couple of years are essentially pro-forma and this year I'm not even sure I'll do that.

Going back to this thought... Ned, I think you're on the right track by creating your year-end lists based on number of listens. So pretty much you're not creating the list, it just comes together on its own. Instead of "here are my favorite albums," it's just "here is what I played the most" -- which is really all that interests me these days, to be honest.

"Played the most" is always a big influence on my end-of-year best-of lists, and dissatisfaction with what even that reveals about wider listening habits is what lead me to write this - http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/staff_top_10/top-ten-most-listened-to-in-2007-not-from-2007.htm

Another thing with Radiohead (agree massively with Ned & John re; classic rock, btw) is that... associates of mine who like music...

Argh, let's give a direct example. Guy called Steve who I went to school with, not seen him in years, know from his facebook that he's still really into music, played in bands, DJs locally occasionally, he was always 'cooler' and I was always 'more knowledgeable" or something about music. Anyway, randomly bump into him in a pub the other week and have a drunken conversation about music. (I've outlined in the past how much I HATE talking about music - http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/soulseeking/i-hate-talking-about-music.htm) and somehow the conversation gets to a point where Steve is saying "no band has ever progressed / changed / developed and remained good", which I think is ridiculous. Especially when he says "except Fugazi". Now I like Fugazi, but he's saying something mental about them going from instrumental to not instrumental or something. Correct me if I'm wrong, but... wtf? I throw out lots of examples. He dismisses The Beatles and Talking Heads and Talk Talk and several others because "it's not during our lifetime [of being music fans]". So I suggest Orbital and he dismisses that because they're "not a band". So I suggest lots more. He's not really aware of Wilco. I think basically he only likes Deftones. But at the end, the only two bands he'll accept as contraries to his position are Radiohead and Blur, and he kind of doesn't want to accept Radiohead because he doesn't really accept much of what they've done from Kid A onwards as music. To the kind of person who professes to care about this kind of thing but who will take it on received wisdom, Radiohead are not just, or even, "the MOST classic" classic rock with OK Computer, they're also "the END of experimental rock", because why go further? And for the people who can then get past OK Computer, a lot of the time Kid A becomes "the MOST EXPERIMENTAL record EVER". And if you disagree, you're just being weird and obscurantist and pig-headed because that other stuff's not classic rock enough to actually be experimental, it's just weird noise, or something, and it's all just opinion anyway so it doesn't matter (and I know it doesn't but it DOES too), and so then I might say something about how OKC is mixed and mastered too coldly and I get "but it's MEANT to be cold" and I'm like "yeah but this isn't in a good way" and then I'm like "Kid A just sounds like any modern mainstream mega-huge rock record but with the choruses sawn off and some bleeps added in and there's no depth too it" or whatever, striving for an objective reason that they might understand as to why I dislike it, and nothing is accepted because, again, I'm "just being weird, and it doesn't sound anything like Bon Jovi" or whatever and ARGH.

My opinions haven't really changed in the past four years -- I still love the singles but could do without the rest.

The speed at which this album became canonized (practically upon release) was pretty shocking, and I've never understood exactly how and why it happened the way it did. The "classic" tag was applied so early and so often, and persisted long enough to thoroughly squash its own backlash. People are commenting here on how they discovered the record rather randomly and didn't care about rockcrit, but without the insta-canonization, the chances that you stumble across a review of the album or see it displayed prominently in a record store are a lot lower. Critics did a big part to create the impression that the album was a Big Deal, and that filtered down to the way music shops, smaller newspapers, MTV, etc. treated it. So people were susceptible to the rockcrit influence on "OK Computer" whether they wanted to be or not.

Would it be going too far to say that "OK Computer" was the last album to be canonized moreso by "old media" (print, TV, etc.) than by the internet?

That seems pretty fair.

if hip hop doesn't count, maybe

Sadly it doesn't, in the (British rock crit) canon.

Y'all are crazy, you know that?

Here's my view on Radiohead: they made a string of fantastic albums from The Bends through Hail To The Thief. FIN

I don't like his voice and they remind me a bit of U2

Exit Music for a film is really good though

Dan, what's wrong with In Rainbows?

http://alittlefurtherdowntheriver.files.wordpress.com/2007/06/arcade-fire.jpg

In Rainbows has a bunch of really good songs on it that, to date, have never actually cohered together as an album for me. Whenever one of those songs pops up on shuffle, I think "Oh yeah, this is great! Why don't I ever listen to this?", then I play the album front to back and think "oh that's right, I hate this as an album" and go back to playing "L.E.S. Artistes" and "Machine Gun on endless repeat.

Fair enough. I think I enjoyed (note past tense) it more as an album than I have anything else by them. That said, my affection / enthusiasm for it has now waned considerably. But I expect that with Radiohead anyway.

wtf Arcade Fire, btw?

It's a stadium rock album that became instant classic in a way that filtered from rock crit to everyone in a similar way, I don't think OK Computer could be considered the last of these by any means.

Interesting idea, except that Arcade Fire are nowhere near as big as Radiohead, and will probbaly not have anywhere near the longevity, either.