"OK Computer": Classic Or Dud?

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.

Really? I thought they were. Scratch that then.

They might be in the States, I guess, but over here Radiohead releasing a new album for choose-your-own-cost download was a main feature on BBC Breakfast News that morning; last Arcade Fire album got the lead review in the specialist broadsheet culture / review / music & film sections, kind of level. It's like... I bet Neon Bible sold about 300,000 copies in the UK, perhaps. I pet the Radiohead sold 3 million. Easy.

I was basing this on them being the band everyone likes in Ireland from what I can tell. I'm not disagreeing with you, I just thought they were huge, I don't really care much about them so I don't know.

"Is this it?"/"De Stijl"/"White Blood Cells" are way more insta-classic American rock albums than "Funeral", no?

I do think "OK Computer" was the last to be instantly-canonised solely by the old media giants though and "Kid A" probably the first when new media started to have an impact... it think it was the first album where the "best album ever" talk started even before its release because of online leaks, and then it went to number one on the back of one blurry video and no singles.

it think* = i think.

It didn't have a particularly good review in NME, I seem to remember. 7/10, I think.

something about OKC seems so unnatural and forced, not at all like the very voice of God speaking to me through my stereo, which is kind of how I hear good music.

Unnatural how?

If God ever spoke to me through my stereo, I'd hopefully wonder if it was George Clinton before returning it to the shop.

too lazy to search for the In Rainbows thread but: http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/news/144559-radiohead-pony-up-extra-for-video-contest-victors

I mean really, these guys are way too nice.

"... Is my stereo George Clinton? I'd better return it."

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.

The songs in In Rainbows have held up remarkably well for me. This gets said about a lot of albums, but for me, the songs on In Rainbows really revealed themselves over time, and I still find fresh nuances that I didn't hear before. Swaping the MP3 version for the better sound quality of the physical disc made a big difference, in that regard.

As I said above, I like the individual songs a lot. Put them together as an album, however, and they somehow half-cohere into something less than the sum of its parts.

Unnatural how?

for the most part the chord progressions seem labored over and smack of a studied effort rather than being a natural expression of thought or innate melodic sense. there's this weird sort of showmanship in the writing that reminds me of the calculating obsession of gearheads, as well as the self-conscious bombast of musicians who feel they need to prove themselves with odd time signatures and by forcing the music into unexpected directions so as to not be accused of being run-of-the-mill. The whole album just reeks of effort. And I don't mean to say that effort itself is a bad thing. I just don't want to notice the effort. I notice it nearly every second of this album, with just a couple of exceptions.

The one thing that struck me about "Paranoid Android" the first time I heard it was how effortlessly all of its disparate parts hung together; one thing flowed directly into the next without a hitch or false step, zooming through a semi-proggy musical soundscape without really making a big deal out of it until the crescendo into the slow section. If you found that "labored over" and "a studied effort", I don't think I'll ever understand where you're coming from on this album.

Dan OTM about RH albums failing to cohere. When they DO cohere, as on Kid A, the songs aren't very interesting.

I don't think that captures the spirit of what I actually said, considering that the statement right before I started complaining about In Rainbows was "all of their albums from The Bends through Hail To The Thief are fantastic"...

Right....which is where we part company.

I'm fasincated that people are talking about the coherency of their albums. That's an interesting topic. I don't really think of them that way, the coherency...

I've only got 9 days left before I see them live and I'll be so happy.

xpost

I mean, you just complimented and insulted Kid A in the same breath. That's crazy stuff. But it sure is interesting.

But you're right though...I can't parse Kid A. I can't break it apart in my head. "Idioteque" nearly manages it, but still can't break it apart into separate songs, but I can do that with OK Computer.

If you found that "labored over" and "a studied effort", I don't think I'll ever understand where you're coming from on this album.

yeah, probably not. I don't hear it in the way you do at all.

I think the problem I have with Radiohead somehow has to do with the tastefulness with which they are invariable presented and present themselves. There never seems to be any sense of humour or play or even curiosity outside a certain brand of sophisticated stadium rock. Their position as latterday representatives of the great rock canon is maybe somewhat attributable to their apparent steadfast refusal to embrace all but the most tasteful of references. The pain in their music is the pain of Ian Curtis, Kurt Cobain, Nick Drake. Heavy, humourless boy pain. It's never Joe Meek, Karen Carpenter, Dusty Springfield. Sorry if this is a daft criticism, I can only say why I don't really care about them, it's just that their pathos feels so abstracted and heavy, the pain of someone who reads too much Benjamin and doesn't get the jokes. It never winks at its own histrionics.

Thom Yorke's lyrics are so extreme in their portentousness, they feel completely unlike anything I can relate to. "Exit Music (for a film)" is a rare exception, unlike the doom laden dystopias of "Karma Police" or "Fake Plastic Trees", it feels like the real world; small actions seem to matter and there's a genuine tenderness to the urgency ("breathe, keep breathing"). It works because it implies a bigger world through the daft swelling strings but maintains an intimacy you rarely get with his voice close against the mic.