Radiohead - Ok Computer


Speaking of the next world war, and waking up to find that you're not dead and have to live like a stranger trapped in your own world where everyone is out to drain you dry and you just wish aliens would abduct you so you'd have an interesting story to tell....here's the monolithic 1997 album from Radiohead. Ok Computer, remind me of what every waking moment feels like right now.....

Did Radiohead invent time travel? I honestly don't remember 1997, other than that was right about the time when my high school adopted "core curriculum" and i wasn't allowed to take calculus. Really, scheduling conflicts meant i literally had to choose between advanced math and science classes and orchestra. I chose orchestra and wasted 2 years reading newspapers in classes below my level. I had many nice chats with the principal after doing a weeks coursework in class and reading the newspaper until the teacher just told me to go somewhere else. He agreed it was dumb and unfair, and incidentally his favorite adjective was bitchin'. I'm an "awesome" guy myself, i saw him at a Barnes & Noble one time after high school and he insisted i call him Jerry.

I said The Black Parade was an exhausting listen, and that The Downward Spiral left you starving for nutritious food but too nauseous to eat it, but Ok Computer sounds like emerging from an opium den after a 3 months coma (or so i imagination). 

It's been called a "reluctant concept album," as in it resists being constructed. Wrong, this is the inside mental state of the character that sings The Bends, the lost child.

The title is from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and the paranoia is exactly what we expected the age of instant connectivity to everything was going to do to us. Listening to this album today is exactly like a really bad morning on your facebook scroll: everyone you know is a raging lunatic and you're just bombarded by everything all at the same time, and you try to go back and comprehend some of it but its just too much and you say SHOOT THE HEROIN DIRECTLY INTO MY EYEBALL AND THERE BETTER NOT BE AN AFTERLIFE!!!

You forgot that there was a time before the modern internet, a mystical land of bulletin board systems and AOL home screens, and modem noises, and people who really didn't want to live to see right now, because it's awful, right? Yeah, sure all the good stuff is still hiding under there somewhere, but every waking moment of the day is like watching crazy ladies sell unicorn jewelry on QVC, and you're sure at any moment one of them will pull out a hatchet. 

This is still just a gorgeous album from start to finish with so many sounds and shapes and colors, and if you've never really sat down and experienced the whole 53:27 onslaught, then you really, really should. It was mindblowing back then and it's still mindblowing today, albeit for slightly different reasons, or maybe because now you have a lot more experience with the kind of mental state Radiohead was channeling 23 years ago.

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