Deeeeeeeeeeeep breaths . . . here we go:
- Nothing I learned re-listening has changed my view that this is – hands down – the most overrated record in pop music history.
- I’ve also said over and over that I don’t hate everything this band has done. And I derived some pleasure from this, more than I recall deriving before.
- I do inherently hate the tempos. Slow BPMs aren’t me. I’ve talked a lot about “sit and listen” records vs. “get up and move” records and this is one of THE poster children for the former outside of “Dark Side Of The Moon” (a record I very much like) and which I and others think this record tries to resemble (fairly unsuccessfully).
- I dislike the lack of balance, optimism, humo(u)r and tone in this record. I am not one for mopery. I'm too busy. I have too many things in my life I either enjoy, or tasks to complete which I will enjoy when done. Wallowing has never been me.
- The comments on production leave me conflicted. It is well-produced. But as I wrote about The Waterboys record, production is sometimes a way to cover up thin melody, and that is absolutely the case here, regularly. It’s not going to fool me. I know a hook when I hear one. There aren’t many (though there ARE more than I remember), and feedback, overdubs and the periodic use of a glockenspiel or some such other instrument isn’t going to trick me into thinking the sonics are a substitute.
- I can’t divorce what I know about the artist from the record. It’s meta – I get it. My comments about Thom Yorke wanting to be a rock star, not a musician, apply equally to Bono and U2 IMO, and for me it’s a major strike against them as artists. RH’s sound was 50,000-person arena suited from the beginning. They were offered a record contract early. Imagine them trying to grind their way through the bar band/club circuit. That’s where frustration and humility are born and worked through, where nearly all (not all but nearly all) great bands were once forged before the age of direct-to-audience-via-YouTube. These guys didn’t pay those kind of dues. Even the greatest arena rock band I’ve ever seen – Van Halen – did. How am I supposed to believe Thom’s tales of alienation knowing this? Worse, after he got famous, he moaned incessantly about how tough his life as a rock star is. The brothers Gallagher are often wrong about things, sometimes spectacularly, but when Noel said, “They’re stuck in the back of limousines telling you how bored they are being in a group. If you don’t enjoy it, retire. Do us all a favour. Or move to a mansion in Oxford so we don’t have to listen to you bleeding on about how shit your life is”, he’s right. You can’t get away from this when trying to contextualiz(s)e the misery Yorke sings about. If you can, you’re in denial. If he was singing about his own specific miseries without the ellipses, then okay. But he isn’t – which is why I think this becomes largely inauthentic. Even if I knew nothing about him – and I didn’t when I first heard this – I’d say (and did say) “What in the actual fuck is this guy talking about? WHO is he talking about? This is misery for misery’s sake.”
- I’ve already addressed this but I’ll repeat it: This is overrated because it’s NOT about a dsytopian now or future. It's about that only in RETROSPECT. Ask the band: "Radiohead have said they do not consider OK Computer a concept album and did not intend to link the songs through a narrative or unifying concept while it was being written." This creates a problem for some of those who love it because the intent they ascribe is and was not there - a classic consumer vs. creator issue in art generally. When I bring this up I get the take of “you just don’t understand” or “you need to listen to it more” or “you had to be there”. This is the crux of why I think it's overrated. @threespires noted this too.
- Now to the tunes. The most moving, and best, song on the record is “Fitter Happier.” It’s the one realized vision, the one universal. All of us have been force-fed a goal set and rules to live by that seem crushing and overwhelming, and by computerizing the vocals, the prescriptive directives take on a different, chilling, hopeless air. And because they are specific (and direct, unlike so much of the rest of the record), they have power. And because they aren’t “emoted” by Thom, they are authentic. And by the way – he wrote the lyrics in ten minutes. There’s a lesson there.
- I will say that I actually came away liking “Airbag” quite a bit more than I remembered. The echoey carry still irritates me, but the backbeat and chord changes hit me harder than I recall. I wish the band had carried that Soundgarden-y tempo along into other songs.
- The tune the band thought sounded least like Radiohead isn't THE best but it's the one I LIKE best – the closer “The Tourist.” Here the rather lovely chorus provides the melodic hook. It’s pointless, like nearly all the rest of these songs, but at least vaguely pretty.
- The most actual “song-form” song is “Karma Police”, which whilst I don’t love it, is good enough - better conceptually and aurally than their pre-OKC hits “High And Dry” and “Creep”, which I find pretty unbearable. Whilst I am unclear on what the Karma Police would be arresting anyone for (as usual, Thom’s idea trails off into nothingness), the idea that a Karma Police exists is pleasant to contemplate.
- “Subterranean Homesick Alien” is the greatest U2 imitation ever crafted. As such, it’s both imminently listenable and vomit-inducing in equal degrees.
- “Paranoid Android” - save the power-chord guitar-bridge - is infuriating. I’ll never get it. Of all the songs I've heard in my life, very few more than this tune do I have such a love/hate relationship with. I love parts of it. Then I hate it. Then I like it for 17.5 seconds. Then hate it for 31.9 seconds. Arrrrrrrgggggghhhhhh, make up your mind, you bastards.
- There are two awful, awful, AWFUL songs on this record. I absolutely cannot stand “Climbing The Walls” and “Exit Music (For A Film)”. The first is a horror film – I am actually physically revolted by the lyrics, and the tune is the usual slow march into tuneless blackness – and the second is so abstract I was actually floored when I read it was inspired by an image of Clare Danes with a gun to her head in “Romeo + Juliet”. In fact, I can find so little trace of all the influences Yorke et al said they had on this record (Miles Davis in particular), it’s almost as if he made all that shit up after the fact to give the record more heft. It drives me batty.
- Though I have spilled a lot of blood-words decrying the rampant cynicism I felt coursed through this record, now that I'm calmer, I’ve since softened my view and attribute at least some of what I thought was cynicism to Thom Yorke’s fundamental inability to write very well. He described these songs as “Polaroids” he took while passing through life. He is a misery voyeur, which annoys me, but there’s something else. In my mind, great art takes small things and spins them into big themes. This is precisely the opposite of that – an attempt to cram every negative observed into the world and force them into a 53-minute box. He also offers no hope for escape. No doubt as an inveterate optimist, which I am, neither the effort nor the outcome are going to resonate with me. But then I find this quote on Wikipedia: "Yorke said he did not want to do 'another miserable, morbid and negative record' " after "The Bends". Once again, this man's lack of self-knowledge is so low it can barely be charted, low even for a rock star.
- One theory I’ll float is that pasty-faced young adults who didn’t cotton to Nirvana’s sonics but needed an anthem to underscore their biological age-based malaise were ripe for oppositional music like this – slow, doleful, dark (albeit with bursts of guitar like on “Airbag”, “PA” or “Electioneering”). What irony that both Kurt and Thom claimed influence by The Pixies. Even more ironic that so many of you didn’t like “Doolittle”.
- The earlier point that there wasn’t a lot of good music released in 1997 and therefore this punches above its weight is interesting. I don’t think naught-else released in 1997 was good (and I know that wasn’t implied), and I will offer up my favo(u)rite 1997 record in future. But was 1997 thin compared to lots of other periods (1980-83, 1991-94)? Absolutely IMO.
- Here’s my blind spot, and it took some study and comments by some of you to get me to see this: I don’t have the appreciation Brits do for how this stomped on Britpop at the time, similar to how Nirvana stomped on hair metal. That’s because whilst Oasis, Blur, etc. were a thing over here, they weren’t THE thing they were over there. Whatever I think, Radiohead clearly tapped into something that struck a whale of a transformational chord musically, and I think this was part of the rapturous reception, and a part I didn’t appreciate. Whether accidental or intentional, cynical or heartfelt, none of us can deny its influence. And that is special.
- So if we put ALL of this in a blender, how do I score it? I’m not going to take the @threespires approach. I like it less musically than he does. But there are moments I’ve come to enjoy, and even feel. I’m not going to penali(z)e it for being so clinically overrated – that’s on all of you.
I think for such a record, a special score is needed: Pi/10.
I'll respond to a couple of these just now, most that are imo worthwhile to general music discussions and exchanges.
1. Any and every Beatles album begs to differ. Not that they are bad (not that this one is either), but fuck me are they overrated and over pedestal-ed. They can still be, and are, loved by many.
17. Disagree that 1997 was 'thin', or a couple years around it were bad for music releases. There were some amazing and notable albums then. The same year, we had quite a few really good sophmore albums. Deftones, Around the Fur, Blink's Dude Ranch, Wu- Tang Forever, Foo's Colour and Shape etc. We had longer running artists release strong albums like Nick Cave, Blur and Oasis (neither of the two my thing, but big successful albums non-the-less). And we had some really incredible debuts. Placebo, Queens of the stone age, Jimmy Eat World, Muse, death cab for cutie, Mogwai! I'd argue it was a great year for music, as I said previously, and possibly one of the reasons I at the time was a bit ambivalent about this album, with so much else wowing me.
16. Think most recognised the influence of the pixies. Don't think there is any irony in liking something at the time, and then 30+ years later not liking the prior influence as much. That would be like arguing it is ironic I don't/didn't like Radiohead, given the many indie bands I like today. Incidentally, 'pasty-faced young adults who didn’t cotton to Nirvana’s sonics but needed an anthem to underscore their biological age-based malaise' is a very entitled and derivative comment.
12. At first listen at least, that was the song that caught my attention most readily. In a good way. There you go.
5. A comment on production, or in my case the delivery, is just that. I don't think it matters whether it hides or not melodies, themes or 'integrity'. It is either good or bad. Just like guitars can be good but vocals bad etc, a bass can cover dor the drums etc, production and everything else can exist separately.
6, 7, 15. I really think this is a weird philosophical qualm you have. Is a vegetarian incapable or prohibited from making a good meat dish? You have found an argument for hypocrisy, but true or not, I don't think it matters to the output. Did Paul's troubles really seem so far away the day before he wrote the song? Is a dolled up pretty as hell wall-poster pop-star diva out of line when singing about inner beauty to a huge audience of teenage girls? Do we judge the true extent of heartbreak of someone singing about it. Or whether their heart actually broke, and if so how the fuck they are still alive, etc. I get the point on honesty and integrity being important particularly in how it is recieved, but I don't think it is immediately that dismissible based on a few background articles or perception of someone's life.
4. Can anyone really be 'too busy' for a pretty fundamental core emotion that is part of what makes us as a race who we are. I find that remark a little bit almost inhumane.
