The Genius Of Radiohead’s "Ok Computer" | Classic Album Under Review | Amplified
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- Опубліковано 26 кві 2024
- An examination of the British rock group's influential 1997 album "OK Computer," including comments from music journalists and the band's biographer.
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One thing that I don't think really comes across is that while The Bends was a very respected album, the band were still kind of treated like a one hit wonder. Maybe in England there was a sense that Radiohead were on the cusp of creating something big and important, but that same anticipation did not exist everywhere. We thought for sure they were going to fade into obscurity with Creep being their biggest legacy. (which probably contributed to Thom's resentment of that song)
The genuine shock of OK Computer's release can't be overstated.
I agree. After "Creep" I thought they were going to be a flash in the pan, then The Bends came out at which time I said to myself "These guys are maybe the best band of the last few years". Then OK Computer was released and after picking up the pieces of my mind that had been blown all over the room I thought, "These guys are maybe the best band of the last _25_ years". After Kid A, I further amended my statement by just dropping the "maybe" altogether.
Not sure about America, but it's documented, at least with the their domestic music charts, that Radiohead was making big waves in Australia, Canada, Japan and Israel with The Bends. The last two places especially, where they were so over the moon popular. Evident where they've played rarities when they've toured both countries post OK Computer.
You overstated it very well
Musicians etc pretty much knew they would be HUGE after hearing "The Bends" and getting really familiar with it, ye kmow?
I remember the very fist time I heard him wailing away at the end of Karma Police (Phew for a minute there I lost myself...") and I was mesmerized. I couldn't get it out of my head. It was on my alarm clock radio when I woke up. 1997. I still remember that moment. That's what OK Computer meant to me. It changed everything.
It took me years to come to my senses. I hated OK Computer the first 10 times I listened to it. It seemed so foreign, fragmentary, blurry, complex, and dissonant. The only reason I kept after it was because of an interview I'd read with Esa Pekka Salonen, then director of the LA Philharmonic, in the New Yorker in 2007. The article is titled "The Anti Maestro" and is worth reading. Classical composers and musicians tend to be VERY critical of rock music and musicians, and this Salonen was (and still is) one of the top conductors and composers in the world.
...and he was absolutely astonished by OK Computer. So much so, that he sought out the band and met with and collaborated with them. Now, I'd become a fan of Radiohead when Kid A was released, but had never been able to crack OK Computer. It was just too challenging for me. But after reading that interview, I committed myself to trying to understanding why Salonen considered it such a masterpiece. I bought a set of high end Grado Headphones, popped in the CD, and over the course of the next week, listened to it a dozen or so times.
Then it all suddenly snapped into focus for me.
It's still a challenging record to "like" the way one likes a Neil Young or a Nirvana of Pearl Jam record. It's definitely not a party record. The closest analogy I can muster is Pink Floyd's Dark Side of The Moon or perhaps The Beatles Sargent Pepper. OK Computer is equally important, conceptually driven, virtuosic, and revolutionary as those records. It's become a sonic touchstone for a past era. A dark, melancholy harbinger of things to come. The alienating, dehumanizing technological dystopia we find ourselves in today was in it's infancy in 1997. A demon's seed gestating rapidly in totalitarian Capitalism's black womb.
Tom and the band saw the darkness coming. They knew it was gonna be bad. The album is both a premonition and a warning:
"...We are standing on the edge...."
The Iphone was introduced in 2007. MySpace was in full bloom, and Facebook was gaining traction. Email and flip-phones were everywhere. 9-11 had brought down the authoritarian hammer and spawned war and mass-media propaganda selling it. The Great Financial Crash loomed as housing and financial markets spiraled maniacally upwards.
...and OK Computer finally made sense. It's more relevant today than ever, post pandemic. Perhaps pre-apocalypse now too, based on what's unfolding at the moment (March 8, 2022) in Europe.
"Pull me out of the aircrash"
Please.....
Can I just say (and I mean this as a high compliment) it is absolutely *buck wild* to me that you got into Radiohead through Kid A, but found OK Computer to be almost too challenging. Way to go completely against the critical consensus!
@@Eddyfilm National Anthem set the hook for me. That bass line! The drums! Those horns! The dissonance. I'm a Jazz fan. National Anthem is the perfect driving song. How to Disapear Completely. Everything In It's Right Place. Ideoteque. Morniong Bell, etc, etc... incredible.
The entire Kid A album is brilliant. ALL of Radiohead's albums are, but something about Kid A resonantes deeply with me. It's just so dark and anti-pop. It's like Dante's inferno - a tone poem written from the gates of hell. There's a sonic and conceptual refinement and sophistication and clarity that was easier for me to take in initially than OK Computer. I could relate directly to the emotions York was working with. OC is more like a gut-punch - an unpredictable, fragmented and dissonant sonic assualt. High strung and anxious. Not an easy listen - but one that rewards those who make the effort in the same way Picasso rewards those who make the effort to understand analytical cubism, or Duchamp and DADA. It requires some intellegence and effort.
OC is a masterpiece of course. Unparalelled in contemporary music. You really have to back to the 60s and 70s to find anything remotely as groundbreaking in rock - if you can even call it rock.
But I'm not sure which album I'd choose if I was marooned on a desert island.
Probably Kid A.
Great comment, except it's not totalitarian capitalism, it's economic globalism and post-modern socialism at work...using tools such as "climate awareness" and inter-sectionalism to get there.
@@Fritha71 Whatever you wanna call it - we now live in an incresingly oppressive, technologicaly driven totalitarian dystopia. This is undeniable post GFC and post pandemic. The way I see it, Capitalism has hijacked the worst aspects of Maosim and Stalinism's totalitarian bureacratic oppression through corporate capture and has indeed achieved global hegemony on behalf of corporate interests like Amazon and Google / Alphabet / Meta, Goldman Saks, and of course Raytheon, Boeing, and Pfizer et al. Claus Schwab and his jet set cronies are in the driver's seat in the West, as something just as sinister unfolds in the East.
In short, it's socialism for the rich and austerity and lock-downs for the poor accross the globe, using internet and AI driven mind control and survielance tactics history's worst tyrants couldn't have even imagined. Holllow and distracting pleasure rather than pain is used to control the masses, along with fear and anger at each other.
This will not end well.
I like that you came to OK Computer from the opposite direction than I did. But there is something special shared amongst us who fell in love with OK Computer in 1997. It was magical.
Radiohead, Thom Yorke, and Jonny Greenwood, individually, are all simply musical geniuses that produce the most beautiful music ever composed. And Thom just happens to have the voice of an angelic choir boy, whether it's with Radiohead or all the beautiful soundtracks they've written
"the most beautiful music ever composed"?
I resemble that remark
signed,
Alan Hovhaness
Climbing up the walls is probably the most unnerving song in the entire Radiohead catalogue. It’s in the perspective of depression and fear it speaks first of you who cant escape or call out and when it’s not there it is climbing up the walls. Then it speaks of the local man who is a mass shooter supposedly who had 15 blows before he snapped. He’s a lonely man just as you are depression follows him the same.
I have loved that song since 1997. So beautiful, dark, and full sounding. This album had such a rich, full texture.
Incredible track! Just had to listen to it a couple of times today. The atmosphere is genius.
My favourite album of all time. It changed my life. Each song sends shivers down my spine.
This album was so full sounding, unlike any other album I'd ever heard. Good from beginning to end. I can't even imagine how many times I listened to this album. I remember annoying everyone around me who didn't like it. I remember thinking how crazy these people were to not love it. It was so alienating, but also I enjoyed being the only one who loved it.
Totally understand. You’re not alone 😊
MASTERPIECE OF AN ALBUM, WELL IN MY TOP 10 ALBUMS OF ALL TIME.
Being a total Radiohead newbie I really appreciated this doc. The mythology around this LP is intimidating, and I’m trying to grasp it while still struggling to connect to it
One of the greatest albums of all time.
I wasn't a fan of Radiohead. The day this came out I had an early finish at work, went to HMV and went to the listening station, plugged in the headphones.
I was so blown away I had to be asked to leave as they were closing shop.
Kept pressing the repeat button.
It was an audio time capsule. A stamp almost that read this is how things are... let's see what happen next.
Welcome to the sonic tribe. It took me years to come to my senses too. I hated OK Computer the first 10 times I listened to it because it was seemed so foreign, fragmentary, blurry, complex, and dissonant. It's still a challenging record to "like" the way one likes a Neil Young or a Nirvana of Pearl Jam record. It's definitely not a party record. The closest analogy I can muster is Pink Floyd's Dark Side of The Moon or perhaps Sargent Pepper. OK Computer is just as important, conceptually driven, virtuosic, and revolutionary. It's a sonic touchstone for a past era. A dark, melancholy harbinger of things to come. The alienation and dehumanizing technological dystopia we find ourselves trapped in was in it's infancy. A demon's seed gestating rapidly in totalitarian Capitalism's black womb.
Tom and the band saw the darkness coming. They knew it was gonna be bad. The album is both a premonition and a warning:
"...We are standing on the edge...."
@@TheWilliamHoganExperience Yet, now we’re actually here, they’re quiet.
“For a minute there, I lost myself” I always thought he was saying “Arrest myself”, inline with one’s conscience being the actual karma police
Great documentary on a band that changed my life. 📓✌
Incredibly original release. A band that became a new band with this release. Truly progressive.
I had a pc that wasn't good or bad it was just a ok computer.
Lmao
an*
an*
A pig in a cage on antibiotics
Maybe a Kid A Ok Computer? 😂
"The world is buggered".
This could be the international motto for the 2020's so far.
I remember buying the album shortly after its release. Rolling Stone's crowning of the album as "the Dark Side of the Moon of the 90s", to me, as classic rock fan, seemed an insult and a challenge. After twenty five years of enjoying an album that still sounds fresh and original, I'm willing acquiesce with pleasure.
Massive emotion being unlocked by revisiting this album
I dont know why, but i overlooked Radiohead my whole life. Going on 50, I'm slowly getting familiar with this epic group. It's almost as if i been waiting to get into the band.
I love each and every comment i see. The fans are very cool group that you usually don't see elsewhere. I've been listening to OK Computer as a first look and its been on a loop for theee days straight and i am familiar with the music now I'm seeing the meaning behind the lyrics and just so glad I gave it a chance.
So far I'm just blown away.
The way they go on about Yorke and Greenwood you'd think there weren't anyone else in the band making contributions of any size worth mentioning.
Ed, Colin and Phil are fukn monster musicians. Probably the most talented bunch of individuals this side of a Miles Davis Quintet iteration.
Completely agree. At the time thom said alot of the tones Ed created on his guitar actually set the songs, such as his guitar in airbag and no surprises. All 5 of them are supremely talented multi instrumentalists.
To me, Paranoid Android is like a modern Bohemian Rhapsody.
I agree, and funny enough I remember being ten years old and obsessed with both songs at that time. Bohemian Rhapsody, I had on the Wayne's World soundtrack cassette tape and played over and over. (The other song I liked from that tape was Gary White's Dream Weaver.) And being a lifelong night owl, I used to stay up way past my bedtime watching MTV After Hours, and sat absolutely *mesmerized* when Paranoid Android came on. The animation and the music was like nothing else I'd experienced.
Radiohead and Queen remain two of my favorite bands to this day, and either of the aforementioned songs bring me right back to that time when I was still so naive to music but these songs had such a power over me.
Anyway, yeah, apt comparison!
Queen doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence as Radiohead.
@@Dex000x who do u think are better then? Queen has a few albums that suck yet are more iconic, Radiohead don't have a really bad one in my opinion
@@Dex000x huh?! Queen made some of the greatest albums of all time. Listen to "Queen II" or "Night at the Opera"
And Jesus of suburbia
Nice little shout out to Floyd with that sharpie illustration ion OK Computer...
Floyd said "Wish you were here", whereas Radiohead said "I'm not here, this isn't happening..."
Work of art. Kicks anything Coldplay have done into a cocked hat !!
Never understood this comparison
exactly lol, Coldplay came out almost ten years after Radiohead, Nirvana would be a much more logical comparison
@@mylesasipa1332 as a comparison for what they did for music in general I would say Nevermind by Nirvana was more influential than OK Computer. Certainly for me it was. The level of production was off the charts on Nevermind. As for Coldplay, they have completely sold out and are milking their audience for all their worth. Songs for adverts, every year a world tour it seems and that shower of shite song “paradise”. They can take a running jump for me !!!
Only idiots would compare Radiohead to Coldplay.
I remember when this album was released the "Karma Police" video came on and my ex-girlfriend said "That's a stupid song." Like I said, she's my EX-girlfriend.
I really actually enjoyed this review. The guys talking about the album get it.
Best band live and on record EVER!!!
The movie theme in the background of that song is “windmills of the mind” from the Thomas Crowne Affair
This was great!
21.50 the chord sequence is redolent of English choral music. I mean as in church. Many great works by Bach, Mozart, Taverner & others pick a root sequence that just pulls your guts out as you look towards heaven. If you’re lucky, just once, you get a glimpse of the divine. I know the notes don’t map, but the effect absolutely does match what I’ve just a couple of times touched, or rather, been touched, by something greater than us all.
Is this what Thom has been staring at for several decades? Perhaps he cannot tell us what he’s seen, because I sense with gathering horror, it’s the other side.
Dude at 11:05
ELP: Karn Evil 9 1st Impression Part 2, Lucky Man, I Believe in Father Christmas, From the Beginning
YES: Roundabout, Owner of a Lonely Heart, Your Move/All Good People, Changes
Good video. The album is a bona fide masterpiece, up there with all the usual suspects
At around 35:00 …that sounds a bit like The Windmills of your Mind, that old Noel Harrison track
Pretty sure it is.
OK Computer was the 90’s equivalent to Dark Side of the Moon. It’s a perfect album, not one bad song, a true classic. Lucky is my favourite track
Wish more people could relate to this.... These guys cared
I knew they'd be shitting on oasis as soon as I clicked it haha
I’ve always really liked the song let down
I used to pull over and just listen to this song
radiohead are literally the greatest band of all time.
we were all aboard the titanic
having a blast
radiohead was the band on deck
somehow sensing the iceberg
from hundreds of miles away
twenty-five years later
welcome to 2022
Radiohead is Punk Floyd or should I say Talking Floyds
did feel like 21st century...was a great show that tour
Band make beautiful music critics tear into it and tell u what it meant what
i moved to a cold cliquey town in 1995, thankfully i had the cassingle for fake plastic trees.
I saw them in 1997 on their OK Computer tour
Best thing I’ve ever seen.
I walked on to their tour bus because I was young stupid & drunk.
my #1 album from my top ten list greatest Albums of all times. #2 bitches brew #3 laughing stock. Amplfied please make a Talk Talk documentary. they deserve it!!!!
Laughing Stock is one of those albums that gets better every time i listen to it. It used to be my third favourite Talk Talk album behind Spirit of Eden and Colour of Spring (both 5 star masterpieces in their own right) but it's now easily my favourite. I always look forward to listening to it because i know it's going to sound even better than it did the last time i heard it.
I've just recently discovered "laughing stock". One of the greatest albums ever made. I'm shocked it came from talk talk. I've always loved "It's my life", but "stock" is very different. A masterpiece.
The ads are killing this
Ive tried over and over to listen to this band, finally gave it another shot and it stuck. Now im watching videos on this album
*in an interstellar burst* is the line that inspired their album *in rainbows*
Ok Computer 1997 feels like it prophesized the ever advancing, slow-creep of society merging with technology; & the ensuing sense of dischord / isolation of an increasingly synthetic environment.
The statement 'OK Computer' can also be interpreted as a response. One is answering to a computer or technology. Not the other way around...
Did they round up every pretentious and ridiculous music journalist in order to make this documentary
Lol!
yes 😂
The short haired author is nice. The bald cynical guy is annoying.
It's so weird listening to all these British posh voices talking about this album.
THE album ever.
In Rainbows also deserves to get a doc.👍
Where in earth has this footage been dug up from? Did you get a job lot of magazine cover DVDs or something?
10:01 Tristan und Isolde
Can anyone tell me Wtf he’s saying 00:37 😂 cuz it sounds like he begins his sentence as though he has something to say and then just starts… spouting random related words… and they kept it in! idk it didn’t make sense to me. Of course there was a ‘standard for men with guitars’ in the nineties…
‘Emission makes you look pretty ugly’
I think he says "ambition " but I like it!
I agree that the album was a counter cultured
Quite an odd choice to use live versions of tracks in an album review/documentary. An album where the production and studio sound were as integral as the harmonies and melodies. It works though but I do find it an odd choice.
1m 21s. "Previously obscure indie band release their 3rd record" (????) 🤨
Creep was a hit 4-5 years earlier and a LOT of people bought the Bends, myself included. In fact by 1997, they were widely respected and as big, if not bigger, than the Brit Pop bands of the era.
You can use "obscure indie band that made it big" as context for for Pulp, Midnight Oil, Flaming Lips or Elbow, but please don't insult our intelligence or re-write history by suggesting that Radiohead were unheard before OK came out.
You misunderstood totally. They said Radiohead were obscure prior to any major album releases
I'm still trying to tie together what the Labor party' gains had to do with this album. Was that what inspired the band?
It’s basically explaining the backdrop of what was happening in the world at the time
Journalism remains incurable
Super-Gay...
... I love it!
"LiL'JpD."
9:01 “Trying to make it less ______” what is he saying? Sloppy? Sappy with a British accent? Sore pea? Saw pee?
only two albums matter in rock and pop history: Revolver & Ok Computer
Dsotm, revolver and sgt peppers. That’s the 3.
@@doscwolny2221 *cough Led Zeppelin*
Dark side of the moon
It seems to me that these people don't actually understand the lyrics of the songs they are discussing half the time.
Did this kill Britpop? We’re they part of “Kool Britiania”?
Yes. No.
After OKC, everything got more serious, following the cartoon of Britpop/Oasis/Blur, helped along by the foundation set by the trip hop of a couple of years earlier.
So much to say about this album and English music as a whole, not my favorite album. That goes to Pet Sounds but love this record. I’m a huge Oasis fan and try to love Radiohead. Can’t even put it into words. I live in America and hate American rock but after this record, couldn’t relate with Radiohead.
Is this the first comment comment?
Did you ever find out the answer to your question?
Following subscribing
@@robovac3557 no 😩
In the end, no-one was able to point out what makes this album the work of genius. Typical rock journalism which is not worth it's weight pickled in brine. The unease felt by Thom is not exceptional in itself, there are hundreds of artists who express it in their songs. The sounds created in the studio are also quite easily reproduceable if one is in the know, What I feel about this documentary is that yes, Radiohead is a very good band, possibly the best of the last 25 years, but there were others that were very good, only the critics don't admit it. Ultimately, it boils down to what the speaker at the piano mentioned fleetingly somewhere near the beginning: that dirty word: prog/art rock. It's a chip on the shoulders of most so-called critics but, as the saying goes, if it swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck. They poured so much vitriol on the ambitious artists, they cannot fathom how a band that started off as an indie darling ended up betraying them writing 6 minute singles like Queen, mixing experimental chord sequences like the rest of the "old farts", and daring to juxtapose it conceptually like a bona fide album of old. Sorry, but after watching the whole documentary, I am none the wiser.
Then came Kid A........ and the 'Rock' label was torn up like a William Burroughs chapter, and instead of being put bk together, was pulped, rolled out into a sheet of bog roll, used to wipe, then stuck to the face of the pigeonholer industry at large.
@13:34 "A computer can't be okay, a computer can either be a zero or a one. It can't be kind of moderate gray bit in the middle". Yeah... a computer is only as good it's components and it's software. It's entirely possible for a computer to be just OK. I mean, I appreciate the effort to explain what's going on, but that's not in it, bub.
Ok kids, I had to go flush my brain out with the Kinks song, Better Things I was so depressed after listening to several hours of music that includes every sort of complaint the mentally oppressed brain could conjure. Nice production, innovative sound, but, good luck with your mood disorder.
I love OK Computer. I don't need middle class wankers to tell me why I love it or why it's a great album.
Haha right? I swear that guy at the piano is literally just “so in this song, they do something like this….” *plays a singular guitar part one too many times*
Plus people interjecting their political views into why the album is good. F off.
Paranoid Android
Why does the narrator sound so bored.........................
Like Bones on The Bends, I always skip Electioneering. Horrible song amongst works of pure art.
Oh, that song is awesome.
Just because it’s a more traditional rock song doesn’t make it horrible
@@IntriguingTangerine each to their own
Genius? lol where?
What?
Obviously nowhere near you....
I still dont get it why so many like their albums. For me 2 or 3 songs are great in all their albums but all no.
When did you fist hear them? I think it has to do with people in my generation (born in 1978). We were hungry for music. OK Computer was special, completely new sounding, beautiful and interesting... hard to explain.
@@masterninja9716i have almost all of their albums because im the kind of guy who listens to what critics say so i buy it. i dont know maybe i have poor taste in music.i just find their albums good not great.but for me no suprises is one of my all time favorite songs ,maybe at my top 7.
Kid A is better
No
@@SiLatics56 Eh, it's definitely close. Both albums (and In Rainbows) are masterpieces
@@moonillusions832 A lot of people seem to think so. KID A didn't have the same impact on me as OK Computer did. In fact I hated much of it when I bought it all those years ago. Many songs from it have grown on me and have gone back to it again recently as it happens. Still can't see how it can be held in the same high standing. The National Anthem sounds like a complete mess. Too much happening. One or two others I can take or leave. A lot of it is mood music, that serves a purpose of being relaxing. How To Disappear Completely is an interesting one. Everything In It's Right Place I have always liked. Same with Idioteque and Morning Bell, but for me every single song on OK Computer stands above anything on Kid A. OK Computer is like the perfect blend of the weird and experimental with epic melodies.
EDIT: I no longer like Morning Bell. Thom Yorke sounds terrible on it. His singing on OK Computer was never bettered.
Kid A was what happened when Radiohead ran out of things to rip off from The Pixies.
@@Dex000x What an embarrassing comment lol
YO you gonna cut it RIGHT at the literal BEST part of the song (of Exit Songs to a movie) to TALK about how great a singer he is only to NOT even PLAY THE PART!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!