My Favorite Album, You Ask?

Some albums are good in a factual sense: so unanimously praised, so widely cited as an influence in subsequent artists, so statistically successful. Others are good because they are a part of us. They represent distinct memories, times, and places; different feelings and sensations and smiles interwoven with the series of events that defines what we are. OK Computer represents one of the few constants in my life and straddles both of these categories. Released when I was a ripe twelve years old, I was not previously aware of any Radiohead existence -- of course I had heard "Creep," but I didn't know it was Radiohead (Thom Yorke's dream fan?) until some time after. I have a very distinct memory of staying home sick sometime in what was probably sixth grade and listening to "Airbag." I had a thing, back in those days, of recording cassettes of songs played on the local modern rock station, and I had happened to catch the song on one of those recordings before falling ill. I remember lying in bed playing the thing on "repeat" (stop-rewind-play), listening to the tremolo guitar solos and thinking it was the coolest fucking thing I'd ever heard. In fact, everything about the song amazed me. The choppy, droning bass riff that I would be stuck humming for days; those fluttering drums that I would emulate with rapping hands on my desk in math class until the teacher would apprehend me; the seething one-string guitar lick that opens and closes the song. And those fucking vocals: who was this guy, with this high-pitched bleachy voice, singing about something something something to save the universe??

I used to have a rule that I would need to hear at least three songs I liked on an album before buying it. Remember, this was in the pre-Napster days, and I'd seen my friends fall into the Sugar Ray trap; I would try to resist the impulse of falling so obsessively in love with a song that I'd spend a $16.99 (plus tax) portion of my allowance for the ability to possess it and to command the power to play it back for myself whenever I wanted, repeatedly, until getting bored of it in a week or two -- whereupon stamping the song, and album, a bust. That's not to sound righteous, but I think I kind of got it. And hey, I was on a budget. After hearing "Airbag," "Paranoid Android," "Let Down," "Karma Police," and "No Surprises" on the radio, and falling equally obsessively in love with all five, OK Computer was a must-have. While many of my peers would immediately skip to the recognizable songs, I had a practice, after purchasing a new album, of first listening to the whole thing through from start to finish. So there I sat on my floor, right up near the little boombox that was the centrifuge of all of this snobby cd-listening and diligent radio-recording, and marveled in awe and wonderment at the sounds that came out when I put OK Computer on. So novel was the noise, I even remember thinking my stereo was broken when the super-fuzz bass of "Exit Music (For a Film)" came in. And who didn't do a double-take when the SimpleText voice comes in on track 7, "Fitter Happier," prescribing the necessary steps to a healthy, well-balanced, modern yuppie life? At such an age, I wasn't fully cognizant of all the academic analysis that deems an album good, bad, or ugly (and that currently consumes a fair amount of my free time), nor had my musical tastes really developed to a point beyond simple appreciation of whatever was "sonically pleasing" and/or hip to be listening to. But I think that when I listened to OK Computer, a new dimension of musical appreciation flickered within me, though I may not have been able to articulate it at the time. It is one thing, I realized, to create music that is pleasing to the ear. It is another thing to strive to truly create what has not been created -- to create music that has the courage to experiment, that has the courage to defy the existing laws, and that is not merely influenced, but that takes a chance at being influential.



Now that I have been on this earth for twice as long as I had been then, OK Computer remains my favorite album, which is why I called it one of the few constants in my life. Though as I have grown, it too has grown and changed with me. As I grew out of bodily, mental, and musical preadolescence, and began to delve into the academic analysis that is out there, I came to understand what made OK Computer good in the "factual" sense as decreed by the musical pundits. I came to understand how the album was a destructive journey through a faceless Twentieth-Century landscape of blinking and beeping technological paranoia, through the eyes of one who is both an outcast and an integral part of the mess. I read the reviews declaring the album revolutionary, changing and saving and destroying rock. I saw how it influenced modern rock throughout the following years. And as I grew and looked back on it, and was able to contextualize it with where society was coming from and where it was going, I began to see how the album's riveting sounds and images all fell into place amongst the backdrop of the then-modern world. Computers, cars, planes, lights, darkness, people, places, fear and loathing: all of OK Computer's sounds and images swirl into what becomes a marvelous patchwork of 90s modern life. Still, in spite of its historical context, the album is somehow timeless, much in the way that George Orwell's 1984 is -- it represents the perpetual fear that society will come to control us, and that we will cease to control it.

Not to mention the brilliant music. As the themes of the album are timeless, so too is the music -- it is one of those records whose sound will never be dated. This is for the simple reason that Radiohead did not follow any existing conventions or fads when making this album, but instead struck out to form their own sounds and styles: some colorful composites of diverse influences, others completely novel. What's more is it's obvious their producer, the esteemed Nigel Godrich, was in a perfectly concordant state of higher mental synchronization with the band while at the soundboard. Considering musical acts at a height of fame comparable to where Radiohead were after The Bends had been out a couple years, too often do we hear of these artists running amuck with tensions between their own artistic adventurousness and the capitalist loyalties of producers; and likewise, too often do we hear the output of these artists whose production engineers and packages a commodity to appease a key demographic. Maybe it's just me, but sometimes when I listen to music I can "hear the production through the music," and can actually separate what the artist wrote (or didn't) from the elements that were suggested, instated, and commandeered by the producer. On OK Computer, the line between producer and artist is indistinguishable.



And like any great song or album, the music and lyrical themes are seamlessly married. Maybe this is why they both seem so timeless -- the driving organic force behind the two anachronisms is one and the same. The two fuel one another and push the songs through you to that place of vague profoundness. Though Thom's lyrics don't always necessarily make sense, and are often no more than snippets of scenes from his everyday life ("kicking squealing Gucci little piggy" is apparently a reference to some priss Thom saw at a bar who flipped shit when she spilled red wine on her dress), with the aid of the accompanying music you can certainly divine what each song is generally about. Nay -- I don't think it's suiting to say that the songs on OK Computer are "about" anything; it should rather be said that they "are" those things. Twelve concrete, tangible chunks of the world, extracted, condensed, and sequenced into three- to seven-minute entities of sound. In the sense that an album can be thought of as a one-dimensional vector of sound traversing from start to finish, I've found that these entities of sound that make up OK Computer don't seem to follow a linear course, nor any course at all. Instead, they seem to all be a part of some dynamic three-dimensional body in space -- even when the album is played from start to finish like any other album. And as well as the album does work in such an uninterrupted, start-to-finish method of playback, I quickly discovered that the songs are quite easily played in any sort of permutation, or entirely independent from the others. Each song lends itself to different shades of the human condition. I can say with the utmost confidence that, at some point or another, each song has reached me in its own right: whether it be to uplift, to console, or to thrill; to excite for the weekend or to lull to sleep; or simply to bring purpose to staring at the ceiling -- each has had its place.

Thus has the album followed me through the years. As I have come to see it in the mature light of understanding its brilliance, the childlike awe and wonderment I initially felt, and the sentiment surrounding its place as my favorite album, have not been lost nor replaced. Instead, the two forms of appreciation have intertwined and augmented one another. It is an album that never gets old to me, though I could recite every line backwards and forwards in my sleep, and can hear every instrument, sound, and electronic blip as I replay the songs in my head. As I hear it now, I grasp its meaning and significance and influence and rule-breaking-ness, and appreciate its fearless creativity and bold experimentalism. Yet as insightful and esoteric as I can get about it, I know in some way I'll always be that little kid sitting on the floor by his stereo, confused and bedazzled in the fantastic journey of OK Computer. Maybe it isn't fitting to say that the album has followed me through the years -- maybe it is I who have been following OK Computer.