Part of this line of reasoning has to do with the technological shifts that have affected the album format itself. One way to explain the absence of a manifest 21st-century equivalent to OK Computer is that OK Computer was an ending point. Some of the most acclaimed rock albums of the last two decades, including the Strokes’ Is This It, the White Stripes’ White Blood Cells, and Interpol’s Turn on the Bright Lights, drew on vintage sounds others, like Arcade Fire’s Funeral, lacked OK Computer’s vast marketing and recording budget none of them matched OK Computer’s sales numbers. As OK Computer turns 20 this year, it’s difficult to name a guitar-based full-length since that has matched its combination of critical and commercial success, along with its stylistic adventurousness. and the Smiths, but the Beatles and the Beach Boys, too. First in 1998 and again in 2006, readers of the staid British music monthly Q Magazinevoted the twitching opus as the greatest album of all-time, ahead of not just R.E.M.
But it also represented the latest in a hoary tradition: the classic art-pop album. When OK Computer came out, it sounded to some like rock’s future. It was a moment unlike any other, when making a record that at once epitomized and subverted the rock-album ideal would lead to it being crowned the best album ever. This tactic was particularly resonant at a time when the vocabulary of rock still dominated music media, with the innovations of electronic music lurking just left of center, and the era’s “alternative” culture giving way to unabashed pop. With OK Computer, Radiohead made their grand artistic statement and savvily got it to sell-all while pointing out the absurdities of the system they were skillfully manipulating. But the awkwardness of that taxi scene captures a tension that defined their appeal. The press hype around the record was so heaping that Yorke himself dismissed it in real time, scoffing elsewhere in the film, “It’s bollocks!” The album wasn’t just a critics’ darling, either at this point, OK Computer has sold more than 4.5 million copies worldwide. Outspoken door guys aside, Radiohead were already becoming “one of those bands” following the release of OK Computer in the summer of 1997.
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