Thursday, 6 July 2017

Radiohead's Rhapsody in Gloom

July 06, 2017
by

CREATIVITY & DISRUPTION

OK COMPUTER 20 Years Later

BY ANDY GREENE VIA ROLLING STONE

Released in the spring of 1997 – a time when music was fragmenting into a thicket of subgenres and the relevance of guitar rock seemed to be fading – OK Computer was the last masterpiece of the alt-rock movement, and a reminder that there's still room for rock bands to carry on the late-Beatles mission of using the studio to create grand artistic statements with heretofore unheard sounds. "It was the album where they threw everything out the window," says Yorke's friend Michael Stipe. "They re-imagined and decontextualized what it was to be a band. It was a yearning, emotive, grounded urge to create something real."

Thom Yorke has four words of blunt advice for his younger, twitchier self, that paranoid twentysomething humanoid who made his band's turn-of-the-millennium masterpieces. "Lighten the fuck up," Yorke says, laughing hard. Radiohead's frontman, who turned 48 in October, is long past his days of hiding in tour buses and venting pain and fear into spiral notebooks. Now, he dances onstage and DJ's in clubs. READ NOW THIS GREAT ARTICLE ABOUT "OK COMPUTER" ON 20TH ANNIVERSARY VIA ROLLING STONE.