How do you sum up the cultural impact of an album like Ok Computer? In the 20 years since its release Radiohead's third album has become a go-to answer in the discussion of the best albums of all time. It's one of the only British albums of the 90s that can't be solely defined by the time it was released. Radiohead’s peers of the time: Blur, Oasis, The Verve, and Pulp all produced classic albums in that decade, the difference is that when you listen to Parklife, or Different Class, or Definitely Maybe, you can feel the 90s pulsing through the music. With Ok Computer you could feel the future.
My future to be exact. When Ok Computer was released I was 7 years old; my only memory of the band at that time was the image of a weird looking guy trying to give his head a bath in what I later found out was the video for "No Surprises". It wasn't until my teens that I discovered Radiohead through the platform of a 100 Greatest Albums countdown on Channel Four. Among mainstay albums from Michael Jackson, The Beatles, and Bob Dylan, and the new discoveries like Jeff Buckley and the Manic Street Preachers, Radiohead claimed the top spot with Ok Computer. Unsurprisingly album sales grew exponentially after he broadcast as a new generation, my generation was introduced to the band.
It may sound like a cliché to say that the album changed my life, but it did. The first chords of Airbag told me that my taste in music had just expanded, the weirdest thing I had listened to until then was Interpol. Airbag was another world, a world in which an ordinary man comes back from the dead to save the universe, or the best use of creativity attached to a fear of automobiles. I was hooked. Then there was Paranoid Android: the albums six minute mission statement. Not even Airbag could have prepared me for that wormhole. It went on like that: aliens, chemical reactions, Hitler hairdo's, and idiot slow down. It was all surprises and all revelation.
As much as I love Ok Computer, it's not my favourite album, that goes to The Bends, and I do thin In Rainbows and Kid A are stronger records, but Ok Computer opened the door, and to this day I'm glad I walked through it.
