The reward for doing great work, it appeared, is being made to feel completely trite. The band felt manipulated, like record company puppets, or media dancing bears. That sort of thing never really did my head in, because there was no way of relating to it.”įor Yorke, who turns 32 in October, the unpalatable paradox was that everything good they had done had been stripped of personal meaning and reduced to hyperbolic headlines. But Yorke says of such polls, “Well, it means nothing. A new UK albums poll by Colin Larkin, canvassing 200,000 punters, has The Bends at number two, after the Beatles’ Revolver, with OK Computer at number four. In 1998, Q readers voted OK Computer the greatest album in the world. A September 2000 article from The Guardian featuring Thom Yorke expressed it best:
I hope it doesn’t go there because these silly debates diminish both the works and the artists who produced them. I really hope it doesn’t go there, but I hoped Hillary would beat Trump, so I’m not very good at this hope thing. Two bands steeped in existentialist grunge battling it out for meaningless glory! Tune in to find out which album best captured the alienation of an entire generation! With sincere apologies to Oasis, Sade and PJ Harvey, MBE, it’s likely that the championship round for Best Album of the ’90s is going to come down to a bout between Nevermind and OK Computer, a thrilling match between two bands whose lineage can be traced directly back to the Pixies. There’s also the undeniable fact that many influential albums flat-out suck, and are only influential because someone with more talent and imagination found something interesting in the muck that they later transformed into a listenable piece of music. I suspect several artists mention other artists to build up good karma and get a plug in return, while others realize that many music journalists aren’t that bright so they need to hand them a few questionable analogies to help them meet their deadlines. If you’ve done as much research as I have over the years, you’d know that Paul McCartney loves every piece of music he has ever heard and that Thom Yorke has cited different influences for the same song depending on his mood and memory. Influence is often cited as a reason, but a lot of that is based on how many famous musicians happened to mention that they liked a particular album. Record sales have as much to do with musical excellence as the popularity of Doritos has to do with culinary achievement. The “Best of Anything” is a pretty lame concept because any criterion you could use is shaky at best.
Because OK Computer was released on May 21, 1997, I was seriously motivated to publish this review at the start of the year to avoid becoming engulfed in the 20th Anniversary of the Greatest Album of the 90’s hoo-hah.
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