Still OK. . .

Before I leave tomorrow for Chicago to attend the music geek circle jerk known as the Pitchfork Music Festival, I'd like to wax nostalgic for a bit, since it's recently come to my attention that this month marks the 10th anniversary of the release of what is probably the most significant album for nerds of my generation, and arguably the last great rock album. While music critics have certainly written enough on OK Computer to fill volumes and consistently vault it to the top of numerous "best of" lists, I think it's probably worth going back and reevaluating it with some hindsight and a slightly more seasoned ear than I had when I first listened to it in eighth grade.

Historically speaking, 1997 was a pop cultural no man's land. Whatever energy the rise of indie rock and grunge had in the eighties and early nineties had long since sputtered out and mainstream hip-hop had become nothing short of a complete farce (or a heartbreaking tragedy, depending on who you ask). The pop culture void had not yet been filled by boy bands, pop punk, emo, and rap-metal, leaving room for all sorts of oddities, from Hanson to the Spice Girls to that bizarre two-week period when 1940s big band music was apparently hip. And yet I still remained a slave to modern rock radio. So (though it pains me to admit it) my favorite albums at the time were probably Everclear's Sparkle and Fade, and the self-titled albums by 311 and Collective Soul. Fortunately, "The Edge," our local modern rock station (and apparently the universal name for alterna-rock stations across the country), still had something resembling a spine, and played OK Computer's first single, "Paranoid Android" in light rotation (a fairly bold move for a structureless song with sporadic time signature changes, clocking in at well over six minutes). That Christmas, with "Karma Police" out as the somewhat more accessible follow-up single, I convinced my mom to get me the album for Christmas. Of course I didn't much know what the lyrics meant. I wasn't exactly sure what yuppies were, or why I was supposed to hate them, but I knew that the people making this music were much smarter than me and that I couldn't get it out of my head, which I seemed to believe entitled me to a smug sense of self-superiority that I apparently still carry with me.

Looking back on it now, I certainly don't believe OK Computer to be the flawless masterpiece I once did. The lyrics are often more whiny than they are ethereal, and the album's ironic send-ups of bourgeois conformity seem naive in their simplicity. Though it remains one of my all-time favorite songs, the lyrics of "Paranoid Android" read like the angsty adolescent poetry of an over-privileged child that's too smart for his own good, and Thom Yorke would probably cringe at the number of times I've listened to "No Surprises" (sans-irony) as a form of musical Zoloft to wind down or help me fall asleep. Casting my twentysomething hipster gaze on this album, it seems that the best songs are actually it's most abstract and difficult to pin down. The crescendo at the end of "Exit Music (For a Film)" still gives me the chills, and "Let Down," which I used to dismiss for the simple fact that it sounds like a conventional rock song, I can now accept for being brilliant as such.

Perhaps the greatest testament to this album is the breadth of bands that claim influence (or, in some cases, deny influence, despite the obvious similarity). Mainstream British rock acts from Muse to Travis to Coldplay are forever indebted to the Thom Yorke falsetto for making whining sound cool, while at the same time, ardent indie music critics will consistently include this album in their canon of all-time great albums, despite the fact that it was released on Capitol Records and played on both mainstream radio and MTV. The indie fascists at Pitchforkmedia still voted it the best album of the 1990s, and last week Stereogum celebrated the album's decennial by enlisting some of their favorite bands you've never heard of to do covers of each of the album's twelve songs.

I'm glad to know that, if nothing else, OK Computer will go down in history as one of those things, like Andy Warhol and Quentin Tarentino, that all college students of a certain age and disposition will discover and worship for a while, then move on to whatever flavor-of-the-week indie band CMJ is plugging at the time.