The debate about which Radiohead album being the band’s best was essentially a surefire way to get the Jalopnik employees’ attention. The answer, of course, is Computer OK, but I don’t blame my colleagues wrong. Look, when it comes to Best Radiohead album, it’s a close call between works such as OKC, Kid A and Bend.
For me, it will always go to album opens with “Airbags” and a few minutes later switches to “Homesick Aliens Underground” and “Drop Down” and “No Surprises”. I mean, all the songs above Computer OK It’s traffic jams, but that’s what I like, and it all starts with a song about a car crash.
I won’t go into depth about the 2017 re-release of Computer OK, IS THAT OKAY, which features passes and B-Sides from the original album – among other gems! I will only say if the album OKC (1997) is a motherboard, then disc two from the re-release is like flipping over that familiar board and feeling the bare but gritty PCB underside: complex in its own right.
I would even throw in two other people – to the dismay of early Radiohead fans – and say that In the rainbow and Moon shaped swimming pool should run for the best. Because, like all great artists, time has made Radiohead’s music more poignant.
That’s exactly why Computer OK is the best: it’s timeless. It’s a moment of composing and songwriter excellence suspended in time, immune to its passage. The album’s narrative about a backward society dependent on machines is all too real, and it predicts an uneasy relationship between people, who live in wet clothes Our bodies and robots (also aliens,) exist apart from us in cold hardware or software that we suggest by saying “OK, Computer”.
These days, there’s a computer in our pockets – we call it Siri or Google – and airbags are all over the cabins of fast German cars. So why do we feel unsafe? So estranged? Worried? Sometimes it feels like we’re about to explode into the next world war, like Thom Yorke sings in “Airbag”. However, Radiohead still makes the end of the world or a near-fatal car crash like a rebirth.
