This healing power wasn’t just restricted to the opening track either. I can’t recall any music lifting me so high at a time I was so low. It’s almost impossible to describe what it was like hearing the intro to “Race For The Prize” for the first time, the Zeppelinesque drums and soaring strings would have laid me flat on my back, were I not here already. When I eventually got back ‘home’ after a long tune-free trudge through an unforecast torrential downpour, I put the CD into my stereo, closed the bedroom curtains and lay on my back staring at the box-room ceiling.
SPIN THE FLAMING LIPS SOFT BULLETIN YOUTUBE PORTABLE
Ten minutes later I was walking back to my parents, with The Soft Bulletin in my hand and kicking myself because the batteries in my portable CD player had just died. The only thing I knew would raise my spirits was a random compulsive purchase (house prices be damned), so I wandered across town to Record Collector and browsed the racks. Then one day, after having been outbid on yet another dilapidated two bedroom shed, I was pretty much at my lowest ebb. I was in my early twenties, single, I hated my job, what little money I earned was going towards the purchase of my new house and I was living at my parents, with my chances of escape narrowing by the day. My friends had all started to settle down with their significant others and had gained fancy job titles and salaries that were far beyond my wildest dreams. The search for a new house was getting more and more frantic as property prices sky-rocketed, the longer it took to find a place and get an offer accepted, the more difficult and expensive it became. I loved my parents, but having experienced glorious independence and freedom, having to move back in with them and their ever growing menagerie of cats, dogs, rabbits, guinea pigs and birds, was making me ever more depressed.
SPIN THE FLAMING LIPS SOFT BULLETIN YOUTUBE TV
My relatively sizeable CD collection was limited to my 100 favourites, my iMac was on top of a chest of draws, which in turn was on top of a blanket box, I had to limit myself to a dozen books, the TV was on top of the VCR, which was on top of the airing cupboard and could only be viewed if I stood in the corner, wedged between my stereo and the window ledge. I’d sold the house I’d worked so hard to afford and had struggled to find a new place, so I was stuck back at my parents and holed up in their tiny box room with those few of my worldly goods that I could not live without. OK Computer is the most critical, flawless record in the last 25 years and the quintessential rock album for the next 100 years.It is a time of personal misery and darkness. There has been no band since The Beatles to push the pace of musical ambition when they could have so easily rested on their laurels and patted themselves on the back. It works and fits and flows perfectly, as does the rest of the album. Take “Paranoid Android” - that goes from scrambly guitar psychedelic - to remorseful vocal solos to large-scale guitar solos in 6 minutes flat. There is no formula on OK Computer it is jarringly innovative and inventive. Radiohead took guitar-rock to the furthest edges of the genre and afterward, knowing there was nowhere else to go, blew it all up with Kid A in 2000. OK Computer is forward-thinking in every sense of the phrase, starting with the incredibly dense lyricism of Thom Yorke - where Yorke warns of a future society (an all too true a prediction) of technological dependency. Praised by every nook and cranny of the universe, there aren’t enough synonyms to fully explain the genius and brilliance that sits between 53 minutes of immaculate guitar-rock fused with electronic music. We threw our complex and proprietary formula into the blender, and this is what came out - our absolute, unequivocal determination of the best 25 albums in the last 25 years.Īt this point, OK Computer has become a legend that cannot be described. Hip-hop had an explosive and formative decade, and a little thing called the internet began to change the way we consumed music forever.īut, how do we determine the best over such a widely changing, extremely random, genre-shifting, complicated, and technologically driven 25 years? Simple: we listen to the music. Meanwhile, Metal took a backseat, and edgy Hard Rock groups like Marilyn Manson to Rage Against the Machine to the Smashing Pumpkins rode shotgun. Grunge came and went, and in its absence, it paved the way for more countercultural bands to break through the mainstream. The changes and shifts heard in music over the last 25 years are astounding. As it turns out, 1996 was an outstanding year for music and a reasonable place to start. Well, why not? We worship lists with specific numbers.