Radiohead: Exit Music (For A Film)
[purchase]
OK Computer, an album which tends to be in the top 10 whenever someone feels like summing up the best albums of 1990s. Overhyped and overrated some people would say. I however is not one of those people - OK Computer is exactly as great and monumental as the critics claim.
It was immediately hailed as a masterpiece, a concept album perfectly capturing the essence of the spiritually detached modern man's search for a sense of purpose, the very embodiment of the zeitgeist. The Dark Side Of The Moon of the 90s, you might say. A study of the difficulties to stay sane and human in an increasingly technological and stressful world.
The band dismissed this and claimed there was nothing zeitgeist-y about it, and that it was most definitely not a concept album.
I don't know about that, but I do know it captured my zeitgeist. I bought both OK Computer and Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club on the same day in the fall of 1997, and they were exactly what that spotty 16 year old needed at that point in his life. I can't explain it in detail, but both just sort of fit. They opened my eyes and spoke to me in a way nothing has, before or since. Things actually made sense for a change, and the world wasn't the same the next day.
Both gave me a sense of direction at a point in my life when I needed it the most, and pushed me down the right path just as I was about to head down the wrong one. As corny and juvenile as it might sound, I've always felt I became a better person on that rainy September afternoon thirteen years ago.