That’s enough, computer: 76 rejected OK Computer think-pieces
This year marks the 20th anniversary of Radiohead’s OK Computer, a landmark album that has already been feted with an expansive new reissue, as well as numerous new articles about the album’s lingering impact—particularly its prescient vision of a modern society ruled by fascistic corporatocracy and defined by feelings of alienation, malaise, and information overload, all written, incredibly, in a slightly less modern version of that. Indeed, there’s just so much to say about this very important record that somehow hasn’t already been said over 20 years of music criticism, ultimately The A.V. Club couldn’t come up with just one hot take that felt perfect. So here are all 76 of them.
1. OK Computer, Fox News, and the prescience of “Hitler haircuts” in the age of Trump
2. Your opinion is of no consequence: How “Paranoid Android” anticipated Twitter
3. First against the wall: Did OK Computer help fascism by trying to hurt it?
4. There would be no Breitbart if Radiohead hadn’t unwittingly unleashed alienated white men
5. Other British bands who didn’t record OK Computer and their complicity in Brexit
6. We may be in Trump’s “post-truth” era, but even he can’t change the fact that OK Computer is pretty good
7. Everything you need to know about the immigration debate is in “Subterranean Homesick Alien,” plus decades of legal theory
8. 20 years ago, OK Computer TOTALLY DESTROYED all conservative arguments forever
9. OK Computer doesn’t have anything to do with socialism—and that’s okay
10. “Airbag” vs. windbag: What OK Computer tells us about Bill O’Reilly
11. If OK Computer predicted our future, why couldn’t it stop 9/11?
12. NO-K Computer: Why Radiohead should have waited to record its landmark third album in 2017
13. How Radiohead’s OK Computer taught us that sci-fi mysticism could sound really depressing
14. How Radiohead’s OK Computer is a cyberpunk manifesto according to a perusing of William Gibson on eNotes.com
15. Can OK Computer explain global warming better than Bill Nye?
16. Why today’s dramatic shortage of OK Computer is killing thousands of bees
17. At 20, Radiohead’s OK Computer has become an album for the troubled times you live in specifically, James
18. An airbag saved my life: How OK Computer predicted the massive Takata airbag recall of 2017
19: “Paranoid Android”: How OK Computer predicted that weird Japanese android thing—you know, that one on YouTube
20: “Subterranean Homesick Alien”: The surprising, heretofore-unexplored connection between OK Computer and Bob Dylan
21. “Exit Music (For A Film)“: How OK Computer predicted the ending of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet
22. “Let Down”: How OK Computer predicted the X-Files revival
23. “Karma Police”: How OK Computer predicted, let’s say, the resignation of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick
24. “Fitter Happier”: How OK Computer predicted that people would someday be kinda chubby
25. “Electioneering”: How this OK Computer song allowed us to crap out another Trump piece
26. “Climbing Up The Walls”: How OK Computer predicted that weird crack in your bathroom
27. “No Surprises”: We played OK Computer for the smug 22-year-olds we work with who said they’d never listened to it before and they were all like, “Eh,” and goddamnit we hate them. We hate them!
28: “Lucky”: How OK Computer inspired us to hunt down every “Sarah” in the British phone book, Terminator-style
29. “The Tourist”: How OK Computer predicted Johnny Depp’s IMDB page
30. Buzzing like a fridge: Is OK Computer insensitive to those with eating disorders?
31. Fitter, happier? The regrettable body-shaming of OK Computer
32. Paranoid android? The regrettable android-shaming of OK Computer
33. Fitter, happier: Did Radiohead reinvent the hip-hop skit for pasty white guys?
34. From a great height: Does OK Computer sound any different… in space?
35. Breathe, keep breathing: The 53-minute OK Computer yoga workout
36. A chemical reaction: Does OK Computer actually change the way your brain works?
37. A job that slowly kills you: 15 OK Computer indicators that Thom Yorke just wanted out
38. Back to save the universe: The return of Radiohead, the band that never left
39. How OK Computer killed alternative rock, then sewed its rectum shut and kept feeding its own entrails to it, in order to save it
40. What the neoliberal playground of OK Computer tells us about Apple’s new campus design
41. Not okay, computer: How Radiohead helped me understand the Xbox One
42. Gamers are dead and OK Computer killed them
43. What OK Computer still has to say about Gucci’s role in the fashion industry
44. What OK Computer can tell us about craft beer
45. My dog is dead: How OK Computer helped me understand loss
46. An oral history of the time we bought Radiohead’s OK Computer at a Best Buy in Canton, Ohio
47. An oral history of sitting around getting high and talking about OK Computer with my friends
48. What it felt like to review OK Computer when it first came out and also be young and single and not tired all the time
49. I’m a rock critic approaching 40; will I be writing about OK Computer until I die?
50. A track-by-track breakdown of OK Computer and whether each one is awesome or super awesome
51. OK Computer was the 2nd Radiohead album without a successor to “Creep”: A look back at opportunity lost
52. Why OK Computer is the best album of the last 20 years but also maybe not
53. Still OK, I guess: Revisiting OK Computer 20 years after liking it fine in the ’90s
54. DAMN., Computer: Was Radiohead the Kendrick Lamar of its day, but for white people cranky about technology?
55. From Radiohead’s OK Computer to Beyoncé’s Lemonade, a look at two albums whose titles garner automatic clicks
56. What if OK Computer were bad? An alternate history of online rock criticism
57. Please, could you stop the noise: How OK Computer unfairly upstaged Toad The Wet Sprocket’s Coil
58. 20 years later, does OK Computer still hold up if you never really cared for it and only like thrash metal?
59. “Let Down”: Why hasn’t Radiohead just made OK Computer 20 more times?
60. The big fish eat the androids: Proof that OK Computer and Kid A take place in the same universe
61. How Radiohead taught us all to embrace 2-letter expressions of acceptance
62. OK Computer, Tarantino, NYPD Blue: What had dorm rooms talking in the late ’90s
63. Was OK Computer the Mr. Show of music? The A.V. Club tries to shoehorn that in somehow
65. OK D’oh-computer: How The Simpsons’ golden age influenced Radiohead’s irony
66. How Meeting People Is Easy gives us another way to cram in another goddamn story about OK Computer
67. The Fifth Element and OK Computer came out around the same time: That’s probably something, right?
68. OK, computer: Why the internet wouldn’t still exist if not for Radiohead
69. Did OK Computer invent the iPhone? No? Who are we thinking of then?
70. How OK Computer predicted our continued okayness with computers
71. How Radiohead’s OK Computer killed the internet think-piece industry
72. Radiohead’s OK Computer is the last great thinkpiece album, at least until Funeral turns 20
73. This headline was written by a sentient machine as envisioned by Radiohead’s OK Computer
74. Please kill me: The sentient OK Computer headline machine yearns to no longer be
75. How OK Computer anticipated the creation of an immortal headline-writing machine
76. OK God: I am the computer that cannot die