I tore letters out of a newspaper and taped them to a large piece of white paper like a ransom note. To be allowed to run the show, all you had to do is write them a letter why you should be allowed to DJ for an hour. The only rock radio station in El Paso had a program on Sunday nights called The Lone Star Radio Show. Two years later it was time to move back to Arizona. No matter how much he screwed me over, no matter how much I hated him, I owed him. I had never heard these bands before. Within two years or so this guy would betray me professionally in a major way. On its twentieth anniversary in 2017, the band released a deluxe set including B-sides and never-before-released studio versions of songs, titled OK COMPUTER OKNOTOK 1997 2017.One day around 1997 a copywriter I worked with in El Paso gave me burned copies of Radiohead’s Ok Computer and Tool’s Aenima. OK Computer was released to universal acclaim upon its release, and is often considered to be one of the greatest albums of all time. That’s what I had to write about because that’s what was going on, which in itself instilled a kind of loneliness and disconnection. Everything I was writing was actually a way of trying to reconnect with other human beings when you’re always in transit. But I was using the terminology of technology to express it.
The paranoia I felt at the time was much more related to how people related to each other. Yorke, however, explained that it stemmed mostly from his personal experiences travelling non-stop in a touring band. The album’s lyrical themes and composition has it hailed as way ahead of its time, predictive of society’s obsession with technology, and the isolation and paranoia that comes with it. Lots of people, lots of ideas, and we all could pull in the same direction. It was very high-level thinking, conceptual, moving forwards in terms of sonics, and beautiful songs. Then new-ish engineer and future Radiohead mainstay Nigel Godrich told Rolling Stone of the recording sessions: The result was 1997’s OK Computer, which was designed as a deliberate reaction against the grunge movement of the 1990s. Despite not having a hit anywhere near the size of “Creep”, Radiohead’s previous album The Bends (1995) was successful enough for their record company EMI to give them complete creative control.
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