The album is about a lot of things, but one of its big themes was the notion that technology was coming to destroy us. OK Computer cemented Radiohead as one of the great rock bands - a reputation they’ve only fortified with subsequent releases - but it’s also a time capsule of a bygone era before we started living online. But OK Computer, which came out in May 1997, connected to a vague, paranoid feeling that something bad was coming, a suspicion that the growing computerization of everything spelt certain doom - and that we were doing nothing to prevent it. Radiohead’s third album wasn’t specifically about Y2K. Were we losing part of our humanity in the process? Were we turning into machines? And what might happen at the end of the century? Was Y2K going to destroy civilization as we knew it? Sure, the decade had mostly been a breeze, but maybe we were just setting ourselves up for a global catastrophe. Everybody had started getting computers, and the internet was becoming a thing, and we weren’t sure what all of that meant.
Well, we did have one thing that kept us up at night: technology. (I mean, there were, but we Americans didn’t pay attention.) Yep, everything was pretty chill. Man, the 1990s were so great, there was nothing you had to worry about back then. Come for the Chumbawamba, and stay for the return of the Mack. Twice a week over the next 12 months, we will take you back to the winter of sheep cloning and the summer of Con Air. It was an ear-biting, Pierce Brosnan-loving, comet-obsessed world, and we’re here to relive every minute of it.
2022 marks the 25th anniversary of the year that everything happened - 1997.
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