Great album openers get the listeners to keep on listening. They can do this in any number of ways. Some openers set the tone by easing us in. Others jump right in and blow our minds from the very beginning. A great album opener isn’t an easy thing to create. More than a great song, it’s all about the sequence. Track 1 has to be the perfect starter. This month, I’m highlighting my favorites. #AlbumOpeningSongs
When OK Computer came out, I wasn’t quite ready for it. My musical tastes were a little all over the place at the time, which I suppose isn’t a bad thing. But it’s very telling of the state of rock music in the mid to late 90’s. Grunge came in the early 90s like a hurricane. It shook up the world, starting as a music for the outsider and quickly went mainstream. But it ended quickly. After that, rock had multiple personalities. Indie rock was seeing a resurgence; some of the more well-known acts of this era include Yo La Tengo and Belle & Sebastian. But it wasn’t until OK Computer was released that music felt like it was getting a reboot. “Airbag” wasn’t a hurricane; it was more like an unexpected blizzard.
What did you think when you first heard “Airbag”? What did you feel? Is it hard to pin down what it meant and what it did for you? “Airbag” is a blizzard, for me, because it seemed like so much was happening, I just couldn’t see it all. And when all the snow settled, the music landscape looked very different. OK Computer’s opening track threw computer blips, middle eastern sounds and that iconic and slightly demonic guitar riff into the ether. It didn’t seem to be borrow from other genres. It was an entirely new style of music engineered and conceived from scratch. More than 25 years after the release of OK Computer, I still marvel at what Radiohead did here.
“In an interstellar burst, I am back to save the universe.”