The one album Dave Grohl said “changed the landscape of music” forever
Dave Grohl has been through his fair share of musical revolutions.
From his first days jamming with Nirvana, the snot-nosed kid from Virginia had no idea what he was getting himself into, becoming one of the most prominent musicians overnight, the minute that Nevermind blew up on the success of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. Once he was alone in the Foo Fighters, though, Grohl saw the whole thing happening again just a few years later.
After Nirvana ended with the passing of Kurt Cobain, Grohl’s insistence to carry on gave birth to a whole new outfit, with Grohl crafting songs that would become the Foo Fighters’ first hits out of a studio a few miles away from his house. As the band started to get bigger and bigger with the success of singles like ‘Monkey Wrench’ and ‘Everlong’, the musical world was already shifting again.
Having been through the downfall of grunge and the tail end of Britpop, Grohl was shellshocked by what he heard from Radiohead’s OK Computer in 1997. Though Radiohead had been one of the grunge acolytes at the beginning of their career with singles like ‘Creep’, their ability to change with the times made them create a foreboding look at the genre of rock to come, with songs that pushed the boundaries of rock and roll.
When talking about the record after the fact, Grohl thought that nothing would be the same after the album came out, saying: “I honestly believe that was the beginning of some kind of revolution musically. I think that record changed the landscape of popular music for years to come.” It certainly changed things for Radiohead.
The 1990s were a bizarre time. Being constantly compared to Oasis and Blur must have been a drag and the group made sure to put an end to it with OK Computer. While the Gallagher brothers and Albarn and co were still duking it out over spilt beers and football pitches, Radiohead were making one of the records of the decade and changing rock music forever.
They still kept the post-modern affluence of Britpop, but they threaded it with third-person narrative and a detachment that only Radiohead can truly pull off. They invited science fiction into the action movie world and came up trumps. Thanks to the speculative narrative structure, we have Yorke possibly at his peak lyrically, using his storytelling skills to invite the audience to be a part of the sci-fi frolics. As well as hits like ‘Paranoid Android’, the album truly relies on the duality of marrying both their rock roots and their evolutionary ethos.
After Radiohead became the next rock gods, though, a million copycats were trying to make their own version of the same sound, with everyone from Travis to Coldplay working on songs with the same forlorn quality as Thom Yorke’s voice. Although Radiohead could have gone in any direction after that record, they decided to toy with the fan’s expectations again on Kid A.
Being miles removed from their masterpiece, Radiohead took a different approach by focusing on electronic music, using different synthesised patches of noise to create a disembodied atmosphere on songs like ‘Everything in Its Right Place’ and ‘The National Anthem’.
As much as the band loved making the studio their home, Grohl would say that the best version of the band was on the live stage, explaining, “As a live band, they’re one of the greatest of all time. They were performing a song that was challenging the audience to join them in this musical revolution. ‘Paranoid Android’ live is not exactly like the record, but it’s better because it’s happening in front of you.”
That approach to live sound continued with Radiohead for the foreseeable future, using their Live in the Basement series to capture moments of them playing forward-thinking music in real-time during the sessions for albums like In Rainbows and The King of Limbs. Although it might have seemed like ages ago since Grohl first burst onto the scene with Nirvana, the rise of Radiohead was the moment when he knew that rock history was being created all over again.
