OK Computer by Radiohead

The Blueprint

JAY-Z

In 2001, he was on top—but he still had a chip on his shoulder.

Just a few years earlier, JAY-Z couldn’t find a label. Now, he not only had the culture on his shoulders—he was helping to legitimize it for an audience that still might’ve written him off as a fad. Released on September 11, 2001, The Blueprint arrived as a classic. It’s brutal (“Takeover”), arrogant (“Girls, Girls, Girls”), playful (“Izzo [H.O.V.A.]”), and disarmingly vulnerable (“Song Cry”). With the exception of LL Cool J, the culture didn’t really have examples of second lives.

But The Blueprint pushed the lyrical parameters of mainstream hip-hop while returning to the form’s origins, thanks to the album’s samples of classic rock and soul (courtesy, in part, of a young producer named Kanye West). The result was a record that would help establish rap as music with historic continuity.

“It is very educational for all the young hustlers.”

Playboi Carti

“Reasonable Doubt, classic/Shoulda went triple,” Jay raps on “Blueprint (Momma Loves Me)”: a callback to his first album, but also a reminder that he hasn’t lived it down. Can you be on top and still carry a chip on your shoulder? On The Blueprint, Jay has it all—and still wants more.

OK Computer

Radiohead

A dozen songs of terror and oblivion and hope.

Few albums so audacious, innovative, and anxious have ever captured the popular imagination like OK Computer. It’s a triumph that not only announced a new frontier in rock exploration, it also articulated budding pre-millennial interest in—and concern over—our technological toys. In a dozen songs of terror and oblivion, Thom Yorke is so alienated by the society spinning around him that he pines to be abducted by aliens so that he may witness “the world as I’d love to see it.” It remains a deeply unsettling song cycle that is also deeply magnetic, its reordering of rock ’n’ roll’s sounds with classical ambition making it one of the form’s most radical and necessary statements.

For all of its dread, OK Computer is ultimately an act of hope, the expression of a belief that our inexorable path of progress does not have to cost us our goodness. And if there is a remedy to the dizzying pace of, well, everything, it’s simple enough: “Idiot, slow down,” Yorke sings for the last words of closer “The Tourist.” In the decades since OK Computer made Radiohead rock’s new standard-bearers, its grievances—namely, our accelerating isolation—have only mounted. But the answers and the hope it holds linger still.

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The Blueprint

OK Computer