Really? OK Computer is one of my favorite albums. I would put it alongside In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, but I don’t really think of it as a concept album.
:eek: Blashpemy! With the possible exception of My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless or, perhaps, the more popular Nevermind by Nirvana, this has got to be the pinnacle of rock music in the 90s.
As for whatever y’all consider concept albums, I do wholeheartedly support Neutral Milk Hotels’s In the Aeroplane by the Sea. If the Flaming Lips’ Yoshimi … qualifies, I’ll throw a vote in that direction, too.
This is kinda answered in some of these posts, but never directly, so I’ll take my shot at it. Others should feel free to correct me if they disagree.
A concept album is an album on which all the songs are connected by a common theme. The theme is often somme kind of story as in the case of The Lamb Lies Down… Sometime the theme is a bit more nebulous like on Thick as a Brick.
Qualifying an album as a concept album is a fuzzy subject. For example, the first side of Aqualung is generally about the lower class in London while the second half is generally about organized religion. The two halves aren’t obviously connected, but the whole album is generally considered a concept album. There have been a couple of albums listed above that I wouldn’t call a concept album; there are a couple I’m sure are concept albums, but I can’t for the life of me explain the concept.
[minor hijack]
Can anybody help me with the unifying concept behind Dark Side of the Moon, Fragile, OK Computer, or Kid A? I like all of them, and I generally see them listed as concept albums, but I don’t understand that the common theme is.
[/minor hijack]
I don’t know that there’s an overarching concept (which is true of a lot of the albums listed here). But there are themes. I’ve overanalyzed OK Computer the most, so I’d say it’s about alienation from the modern world. [Is that unique? Not particularly, Dark Side shares a lot of that idea.] Technology plays a big role, usually a dehumanizing one, and there several songs that commonly deal with characters feeling helpless and drifting, raging but not sure what against. I think it’s a bit hard to describe because to me, the music is very expressive, and the band (Thom Yorke especially) tends toward abstract lyrics.
It’s not a story-album like The Wall and some of the others here, it’s a concept album literally. There are threads that run throughout the album, and you can assemble a great deal from them if you so choose. I was just looking at one website that says references to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Brave New World and 1984 can be seen through the album, and I think that sums up a lot in terms of its perspective.
Oh, and Radiohead has said that Kid A is the story of the first human clone. I’d go on but I’d mostly be giving my own interpretation.
I look at Dark Side of the Moon as being about the way people die slowly every day, in little moments and little ways. Some of that stuff is laid out pretty bluntly in Time. Just my take.
I just watched an excellent program on the making of Dark Side of the Moon a few days ago. Roger Waters said that one of the themes that emerged in the making of the album (and which, to some degree, permeates later records) was that of “empathy” (particularly in “Us and Them”). I think the intended overarching theme of DSotM was a bit more nebulous than that, though.
What - nobody picked Robert Calvert’s trancendentally sublime Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters? You people don’t know what you’re missing.
www.headheritage.co.uk/unsung/reviews/index.php?review_id=74
Otherwise, I’d go for Radio K.A.O.S. which is really really great, although now that I think about it Animals is probably a stronger artistic statement.
Hopefully this won’t sound rude, but how is In the Aeroplane Over the Sea a concept album? What’s the concept? I know “Holland, 1945” is about Anne Frank, but the entire album is not about her. Besides, Jeff Mangum’s lyrics are a bit too obtuse to be about a particular theme.
Even stating that In the Aeroplane Over the Sea only has related themes isn’t even true. “Oh Comely” is a despairing look at death, while “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” is nearly elated about what happens when we die.
In my own interpretation, OK Computer is about the emptiness of the technological end (both chronological end' and end’ as a synonym for aspect') of the 20th century. It touches on technology directly ("Paranoid Android"), politics ("Electioneering"), and alienation from loved ones ("Exit Music (For A Film)"). It ostensibly takes place’ in a modern airport, the very image of modern Modernity, but that is mainly alluded to in the box art and some incidental sounds.
Dark Side of the Moon is about how modern life can drive you mad. It directly compares the `real world’ to a mental institution, and it states that our normality is just a pretense underlied by essential madness (“Everything under the sun is in tune, but the sun is eclipsed by the moon”).
Both are best experienced as an extended excursion into a certain frame of mind, not as a story or a coherent narrative.
I’d like to thank you all for playing, but the correct answer is:
Kate Bush
Hounds of Love/The Ninth Wave
“In the Aeroplane Over the Sea”
“There are lights in the clouds
Anna’s ghost all around
Hear her voice as it’s rolling and ringing through me”
“Holland, 1945”
“The only girl I’ve ever loved
Was born with roses in her eyes
But then they buried her alive
One evening 1945”
“Oh Comely”
“And I know they buried her body with others
Her sister and mother and 500 families
And will she remember me 50 years later
I wished I could save her in some sort of time machine”
“Ghost”
“And she was born in a bottle rocket 1929
With wings that ringed around a socket
Right between her spine
All drenched in milk, in holy water”
“Two-Headed Boy Pt Two”
“And when we break we’ll wait for our miracle
God is a place where some holy spectacle lies
And when we break we’ll wait for our miracle
God is a place you will wait for the rest of your life”
The other songs only seem to belong to the theme if you have read Anne Frank’s diary. They are about awkward adolescent love, amid hardship and death, similar to Anne and Peter. The singer describes a modern situation that in many ways parallels that of Anne Frank and Peter (awkward adolescent love amid hardship and death), with perhaps the intention to show that all goes on and on, and he is haunted by Anne’s ghost, wishing he could go back in a time machine and save her. Maybe to really understand it you have to have read the diary, sort of fallen in love with Anne Frank, and wished that you could go back and save her. Of course I haven’t even scratched the surface of what the album means to me, but those things can’t quite be told. I’ll just say that I don’t find the lyrics obtuse at all, though they are surely not obvious and depend a great deal on the mind of the listener. God is a place you will wait for the rest of your life could refer to the ghost of Anne Frank which haunts most of the songs, or perhaps the more modern girl who is so like Anne Frank, who fell from the top of a burning apartment building. It is up to the listener.
One I didn’t see mentioned that really surprised me…
Alan Parsons - I Robot.
Another vote for the greatness of Quadrophrenia.
And speaking of Rick Wakeman –The Six Wives of Henry VIII.
And thanks for the Joni Mitchel shoutout, koeeoaddi old friend.
Dammit, you’re right! As a matter of fact, most of the earlier albums have great themes:
Eve
Eye In The Sky
Gaudi
I Robot
Pyramid
The Turn of a Friendly Card
Vulture Culture