Ye Olde Hit Parade: Optimistic

Editor's note: Ye Olde Hit Parade takes a look back at my favorite songs year by year (starting in 1978, when I really started paying attention to music).

2000: Radiohead - Optimistic

First things first, we survived Y2K intact. Nothing happened, the computers kept working and on we went. It was another presidential election year in the U.S. and this one was particularly crazy, with George W. Bush edging out Al Gore after a controversial monthlong recount in Florida. The dotcom bubble began to burst, leading into a lot of companies going under.


That last piece of news wasn't particularly great for the dotcom I was working at, although we weren't as reliant on big money as some of the more infamous companies were. We were busy in 2000, moving our office from Stoneham to Central Square in Cambridge, which was fun. We had a pretty cool space and I was working closely with a good group of folks covering all these dotcom investments. One big story we followed was when Metallica decided to sue Napster, followed soon afterward by the major labels filing suit. We went to South By Southwest in March, where we had a booth and spent a lot of time covering the event; we also spent a lot of time eating BBQ and going to see bands including Modest Mouse, Fu Manchu and the Bevis Frond. In November, we were back in Los Angeles for our annual conference. But as we tracked how a lot of these internet-based companies were unable to take advantage of the funding they had received, we also were facing a similar dilemma as we headed in 2001.

Meanwhile in Beverly, Deb and I spent the first part of the year getting ready for our wedding in July. About a month before the big day, a huge tree branch fell on and totaled my car. Since I was taking the train to work anyway, we decided to just go with one car for the time being. The wedding itself was great and we went to St. Lucia for our honeymoon. Then in the fall, we ended up buying a two-family house across town with Deb's mom. By total coincidence, it just so happened to be the same house I rented an apartment in eight years earlier.

We had shitty dial-up internet at home so using Napster was out of the question. I tried it, but it was so slow. But in the office, we had a nice, fast T1 line, so we used it "for research purposes" (which was actually true, because we had a research department that was publishing reports on the service). New music was getting leaked early on Napster, including Madonna's latest single. This was the pre-iPod era, but we had gotten different MP3 players sent to us, including my personal favorite, the Diamond Rio. The player only had 64 MB of memory, which could play about an hour's worth of music (depending on the bitrate or size of the files; we used to get stuff at 96 or 128 kbps, which is pretty low-quality, but it worked). But you could add a memory card and double the memory. So I was getting advance copies of new albums and listening to them on my commute. These included the new releases from Radiohead (more on that in a bit), At the Drive-In, The Tragically Hip, U2 and others. I was also still buying CDs and ripping them into MP3s to listen to on my MP3 player; these included albums from Queens of the Stone Age, PJ Harvey, Sleater-Kinney and Outkast.

Once we moved to the Cambridge the office, we started listening to WMBR, the MIT campus station, which introduced to a lot of newer acts like the White Stripes, Peaches, Modest Mouse and others. We also had this weird Sun ray computer system (you used a smart card to log in, so you could go to any terminal and get your settings and stuff) with a shared music drive full of stuff we had downloaded from Napster. You couldn't download it to a personal player, but it was cool when you were working in the office. For concerts, I saw Supergrass, the Tragically Hip and Guster, in addition to those shows I saw in Austin. But certainly a lot fewer shows than in previous years, probably due to a longer work day (I was up at 5 to go to the gym and then catch the 7:20 train to Boston and then didn't get home until 7:30 p.m.) and the fact we only had one car now.



Coming off the success of 1997's OK Computer, Radiohead had established themselves as a band to watch and the anticipation for their follow-up was immense. Fans and critics were expecting a continuation of the guitar-heavy sound the band had used on their first three albums, but 2000's Kid A ended up going in a totally opposite direction, embracing electronics in an almost shocking way. I'm a guitar fan so when I first heard songs from Kid A via Napster, I was disappointed, but the more I listened, the more I liked them. That was where the intimate experience of listening to those songs on my Rio 500 player really paid off. I dug into those songs while on that long-ass commute, which included walking to the train station, 35-40 minutes on the train, another 10-minute walk to the subway and yet another 10-minute walk to my office. That made Kid A really imprint itself onto my brain, and there was so much to like about it. I especially liked "Optimistic," which sort of melded the band's old and new approaches.

For me, "Optimistic" represented a lot of different things, not the least of which was a positive outlook as I moved into the "grown-up phase" of my life. It ended up coming in handy the following, which presented a lot of grown-up challenges, both good and bad.


Honorable mentions: Radiohead - "Everything In Its Right Place"; Radiohead - "Idioteque"; PJ Harvey - "Good Fortune"; PJ Harvey - "This Mess We're In"; Queens of the Stone Age - "In the Fade"; Queens of the Stone Age - "Feel Good Hit of the Summer"; The Tragically Hip - "My Music at Work"; The Tragically Hip - "Lake Fever"; Pearl Jam - "Nothing As It Seems"; Rollins Band - "Get Some Go Again"; Yo La Tengo - "Cherry Chapstick"; Steely Dan - "Cousin Dupree"; Elliott Smith - "Son of Sam"; Sleater-Kinney - "You're No Rock 'N Roll Fun"; Modest Mouse - "Tiny Cities Made of Ashes"; The White Stripes - "Hello Operator"; The White Stripes - "You're Pretty Good Looking (for a Girl)"; U2 - "Elevation"; U2 - "Walk On"; Outkast - "Ms. Jackson"; Outkast - "So Fresh, So Clean"; Dr. Dre - "Forgot About Dre"'; Fu Manchu - "Boogie Van"; Fu Manchu - "King of the Road"; Geddy Lee - "My Favorite Headache"; At the Drive-In - "One-Armed Scissor"; At the Drive-In - "Rolodex Propaganda"