Music
7 albums that predicted the future
Looking into a crystal ball, these LPs seem to have foretold the future...
Some records seem to be eerily prescient of future events. Sure, they can't tell you the winning lottery numbers, but sometimes - by virtue of a forward-thinking artist, or just sheer coincidence - musicians have successfully predicted the future in their work.
Here are 7 stone-cold classic albums that looked at what the future held and got it right:
1. Radiohead – OK Computer
Released 20 years ago – as marked by the fancy forthcoming reissue – Radiohead's OK Computer is an album known for sounding the death knell of Britpop. The reason it was so effective in helping kill off a movement largely based around nostalgia was because it looked to the future. Radiohead’s third album is a dystopian dream, packed with depressing – but realistic – themes of urban sprawl, as heard on No Surprises or Paranoid Android’s rejection of capitalism. While Fitter Happier warned of incoming cultural conservatism, our over-reliance on technology, and what happens when the stress of modern life is like a concrete boot around the ankles of a generation.
2. TLC – FanMail
Looking back from 2017 – a year in which the most powerful man in the world can broadcast every thought from his phone directly to an audience of millions – TLC’s prediction of the future looks rather quaint. To understand it, you have to know what life was like in 1999. TLC had been on a five-year break, and returned to the spotlight as talk of Y2K was hotting up. The Millennium Bug was causing panic around the globe, Google was one year old, while Facebook and YouTube were still a distant dream. The internet’s potential was largely theoretical, and FanMail captures that feeling of possibility and excitement. Its title track mentions email, hinting at the potential isolation of electronic relationships: "Said I got an email today/Kinda thought that you forgot about me/So I wanna hit you back to say/Just like you I get lonely." At its core, FanMail is a love letter to fans, thanking them for waiting five years for the follow-up to CrazySexyCool, and shrinking that gap between a band and their audience. How very 2017.
Frank Zappa
© Getty Images
3. The Mothers of Invention – We're Only In It for the Money
The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released 50 years ago this month. In a way, that album predicted the future itself – a band distancing themselves from the crushing pressure of fame by pretending to be someone else. It was a concept album when such things barely existed (even if that concept that didn’t last beyond a couple of songs). But however short-lived the idea of The Beatles as an Edwardian marching band was, it’s possible to draw a line between them and Gorillaz, or any other artist who hides behind a persona. Enter Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention, whose third album, released in 1968, was a Pepper parody predicting the demise of the 60s dream, while criticising The Beatles for insincerity; objecting to corporations cashing in on youth culture, while telling us it was only going to get worse. Don’t say Frank didn’t warn you.
4. Notorious BIG – Ready to Die
Biggie’s 1994 classic may have been released three years before he was gunned down, but death had been on his mind for some time. Ready to Die is predisposed with the idea of an early exit. Smalls was ready for it, as laid out on Suicidal Thoughts: "I want to leave, I swear to God I feel like death is fuckin’ calling me/But naw, you wouldn’t understand, n---- talk to me please." He later attributed this talk of depression and mortality to the strength of weed he was smoking. But after the fact, it looks like Biggie knew what path he was on and what might be waiting for him around the corner.
Notorious BIG
© Getty Images
5. Wilco – Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
There’s no small amount of myth attached to Wilco’s fourth album. You can trace it back to when the band’s label, Reprise, refused to release it, believing it to be something of a career-ender for the Chicago band. It’s slated release date? September 11 2001. Songs such as Jesus, Etc, seem to predict 9/11, with lyrics of buildings shaking and scraping together. Then there’s War On War – "You’re gonna lose/You have to lose" – which, given the liberal response to America’s invasion of Iraq in the aftermath of 9/11, could be squarely aimed at George W. Bush and his administration.
6. Killah Priest – Heavy Mental
"Our telephone conversations will be automatically wiretapped/And transcribed by the National Security Agency" rhymes Killah Priest on Information, a key track on his 1998 debut Heavy Mental. Turns out the NSA would be listening in to people’s phone conversations – although not until the Patriot Act was passed in the US in 2001, and Edward Snowden’s data leaks confirmed it in 2013. Even conspiracy lover MIA was almost a decade behind Killah Priest with her track The Message, which was along the same lines.
7. Spiritualized – Songs in A&E
Life, death, God, religion and drug addiction have occupied much of Jason Pierce’s work over the years. Often it’s a celebration, such as Ladies and Gentleman… We Are Floating in Space, written as a joyous reminder that we live on a planet in an ever-evolving solar system. Death Take Your Fiddle, from Spiritualized’s 2008 album Songs in A&E, was initially written with the same sense of joie de vivre – the sense that life only becomes exciting when lived with an eye on how close we are to the opposite. "So death take your fiddle and play a song for me/Play a song we used to sing/The one that brought you close to me/Play a song and I will sing along." That was before Pierce contracted periorbital cellulitis and bilateral pneumonia – delaying completion of the album while he was in intensive care with a severe case of life imitating art.
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