You can imagine how bummed I was when, at a Y2K party on Dec. 31, 1999, nothing really happened (beyond finishing off a bottle of ‘schlager.)

Here we were, expecting satellites to come plummeting down from orbit, cars to drive in reverse unprovoked, and ATMs to be self-aware and hectoring, all HAL 900-like.

Alas it was not to be.

The morning after, Earth was still in tact, the living room was trashed, and some of us had a cinnamon-infused hangovers.

But that didn’t stop a handful of adventurous bands from examining the acute existential angst bubbling under the surface as technology slowly and irrevocably took over our lives.

One band was Radiohead and their illustrative record was “OK Computer.”  Another was Granddaddy.  Their record, released in 2000, was called “The Sophtware Slump.”

“The Sophtware Slump” is better.

One reason why it’s better is there’s a frisky absurdist undercurrent which prevents the record from devolving into a grim, hopeless funeral procession (Radiohead is guilty of that, but can you blame them?  To quote Roger Waters, “Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.”)

I mean, if the world’s gonna end, let’s leap into our e-graves laughing, no?

And guess what?  Grandaddy is playing the Henry Miller Library, August 8th.  Get your tickets HERE!

Which brings us back to the present: 2012.   Fortunately, twelve years later, Radiohead and Grandaddy’s dire warnings about the encroaching, hope-crushing march of technology into our lives never came to pass.  It was all a false alarm.