Ah, 1997 and the end of Britpop. Do you remember where you were when the dream died for you? And was that experience pleasant or painful? Did you take one listen to the supersonic 'Yes, we can!' of Blur's eponymous fifth and near explode with joy at their discovery of limitless possibilities beyond being coke-scoffing Smash Hits poster boys? Or perhaps it was an enervating, even embarrassing moment of realisation, in which case it probably came as you slogged your way through Oasis' Be Here Now (Where is that album on Soundblab's list? Nowhere, my friend. Nowhere.) or myriad other stinkingly rubbish albums from two-bit chancers with Slade best ofs echoing round their heads.

Oh, it was the worst of times, and yet... Well, it wasn't quite the best of times but, as always, there was great stuff if you looked. For a start there was that Blur album, a beacon of strange, sprawling genius concocted from the wreckage of Damon Albarn's all-consuming hunger for fame and Graham Coxon's equally fathomless desire to sabotage his role as organ grinder to Damon's cheeky monkey. Somehow, they made it work and the result remains Blur's definitive statement on what it means to be Blur, put to their most diverse and consistent set of tunes.

Then, of course, there was Radiohead's OK Computer, which loomed across the remainder of the decade, rock music and Radiohead's career like a great, sulky, monolithic thing. Has time robbed it of some of it's grandeur? One would hope so. No album deserves to be as revered as OK Computer has been over the last decade, especially by sections of the music press for whom a new Stereophonics' album usually counts as a daring leap forward in rock. For that reason alone, OK Computer deserves a little bit of opprobrium and mockery. The truism that it's experimental music for people who don't like experimental music is a truism for a reason.

But, hey, what would this year, let alone this decade be without the album which, for good or ill, probably did more to sum it up than any other? If you haven't listened to OK Computer for a while – because it's too big, so picked-apart you just can't connect any more – go back to it now. Don't listen to 'Paranoid Android' or 'Karma Police' or the monumental whinge of 'No Surprises'. No, go for 'Subterranean Homesick Alien' and drink in it's lightness-of-touch, it's nimble elegance, it's brevity, and ruminate on the fact that, despite all their fidgety, ostentatious experimentation since, Radiohead have never been more concisely, simply beautiful as this.

Anyhoo, moving on – her elemental nuttiness, Björk, cemented her place as the most original solo artist of the age with her third album, Homogenic, a record at once so far out yet contained, reptile cold yet sexy warm, futuristic yet amniotic, that Thom Yorke spent a good chunk of the 00s trying to sound just like it. Meanwhile, Primal Scream, who had missed Britpop entirely because they got confused and thought they were The Rolling Stones for the whole of 1994 or something, finally crash-landed back in our reality with the refreshingly forward-thinking Vanishing Point, a record which hymned vast, open spaces and vast, uncontrollable drug addictions in equal measure. They followed it up later in the year with Echo Dek, an album of dub remixes which had no business being as brilliant as it was.

In one way or another, all the best music this year had little to do with guitars, or at least made guitars serve a master other than rock. Prodigy, Chemical Brothers and Death in Vegas were somehow more rock 'n' roll than the prominent rock bands – not hard with Shed Seven and Kula Shaker knocking around. Elsewhere, Roni Size & Reprezent, Daft Punk and Stereolab all took electronic music into new areas in different ways, Wu Tang Clan proved unbeatable at being mental and quite scary and a band called Cornershop, previously written off as riot grrrl mascots, made a record called When I Was Born for the 7th Time which was the greatest album of the 90s. Yes, you read that right.

So, 1997, then. There was a lot of great stuff. And a lot of shit. A whole, heaving, intestinal prolapse of shit. But think about the great stuff.