[beeswax]

'Depressing' has a variety of facets made up of sadness, textual content/lyrics, and (at least for me) the placement of the title within its respective album context.

Anecdote: When I previewed Kid A via AudioGalaxy back then (it would not be released for another two weeks in my region) I thought the stylistic choices of 'Everything in its right place' were some kind of encoding error (quite frequent back then) so I trashed the whole album after spending hours on the download.

Imagine my surprise when I listened to the album from the physical album I bought a fortnight later :)

[loudmax]

I got my first cassette tape player in 1982 and Prince's "1999" album to go with it. The lead track starts with distorted vocals, and I thought my player was malfunctioning. The intro is only about ten or fifteen seconds, so unlike you, I didn't trash the tape.

Closer to topic, listening to the song "1999" as a kid, I thought it was a cheerful party song. After Prince's death, I listened to the song as an adult and realized it's about nuclear annihilation.