Radiohead's Kid A

by Lin, Marvin

  KID A

  Praise for the series:

  It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in the Rye or Middlemarch … The series … is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration—The New York Times Book Review

  Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough—Rolling Stone

  One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet—Bookslut

  These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds—Vice

  A brilliant series … each one a work of real love—NME (UK)

  Passionate, obsessive, and smart—Nylon

  Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful—Boldtype

  [A] consistently excellent series—Uncut (UK)

  We … aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way … watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Continuum’s “33 1/3” series of books—Pitchfork

  For more information on the 33 1/3 series, visit 33third.blogspot.com

  For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book

  Kid A

  Marvin Lin

  2011

  The Continuum International Publishing Group

  80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038

  The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX

  www.continuumbooks.com

  Copyright © 2011 by Marvin Lin

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lin, Marvin.

  Kid A / Marvin Lin.

  p.cm. — (33 1/3)

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4411-4446-1

  1. Radiohead (Musical group). Kid A. I. Title. II. Series

  ML421.R25L56 2011

  782.42166092′2—dc22

  2010033004

  Typeset by Pindar NZ, Auckland, New Zealand

  Printed and bound in the United States of America by Thomson-Shore, Inc.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Kid Aesthetics

  Kid Authenticity

  Kid Abstraction

  Kid Acclaim

  Kid Adaptation

  Kid Activism

  Kid Apocalypse

  Kid Agency

  Kid Ascension

  Acknowledgments

  For my grandma Po Chu Chan and my son Miles

  Introduction

  It was virtually impossible to ignore Radiohead’s Kid A when it was released in early October 2000. Bolstered to various degrees by the hype generated from the Napster controversy, its “anti-marketing marketing” campaign, the media’s sensational myth-building, and a rabid online fan community, Kid A was more than just a ten-track collection of songs written by five musicians from Oxfordshire, more than the “weird” follow-up to the critics’ fashionable go-to record of choice OK Computer, more than what the Village Voice described as “the biggest, warmest recorded go-fuck-yourself in recent memory.”

  Kid A was political yet visceral, thoughtful yet abstracted, assured yet contradictory; it served as both a musical breakthrough for its fans and a hybridized pastiche for its critics; it was actively critiqued, not passively consumed; it was an assimilated cultural aberration that wouldn’t stop grumbling, a subversion of capitalism that ultimately produced a lot of capital; it was a medium through which the chatter of the industry would crescendo to a point that nearly suffocated the album’s incessant protests and aesthetic explorations.

  The album, in short, served as many different things for many different people. But for me, Kid A was my ticket to transcendence.

  * * *

  Back in 2000, as a sophomore in college, my ideal music experience wasn’t too different from other impressionable fussbudgets: I wanted music to sweep me away, to transport me to a new plane of existence, to make me feel like nothing in the world mattered except that all-enveloping, transcendent musical moment. Transcendence was more than just an entertaining way to “pass the time”; in fact, it was during these moments when time itself seemed utterly inconsequential, when schedules were forgotten and all I could do was surrender to the music. It was rapture without guilt, ecstasy without drugs, and I’d spend much of my formative years trying to recreate the feeling, if only because it was so rare, so transient.

  While any music designed to “sweep me away” would be adequate, I was drawn to rock’s grandest construction: the album format — specifically, albums that adopted aesthetic tricks (transition tracks, deliberate sequencing, conceptual unity) to elongate a sense of continuity and wholeness across its runtime. With these albums, not only was a ritualistic response practically built in but also the format created the illusion that transcendence was indeed the ultimate goal. Radiohead seemed serious about this too, as the band sent promotional versions of OK Computer in “modified cassette players” (Aiwa players that were literally glued shut) to encourage press and radio DJs to listen as intended: undisturbed and in its entirety. I played right into the idea. After all, who was I to short-circuit the intended experience? This is Art, isn’t it? This is how “serious” listeners consume music, right?

  With rumors that debates over Kid A’s track listing had nearly broken up the band, I saw no reason to veer from the ritual. The album was arriving at the most opportune time, too, as by 2000, I was so obsessed with Radiohead that my heart would pump faster just by spotting those ubiquitous “genetically modified bear” stickers clinging to car bumpers or hugging some college kid’s water bottle, signifiers that interpellated me as strongly as someone shouting my name. (Who knew a sticker could so forcefully affirm identity?) Such a visceral reaction to the album’s imagery was a testament to my efforts to devour the band whole: at that point, I had owned original copies of every official Radiohead song (including all of their B-sides and the coveted Drill EP); I had seen the band perform in both Minneapolis and Chicago; and I had even made my dad purchase a copy of OK Computer from Japan while he was there on business, just so I could hear it a month before its US release.

  But this time, hearing Kid A early wasn’t my concern: I just wanted to hear the album undisturbed and in its entirety. The goal was to retain, as much as possible, the “purity” of the first listen, to abstain from immediate pleasures in order to heighten the feeling of transcendence. This meant avoiding bootlegs of live Kid A tracks from Radiohead’s early-summer 2000 Mediterranean concerts, restraining myself from downloading the album early (it had been leaked in full roughly a month in advance), and avoiding the viral marketing that was urging me to preview both the full-album stream on Capitol’s website and the promotional blips that pervaded the internet.

  On October 3, 2000 (midnight, October 2), I purchased Kid A at a record store and rushed back to my dorm room, fast-walking like a fucking fanboy idiot. I was so excited to finally enact the ritual. I proceeded to put on my headphones to block out any potential disruption, flicked off the lights, and closed my eyes. Sure, this “pure listen” was a self-imposed, manufactured buildup. But at the time, all the waiting, all the teasing, all the hype, all the research, all the anticipation, all
the asceticism, all the enthusiasm had combined to create what I believed to be the perfect disposition for pre-transcendence, the ideal state of mind to sponge up Kid A.

  But I was wrong. Not because of the impossible expectations I had for the album, but because the whole ordeal wore me out.

  So I fell asleep. Twice.

  I FELL ASLEEP TWICE DURING MY FIRST LISTEN TO Kid A.

  * * *

  While this failed attempt at “transcendence” was upsetting at first, time has afforded me new perspectives. There I was, lamenting the fact that I couldn’t keep my eyes open, while a week before Kid A’s release, anti-globalization protests in Prague became so disruptive that the last day of the IMF and World Bank summit was halted; and two days after Kid A’s release, the president of Serbia — accused of treason, kidnapping, murder, and censoring independent media — was forced to resign under the pressure of thousands of demonstrators fighting for a more democratic future. With all the political turmoil in the world, why was I even thinking about “transcendence”?

  Over the next several years, I would continue to seek new perspectives by burying my head in academic books about music, culture, and politics. I would think back to these so-called moments of transcendence and chuckle at my naïveté, asserting that these experiences were nothing more than escapist retreats into fantasy worlds, aesthetic traps to keep me politically disengaged and socially disconnected. I would note how tenuous and fleeting these transcendent experiences were, how they could be so easily deflated by “reality” (a cell phone ringing, an alarm clock buzzing). I’d wonder why anyone would want to transcend in the first place. I would call the experience illusory, immature, distracting. I would call it a waste of time.

  But can this intense perceptual experience be so easily marginalized?

  Despite my higher education pounding “rationalization” and “logic” into me, encouraging me to demystify the “power of music” by situating it within socio-political contexts, I’ve yet to fully shake these moments of transcendence. They still seem to come out of nowhere, occurring at virtually any time and in any context, and no amount of musical analysis or intellectualism has dissolved these life-defining moments. In fact, what I find especially seductive about transcendence is how non-academic it is; how it’s dependent on our perceptions, not our conceptions; how it resists the ideological control and “rationalization” upon which modern capitalism thrives.

  This opens up an interesting line of questioning: If transcendence goes beyond the exploits of the free market, can it also be a tool with which to subvert its most hideous symptoms? Is transcendence a sensibility that lies beyond capitalism’s industrialized, atomized, mechanized articulations? And because some of us spend so much time — our leisure time, our commute time, our downtime — listening to music for transcendent experiences, what implications might this have on music and society? How might this affect how we experience Kid A? And what does any of this have to do with our concept of time?

  * * *

  Music’s relationship with time is a curious one. Its formal qualities hinge on our perception of time, yet we often listen in the hopes of circumventing it. While the Merriam-Webster [Online] Dictionary defines music as “the science or art of ordering tones or sounds in succession, in combination, and in temporal relationships to produce a composition having unity and continuity,” the orderly narrative this definition implies betrays our listening experiences, which are much more disorganized, illogical, and unpredictable. As much as we try to intellectualize music, listening is a perceptual endeavor first and foremost: some of my most memorable musical experiences happen during such sweeping euphoria — surrendering myself to Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz, screaming along to Neutral Milk Hotel’s “Holland, 1945,” dancing furiously to Outkast’s “Hey Ya!” — that my sense of time is destabilized, if not made irrelevant.

  Yet, in Western society, we often think of music as simply a product to be bought and sold, a purely capitalist endeavor, while music listening itself is considered a luxury that’s supplemental to our eat-sleep-work schedules. That music has become so often identified as pure commodity bespeaks the capitalist ideology rather than any fundamental function of music and its place in cultures: our listening habits are tied to the product, where music criticism reads more like a buyer’s guide and music listening devolves into debates over whether an album is “worth” purchasing.

  But it takes time to create music, time to perform music, time to listen to music, time to reflect on music. It takes time for sounds to physically reach our ears. Music’s slavish dependence on time isn’t just implied: it’s constitutive. It helps to form our subjectivity and shift our aesthetic tastes; it enables the feeling of movement, of change. Therefore, to involve ourselves in music — whether to write, perform, listen, reflect — is in fact to engage in the activity of music.

  This book is about exploring the disjunction between music as a static product and music as a temporal activity. What better way to examine this relationship than with Kid A? The album not only exemplifies modern music’s increasing manipulation of time as an aesthetic technique but also it both remarkably defined its time and continues to define ours; an album that many music critics would argue to have withstood the “test of time” just a decade after its release. While I intend to emphasize the album’s positive attributes, I’m not going to argue that Kid A is one of the “greatest” albums of all time. The idea isn’t to sanctify Kid A; it’s to ground it in socio-political contexts while being suspicious of rationalization, to examine its politics while recognizing any hypocrisy.

  Needless to say, I won’t be recounting my favorite Kid A moments or uncovering how each track was made. And I certainly won’t be flying to Oxford to get the “real” story behind the album or the band (“Hey Thom, what do you think about Kid A’s relationship with time??”). While the album’s aesthetics are the foundation upon which the book will proceed, I’ll situate Kid A in contexts that extend beyond the sounds themselves. I’m especially interested in roping us — the audience, the fans, the listeners — into the discussion, to reinvigorate music listening as a site of socio-political importance, to see if we can learn more about ourselves through our shifting tastes, through the mythologies we perpetuate about the album, and particularly through our perceptions of it. I should also note that, while Amnesiac was recorded concurrently with Kid A and released only eight months later, my focus will be almost entirely on Kid A.

  Finally, my preoccupation with time isn’t arbitrary. I’ve always been interested in music as such — that is, music as different from other art forms. While a painting, for example, is intended to in effect “freeze” time, music is designed to bring us through time. How? With what outcomes? And with what implications? I’m not claiming that music’s relationship with time is “what it all boils down to” or that it’s an entryway to the “bigger picture”; while time will frame the book, not every chapter will specifically deal with it. My approach will instead be ruminative rather than scientific, lateral rather than direct. And if the distinction between music as a product and music as an activity allows us to conceptualize Kid A as a temporal activity, allowing us to assess the musical experience as also an experience of time, then perhaps we can see how shifting taste is as important as the sounds themselves, how time itself is music’s biggest enemy, how the desire for transcendence can in fact be a socio-political impulse rather than the pointless, mystified experience to which we often ascribe it.

  Here’s my ultimate hope: if clocks allow us to visually “see” time elapsing, then Kid A — through the seemingly magical continuity of music — will allow us to, in a sense, “surf” time. And if we take our critiques in and through Kid A, perhaps we can go in and through time too. Who knows, maybe we’ll even transcend it.

  Kid Aesthetics

  There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present-day society: to retreat ahead of it.

  Roland Barthes

  An in
ternational cultural movement called Dada arose during World War I. That the movement was born of this tumultuous period in time wasn’t coincidental: Dada was an overt political reaction against the war and the complacency that came with it. While not everyone understood the movement — psychiatrist Carl Jung called it “too idiotic to be schizophrenic”; Adolf Hitler called it “spiritual madness”; American Art News said it was “the sickest, most paralyzing and most destructive thing that has ever originated from the brain of man” — the group was largely impenetrable for a reason: Dada was based on the idea that if “rationality” led to bombs bursting in air, then irrationality could serve to counter it. Therefore, Dada artists like Hugo Ball, André Breton, Jean Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Hans Richter would express their disgust through absurdity, randomness, and paradox; they’d produce bizarre collages and unsettling photomontages; they’d wear cut-up masks and recite nonsensical sound poems; they’d draw a mustache on the Mona Lisa, take pictures without cameras, shoot blanks into crowds.

  Dada’s goal was not only to question the art world’s preoccupation with aesthetic beauty but also to critique the very foundation of meaning in a world that could be shocked by an artist submitting a urinal to an art show on the one hand, yet accept a human getting blown to bits by a railway gun on the other. As Greil Marcus put it in Lipstick Traces, “The idea was that, to the degree aesthetic categories could be proven false, social barriers could be revealed as constructed illusions, and the world could be changed.”

  One of the “constructed illusions” Dada sought to expose was the mythology of the artist.

  On December 12, 1920, artist Tristan Tzara wrote a manifesto on behalf of the group, called “Dada Manifesto on Feeble Love and Bitter Love.” Divided into 16 parts, Tzara’s manifesto contained mostly illogical but occasionally incisive prose, vacillating between the odd (“I prefer the poet who is a fart in a steam-engine”) and the odder (“the page was taken to the barbaric country where humming-birds act as the sandwich-men of cordial nature”). But there was one section that stuck out: wedged between a rant on “selfkleptomania” and another on autobiographies “hatching under the belly of the flowering cerebellum,” Tzara, in his most lucid state, provided instructions on how to make a Dadaist poem: