Radiohead's Kid A
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• take a newspaper
• take a pair of scissors
• choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem
• cut out the article
• then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag
• shake it gently
• then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag
• copy conscientiously
• the poem will be like you
• and here you are a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.
With the last line, Tzara hoists the poet atop a pedestal as a unique but misunderstood personality. The joke, of course, is that the preceding instructions almost entirely remove personality from the process: can a poet truly be considered “original” in the context of randomness, chance, and appropriation? Here, the artist is held accountable for technique, not for any autobiographical connotations, with the Dadaist poem sharing more aesthetic traits with auto-generated spam emails than with labored-over sonnets flaunting perfect semicolon placement. With a playful sense of irony and wit, Tzara was really critiquing the notions of celebrity, uniqueness, and craft, providing a subversive getaway authors could use to create distance between themselves and their work.
Ninety years since these instructions were first published, the Dadaist poem is still relevant to the silly mythologies we have of the modern musician: original, full of personality, and of course misunderstood.
* * *
So what about Thom Yorke?
While he’s decidedly full of personality, he’s certainly not winning any awards for affability. In a Kid A-era interview with the Observer, he admitted to still receiving hate mail from fans he upset during the OK Computer tour (one letter said it was a pity Jeff Buckley died instead of him), and during the Kid A recording sessions he posted on Radiohead’s official website, “I got beaten up in the middle of Oxford last week by someone who recognized me and saw me as an easy target.” Just try to find an interview with Thom that isn’t prefaced with a jab at his personality. Everyone seemed to have an opinion, and they were often high profile too: Kelly Jones of the Stereophonics called him a “miserable twat”; Noel Gallagher said he was a “cunt”; and Ronan Keating of Boyzone not only called him a “muppet” but also said he’d love to throw him off a mountain (metaphorically). At 2009’s 51st Annual Grammy Awards, Kanye West “sat the fuck down” during Radiohead’s performance after supposedly being snubbed by Thom, while Miley Cyrus claimed she was going to “ruin [Radiohead]” and “tell everyone” after the band refused to have a “sit down” with her. (Perhaps Cyrus should’ve had a “sit down” with West since he “sat the fuck down” anyway.)
And these are only the criticisms that made headlines.
Thom is clearly no stranger to having his personality stretched out and laid bare, but nowhere was this character examination more overblown than during OK Computer’s “Running From Demons” world tour. The press wasn’t concerned with the album’s commentary on the speed of human interaction in a hyper-capitalist technological landscape. It wanted to get to know him, as if the lyrics were purely autobiographical, as if they came from a tortured artist, a visionary, a depressed outcast on the brink of self-destruction who — hey, what do you know — just so happened to be artistically “brilliant.” How many times have both Radiohead’s music and Thom been described as “moody”? How many times have both been described as “paranoid”? To many, including me, OK Computer’s lyrical content and Thom’s psychology were one and the same.
But, ironically, not only were OK Computer’s lyrics overtly skittish but also they were purposefully designed to stray from The Bends’ introspection and to function more like Polaroids. As Thom told Q magazine in 1997, “It was like there’s a secret camera in a room and it’s watching the character who walks in — a different character for each song. The camera’s not quite me. It’s neutral, emotionless.”
However, Thom’s intent with OK Computer was immaterial to an industry that masqueraded as “neutral” and “emotionless.” As depicted in Meeting People Is Easy, the indelible 1998 documentary directed by Grant Gee, the media’s insistence on marketing a downtrodden yet noble artist in fact engendered the very conditions of alienation, disconnection, and simulacrum that OK Computer was lambasting, kick-starting a vicious downward spiral: Why is Thom wallowing in despair? Why is he always so angry? Perhaps it stems from the lingering trauma due to his drooping eyelid? Thom’s aversion to celebrity culture was mistaken for misanthropy, and the journalistic cheap shots aided in part to a nervous breakdown after OK Computer. He had trouble even speaking. As Thom admitted in a Rolling Stone interview,
I came off at the end of that show, sat in the dressing room and couldn’t speak. I actually couldn’t speak. People were saying, “You all right?” I knew people were speaking to me. But I couldn’t hear them. And I couldn’t talk. I’d just had enough. And I was bored with saying I’d had enough. I was beyond that.
The industry, as it tends to do, reduced Thom to a manufactured personality, to the point where fictitious storylines seemed to coalesce out of thin air, where consumers could hardly separate the value/function of the band from any other packaged goods on the shelf.
But as the lens focused more vigorously on his personality, Thom was already devising ways to increase the distance.
* * *
It wasn’t surprising, then, when I discovered that Radiohead had actually posted Tzara’s instructions for a Dadaist poem on their official website in the fall of 1999, roughly a year before Kid A’s release. It also wasn’t surprising to find out that Thom in fact employed a similar poem-making technique during the Kid A sessions to combat a two-year case of writer’s block. As he stated on a Dutch television show,
What I’d went off and tried to do with the writer’s block thing was just basically have all the things that didn’t work and stopped throwing them away, which was what I’d been doing before, and keeping them and cutting them up and putting them in this top hat and pulling them out.
If one of the benefits of the Dadaist poem is the removal of personality and the distancing it provides, then randomly drawing cut-up lyrics from a hat seems like a reasonable reaction. With this new lyrical technique — influenced in part by David Byrne’s like-minded approach to Talking Heads’ Remain in Light — Thom was able to mount a critique that couldn’t be mistaken as autobiographical, couching his lyrics in obfuscation and ambiguity in order to distance himself from rock’s self-important mythologies. It was a lateral technique that provided links, however tenuous, to Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies, to John Cage and the I Ching, to Guy Debord’s Mémoires. “The vocal parts are really interesting,” said guitarist Ed O’Brien, “because it’s the first album that we — as a band — haven’t been aware of what Thom’s singing about. He didn’t talk about his lyrics.”
When compared side by side, the lyrical differences are compelling. On OK Computer, for example, the invectives were clear, concise, purposeful:
Riot shields, voodoo economics / It’s just business, cattle prods and the I.M.F. / I trust I can rely on your vote.
(“Electioneering”)
A heart that’s full up like a landfill / A job that slowly kills you / Bruises that won’t heal / You look so tired, unhappy / Bring down the government / They don’t / They don’t speak for us.
(“No Surprises”)
Although still purposeful and full of meaning, Kid A’s lyrics were anything but clear and concise. In fact, they often read like Dada poetry. On “Morning Bell,” Thom sang:
Where’d you park the car? (×2) / Clothes are all alone with the furniture / Now I might as well / I might as well / Sleepy jack the fire drill / Running around around around around around / Cut the kids in half (×3).
The title track’s lyrics were similarly disconnected:
I slip
away / I slipped on a little white lie / We’ve got heads on sticks and you got ventriloquists (×2) / Standing in the shadows at the end of my bed (×4) / Rats and children follow me out of town (×2) / Come on kids.
Even when Thom did embrace his subjectivity on “How to Disappear Completely,” he sang:
That there / That’s not me.
Kid A’s lyrics functioned more like detached allusions rather than penetrating indictments, impressionistic encryptions rather than scathing pronouncements. As Mark B.N. Hansen described it in his essay “Radiohead’s Plunge into the Sonic Continuum,”
OK Computer is, in short, the mode of the referential — music as a way of speaking about the world. What a contrast with the “symbolic” mode of Kid A/Amnesiac, which finds Thom, as [Simon] Reynolds aptly puts it, “literally voicing (rather than articulating) contemporary feelings of dislocation, dispossession, numbness, impotence, paralysis.”
According to Thom, Kid A was about “bearing witness,” describing the album as “deliberately trying to keep everything at a safe distance”: “I managed to preserve whatever emotions were in the original writing of the words, but in a way that it’s like I’m not trying to emote.” He expounded further in an interview with Pulse:
What really pisses me off is this idea that I am this tortured artist. That is something based on flimsy evidence which is endlessly being projected back onto us. It is just reductive and dull. In order to be creative there has to be a distance from you and the thing itself. It is only when the distance gets confused that things go wrong. If you actually start to believe that you are what you write, then you have fucking had it. You have had it and you ain’t coming back. To assume that everything is about somebody’s life is to assume that that person is inherently stupid and isn’t capable of absorbing anything else. The whole point of creativity is that you spend your whole life absorbing things almost to where it is unbearable. The way you deal with it is [to] get it out.
But it wasn’t enough to just distance himself lyrically; Thom sought to alter the very color of his voice, what one might call Radiohead’s bread and butter, their je ne sais quoi, their It factor. With new sequencers, new recording software (Pro Tools, Cubase, Auto-Tune, Logic), and a new frame of mind, Thom was able to dislocate his voice ad infinitum, to obscure its emotive signifiers and emphasize texture, to reposition it from a privileged status to just another instrument, to, as Thom put it, “do anything, frankly, to not sound like me.” Under producer Nigel Godrich’s suggestion to do weird things “then and there” rather than “in the mix afterwards,” Thom pulled out all the stops (Amnesiac tracks included here to underscore the point): He sang through a ring modulator on “The National Anthem” and an eggbox on “You and Whose Army?” He sampled and then manipulated his own voice on “Everything in Its Right Place.” He used Auto-Tune software for both “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors” and “Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box,” and on “Kid A” he streamed his vocals through the Ondes Martenot (an early electronic instrument popularized by French composer Olivier Messiaen), mouthing lyrics drawn from a hat while multi-instrumentalist Jonny Greenwood improvised the vocal melody in unison. Thom even sang backwards on “Like Spinning Plates.”
Rather than playing to rock’s preoccupations with authenticity and the construct of the artist, Thom’s vocals emphasized aural sound rather than oral meaning, a distinction that evened out the sonic field for an audience typically accustomed to lead-singer adulation. It was about as blasphemous to their fans as Dylan going electric or Merzbow going digital, as shocking as Lou Reed releasing Metal Machine Music or The Beatles dabbling in the avant-garde (“Revolution 9”). As Thom explained in an interview with The Wire: “Even now, most interviews you do, there’s a constant subtext: ‘Is this you?’ By using other voices, I guess it was a way of saying, ‘Obviously, it isn’t me.’”
* * *
Reaching the point where Thom could freely experiment with his voice wasn’t easy. At the time, the band members had been playing music with each other for 15 years (and had known each other for roughly 20), finally garnering enough cultural and financial clout to boast leverage within a conservative major label system. This was no small feat for a band only three albums deep into its career. Imposing neither pressure nor a deadline, EMI — the music group that owns Radiohead’s then record labels Parlophone and Capitol — granted Radiohead one of the rarest luxuries: artistic autonomy bankrolled by a major conglomerate.
It was interesting, then, how tentative everything was. Explained Ed in an interview with Spin,
Musically, I think we all came to it a bit vague. Thom didn’t know exactly what he wanted the new record to be either, but he did know what he didn’t want it to be, which was anything that smacked of the old route, or of being a rock’n’roll band. He’s got a low boredom threshold and is very good at giving us a kick up the ass.
Clearly, Radiohead were neither interested in recycling OK Computer’s winning formula nor in hitting the stage of Celebratory Rock Theater. Responding to Ed’s original idea of regressing their songs into three-minute “snappy” pop tunes, Thom told Q, “Fucking hell, there was no chance of the album sounding like that. I’d completely had it with melody. I just wanted rhythm. All melodies to me were pure embarrassment.” If Kid A was going to be anything at all, it certainly wasn’t going to be “rock.” At one point, Thom even entertained the idea of changing the band’s name in order to demarcate an aesthetic break from their first three albums.
But contrary to popular opinion, Radiohead weren’t out to alienate fans. With fame comes imitation, and Radiohead had a hard time dealing with the many bands — Travis, Coldplay, Muse — lifting their aesthetic like free weights (and leaving the politics alone, of course). “[There] were lots of similar bands coming out at the time, and that made it even worse,” said Thom to The Wire. “I couldn’t stand the sound of me even more.” And the similarities didn’t go unspoken: While some felt guilty about it (“When we won best band at the Brit Awards, the first thing I did was apologize to Ed O’Brien,” said Coldplay’s Chris Martin), others couldn’t even tell the difference (“I think [Radiohead] sound like Muse,” quoth Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo). Björk, who around that time collaborated with Thom on the track “I’ve Seen It All” for director Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark, spoke about this artistic appropriation on her website:
What really really hurts and I know I am speaking for a lot of people here, video directors, musicians, photographers and so on, is when a lifetime of work gets copied in 5 minutes with absolutely no guilt. That expression, ‘imitation is the sincerest form of flattery’ — it might be true, but it is the kind of flattery that robs you. I spoke quite a lot about this with Thom from Radiohead [a] couple of years ago, when every other singer on the radio was trying to be him, and he said it really confused him. After hearing all that, next time he stood by the [mic], he didn’t know anymore what was him and what was all those copycats. It is one of the reasons Kid A was so hard to make.
Kid A, then, could be seen as Radiohead’s opportunity to construct a new identity, to pacify a desire for change because stasis would’ve meant tailspinning into the same predictable cycles; it would’ve meant going through the motions; it would’ve meant accepting the mythology. “There was no sense of ‘We must progress’,” said Thom. “It was more like, ‘We have no connection with what we’ve done before.’” As bassist Colin Greenwood put it, “[We] felt we had to change everything. There were other guitar bands out there trying to do similar things. We had to move on.”
But if distancing themselves from their previous aesthetic was the mission, where would they go and how would they get there?
Despite the uncertainty in direction, Radiohead realized that aesthetic renewal would necessitate a renewed approach. “If you’re going to make a different-sounding record, you have to change the methodology,” said Ed. “And it’s scary — everyone feels insecure. I’m a guitarist and suddenly it’s like, well,
there are no guitars on this track, or no drums.” Influenced in part by German Krautrock group Can’s approach to songwriting, Thom’s desire was to shape half-formed ideas — sometimes just a beat or an interesting sound — into songs. He wanted to stumble upon sonics rather than force them into existence. “When we started doing the recording properly, I bought a new notebook and put at the front, ‘Hoping for happy accidents,’ and that’s basically what we were trying to do.” And since Thom — at that point completely enamored with electronic artists like Aphex Twin and Autechre — wouldn’t be satisfied with “rock music,” the recording process was made even tougher. Said Godrich to Spin: “Thom really wanted to try and do everything different, and that was … bloody difficult.” “There was a lot of arguing,” he said to the New Yorker. “People stopped talking to one another. ‘Insanity’ is the word.”
After several failed attempts, the band eventually got fully behind Thom’s quest for “happy accidents,” and in addition to his own contributions, the flood-gates opened wide for the other members: Rather than wielding his ax, Jonny was primarily arranging strings and playing the Ondes Martenot; Ed and drummer Phil Selway could be found creating sounds on keyboards and sequencers rather than on guitar or drums; and instead of simply playing bass, Colin “drunkenly played other people’s records over the top of what [they] were recording and said ‘it should sound like that’” (it’s Thom, not Colin, playing fuzz-bass on “The National Anthem”). It was all a bit scattershot: many tracks were written entirely in the studio, some were tried and just as quickly ditched, and still others didn’t even feature every member. At one point, Godrich (often dubbed Radiohead’s “sixth” member) split the band into two groups to create music separately, not allowing them to play acoustic instruments like drums or guitar. At another point, they considered using no guitars at all. “We had to unlearn, get out of the routine,” said Godrich.