Radiohead's Kid A
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The recording sessions resulted in roughly 30 completed songs, which Radiohead had the unenviable task of whittling down to a proper album length. After drafting more than 20 different track listings, any song that ultimately didn’t fit the continuity and flow from opening track “Everything in Its Right Place” was left off, most of which were released the following year on Amnesiac (though, even that album’s second track, “Pyramid Song,” was in the running for Kid A as late as the early summer of 2000). After several arguments and debates, Radiohead eventually agreed on a firm ten tracks that would make up Kid A.
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Entering the studio without a clear aesthetic purpose is commendable, but to act on impulses of both depersonalization and renewal for an astonishing 18-month recording session nearly justifies the deification of Radiohead.
Rather than simply regurgitating the additive aesthetics heard on OK Computer, an album that Thom disparaged as “still pressing all the correct buttons,” Kid A saw Radiohead pressing all the incorrect ones, taking cues in varying degrees from electronic/glitch (“Kid A,” “Idioteque”), modern composition (“Treefingers,” “How to Disappear Completely”), free jazz (“The National Anthem”), and Krautrock (“Optimistic”). They removed themselves from rock’s most debilitating fictions by obliterating their three-guitar attack and emphasizing dissonant electronics, complex time signatures, intricate poly-rhythms, unconventional structures, processed guitars, oblique lyrics, esoteric samples, and ambient textures.
The experimentation also served to reconstitute the traditional band dynamic, an intentional subversion of the hierarchical tricks that tend to limit collaboration and lead to aesthetic deadends. As Phil said to the New York Times, “We were working more like producers than musicians.” Indeed, not only was Kid A predominantly a studio creation (as opposed to OK Computer, which mostly captured the band playing live) but also their songwriting experiments blurred such trite occupational distinctions, something that many hip-hop, electronic, dub, and avant-garde artists have in fact been obscuring for decades. According to Colin:
The first thing people ask is, “Where are the guitars on the new record?” Well, we recorded guitars on all the songs, but they just didn’t get there in the mix stage. Kid A is an acoustic-based record that has been digitally manipulated afterward. There isn’t an over-arching aesthetic criterion. It was more a case of a bunch of guys with microphones and tube gear going to interesting spaces, recording it, and seeing what happens. You use what works.
But using “what works” was the ultimate source of confusion for fans and critics: If Thom’s voice wasn’t intended to be “him,” if the lyrics weren’t meant to be understood, and if the overall style didn’t even sound like the Radiohead we all knew, then what exactly were we supposed to make of it? What was Kid A supposed to “be”?
Kid Authenticity
Nothing is really ‘disparate’ if your concerns are similar. It’s only a belief in genre distinction that makes for that perception.
Jim O’Rourke
I’ve always hated the phrase “music is just music.” It’s dismissive and shortsighted, even antagonistic in certain contexts. We apply the phrase when discussion about music becomes overly analytical, when our emotional reactions to a song can’t be so easily expressed. It’s a tautology designed to short-circuit conversation and obliterate context: Why do I feel “swept away” when listening to “How to Disappear Completely”? What’s the point of a song like “Treefingers”? Why do critics say Kid A lacks emotion?
Who cares? Music is just music.
Because we can’t reach up and grab music from the air, because we can’t see it traveling from a singer’s mouth to our ears, because we can’t add milk and eat it for breakfast, we often treat music as some mysterious floating “thing” able to cross cultural and geographical boundaries on its own, as if it had some sort of life itself, as if it possessed magical powers that we can’t quite put into words because, well, music’s just too damn ethereal or something. The assumption here is that contextualization is pointless because music operates under self-contained principles with inherent attributes. Who cares how the album is made? Who cares what the artist is trying to voice? Who cares about the political tumult at the time of its release? The music tells me everything I need to know.
This myth, however, was difficult to perpetuate with Kid A. The album has the distinction of being Radiohead’s most emotionally, intellectually, and musically challenging work, so it’s no surprise that this tender, fall-off-the-bone slab of meat had everyone sinking in their incisors. What was surprising is how the entire project — its release, its artwork, even the band’s website — begged for further scrutiny, amassing the kind of marketing hype that a cynic might imagine to have been concocted in stuffy boardroom meetings. And the more we discussed Kid A, the more we found ourselves knee-deep in its mythologies, its cultural contexts, its politics. In fact, these dimensions often served to trump the music itself, making the platitude “music is just music” seem like nothing but a superficial exit strategy.
But if Kid A is not “just music,” it must be something, right?
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Nowadays, listeners are so culturally deft that the notion of “rock” has expanded to the point of non-meaning. In 2000, however, the idea of “saving rock” was as ubiquitous as the ILOVEYOU computer worm. “If there’s one band that promises to return rock to us, it’s Radiohead,” published Melody Maker just months before Kid A’s release. These stories functioned as the media’s way of decrying the declining hegemony of rock without pointing fingers or lambasting its successors (that year, ’N Sync and Britney Spears, combined, sold more than 20 million albums in the US alone). It was their way of placing the burden on bands like Radiohead rather than shouldering the responsibility of their own rockist fairy tale: to them — and, by extension, to many purists — rock had gone astray, had veered too far, had become “inauthentic.” ROCK MUST BE PURIFIED.
You could probably predict where Radiohead’s allegiances were. “I never wanted to be in a fucking rock group,” said Thom in a Spin interview. “The Pixies were not a fucking rock group. Neither are R.E.M. Sonic Youth are not a rock group and neither were Nirvana. We use/have used electric guitars therefore we are a rock group?!” And if that interview didn’t quite capture his utter disdain for “rock music,” then his interview on Dutch TV did:
Fucking rock music sucks, man. I hate it! I’m just so fucking bored of it. I hate it. It’s a fucking waste of time. It’s not really the music; it’s not sitting on a stage playing guitar, drums, and singing. That’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is all the mythology that goes with it. I have a real fucking problem with that. I have a real problem with the idea you have to tour yourself stupid, do certain things and talk to certain people.
Though, if Kid A wasn’t the “authentic” rock album the press had hoped for, then what was it? A surprisingly large reserve of culture vultures pegged Kid A as Radiohead’s “electronica” album, throwing around the acronym IDM (intelligent dance music) as freely as they salted their potatoes. All Music Guide, for one, described Kid A as “the most successful electronica album from a rock band.” Which wasn’t entirely unfounded: one of the first things Thom did after the OK Computer tour was purchase the entire back catalogue of Warp Records, a Sheffield-based electronic label featuring artists like Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada, and soon after Thom collaborated with electronic-based artists Björk (“I’ve Seen It All”) and UNKLE (“Rabbit in Your Headlights”). And not only has Radiohead’s music been remixed by a plethora of electronic producers (at one point, Massive Attack was scheduled to remix the entirety of OK Computer), but the band members themselves were no strangers to employing loops and samples on Radiohead tracks like “Airbag,” “Planet Telex,” “Meeting in the Aisle,” and “India Rubber.” Thom was even a DJ and a member of techno group Flickernoise back in his Exeter university days.
But while K
id A was undeniably influenced by electronic-based music — “Everything in Its Right Place,” “Kid A,” and “Idioteque” being the most obvious examples — the “electronica” tag never quite stuck. Besides, guitars and drums were featured prominently throughout, and the structure of the songs remained largely rooted in rock narratives. Still, the more dramatic fans acted as if Radiohead’s predilection for electronic rhythms drowned out the rest of the instruments, so blindsided by the beats that their critiques became circular. “I think the debate was redundant, because the band ultimately kept doing what it has always done — zigzagging between extremes,” said Godrich. “Whenever we really did try to impose an aesthetic from the outside — the aesthetic being, say, electronic — it would fail.”
If anyone knows a thing or two about redundant debates, it’d be a music critic. Beyond the “electronica” tag, critics began kitchen-sinkin’ all over the place, hyphenating and shit-slinging like their jobs depended on it: CDNOW called it “the ultimate 3 a.m. stoner-headphone music;” Nude As the News, an “electric-emo hybrid;” and Village Voice, “the biggest, warmest recorded go-fuck-yourself in recent memory.” “Sublimely restless mood music,” said Entertainment Weekly; “the weirdest album to ever sell a million copies,” according to TIME; “dinner music,” sayeth Robert Christgau. Some, like Spin, put it bluntly: “Essentially, this is a post-rock record.” Others, like the nascent Pitchfork, weren’t so blunt: “[Kid A] sounds like a clouded brain trying to recall an alien abduction” and “like witnessing the stillborn birth of a child while simultaneously having the opportunity to see her play in the afterlife on Imax.”
It got crazier too, with writers treating the album like a blank canvas on which to project their profundity. In a 188-page dissertation, Marianne Tatom Letts, Ph.D., “investigate[s] the ways in which the band’s ambivalence toward its own success manifests in [Kid A and Amnesiac’s] vanishing subjects.” She interprets the first half of Kid A as the “full articulation and immediate dissolution of the subject,” with an “existential death of the subject” occurring halfway through the album. She stops here to examine more closely “Treefingers,” which is where, she argues, the subject is “reconstituted in order for the album to continue.” (Even odder: she discusses how “Treefingers” anticipates the hiatus between Kid A and Amnesiac.) Her final argument focuses on the remainder of Kid A, where the subject is “revived and given a second chance at negotiating life’s travails, but ultimately fails again and ‘dies’ at the end of the album,” a move intended to link Kid A to French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s idea of “two deaths.”
My favorite? In his book Killing Yourself to Live, Chuck Klosterman went next-level on us by arguing that Kid A inadvertently foretold the events of 9/11: “I am certain Kid A is the official soundtrack for September 11, 2001, even though it was released on October 3, 2000.” He goes on to describe, track by track, how each song serves this wider theme, from the morning Manhattan skyline of “Everything in Its Right Place” and the plane crashes in “The National Anthem,” to “how Al Qaeda members think Americans perceive international diplomacy” in “Optimistic” and “faith that there is something greater than this world” in “Motion Picture Soundtrack.” Instead of concluding with a good ol’ wink and nudge, Klosterman ends his quixotic interpretation quixotically: “A genius can be a genius by trying to be a genius; a visionary can only have a vision by accident.”
And, finally, there was that dork who claimed Kid A was “like an organism trying to reach homeostasis but is instead suspended in a state between entropy and equilibrium.” (Hey, I was young.)
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While none of the more outlandish interpretations have fully rooted themselves in Kid A’s complex history, there was nonetheless an insatiable demand for Kid A to be defined, to have it “be” something. Why? With all the mythologies that revolve around the album, what could be gained by pinning its symbolic ambiguities onto something concrete, to rationalize its abstractions into absolutes, to create and promulgate what essentially amounts to even more myths weighing down the album like a rain-soaked turtleneck?
Part of the concern was to reconcile Kid A’s aesthetics with our notion of authenticity. If the majority of critical assessment proceeded from the idea of rock as authentic — that is, an untainted expression of personal emotion/value — then any musical aberration could be considered “inauthentic.” The further the music deviates from the constituent elements constructing the idealized form, the more illegitimate it is perceived to be. Electronic music, for example, was largely seen as inauthentic by rock-oriented critics precisely because of the pseudo-dialectical interplay between acoustic and electronic sound — which is to say, “real” and “simulated” sound.
But because Kid A’s aesthetics can’t be tethered to a specific style or genre, it wiggles free from any claims to authenticity. In fact, its overt hybridization obliterates the very notion of authenticity, exposing it for what it is: a mythology. As Jonny stated,
[The] whole artifice of recording. I see it like this: a voice into a microphone onto a tape, onto your CD, through your speakers is all as illusory and fake as any synthesizer — it doesn’t put Thom in your front room. But one is perceived as “real,” the other somehow “unreal” … It’s the same with guitars versus samplers. It was just freeing to discard the notion of acoustic sounds being truer.
Depicting musical styles and genres as aberrations itself stems from another mythology: that music, rock specifically, has become fragmented. But to understand the proliferation of styles and genres as slices of a pie is to assume there ever existed a whole pie, and if the ascendancy of popular music — from ragtime to jazz to rock to hip-hop — is any indication, no trajectory can so easily bend to such an all-encompassing narrative. Rock has never had a unifying value set, nor has there been consensus on what exactly constitutes “rock.” So, when a band like Radiohead strays from its “rock” roots to incorporate other styles of music, critics scramble to find words to supplant their typical musings on authentic properties like “honesty” and “sincerity,” forming their own hyphenated styles/genres to the point of abstracting not only our conceptions of “rock” and “electronica” but also music itself.
In other words, by trying to define Kid A as “something,” things just got more confusing. It felt like we were suppressing all the dynamic processes involved in the album’s conception and reception, as if the cultural elements that informed our understanding of it didn’t matter, as if the temporal implications had to be encapsulated into an easily transmissible exchange. Rather than an album proffering the interconnectedness and continuing hybridization of subcultures from the bottom up, Kid A instead became an album through which critics would exercise their atomization skills top down, mirroring the capitalist tendency to isolate, alienate, and devour. If Kid A was indeed an “aberration,” then it was one that was compartmentalized to fit within the strategies of the free market. And with everyone spouting their own version of what Kid A “is,” I can sympathize with those who might throw up their hands in defeat and sigh, “music is just music!”
But perhaps the real problem here lies beyond the difficulty of pinpointing attributes and deciding where an album like Kid A should be filed in a record store. Perhaps the inquisition into its aesthetics is working under a false conceit to begin with.
To investigate, let’s first step back 150 years in time.
Kid Abstraction
Art has become something which is only related to objects, and not to individuals, or to life.
Michel Foucault
On the morning of August 12, 1853, an excursion train and an outbound train were traveling on a single-track line toward each other on the Providence and Worcester Railroad near Pawtucket, Rhode Island. The conductor of the excursion train was behind schedule, traveling at 40 miles per hour to reach the switch where the single track became a double, just beyond a sharp curve. The outbound train started moving at the usual time, headin
g slowly toward the same curve. But because the conductor’s watch on the excursion train was too slow (by two minutes, according to accounts), the trains ended up violently crashing into each other.
The next day, the New York Daily Times published a report with the headline, “AWFUL RAILROAD ACCIDENT; FOURTEEN LIVES LOST. Thirty or Forty Seriously Injured.” Within a month, the conductor was charged with manslaughter. Not for being reckless or for being drunk, but for carrying a faulty watch.
The ruling may seem trifling at first, but it’s particularly significant in the historical context of time. Before the railroads, our sense of time relied on internal and external cues — the phases of the moon, the rising and setting of the sun, the cycles of hunger and sleep. While industrialization had led to an increased presence of clocks by the mid-nineteenth century, your clock might have read 10:20 a.m., another clock down the street 10:23 a.m., and the one in Mom’s house 10:30 a.m. None of them were “incorrect.” Time was simply localized (some states even had three different official times). But with the increasing number of train crashes, as well as the necessity of a uniform time to operate efficiently, the railroads insisted that its standardized “railway time” — reflecting the industrial values of punctuality, efficiency, and rationality — should be everyone’s time.
Not everyone agreed. “Time wars” started occurring throughout the US and UK — including in Oxford, Radiohead’s hometown — with locals protesting the imposition of railway time. They even took to the streets, demonstrating against its uniformity and rigidity; they saw the loss of local time as a loss of identity, as a loss of temporal autonomy. But by the late nineteenth century, dissent was quashed, and the cries of the most roaring protesters were silenced by the weight of capitalist expansion. Time soon became standardized and synchronized, leading swiftly to international time, time zones, the day’s exact length, Greenwich as the zero meridian, and, significantly, a stark division between public and personal time. Eyes were directed away from the “natural” world and toward the clocks on the wall; nature’s rhythms were replaced with a mechanized ticking; and schedules were dislodged from a localized position to one of more global significance. Our conception of time itself had changed.