Radiohead's Kid A
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But can Radiohead live with the contradiction? As Thom told Uncut:
Not really, I’m pretty touchy about it. But if you want to actually have your record in a shop, then you’ve got no way round it because you have to go through major distributor and they’ve all got deals and blah blah blah. There isn’t a way around it. Personally, one of the reasons that I wanted to be in a band was actually to be on the high street. I don’t want to be in a cupboard. I write music to actually communicate things to people.
Clearly, Radiohead’s desire to communicate their ideas trumps the threat of appropriation and commodification. Swallow the contradictions, and the critiques will circulate more widely and more vigorously than ever possible outside of the mainstream. As with the band’s seventh album, 2007’s In Rainbows, which was released as a pay-what-you-want downloadable album straight from their website, Radiohead were not trying to disengage from the industry; they were simply engaging with it on their own terms, underscoring the symbiotic/contradictory dialectic of their subversions within the very industry that sustains them.
Which is precisely where we get to the stakes of Radiohead’s Trojan Horse approach to the industry: given all the energy the band puts into the process of releasing and promoting their music, including all the contradictions that come with it, is their subversive behavior even effective? According to Klein in a 2001 interview with Hot Press magazine:
I guess the testimony for me is that I know, in a way that I think few people can know, how much they have politicized their fans because they come to my lectures. There are always three people in Radiohead T-shirts in the front row of every lecture I do. Like, every single … and I get a lot of letters from them as well, particularly after Kid A first came out, saying, “You know, I usually don’t read books like this, but I did, because I read that the band read it.” And I think that everybody needs entry points, everybody needs doorways. And I know that these guys are very quietly providing all kinds of doorways, and they’re doing it in a very humble way. Like, if you go to their website, they immediately link you to Indymedia or whatever. I have a tremendous amount of respect for the way they’ve chosen to do this. Not as preachers, not politicizing their music, not telling people what to do, but just providing gateways, and portals, and bridges.
While Radiohead have had to fight for cultural space in order to provide these gateways, portals, and bridges, they have at the very least prevailed in relaying political insights to their fans without being patronizing or overbearing. Whether facetiously dedicating songs to George W. Bush, openly criticizing Clear Channel/S.F.X, or simply hyperlinking independent outlets, Radiohead don’t need to immerse us in their soundworld to signify the extent to which politics are integrated in their lives. Even their least political fans — those who can hardly discern between Guantanamo Bay and eBay, between Karl Marx and Groucho Marx — are well aware of their recent efforts to shake us from the cobweb-like dream-state of global warming denial.
With Kid A, however, Radiohead were signaling something even more compelling. Sure, they weren’t able to entirely shirk co-optation and appropriation, and sure their political efforts didn’t influence every fan to chuck bricks at the powers that be, but the cultural spaces in which they voiced their critiques ensured not only that the industry machinations generated during OK Computer wouldn’t be repeated but also that subversion in the mainstream, however dubious or contradictory, was still possible on the artist’s terms. And similar to what No Logo provided for Ed, Radiohead’s engagement with the industry gave their fans “real hope” for a more democratic future.
But one must wonder: if Radiohead were so keen on providing gateways, portals, and bridges, why didn’t they explicitly politicize Kid A’s lyrics?
Kid Apocalypse
Listening to music is listening to all noise, realizing that its appropriation and control is a reflection of power, that it is essentially political.
Jacques Attali
Writing political lyrics can be a risky venture these days. Not only do they require audiences be familiar with the described events to be understood, but they also risk alienating fans on ideological grounds: unlike a love song’s implicit striving for longevity and “universal” appeal, a political song is purposefully confrontational, delineating an artist’s stance on the status quo while investing stock in both the immediate absorption of its ideals and the impact of its content. In other words, the goal is to be timely, not timeless.
But this also means that, theoretically, the timeliness of political lyrics will eventually expire. Here’s the problem: if the issues raised are in the headlines, the lyrical content is considered relevant. But as soon as they’re filed in the archives, the content becomes something “of the past.” Mention NAFTA and you’ve already established a clear temporal relationship; name-drop Dick Cheney and you’re quickly tick-tocking your way to anachronism. While it’s unnecessary to understand the lyrics to enjoy a song, the content of political music can become topically irrelevant in a snap.
Were Radiohead trying to be timely or timeless with Kid A?
For a band so politically engaged, trying to discern the level of politics in Radiohead’s music can be frustrating: some fans champion how political their lyrics are, while others flat-out deny these interpretations as wishful thinking from hopeful subversives. Thom doesn’t particularly help clear things up, either. On the one hand, Thom has said that “[it’s] difficult to ignore wider issues … it’s hard to sing about ‘humping your baby’ when you’re seeing all this other stuff; it’s difficult to live with a bad conscience.” He’s also described Kid A as partially about “the generation that will inherit the earth when we’ve wiped evrything [sic] out,” even citing George Monbiot’s Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain as an influence on the album.
And yet Thom refuses to label Kid A as a “political” album. In fact, if there was any question about Radiohead’s political intentions, he clarified it rather bluntly in a dual interview with Howard Zinn in 2003:
I don’t think we are [political] at all. I think I’m hyper aware of the soapbox thing. It is difficult to make political art work. If all it does is exist in the realms of political discussion, it’s using that language, and generally, it’s an ugly language. It is very dead, definitely not a thing of beauty. The only reason, I think, that we go anywhere near it is because, like any reason that we buy music, these things get absorbed. These are the things surrounding your life. If you sit down and try to do it purposefully, and try to change this with this, and do this with that, it never works. […] I don’t think there is much that’s genuinely political art that is good art.
Whether it’s due to the fatigue of the same old political message or to finding new outlets for political expression, Thom’s clearly concerned about the overlap from more sociological and aesthetic vantages: How can one use political language “tastefully”? Should musicians shoulder the weight of political responsibility? Can political art be “good” art? As he explained in an interview with the Scotsman: “If you try and write anything political, it’s just … shite. Unless you’re The Clash, in which case you can get away with it. But we can’t, and have no intention of doing [so].”
* * *
Kid A’s artwork, however, sings a different tune. In fact, if we were to judge the album by its artwork alone, we might pigeonhole the entire release as a timely political statement (the cover, in fact, was influenced by the 1999 war in Kosovo).
Created by longtime friend/artist Stanley Donwood and Thom (credited as “Tchock”), Kid A’s “apocalyptic imagery,” as the latter described it, proves remarkably different from the Rauschenberg-esque visuals of OK Computer. Instead of the zoomed-in, truth-in-the-details approach, where images were intended to translate sterility and conformity, Donwood opted to create large oil paintings full of vibrant reds, oranges, and blues for Kid A. “I wanted to make big paintings because I’d spent so long making little pictures on a computer, mostly for OK C
omputer,” said Donwood. “All that pointing and clicking was driving me crazy. So I wanted to really go crazy.”
The transition from computer monitor to large-scale canvas serves as an apt metaphor for Kid A’s newfound reach. Whereas OK Computer’s artwork and lyrics presented a hyper-capitalist society wrestling with its internal contradictions and moral bankruptcy — relationships disconnected by the image, communication made impenetrable by mediation, policy mired in corruption — Kid A reaches so far that its purview expands beyond the sunny sidewalks of suburbia to the dark vistas of an apocalyptic future. And the outlook is terrifying: barren wastelands and empty battlefields, burning cityscapes and frozen terrain, blood smeared throughout. It is a projection of a world that has been disregarded, decimated, then ditched. It is the fallout of consumer-capitalism unchecked. It is our buildings on fire, our world covered in ice.
The most compelling narrative weaved throughout this bleak depiction appears in the special-edition version of Kid A. Here, Donwood and Thom evoke the apocalypse through the oversized, thick cardboard, picture-heavy format of a children’s book. And unlike the somewhat abstracted presentation of the regular version’s artwork, the special edition articulates these ideas under the very premise of a children’s book: to educate through story.
NOBODY LIKES NOTHING
I CERTAINLY WISH WITH ALL MY HEART
THAT IT DID NOT EXIST
BUT WISHING IS NOT ENOUGH
WE LIVE IN THE REAL WORLD WHERE
NOTHING DOES EXIST
WE CANNOT JUST DISINVENT IT
NOTHING IS NOT COMPREHENSIBLE
NEITHER YOU NOR I HAVE ANY HOPE OF
UNDERSTANDING JUST WHAT IT IS AND
WHAT IT DOES
IT IS HARD TO KNOW IF NOTHING IS
ACTUALLY NOTHING
AND THUS DIFFICULT TO KNOW IF A POLICY
OF DOING NOTHING IS SUCCESSFUL
NOTHING
HOWEVER EFFECTIVE IT MAY HAVE
PROVED UP TO THE PRESENT CAN HARDLY
CONTINUE TO DO SO INDEFINITELY
IF I HAD TO CHOOSE
BETWEEN THE CONTINUED POSSIBILITY OF
NOTHING HAPPENING
AND OF DOING NOTHING
I WOULD UNQUESTIONABLY CHOOSE THE
LATTER
OR THE FORMER.
While the narrator’s rhetoric reduces policy-making to a binary of “doing nothing” and “nothing happening,” the moral of the story is revealed in the following two pages. The first shows an image of the ubiquitous “genetically modified bear” — which is depicted heavily throughout Kid A’s visual world — floating on an iceberg. The image seems innocuous at first, almost random, until we reach the next page, which lists “selected examples of ice melt around the world.” Black text on a white background, the list provides nine examples (with statistics) of ice melt, from the Columbia Glacier and Glacier National Park in the US to West Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier and New Zealand’s Tasman Glacier. It concludes with the Antarctic’s Larsen A and Prince Gustav ice shelves, both of which “disintegrated completely in 1995,” and a web address pointing to the Worldwatch Institute for further examples of ice melt.
You don’t have to watch Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth to sniff out the artwork’s political undercurrent. In fact, the message is even more obvious today than it was in 2000, as, ten years since Kid A’s release, the threat of global warming has become such a pervasive topic that not only does the intellectual foundation of the so-called “green revolution” have currency now, but also even capitalism is furiously capitalizing on it, a sure sign of its ideological heft and omnipresence. But both the policy of “doing nothing” and the possibility of “nothing happening” remain as pertinent today as in 2000. Gas and oil companies still have an unprecedented amount of political power, exemplified most disturbingly for Thom in December 2009 when he posted commentary on the band’s website during his trip to the Copenhagen summit on climate talks. While his posts showed glints of hope early on, they soon exhibited his frustration with the US, anger over the “display of rhetoric,” concerns over the closed-door discussions, and disgust over the summit’s outcome that, according to a letter he posted written by Ben Stewart from Greenpeace, was “beyond bad” and a “historic failure that will live in infamy.”
Radiohead’s concerns here are clear: As long as corporate lobbyists are directing conversation toward a “green” future powered by fossil fuel companies, there will only be “symbolic” attempts to reduce carbon emissions through renewable energy. As long as politicians are influenced by corporate money, there will be little to no substantial legwork done to assert bold emission standards. As long as companies continue to spend billions in marketing and advertising to skew public perception, there will always be that cousin in your family who peers out the window, notes the disproportionate amount of snowfall for that time of year, and exclaims “Ha, so much for ‘global warming’!” Meanwhile, ice caps will keep melting, sea levels will keep rising, and weather patterns will shift even more dramatically and violently, destabilizing not only the ecological balance of our planet but also the very patterns and dependencies of life. And throughout, oil and gas companies like ExxonMobil will continue to post record-breaking profits, even in times of serious economic strife.
But it isn’t just the iceberg beneath the genetically modified (GM) bear that explodes with meaning; the GM bear itself has plenty of symbolic power too. Responding to the rumor that Kid A was about cloning humans, Thom explained the origins of the GM bear:
Early on, Stanley Donwood, who does our artwork, and I started doing this thing, Test Specimen, a cartoon about giving birth to a monster, the Frankenstein thing. For example, the bear logo — that is a test specimen, the first mutant. The idea was loosely based on stuff we were reading about genetically modified food. We got obsessed with the idea of [a] mutation entering the DNA of the human species. One episode was about these teddy bears that mutate and start eating children. It was this running joke, which wasn’t really funny. But in our usual way, it addressed a lot of our paranoias and anxieties.
Dramatic, sure, but the fear of a GM future is not without precedent. Much of the food consumed worldwide, and especially in the US, is now genetically modified — that is, produced either by combining genes from different organisms or through genetic crosses from plant and animal breeding. But is it safe to consume sweet corn that self-produces poison to kill insects or margarine that contains genetically modified rapeseed? Do we really want to eat strawberries that can survive frost, apples that contain vaccines, and beef beefed up with bovine growth hormones? How long is too long for tomatoes to last? Aside from the troubling fact that some countries — again, most notably the US — do not require the labeling of GM foods in grocery stores (ensuring customers remain in the dark about what they’re swallowing), the concern of GM opponents is that the food hasn’t been tested rigorously enough, independently or otherwise, for governments and “regulatory” agencies to so confidently proclaim their safety for humans and the ecosystem. Under current law, independent studies can’t even be published in peer-reviewed journals without approval from agritech companies.
Beyond safety concerns stemming from allergenic confusion to the possibility of reduced fertility from GM maize consumption, GM foods are also connected in Kid A’s artwork to the same entities that stall the full embrace of global warming: corporations. On the cover of the “secret” booklet (hidden beneath the CD tray of early pressings), a basket full of bear heads with a $50 price tag sits above a single bleeding bear head served on a dinner plate. The image is underscored with text that reads “Take the money and then run,” which provides an aesthetic link between GM foods and corporate powers like Monsanto, a US-based biotechnology corporation that sells 90 percent of the world’s genetically engineered seeds, a corporation that has a vested interest in “doing nothing” to address the growing outcry over GM foods. While public health concerns haven’t motivated action,
the desire for increased profits certainly has: biotech corporations are now stealing and then patenting centuries-old bio knowledge from farmers, charging the same farmers enormous fees to use them, and even suing some who unknowingly used “bio knowledge” without consent after GM crops inadvertently slipped into their farms.
It is quite fitting, then, that Kid A’s “secret” booklet would feature modified and unmodified rats squeaking “™” and “©”: the politics of GM foods has as much to do with private ownership as public health. Who says what can or cannot be owned, and under whose terms? The threat of a GM future exposes the power that megacorporations have in taking ownership of not just products and services, but the constituent elements of life itself. Since 1970 in the US, biotech and genomic companies have the right to legally claim living organisms as intellectual property. Corporations are now scouring for DNA all over the world, attempting to secure corporate rights to these genes through patents. No DNA is immune to their corporate reach, either; even DNA from the human genome is fair game. Genes related to breast cancer, obesity, even bone creation have been isolated and patented. In fact, an estimated 20 percent of the human genome has now been claimed as intellectual property, which means that, without intervention, the very blueprints of life, the very essence of humanity could be owned by (and at the whim of) a handful of corporations.