Radiohead's Kid A (2 page)

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.

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

Roland Barthes

An international 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:

• 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.