Radiohead's Kid A (4 page)

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”?

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?

* * *

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
Kid 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.)

* * *

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.