FEATURE:
Everything in Its Right Place
Retrospect and Re-Examination: Radiohead’s Kid A at Twenty
___________
THE first four Radiohead albums…
are as fascinating and different as any in all of music. Pablo Honey was released in 1993 and, whilst it has some great moments, many people know it for the single, Creep. The Bends of 1995 marked a seismic shift in terms of Radiohead’s clarity and invention; an album that ranks alongside the best of the 1990s. Expanding their guitar sound and providing a wider and bolder sonic and thematic palette for OK Computer in 1997, the band were at the peak of their powers. There was a certain amount of pressure when it came to following such a hugely popular and iconic album. The band were exhausted off the back of touring OK Computer – their lead, Thom Yorke, was especially drained and spent -, so there needed to be some changes. I am amazed that the band managed to release two albums so soon together. Kid A arrived on 2nd October, 2000, whilst Amnesiac followed on 5th June, 2001 – a lot the material for Amnesiac was recorded during the time of Kid A’s sessions. Kid A is an album that completely differed from OK Computer. It shouldn’t have shocked critics that the Oxford band would have wanted to evolve and venture into a new direction after The Bends, and OK Computer. Kid A has some traditional guitar-bass-drums as a foundation, but the band took influence from synthesisers, Electronic music; there are Jazz elements and brass in the mix. More experimental than anything they had released before, Kid A arrived with very little fanfare and promotion – there were no singles released and Radiohead provided no interviews.
This untraditional, low-key approach to releasing an album perhaps explains why Kid A received some mixed and negative reviews. A lot of people in 2000 were expecting Radiohead to release a very similar album to OK Computer but, as I explained when I featured the album in Vinyl Corner, Radiohead wanted to move forward. Maybe Thom Yorke was worried that an album as popular and accessible as OK Computer would create another wave of adulation and touring, which could have finished the band off! Not that Kid A was Radiohead becoming introverted and creating something out-there. Far form it. I think Kid A was Radiohead’s most interesting and nuanced album to that point. Taking inspiration from Talking Heads’ Remain in Light and Björk, Thom Yorke took from Talking Heads’ David Byrne when it came to lyrics for Kid A; often cutting up word and reconstructing them in a random manner. Co-produced by Nigel Godrich and Radiohead, I think Kid A is one of the finest albums Radiohead ever released, and it has gained a lot more positivity and adulation in subsequent years. Kid A did get some positive reviews in 2000, but there were some who felt Radiohead had lost their way. This is what Melody Maker wrote in 2000:
“But d'oh! What are they doing singing something resembling a verse like a bunch of syphilitic corporate whores?!? They are Radiohead band, and Radiohead band knee convention in the nadgers, remember? So come the title track they've locked Thom inside a 10-inch thick Metal Mickey costume and buried it 6ft under Chernobyl, from where we can just about make out his mumbles of "We've got heads on sticks, you've got ventriloquists". Cheers! Jonny Greenwood comes on like a Chinese DJ Shadow, laying down cold and charmless flickerbeats while Robo-Thom, casting himself as a Wonky-Eyed Piper of Grimlin, chokes, "Rats and children follow me out of town", thereby introducing the underlying theme of the album: oh woe upon woe, why must poor Thom be tormented with mass international success, a pile of hard cash the size of Ann Widdecombe, and this damned fanbase that plagues him so? Put another record on, mate.
Quite literally, before they do "The National Anthem". Presumably the National Anthem for some bizarre jazz-loving nation ruled by demented circus folk, it is both "Kid A"'s nadir and its first really important track. For once we're past the lumpen space-funk workout and they let the horn section from Bedlam out of their jaw restraints, it turns into Primal Scream's "Accelerator" as played by 50 crack-crazed clowns on their honky noses and thus utterly redefines the notion of "unlistenability", propels us to a whole new sphere of self-indulgence, invents - if you will - post-bollocks.
You're left dazed, bemused, and musing over the motives of "Kid A". Are Radiohead trying to push the experimental rock envelope, unaware that they're simply ploughing furrows dug by DJ Shadow and Brian Eno before them? Are they having a laugh at the pseuds' expense before they go "not really!" and release the proper album of rollicking great pop songs next spring? Or have they simply made a record not to be listened to but to be placed on a plinth at the head of every dinner party butter?
Ground-breaking? As Thom sang in 1993 on "Pop is Dead", by far Radiohead's most inspired single to date, "The emperor [really] has no clothes on/And all his skin is peeling off." And important? As the great poet, philosopher and anti-globalisation non-robot Jim Royle might have said: "Important, my arse".
There is so much to love when it comes to Kid A. The opener, Everything in Its Right Place, was a breakthrough for the band, and all the rest of the songs followed when they had that lead track cracked. How to Disappear Completely is haunting and hugely evocative, whilst The National Anthem features incredible repetitive bass and Jazz influences. Optimistic, and Morning Bell are two of the best and most accessible songs from Kid A, whilst Motion Picture Soundtrack is a wonderful close. I can appreciate how Kid A was a shock in 2000 but, unbeknownst to many critics, Radiohead were forging a path to the future. This is noted by AllMusic in their review from 2012:
“In the wake of OK Computer, it became taken for granted among serious rock fans of all ages that Radiohead not only saved rock from itself, but paved the way toward the future. High praise, but given the static nature of rock in the last half of the '90s, it was easy to see why fans and critics eagerly harnessed their hopes to the one great rock band that wanted to push the limits of its creativity, without grandstanding or pandering. Daunting expectations for anyone, even for a band eager to meet them, so it's little wonder that Kid A was so difficult to complete. Radiohead’s creative breakthrough arrived when the band embraced electronica -- which was nearly a cliché by the end of the '90s, when everyone from U2 to Rickie Lee Jones dabbled in trip-hop or techno.
The difference is that the wholehearted conversion on Kid A fits, since OK Computer had already flirted with electronica and its chilly feel. Plus, instead of simply adding club beats or sonic collage techniques, Radiohead strove for the unsettling "intelligent techno" sound of Autechre and Aphex Twin, with skittering beats and stylishly dark sonic surfaces. To their immense credit, Radiohead don't sound like carpetbaggers, because they share the same post-post-modern vantage point as their inspirations. As perhaps befitting an album that’s coolly, self-consciously alienating, Kid A takes time to unfold; multiple plays are necessary just to discern the music's form, to get a handle on quiet, drifting, minimally arranged songs with no hooks. This emphasis on texture, this reliance on elliptical songs, means that Kid A is easily the most successful electronica album from a rock band: it doesn't even sound like the work of a rock band, even if it does sound like Radiohead”.
On Tuesday, a new book, This Isn’t Happening: Radiohead’s Kid A and the Beginning of the 21st Century, was released, and it provides wonderful insight into the album’s creation and what was happening with Radiohead prior to the year 2000 – and what impact Kid A has had in the years since. Pitchfork covered the release of the book in an article from 24th September:
“The heady ambition of Radiohead’s work around the turn of the millennium can hardly be considered overlooked. Kid A, which turns 20 next month, has been named the best album of the 2000s by ourselves and some of our peers. This week, when Rolling Stone debuted its revamped 500 Best Albums of All Time list, Kid A leapt straight to No. 20, ahead of any other album of the decade (or by Radiohead). Though the band’s fourth LP initially drew some accusations of pretension, modern critics have fallen over themselves celebrating the infamous hard-left into arty electronics, especially once it turned out to be Radiohead’s semi-permanent direction.
Fittingly, then, Steven Hyden’s new book, This Isn’t Happening: Radiohead’s “Kid A” and the Beginning of the 21st Century, isn’t just another round of gushing praise. Yes, the Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me author and longtime rock critic does argue that “in terms of the culture and mood of the times, Kid A is the most emblematic album of the modern era.” But he’s as interested in the era itself—how the album serves as a kind of time capsule for the early, confusing years of the ’00s. With the conversational irreverence of the guy sitting down the bar, Hyden draws connections to hybrid rock acts like Linkin Park, surreal and misanthropic blockbusters like Fight Club and Vanilla Sky, the internet’s transformation from a utopian dream into a dystopian nightmare, and, as has been noted before, the tragedy on 9/11. For good measure (and fan service), he bookends This Isn’t Happening’s cultural insights with key Radiohead-related events occurring before and after the album”.
“In the future, Thom Yorke will be vindicated. By the end of the aughts, Kid A will be regarded by many as the best album of the 21st century’s first decade. In 2011, the American electronic music producer Derek Vincent Smith, known as Pretty Lights, will create a popular mash-up that melds “Everything in Its Right Place” with Nirvana’s “All Apologies” and Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer,” unofficially confirming Kid A’s status as classic rock for Millennials. Five years after that, “Everything in Its Right Place” will appear in the trailer for a movie in which Ben Affleck stars as an autistic math genius who is also a cold-blooded professional killer, confirming that Radiohead has ascended to “thinking-man’s Smash Mouth” status.
When people hear “Everything in Its Right Place” in the future, it won’t sound alien or cold or difficult; it will evoke glitchy cell reception and patchy Wi-Fi and decontextualized social-media updates and the modern reality of omnipresent technological interconnectivity at the expense of genuine human connection. It will eventually seem logical—even the parts that aren’t supposed to seem logical. It will sound like screaming at your neighbors and never being heard, in an online landscape that is as dark, disorderly, and foreboding as a Stanley Donwood album cover. Or as inescapable as an arena you can’t ever leave. In time, many of us will feel like the singer in the successful rock band—surrounded by every convenience, and yet thoroughly alienated by this supposedly inviting world.
What is that you tried to say? What was that you tried to say...”.
As Kid A turns twenty tomorrow (2nd October), I have been thinking about the reaction the album received in 2000, and how it has been reappraised since then – and the impact and influence it has (Radiohead became one of the first major acts to use the Internet as a promotional tool). Many publications have placed Kid A not only in their list of the best albums of the first decade of the twenty-first century, but of all-time. I think that the towering and wonderful Kid A is…
AMONG Radiohead’s very best albums.