Radiohead

Item: Kid A
Author: Jeffrey Overstreet

Kid A

(2000)

Reviewed by Jeffrey Overstreet

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Label Capitol RecordsThe Phantom Tollbooth2000

alternative rock art rock electronic experimental

Radiohead's Sonic Storm of Sound and Fury

In the year 2000, one might expect to hear music that fuses all the strengths of the last decade into timeless, landmark music. You'll find such solid, traditional, yet bold songwriting on the new U2 album, or in the timeless echoes of Emmylou Harris's Red Dirt Girl, in the wise sentiments of Paul Simon as he gets older, or the surprising optimism and playfulness of Sting on Brand New Day. But you might also expect to hear something new, something experimental, that harnesses new tools, new ideas, and breaks the mold.

Radiohead, who started cracking the alternative-rock, concept-album mold with 1997's OK Computer, just smashed that mold to tiny bits. Kid A is here. And whether you like it or not, it's not like anything we've heard before. But it's a prophetic of what we'll be hearing on rock radio in the future. Like good art-rock, it requires your full attention and repeated listenings.

Undoubtedly there will be detractors. Whenever an experimental album comes out, critics split right down the middle. Remember the backlash when U2 did Achtung Baby and Zooropa? While half of the fans mourned the loss of an organic rock sound, others heard the potential and the meaning in the continental shift, and now rock radio is cluttered with lookalikes, just as U2 reminds us that they're still capable of traditional songwriting. Now it's Radiohead giving us a window on tomorrow.

Radiohead is the band in the spotlight, where U2 were when The Joshua Tree hit, or where "R.E.M." was when they produced Out of Time. It's their turn now.

Kid A is, in a way, the place that Radiohead has been, um, "headed" all along. On The Bends they introduced us to an electrifying new voice in arena-rock-and-roll. Their cryptic, bleak lyrics prophesied the coming darkness when life is dominated by artificial intelligence, where the world is green with plastic trees, and where the arrogance and heartlessness of bureaucracy has dehumanized our existence. On 1997's monumental follow-up, OK Computer, they challenged us with a cohesive concept album, somewhat like what Pink Floyd might have done in their place. It has become perhaps the most groundbreaking rock record since U2's The Joshua Tree. Dwelling on similar themes, OK Computer told stories of people kept apart by their own technological inventions, desperate, disillusioned, drowning in their own self-taught lies. Packaged in elaborate, brilliant sci-fi soundscapes, the experience was more like a viewing of Blade Runner than listening to eleven songs.

Kid A abandons the familiar, comfortable structures of verse/chorus/guitar-solo rock, and introduces us to free-flowing rivers of electronic instrumentals with voices that sound like they're choking on wires, with verses that get clipped, run backwards, their words jumbled, and then re-played every which way.

"Everything in its Right Place," the arresting opener, introduces three distinct, seemingly unrelated lyrics that twist and writhe on a bed of ominous keyboards. "Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon," lead singer Thom Yorke mumbles. Perhaps he is referring to a hangover brought on by the indulgence of youth culture or by the technological revolution. On the other hand, it might be an acknowledgement, that Yorke was inspired by the "lemon" in U2's Zooropa... who knows? (U2's The Edge asserts, in recent interviews, that Kid A has captivated him as the band prepares for their next tour.)

The title track sounds like someone thinking quietly to himself, but the thoughts are a weak, indecipherable electronic signal. A few lines emerge from the garble, such as "We've got heads on sticks/they've got ventriloquism." A political statement? It sounds important, but we have to strain to hear it, and most of it is unintelligible altogether.

Next, "The National Anthem" climbs a ladder of noise until we're treated to a long cataclysm of sound that resembles three traveling circuses colliding on train tracks, or, as another publication put it, "a brass band marching into a brick wall."

Only on the fourth track, "How to Disappear Completely" do we finally hear guitar chord progressions and the familiar, desperate crooning of lead singer Thom Yorke. And it's not until track six, "Optimistic," that there's a song formulaic enough to be a single.

Kid A is a masterpiece of innovation, creativity, and sound mixing. It's important because, unlike most pop and rock which is accessible to the masses, it communicates through sound rather than words. What signals we are given point us to the fact that our own technological tools are preventing us from understanding each other. Power is a means of survival, but in using it we trample our own goodness and destroy our own world.

In "Optimistic" (which, by the way, isn't), Yorke sings, "You can try the best you can/the best you can is good enough," but then asserts that our efforts amount only to that of "dinosaurs roaming the earth." We may have become the "fittest", but our survival is still a shaky proposition. Later, in the relentlessly harsh techno-dance beat of "Idioteque", he practically shouts, "Ice age comin'! Ice age comin'! Women and children first!" The "ice age" is, to all appearances, a flood of information and technology. At times, the sounds begin to warp and sway together, as though they are merely rainbow-colored oil slicks undulating on a stormy sea as the singer drowns, his voice farther and farther below the surface... or perhaps WE are drowning, and he is above, somewhere, calling for us.

What amazes me about Radiohead's achievement here is that this music, after repeated listens, only becomes more and more intriguing, and at times downright beautiful. Meaning lurks like the shadow of a monster below the surface; you catch glimpses, but it eludes clear definition. Somehow they've managed to form something profound, artful, and exciting out of the very tools that they warn will be our undoing.

What bothers me is the same thing that has always bothered me about them. They have a very clear picture of the disease. They have a notion that the cure will be difficult to discover, and it won't be found in acts of power or technology. But they have nothing to offer us as hope, as a glimmer of grace in the chaos. They obviously know beauty, because they can powerfully mourn its passing. Perhaps if their future efforts take the time to acknowledge beauty, they might find signs of the answer, signposts toward the One whose designs for humankind have been so sorely left behind.

4.5 tocks