Credit: Hachette Book Group The themes in Radiohead's fourth album, Kid A — the threat of war, the threat of climate change, fearmongering, disinformation, abject paranoia — have all aged pretty well since it came out in October 2000. No other record has so specifically telegraphed the big mood that is life in the 21st century.
“In terms of the culture and the mood of the times,” Steven Hyden writes in This Isn't Happening, “Kid A is the most emblematic album of the modern era.”
Upon the album's release, plenty of critics were split; Pitchfork wrote a reverent take that insisted "comparing this to other albums is like comparing an aquarium to blue construction paper."
Kid A's eerie electronic synths and programmed beats were an active push away from the guitar rock that defined the ’90s for Radiohead. They’d put out their massive hit, “Creep,” in 1992 and were forever associated with the self-pity anthem. Shedding this reputation, Hyden writes, meant uprooting their sound, “consciously ditching guitars,” and risking alienating their fanbase. “'Creep' was the trap and Kid A was the escape plan.”
Guitarist Jonny Greenwood adopted a modular synthesizer and an ondes Martenot, a theremin-like instrument that scored old sci-fi and horror movies. Songwriter Thom Yorke assembled lyrics in random order, making cryptic lines like “Mobiles skwerking, mobiles chirping / Take the money and run.” Hyden writes about the esoteric parts of the music with aplomb, describing the titular track as "a robot ballet on the moon"; but even he admits, “You can listen to Kid A for twenty years without ever getting to the bottom of it.”
The turn of the century was also a moment of existential crisis for the music industry at large, Hyden points out; music leaks via the internet were brand new, and fans could use Napster and LimeWire to download tracks. Kid A itself eventually leaked, he writes, and the label let it be streamed online hundreds of thousands of times before its release.
“For many people, including myself, Kid A was the first major rock album that was experienced via the internet,” he writes. "In 2000, possessing an album before it was released was, for most people, unheard-of. It was like being handed a cheat code for life."
Hyden cites entries from the online journal of guitarist Ed O’Brien during the interminable recording sessions for Kid A and Amnesiac (their subsequent album) from July 1999 to June 2000, and describes the band as circling the drain, “stuck in a feedback loop of inspiration and creative indecision, coming up with dozens of promising ideas and then whittling them down over the course of weeks into nothing.”
And he covers their 2001 SNL performance, in which Yorke danced like “a man being consumed from head to toe by bees,” while Greenwood pulled cables around a modular synthesizer for “Idioteque,” resembling someone “directing long-distance calls on the East Coast in 1961.” During “The National Anthem,” the seven-piece horn section "sounded like a ska band dying a slow, painful death inside a trash compactor."
This Isn't Happening is a foundational text for understanding a difficult, prophetic album, and an addictive read for any fan of Radiohead. Preorder your copy now. —Emerson Malone
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- Porter Square Books Grown Up Book Fair: Jess Row, author of White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination, presents "Critical Readings on Whiteness," while the shop's "libromancers" recommend books by African American authors across genres — 7 p.m. ET, more info.
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Saturday, Aug. 29: Indie Bookstore Day - Bookstore Day author ambassadors Tayari Jones (An American Marriage), Lauren Groff (Florida), and Emma Straub (All Adults Here) discuss books, bookstores, and the writing life — 8 p.m. ET, more info.
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