MUSIC - Radiohead - Kid A

This is essentially a response to Pitchfork naming Kid A their album of the 2000-09 era.

Score: 8.8

I've had Kid A for a couple of years now - probably after reading about it on countless indie-rock oriented sites. I'd picked up OK Computer a few months previous, and didn't see what the hoopla about that particular album was, so you can imagine when I listened to Kid A once, said "meh", and moved on.

Allow any hipster passerbys to cry foul now and insert interjections full of hyperbole. It's a simple statement: Kid A is not that good.

It's good, don't get me wrong, but it's not that good.

Now I think everybody who'd ever read Pitchfork for any duration longer than a few months would have known that Kid A was a shoe-in for the top pick of the decade, so it's not as though I'm arguing that it shouldn't have been. Their editors, while overly verbose and usually spewing nonsense, are firm, predictable, and seem to believe deeply in the music they like. For the Pitchfork crowd (and, it appears, the Rolling Stone crowd), Kid A simply was the best album of the decade. My argument instead is that, while it has several good points to it, it does not possess the things which people go to music for.

Kid A can roughly be summed up thusly: electronica-infused dissonance. Radiohead obviously did not invent electronica, and were not the first to utilize dissonance as a musical tool (Shostakovich was using it as his overwhelming modus operandi fifty years earlier). So what then, explains the huge outpouring of critical acclaim? Was it the fact that they were one of the first to do the two things in one cohesive package? Perhaps, but I find most arguments for Kid A's importance seem to revolve around two things, one of which is valid (in my opinion), and one which is not: Radiohead itself, and the sociological construct of the western world in the year 2000.

Radiohead as a band started as (more or less, probably less actually) a brit-pop group in the vein of Oasis. At least, that's what their recorded output began as in the mid 90's. By the time of The Bends, they'd more or less perfected that sound and had begun to move on (something Oasis never really wanted to or tried to do). So when OK Computer spun around in 1997, it was radically different - barely rock, definitely not pop, and full of messages that had nothing to do with love or regret or anything like that. I mean, what pop group writes songs about paranoid androids?

Well, there was one pop group that had done something similar thirty years earlier. The 1960's equivalent, of course, was the Beatles, who were ripping the Tibetan Book of the Dead in their post-pop outings of Rubber Soul and Revolver, and doing things that pop musicians were not supposed to be doing, like reversing guitar solos (Rain), writing songs with only classical instruments (Eleanor Rigby), and introducing new, non-western instruments to the pop catalogue (Norweigan Wood). The decades and the topics were different, but the feeling of change was the same. Which is why, after OK Computer, the fans of Radiohead were getting it in their head that Radiohead was their generation's Beatles (and the previous generation's, who had missed out on something similar [Led Zeppelin or The Clash probably came closest]). Kid A was, subsequently, the generation's Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, a pinnacle of engineering, sound development, and pop songwriting.

The difference between the two however, was that whereas the Beatles retained all their fans through Rubber Soul and Revolver, OK Computer (and shortly thereafter, Kid A), had failed to keep up the radio notoriety that The Bends had managed through poppy singles like "Fake Plastic Trees" and "High and Dry". The Beatles had "Paperback Writer" and "Strawberry Fields Forever" leading up to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Radiohead had "No Surprises" (a song I wasn't even aware of until I'd listened to OK Computer probably the fourth time, after which I promptly fell in love with it). More telling, upon the release of Kid A, not a single was heard on the radio. Pop music, even in the year 2000 was still reliant heavily on the radio to determine was what was "pop" and thereby, what was "cool" in the eyes of the masses. Radiohead effectively buried themselves in the first corners of the internet music ward, apart from pop culture, and away from the prying eyes and demands of popular culture (though they would constantly flirt with it, due to their huge success in that internet ward). Whereas the Beatles had "All You Need is Love" and "Hello Goodbye" as the radio holdovers while Sgt. Pepper went on tour for the band, Radiohead had nothing.

Yet those fans who'd followed them through the haze of OK Computer were suddenly convinced that yes, here was the 2000's Beatles, and they were visionaries, pop music boundary-pushers, who were unquestioned geniuses. I have no idea if that's the impression others have got, and I have no clue whatsoever what Radiohead's impression of this was, but pop music was, I believe (and the lack of singles evidence this) no longer in their sights. To their fans they'd created a great album (again, I'm not arguing against the quality of the album, it's good!), and they had secured their place as the pinnacle of the 2000's, by October of 2000. Pitchfork was and remains, such a fan. Like the girl who fell in love with the bad boy once, and never looked at anyone that didn't have a chip on their shoulder, Radiohead fans have pretty much been enamoured with this album since it's release, and have always used it as a measuring stick against which all other music simply fails to match up.

The timing of the album is usually the other thing fans point to: Radiohead described all the tension of the year 2000 perfectly through their electronica, krautrock, and voice-distortion and through a generally dissonant sound and set of lyrics. The world in 2000 was a scary place full of this new technology (PCs, and the Internet, more generally) that was binding us all together (a la Thomas Friedman's book The World is Flat), while pushing us further away from one another, in this endless cycle of digitization and dehumanization. So when Thom Yorke's voice came through in the first track all garbled and disrupted, that was the perfect opening to a decade of personal and cognitive dissonance, where truth wasn't clear and people were no longer measured by their real attributes, but what their digital version would mean.

That's all true. But unfortunately, it doesn't help the music enough to make the album better than it is.

I find the "timing" argument for Kid A to be very interesting, and very accurate in a lot of ways. But unfortunately, that same argument means that the music is exactly what the times were - unengaged and impossible to fathom. Removing the human aspect of music means it isn't music that can reach humans in the ways other music can. It can dissuade, it can disconnect, and it can engage the thought processes, but it can't be felt. Kid A is guilty of, above all else, it's inability to be felt on any emotional level.

"That's the whole point!" Some hipster cries. "And," I would return, "that, is mine." I want music to speak to me, to sing for me, and to do things that I can't do myself, that thought and disaffection and transistors can't do for me - create beauty. Kid A is many things, but it is not beautiful ("Treefingers" being the possible exception).

And I suppose that's the crux of my admittedly rather weak argument. I can't say why I don't like Kid A so much as I can find fault in the arguments of those who do. It's cold, and I want my music to be hot. I want to feel something when I listen to it - not experience the absence of feeling. Kid A will be, for me, a lounge record. The most popular muzak you'll ever hear.

And I love Radiohead. They may be the closest thing to the Beatles we ever have. But the painful thing that made me feel the need to write this in the first place is that Pitchfork's #2 choice, the Arcade Fire's Funeral, is the better album, by almost all leaps and bounds. Pitchfork, which is rarely dogmatic, is fixated upon Radiohead like so many devoted fans. But Funeral signaled the changing landscape of indie music, and it was the antithesis to Kid A in every way - full of emotion, overflowing with it. Funeral was the realization that music, of all things that can be digitized, will remain always attached to human subjects. And it was hot, hotter than anyone was prepared for. For that, it was the decade's best album.