In his book Killing Yourself to Live, writer and cultural critic Chuck Klosterman claims to be convinced that “Kid A is the official soundtrack of 9/11, 2001, even though it was released on October 3, 2000.” It is not that the album announced that event that marked the 21st century, but rather that his songs, heard after the fact, sound like an involuntary premonition of what was to come.
Klosterman’s detailed rendition of Kid A is yet another example of how Radiohead’s fourth album became more than just another collection of hit rock band songs. It was as much for the effort of those musicians to give a Copernican turn to their career as for the reception that the public gave to those ten songs and the interpretation that has been made of both their music and their texts. Because, ultimately, like any other work of art, records are what their creators have decided they are, but they are also what their recipients interpret them to be.
About all this, about what Kid A meant –means–, about its gestation, about what caused it and what made it the way it is, and about what came after, is the book by music critic Steven Hyden This is not happening. Radiohead’s Kid A and the beginning of the 21st century.
Hyden, a confessed fan of Radiohead and Kid A in particular, tries to explain the before, during and after of that work that marked a turning point in the career of the British group led by Thom Yorke, the band’s vocalist and main composer. . Until then, Radiohead had released three albums ( Pablo Honey , The Bends and OK Computer ), and although their success was not immediate, with OK Computer they had become the group that everyone wanted to see and hear, the one that the whole press wanted to interview. They were the band that after half a century of rock meant the survival of a way of understanding music. Epic songs, guitar, destined to fill stadiums. And they had to face, as others did before it, an inordinate popularity.
There is a documentary, Meeting People is Easy, about the world tour they undertook in 1997 after OK Computer, which conveys very well how the group came to feel. Spiritually and creatively exhausted. And they decided that things had to change.
They took almost three years to compose, record and release their next album. And when Kid A appeared, the truth is that he did not garner unanimously positive reviews. There were exceptions, yes, but the majority of the music press – and general press – was upset with the turn taken by the group. A sample: to the reviewer of Melody Maker magazine, Kid A was “a whiny look-mommy-can-suck-my-own-dick trash.” It was hard for him to understand that they changed the guitar epic for electronic sounds (Yorke had become a fan of musicians from the Warp label such as Aphex Twin, Auterche or Boards of Canada) and that their lyrics were even more cryptic than they were before. Which helped to lend themselves to all kinds of interpretations.
And for Hyden, that record that emerged from a moment of crisis – of a crisis for the group but also a crisis in a world that faced the new millennium with fears and uncertainties – stands as the spokesperson for its time: “A disconcerting record for disconcerting times”. An album that put music –and some words– to the anxieties caused by the changes that were coming: the internet and new technologies, globalization, the climate crisis, terrorism, the age of disinformation… In the words of Hyden ” Kid A seemed to be the soundtrack to all those changes.”
Despite the initial bewilderment, the album soon began to expand its recognition. La Vanguardia chose it as the most outstanding of that year 2000 and, already in 2009, as the most outstanding of the decade. And Rolling Stone magazine recently ranked it at number 20 on its compilation of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. Again in the words of Hyden, the key to that success, with a twenty-year perspective, lies in the fact that “Kid A embodied the way things would end up feeling, looking and sounding”.
Perhaps it was a risky bet, but it seems that time has proved them right.
