By the spring of 2000, the British music press was getting antsy.
It had been nearly three years since the release of OK Computer. Radiohead hadn’t toured in almost two. The level of anticipation for what they were going to do next was pushing already excitable English scribes to the point of hyperbole. “The time has come to forget Oasis, give [Richard] Ashcroft the elbow and even reject the adorable Embrace,” Melody Maker declared that March. “If there’s one band that promises to return rock to us, it’s Radiohead.”
The problem was that the members of Radiohead weren’t all that forthcoming about what they were working on. So Melody Maker sent a reporter to literally wander around Oxford looking for leads.
This method proved to be surprisingly effective. The reporter tracked down someone from the Orchestra of St John’s for an interview about recording sessions that took place with Radiohead six weeks prior, in February of 2000. It went down at Dorchester Abbey, a twelfth-century church located just outside of Oxford. You can hear the orchestra on three songs: “How to Disappear Completely” from Kid A, and “Pyramid Song” and “Dollars & Cents” from Amnesiac. Not that Melody Maker was privy to these specifics at the time, though they were able to report that Thom Yorke wanted “the color of the sounds being played to fit in with the mood of each track.”
For “How to Disappear Completely,” this mood could be described as “all-consuming dread that has been numbed to feel more like walking death.” Superficially, it would come to be viewed as one of the relatively “normal” tracks on Kid A, a beautiful ballad centered on acoustic guitar that slowly builds to an operatic emotional climax, just like “Fake Plastic Trees” or “Exit Music (For a Film).” But what set “How to Disappear Completely” apart from those other songs were the string arrangements. They hang over the song like a cold fog, obscuring what you think is in the song sonically and hinting at other, elusive ambiguities that draw you deeper into the murk.
In his online diary, Ed O’Brien writes that Jonny Greenwood in early December 1999 had multitracked his ondes Martenot on the song, creating a sound that O’Brien likened to a “string section from Mars.” Over the next two months, they tried and failed to “get it away from that band thing with an acoustic guitar,” O’Brien writes, “which may have been alright when we were making The Bends, but let’s face it has been done to death by both us and every Tom, Dick, and Harry guitar band.” (This process seems to have to be spearheaded by the band, as Yorke later claimed that he had nothing to do with “How to Disappear Completely” after the demo phase. He wrote the song after suffering a minor mental breakdown over Radiohead performing at a massive concert in Ireland during the OK Computer tour.) Finally, with the Orchestra of St John’s—as Jonny played along with his out-of-tune ondes Martenot—they were able to re-create that Martian string section effect, only this time with an actual string section that could achieve a truly enveloping, beguiling swell.
It’s worth doing a quick aside on the ondes Martenot, an instrument that looms large in the legend of Jonny Greenwood. This strange device, which sounds like a theremin and looks like an ancient keyboard, was invented in 1928 by Maurice Martenot, a French inventor who played the cello and also worked as a telegrapher during the first World War. With that kind of résumé, it’s no wonder that Greenwood was attracted to Martenot’s namesake instrument. (If Martenot had been born in England in the late 1960s, rather than Paris in the late 1890s, he might have been in Radiohead.) Over the decades, he worked on perfecting the ondes Martenot, and also took an active role in teaching the first generation of musicians who attempted to play it. While his intention was to replicate the feel of a cello, the spookiness of the ondes Martenot’s alien tones became most associated with film scores, particularly for sci-fi and horror flicks. That is, until Jonny Greenwood fashioned himself as the Eddie Van Halen of the instrument.
For the British music press in early 2000, the job of reporting on Kid A required more than digging up arcane trivia on the ondes Martenot. The mad pursuit for every scrap of information about Radiohead’s mysterious new album mostly resulted in the sort of drivel that music journalists are forced to turn out when readers want content, no matter the lack of actual news to report. And yet Melody Maker was dogged in its pursuit of England’s most reluctant superstars. First, they showed up at Phil Selway’s house uninvited, and peppered him with questions about when the album was coming out.
“We don’t even know when it’s coming out ourselves,” he demurred.
Then they went to Colin Greenwood’s house. His girlfriend answered the door. “How did you know where we live?” she asked.
Then the reporter went to Ed O’Brien’s house, and Ed managed to sneak into a car before being accosted. But Melody Maker was able to corner Plank, also known as Peter Clements, the band’s longtime roadie.
“Is it good? Oh yeah, it’s very good,” Plank offered. What else was he going to say? “I’m reluctant to answer questions because I’m always getting approached by journalists,” he added.
What’s most striking when you read stories like this is that Radiohead still hadn’t fully shaken the pop-group residue from “Creep.” OK Computer had granted Radiohead a new level of critical reverence, but that didn’t prevent journalists from knocking on their front doors and harassing their girlfriends in the hopes of hearing a loose bit of gossip that they could plaster on the cover of the next issue. They still were the sort of band that music magazines wanted (and, for the sake of reader demand, needed) to dish about.
So much of what was being shared about Radiohead that spring proved to be closer to rumor than fact. Melody Maker procured a CD from a so-called shadowy trader that was supposedly making the rounds in Oxford, purported to be a bootleg from the sessions. The article mentions “How to Disappear Completely” and “Motion Picture Soundtrack,” as well as the elusive “True Love Waits,” that legendary white whale the band tried and failed for years to get right. (It didn’t end up on a Radiohead studio album until 2016’s A Moon Shaped Pool.)
“Radiohead 2000 won’t be making pop songs,” Melody Maker concluded. “It’s going to be orchestrated rock messed around with computers, looped and spliced adventures in sound, art rock for the people with funky jazz influences and white noise. Expect long, drawn-out experiments and beautiful journeys, with Thom’s voice more intense than ever.”
This was the narrative set forth for Kid A months before anyone actually heard it, and it’s amazing how much it still informs how the album is perceived. Though when you deconstruct it, the classification doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny. Is Kid A “funky” or replete with “jazz influences and white noise”? Not really. Not much beyond “The National Anthem,” anyway.
It’s difficult to hear Kid A as those in early 2000 imagined it would sound like. What is clear is that Radiohead’s new music wasn’t described in advance as an enticing or, you know, fun listen. Yes, it was “adventurous” and “experimental.” And it was expected to change rock music forever. But there’s almost a sense of foreboding in how many music journalists looked ahead to the next Radiohead record. It wasn’t presented as a potentially pleasurable experience. It seemed more like work.
The British music press wouldn’t get a real taste of Radiohead’s latest songs until that summer, when the band went back on the road for about three weeks in June and July.
The highest-profile gig was on July 1, at Meltdown, an annual festival curated by a different musician or industry luminary each year. In 2000, it was Scott Walker, the laconic crooner who had started in the 1960s as a teen-oriented pop star and later took a dramatic turn toward difficult and deeply fucked-up art rock on albums like 1995’s Tilt and, later, 2006’s terrifying post-9/11 meditation, The Drift. It was exactly the trajectory that Radiohead was attempting to follow, from “Creep” (which was initially mistaken for a Scott Walker song by the producers of Pablo Honey) to Kid A.
Out of twenty-two songs performed by Radiohead at Meltdown, ten were new. They opened with the cascading guitar shimmers of “Optimistic.” This had become the custom during the shows leading up to the festival. After two familiar favorites, “Bones” from The Bends and “Karma Police” from OK Computer, it was “Morning Bell,” another relatively accessible song centered on a Fender Rhodes electric piano not all that different from the lick from “Karma Police.” The most polarizing number from Kid A, “The National Anthem,” came in the seventh slot, after “Talk Show Host,” a B-side from the “Street Spirit” single that became a radio hit after it was remixed by Nellee Hooper and included on the zeitgeisty soundtrack to Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet in 1996. Then it was “My Iron Lung,” which had once qualified as a “difficult” Radiohead song in the wake of Pablo Honey, and now registered as a comfy favorite.
Radiohead followed this pattern throughout the set: always chase something different with something familiar. A double shot of “You and Whose Army?” and “Dollars & Cents” is followed by a mini–greatest-hits valedictory run through “Exit Music (For a Film),” “Lucky,” “Airbag,” and “Just.”
When you listen to the bootleg of the Meltdown concert, Radiohead seems pretty relaxed. Kind of remarkable, considering the importance of the gig and the fact that most of the audience didn’t know nearly half the songs on the setlist. Perhaps the band was heartened by some people applauding as they went into “Everything in Its Right Place” at the end of the proper set, as well as by the warm response given to “Pyramid Song” (then referred to by the tapers as “Egyptian Song”) at the start of the encore.
Surely there were hardcore fans following them from concert to concert. But live recordings of the shows the band played in Spain, Italy, Greece, and France that June had also already shown up on the Internet. Downloading those lo-fi, alluringly grainy live versions of future Kid A and Amnesiac tracks was the next best thing to hearing the studio recordings. Fans ate them up.
In the room, audience reaction to the new songs, judging from the tape, seems at least respectfully appreciative. Nobody is booing or expressing outward consternation with Radiohead’s new material. This was far removed from a “Dylan goes electric”–type tour. The vibe is loose enough to allow for Ed to tell a story about watching a nature program regarding the mating rituals of chinchillas. The female chinchilla, Ed relates, will urinate in the male chinchilla’s face in order to express her dissatisfaction. I’ve heard enough Radiohead live bootlegs to know that this is not the typical kind of banter one hears before they play “Paranoid Android.” An all-around fun show, in other words.
But when you read reviews of the Meltdown performance, you get a different impression. Writers for some of the UK’s biggest music magazines swiftly expressed their disapproval with Radiohead’s new material. Melody Maker picked up its own “no pop songs” narrative from the spring and weaponized it against the band, expressing their bemusement over the “two hours of mesmerizing confusion” the band had supposedly unleashed.
The magazine sniffed that seeing Radiohead live “is the musical equivalent of [a] mathematical formula—mind-blowing once you get it, but hard work in the meantime.” They added that “experimentation must be weighing them down… because it’s not until they switch the lights on during cosmic tear-jerker ‘Lucky’ that we can actually read the emotion in Ed’s face and feel fully engaged.”
“We wish your new stuff sounded more like the old stuff” isn’t the most forward-thinking of critical stances. But that was essentially Melody Maker’s position. (The best they could muster was deeming “Knives Out,” a straightforward minor-key rock song that could have been on The Bends, “almost catchy.”) And it was the stance taken by most other UK publications. “Many of the new songs betray origins as rehearsal-room jams—all looping basslines and unresolving riffs that meander rather than navigate surprising intervals,” wrote Mojo’s Jim Irvin. “Perhaps they’re wary of sounding too much like themselves.”
The New Musical Express wasn’t quite so scathing, though its dispassionate, almost clinical account betrays a similar lack of enthusiasm for Radiohead’s new material. (The most interesting part of the NME’s review is the claim that Yorke effected “comically phallic gestures with his guitar” during “The National Anthem.” Nothing remotely resembling this description appears in any other review I have seen of the show. You would think that Radiohead briefly transforming into Kiss circa 1975 would’ve been extremely newsworthy.)
Again, none of this really squares with what you hear on the recording of the show. It speaks to how much media narratives can shape how art is initially received. Perhaps British music scribes were expecting Radiohead to make their own version of a bleakly punishing Scott Walker album. Walker would eventually record himself pounding a slab of pork on one of his LPs. Upon its release, Kid A’s most virulent critics would accuse Radiohead of “pounding the meat” in the metaphorical sense.
The most famous tour that Radiohead did in conjunction with Kid A was the “tent” tour, a series of twenty-one shows in September and October played underneath a portable, 10,000-person capacity canvas structure free of any corporate branding. A literal rock-’n’-roll circus, the “tent” tour was inspired at least partly by No Logo, Canadian journalist Naomi Klein’s bestselling anti–big business treatise that swiftly became a crucial text for the emerging anti-globalization movement in the early aughts.
Released in December of 1999, right as Radiohead was mired in the deepest, darkest frustrations of the Kid A/Amnesiac sessions, No Logo first became associated with the band via Ed’s online diary. He name-checked the book twice in the spring of 2000, and the book eventually became a talking point in the band’s profiles connected to Kid A. Three band members apparently read the book, and No Logo supposedly was even in the running as an album title for a brief time.
“No Logo gave one real hope,” O’Brien later told Q magazine. “It certainly made me feel less alone. I must admit I’m deeply pessimistic about humanity, and she was writing everything that I was trying to make sense of in my head. It was very uplifting.” Ed, always the resident hippie in Radiohead, even attended a demonstration against the World Trade Organization.
As for Thom Yorke, he apparently grew tired of Radiohead giving Naomi Klein so much free publicity. “He bats away our questions about No Logo,” Q reported, “and shrugs that the book didn’t teach him anything he didn’t already know.”
He might have also blanched at those who gave the book too much credit for influencing the lyrics of Kid A. Or maybe he was trying to distance Kid A from proclamations that it was some profound political statement about the new century. The whole point of pursuing his “cut-and-paste” lyrical style was to free Radiohead songs of the need to mean anything literal. You could read a song like “Idioteque” as a song about the evils of consumerism. (“Here I’m alive / everything all of the time.”) Or you could experience it as the primal manifestation of a collective subconscious that just happened to come out of Thom Yorke’s mouth when he was in a recording studio. I suspect he would prefer the latter.
This is not to say that Kid A is meaningless, or that one can’t glean political or cultural meaning from it. It’s just that this meaning would never be intrinsic. The extrinsic meaning of Kid A, in fact, wouldn’t be apparent when it was released in October of 2000. It accrued, and evolved, over time, as the language of the album became less alienating and more intuitive.
The crux of No Logo’s argument is that it’s the responsibility of each of us to carve out a space that is free of corporate control, money, and branding. For a band like Radiohead, which was very much ensconced in the highest echelons of the corporate music industry, that seemed all but impossible. But the “tent” tour was an attempt by Radiohead to control its own environment in the physical world, just as Kid A was Radiohead’s bid to sequester itself from Muse, Travis, and all of the other bands that had taken up the mantle of majestic guitar-based rock in the style of The Bends and OK Computer.
Going it alone is easier said than done. Especially when you also have to be the focal point of the communion your fans share at concerts. For that reason, I find myself caring more about those seventeen shows Radiohead played before the “tent” tour, back in June and July of 2000, when they were playing many Kid A/Amnesiac songs for the first time. The run ended a week after that ambivalently received appearance at the Meltdown Festival, with three concerts in Israel. Though the climax was actually on July 4 in Berlin, when Radiohead played what many fans believe is one of their greatest shows ever.
The mood of that tour seems festive, like a much-needed holiday after being cooped up in various studios for so long. Ed, sadly, stopped updating his diary during this tour. His last entry was in Athens, Greece, on June 26. “A brilliant audience who exhibited great patience at hearing a set with nine new songs,” he writes, “and a band which ignored repeated requests for ‘Creep’ (understandable on their part, the requests that is, as this was our first visit) and ‘Pop Is Dead’ (cheeky bastards).” (“Pop Is Dead,” a non-album single from the Pablo Honey era, had been wisely cast aside from the band’s live performances many lifetimes ago.)
O’Brien added that he was drinking “vast amounts of alcohol,” like a proper rock ’n’ roller, and that he was happy about how well “The National Anthem” and “Everything in Its Right Place” were going over. Though the woozy and knock-kneed “In Limbo” was still “a little tricky.”
What’s apparent when you listen to recordings of the earliest shows from June is that Radiohead, unsurprisingly, had to ease into the new material. Contrary to what some of the London-based music critics believed, Radiohead clearly did not want to turn off their fans. When the tour opened on June 13 in Arles, a small artistic community in the south of France, they played seven new songs, though “Optimistic”—which became the tour’s usual opener—was slotted third after “Talk Show Host” and “Bones.” Then came two other chestnuts, “Karma Police” and “Planet Telex.”
They also played “Dollars & Cents,” arguably the most challenging track they played live that summer, and possibly the inspiration for the “rehearsal-room jams” complaint in the aftermath of the Meltdown Festival. (I used to hate “Dollars & Cents” but it’s now one of my favorites of this era. It sounds like Phish deconstructing one of Bernard Herrmann’s old Hitchcock scores—and I swear that’s a compliment.)
Tellingly, they didn’t attempt “Dollars & Cents” again until June 25, in Thessaloniki, Greece. While “Dollars & Cents” eventually became a regular presence in setlists, they steered clear of the most potentially off-putting new tracks: “Hunting Bears,” “Like Spinning Plates,” and “Life in a Glasshouse” didn’t make the setlist, while “Idioteque” and “Motion Picture Soundtrack” were saved for the fall.
If Radiohead’s goal coming out of the endless experimentation of 1999’s studio-bound hibernation truly was to kill every instinct they ever had about “big” rock music, their initial forays back into live performance must’ve seemed like utter failures. Because they still sound like the most awe-inspiring guitar band of their generation when you play those bootleg tapes. However, I don’t really think killing the “rock” aspects of Radiohead’s music was the goal. Maybe they thought that was the goal at some point. But on tour, they deliberately avoided playing the songs they knew would fundamentally alter the fabric of a Radiohead show. They knew, deep down, that you can’t change who you are. And that, above anything else, is what comes through when you listen to bootlegs from the summer of 2000.
Radiohead’s second concert in Berlin, on July 4, at a venue that held about 1,000 people, is the acknowledged high point of the tour. More than that, it’s one of the all-time great Radiohead shows, in which the band was still drawing on the anxious energy of playing scores of new songs to a mostly unprepared audience. And yet, by this point in the tour, they also had an obvious confidence in their material and didn’t feel as obligated to couch unfamiliar songs with reliable greatest hits.
Eleven out of the twenty-two songs played that night were new, including four out of the first five songs. The version of “In Limbo” is especially transcendent. And then there’s the staggering take on “Kid A” that absolutely destroys the version on the album.
The studio take is a low-key hum, like a robot voice sending a distress signal from the deepest reaches of inner space. Live, however, Radiohead made “Kid A” sound like an excursion into outer space, a positively huge and demented sonic explosion punctuated with a wholly unexpected harmonica breakdown, like Bruce Springsteen discovering Another Green World.
Radiohead didn’t play the spooky title track from their album all that much in 2000—it showed up six times on the summer tour, and not at all on the “tent” tour. The penultimate performance of “Kid A” that year was July 4. They had reached a peak and seemed to know it.
I saw a quote once—it must have been when I was in the midst of wasting several hours of my life on the Internet, and hating myself for it—that perfectly sums up the human condition for those of us who spend way too much time online: “The internet used to be a place where some people went to feel good about themselves. Now it’s a place where everybody goes to feel bad.”
Kid A now seems weirdly prescient about the latter statement. A tone poem about our “doomed-to-be-extremely-online” lives. But in the months leading up to the release of the album, it actually symbolized something entirely different. It made people feel good about going online. Kid A was a catalyst that provoked a subset of diehards to go on the Internet and commiserate about whether “Treefingers” was an ingenious homage to Brian Eno or the self-hating technophobe’s version of a space-filling rap-album sketch. Put another way: in 2000, this one was kind of optimistic.
For Radiohead, Kid A was an attempt to sidestep the mainstream media. They wanted to escape the burden of “meaning,” of signifying a specific idea that quickly becomes an albatross after being repeated 10,000 times, a fear ingrained from being a potential one-hit wonder. Here was a record that was as opaque as “Creep” was obvious. It was designed to find a discerning audience. Anyone who found it merely frustrating was not the sort of person worth engaging with anyway. In this way, the Internet would help Radiohead find the audience they wanted.
When Radiohead did give interviews, a recurring theme was their reticence to speak with mainstream music media outlets. “I think we’re generally not very comfortable with the hype that surrounds the release of the record, that’s one of the things that did our heads in with OK Computer,” Ed explained to the website music365.com. In the same interview, Phil added, “That kind of limelight is a barrier for music as well. People aren’t coming to it with an open mind. They’ve already had their opinions formed by it or are railing against those opinions.”
The Internet, at that time, was outside the mainstream media, that loathsome monolith dominated by corporations and groupthink. The online world was decentralized and fostered a plurality of voices. In 2000, Kid A didn’t seem like a critique of that world. The album in a way aspired to it.
For many people, including myself, Kid A was the first major rock album that was experienced via the Internet. Fans went online to read Ed O’Brien’s dispatches from the sessions. They could hang out on message boards to find out which songs were being played on the band’s summer tour. They went on file-sharing services like Napster and LimeWire and downloaded concert bootlegs.
Eventually, Kid A itself leaked. Leaks soon became commonplace. But 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.
I try to remind myself of how awesome downloading music used to be. Because now it’s about as thrilling as ordering paper towels from Amazon. The more convenient that downloading became, the less fun it was. In 2000, it could take an hour or two to download one song. And sometimes it wasn’t even the song you really wanted, as MP3s were frequently mislabeled. (I’m convinced that some bands built entire careers this way. Countless fans were no doubt introduced to Distorted Lullabies by Ours or Muse’s Showbiz while searching for Radiohead files. In some cases, you actually came to like the rip-offs.) Ultimately, you still had the theoretical ability to look up any song you wanted, for free, so who cared how long it took, or if you occasionally got the wrong free song?
This is probably the most exciting pop-culture period I’ll ever witness firsthand. It’s akin to what happened in Hollywood in the late ’60s and early ’70s, when the movie business swiftly moved from the “old” studio system to the “new” generation of Baby Boomers who ushered in a golden age of filmmaking informed by the aesthetics of European cinema and the idealism of insurgent hippie culture. In any documentary about this period, there is inevitably a clip of Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin singing in the misbegotten 1969 musical Paint Your Wagon, a saggy symbol of the decrepit studio system, and then a smash-cut to Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda riding motorcycles to the tune of Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild” in Easy Rider, also released in ’69. It’s the hackiest, and also the clearest and most instructive, way to depict the profound cultural shift of the time.
I love that period of cinema, but I was born right as it was coming to an end in the late seventies, just four months after the release of Star Wars. I was much older and far more lucid in the late ’90s and early aughts, when an even more dramatic and far-reaching revolution occurred in the music business. Just like in Hollywood during the hippie takeover of the ’60s, there were people who intuitively understood and accepted the changes being wrought by technology and changing generational attitudes, and those who pushed back. Lars Ulrich of Metallica, who became the unwitting poster boy for anti-Napster rock stars, was like Paint Your Wagon. And Radiohead was Easy Rider, at least as far as being associated with more progressive ideas about what the Internet could do for musicians and the music industry.
By mid-September, about two weeks before it was released, tracks from Kid A were available on P2P sites because Radiohead’s record company, Capitol, had already put a stream of the record online. The label designed a music player called iBlip that streamed the entirety of Kid A, plus other content that could be updated, including the latest Radiohead news, recent live tracks, links to preorder the album, and enigmatic videos that lasted between ten and twenty seconds.
Then Capitol made the player available to anyone who wanted to post it. Kid A was the opposite of an online exclusive—the smallest music blog had the same access to the most anticipated rock album of the year as Rolling Stone or MTV. More than 1,000 different sites posted the Kid A iBlip, and the album was streamed more than 400,000 times before it was released in early October.
A major record label allowing the public to sample an album ahead of time—and essentially paving the way for that album to be pirated online—was truly a radical experiment in 2000. I found out exactly how radical when I met Robin Sloan Bechtel, who was Capitol’s head of new media at the time.
Bechtel had already been working for the company in that capacity for seven years at the time of Kid A. Her progress at growing Capitol’s online footprint had been frustratingly slow. Her grandest achievements up until then included developing a Beastie Boys screensaver and launching a website for the metal band Megadeth. She also helped Duran Duran become the label’s first band to premiere a single on the Internet. But for the most part, few at the label cared about the web.
Bechtel helped to hatch the idea of streaming Kid A online several weeks before it was released. (She had personally heard the album under much more convoluted circumstances—Radiohead demanded that Capitol executives listen to the album on a bus driving from Hollywood to Malibu.) But it wasn’t an easy sell.
“Everything in the industry at that point was like, ‘The Internet isn’t important. It’s not selling records’—everything for them had to translate to a sale,” Bechtel told me. “I knew the Internet was [generating sales], but I couldn’t prove it because every record had MTV and radio with it.”
Bechtel eventually convinced Capitol to put Kid A on the Internet three weeks before release, though in retrospect she suspected that the label didn’t know “half the stuff we were doing.” When the album already showed up on Napster by September 13, Bechtel didn’t care—the streaming numbers allowed the label to track the listening habits of their customers.
It was a primitive form of the online-consumption data that companies would soon monetize in the years ahead. But for now, Capitol knew they had a hit on their hands.
One of those Radiohead fans who was illegally downloading Kid A that fall was a twenty-five-year-old rock critic living in Chicago named Brent DiCrescenzo.
“I remember sitting in my apartment at the time, at home, on a futon, with my laptop plugged in, and anxiously awaiting every download,” DiCrescenzo told me when I interviewed him in 2015 for the website Grantland. He remembers waiting an eternity to download “Treefingers,” and then realizing it was merely a brief interstitial track.
“It put so much importance on each individual track,” he recalled. “Like, I just waited an hour for this one song and it’s just an ambient song? Oh my God! This track is totally pointless!”
An Atlanta native, DiCrescenzo had moved to the Midwest in order to write for a relatively new and largely unknown indie-music website called Pitchfork. The site was founded in 1995 by a recent high school graduate from Minneapolis named Ryan Schreiber, who met DiCrescenzo on one of the music-geek message boards that they both frequented online in the mid-’90s. Originally called Turntable, Schreiber soon changed the name to Pitchfork, after Tony Montana’s tattoo in Scarface. Though the name would also signify the website’s early, irreverent style, which relished any opportunity to rail against the excesses and general lameness of mainstream rock and pop music.
After relocating to Chicago in 1999, Pitchfork started to move in a slightly more professional direction. But the site’s tastes and especially its style of writing remained proudly anti-professional. Like many Pitchfork writers at the time, DiCrescenzo despised the deferential, buddy-buddy, “color in the lines” style of rock writing that was practiced at major rock magazines.
“There really wasn’t a great music outlet,” he said. “In the early ’90s, I found most of my music watching 120 Minutes, reading Alternative Press, and reading Spin. All three of those things had become worthless at that point. Music magazines were going in a more pop direction.” He then added, with a sardonic glimmer, “Of course, now Pitchfork writes about Taylor Swift, so I guess everybody goes that way.”
As a writer, DiCrescenzo cared more about David Foster Wallace than Lester Bangs, whom he claims he hadn’t even read at that point. DiCrescenzo, in fact, loathed rock criticism.
“I just hate the really preachy, pedantic kind of music writing, where it’s trying to stroke its chin,” he said. “I always wanted to put into writing the feeling that the album would give you. If it was a serious, emotional album, I’d try to be serious and emotional. If it was a goofy, half-thought, dumb album, I’d try to write something that was dumb and goofy.”
From early on, one of the only mainstream rock bands that Pitchfork adored was Radiohead. Throughout its history, even as every other indie trend came and went and the site’s sensibility leaned more and more toward mainstream pop, Pitchfork would continue publishing reverent-to-worshipful reviews of the band’s records.
In 2000, few on staff loved Radiohead more than DiCrescenzo. He had seen them several times in concert at that point, often traveling long distances. In 1998, he road-tripped to Washington, DC, to see them at the Tibetan Freedom Concert. This was the year that a bolt of lightning struck a female fan while Herbie Hancock was onstage, causing her to go into cardiac arrest. (She was eventually resuscitated.)
That night, DiCrescenzo lucked into a secret show that Radiohead played in town at the 9:30 Club. They played “How to Disappear Completely” for the fourth time ever that night, after premiering the song just two months prior in Los Angeles. Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, who took it all in from the balcony as a newly minted celebrity couple, were famously photographed at this show, looking extremely stoned. A peak ’90s moment, and Brent was in the middle of it.
In the summer of 2000, DiCrescenzo traveled to Italy for one of the pre-release Kid A shows in Florence. There’s a reference to that concert in the most famous piece that DiCrescenzo wrote for Pitchfork, the perfect-score 10.0 review of Kid A. It comes in the opening paragraph, though DiCrescenzo doesn’t spell it out plainly. He doesn’t spell out anything plainly in this passage:
I had never even seen a shooting star before. 25 years of rotations, passes through comets’ paths, and travel, and to my memory I had never witnessed burning debris scratch across the night sky. Radiohead were hunched over their instruments. Thom Yorke slowly beat on a grand piano, singing, eyes closed, into his microphone like he was trying to kiss around a big nose. Colin Greenwood tapped patiently on a double bass, waiting for his cue. White pearls of arena light swam over their faces. A lazy disco light spilled artificial constellations inside the aluminum cove of the makeshift stage. The metal skeleton of the stage ate one end of Florence’s Piazza Santa Croce, on the steps of the Santa Croce Cathedral. Michelangelo’s bones and cobblestone laid beneath. I stared entranced, soaking in Radiohead’s new material, chiseling each sound into the best functioning parts of my brain which would be the only sound system for the material for months.
If a single review can be credited with putting Pitchfork—the most important music publication of the early twenty-first century, and possibly the last important music publication—on the map, it was DiCrescenzo’s review. Radiohead fans were eager to read any and all takes about the album as soon as possible, and Pitchfork’s review went up the day the album came out. In the days of treacherously slow print deadlines, same-day album reviews were still unusual in 2000.
But DiCrescenzo’s review was also different, in the same way that Kid A was different. For those who went online because they wanted an alternative to the establishment music press, Pitchfork gave them something they couldn’t read anyplace else.
The passage of time has made Kid A seem less polarizing. But DiCrescenzo’s review of Kid A has not been diluted in the least. It doesn’t seem like it’s “only” from the year 2000. It’s more like a review from the late ’60s, during the druggy early days of rock writing. Or maybe it belongs in the year 2060—a strange, exotic time in which the English language has been chopped and screwed beyond all recognition.
Some of the language in the Pitchfork review of Kid A is evocative—the opening of “Everything in Its Right Place” is likened to “Close Encounters spaceships communicating with pipe organs,” as “Thom Yorke’s Cuisinarted voice struggles for its tongue.”
Other lines, well, make no fucking sense whatsoever. “The butterscotch lamps along the walls of the tight city square bled upward into the cobalt sky, which seemed as strikingly artificial and perfect as a wizard’s cap” is not the kind of prose that any reputable music magazine or website would publish today. And, for the most part, that’s too bad.
What ultimately made Pitchfork’s review of Kid A required reading for any Radiohead fan in 2000 was its effusive, sky’s-the-limit praise. “Kid A makes rock and roll childish,” the site declared. “Considerations on its merits as ‘rock’ (i.e. its radio fodder potential, its guitar riffs, and its hooks) are pointless. Comparing this to other albums is like comparing an aquarium to blue construction paper. And not because it’s jazz or fusion or ambient or electronic. Classifications don’t come to mind once deep inside this expansive, hypnotic world… It’s the sound of a band, and its leader, losing faith in themselves, destroying themselves, and subsequently rebuilding a perfect entity.”
In time, Kid A would lose its ability to make twenty-five-year-old rock writers wax rhapsodic about its value as a game-changer. Kid A would no longer seem like a threat to the establishment; it would be the establishment. And Pitchfork similarly would move from the fringes to the very center of the publishing industry. Ryan Schreiber—who named his upstart music blog after a symbol for populist, outsider uprising—sold Pitchfork to the massive New York publisher Condé Nast (known for titles such as GQ, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair) for an undisclosed sum in 2015.
By then, the very idea of a music publication—any music publication—being a hub for a thriving counterculture had come to seem antiquated. It’s not as if some other upstart media outlet has come along to replace Pitchfork, as Pitchfork had come along to displace Rolling Stone and Spin in the early aughts. The very idea of a relevant music publication had… disappeared completely. As DiCrescenzo, who left Pitchfork in 2006, put it, “The new Pitchfork is just people talking about stuff on Twitter.”
Back in the year 2000, hearing a record for free before it came out, and then reading thousands of words written about it by people who were more like you than the typical rock critic, truly seemed revolutionary. It made you want to spend as much time as you could in the digital world, parsing songs by your favorite band with dozens upon dozens of strangers who had more in common with you than anybody in your “real” life.
Kid A didn’t register as a warning about the dangers of the online world back then. It was an invitation to a place that seemed better than the one you were in. We argued with strangers for fun. We laughed until our heads came off. And we swallowed till we burst.