In time, of course, Kid A would come to be regarded as a cultural landmark. At the end of the aughts, Kid A was named the best LP of the decade by Rolling Stone and Pitchfork. Was the fourth Radiohead record ever controversial? In terms of revisionist history… dissension over Kid A isn’t happening.
“Nobody admits now they hated Kid A at the time, the same way folkies never admit they booed Dylan for going electric,” rock critic Rob Sheffield once observed. “Nobody wants to be the clod who didn’t get it.”
But aside from Brent DiCrescenzo and his upstart Pitchfork peers, few in the press wanted to call Kid A a masterpiece in the fall of 2000. As Sheffield suggests, Kid A hate flowed freer than Kid A boosterism upon the album’s release.
In the UK, the media response was especially withering. Radiohead had won over skeptical British music magazines with the messianic grandiosity of The Bends and OK Computer, albums that would come to define the sound of British guitar rock for the next few decades. But as often happens to bands who put out instant classics, the love that the British press had for Radiohead’s early work was weaponized against their grand departure, Kid A.
The recurring complaint from British critics was that Radiohead had forsaken what they were good at (incredible guitar tones, operatic vocals, songs about totalitarianism that you can make out to) for this, whatever this was. At least two reviews used the same metaphor: Radiohead was now trapped inside of a proverbial bubble—cut off from the outside world, from human emotion, from the very things that had once made them great.
Select explicitly likened Thom Yorke to John Travolta in the 1976 TV movie The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, though the tone of the review was closer to Battlefield Earth. The magazine called Kid A “antiseptic,” scoffing that the allusions to Aphex Twin, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and an impending apocalyptic ice age were overwrought and obvious. “Hardly loveable, it’s nonetheless one of the year’s most interesting records—a tripartite mix of puzzlement, irritation, and pleasure,” Select concluded. “What’s not present is as important as what’s actually here. The main absentees, then, are choruses, coherent lyrics, crescendos and guitars: the very stuffing of OK Computer.”
This was one of the more thoughtful responses from the British press. Most English critics wouldn’t even concede that Kid A might be an interesting experiment. The overwhelming vibe was one of annoyance, a feeling of severe consternation that this band—which many UK critics hadn’t wanted to like in the first place, back in the days of Pablo Honey—now had the nerve to put out a record that seemed designed to make them hate Radiohead. This wasn’t music—it was a provocation, a finger-jab to the chest, an insolent “fuck-you!” move.
“For all its feats of brinkmanship, the patently magnificent construct called Kid A betrays a band playing one-handed just to prove they can, scared to commit itself emotionally,” the NME alleged. “And isn’t that what this is supposedly all about?”
If some UK music mags were merely bemused by Kid A, others reacted with scorn and even fury. “Well, I have to say that, upon first listen, Kid A is just awful,” wrote Mojo’s Jim Irvin, who proceeded to reiterate his “rehearsal-room jams” complaint from the Meltdown gig. “Too often it sounds like the fragments that they began the writing process with—a loop, a riff, a mumbled line of text, have been set in concrete and had other, lesser ideas piled on top.”
And then there was Mark Beaumont of Melody Maker, who wrote the most infamous pan of Kid A, calling it “look-ma-I-can-suck-my-own-cock whiny old rubbish.” It was the pinnacle of the impatience that British critics had with the album, and what it signified about Radiohead’s unwillingness to just play ball already and show the boys in Travis how it’s really done.
Above everything else Radiohead was suspected, oddly, of being insincere. You can’t be serious with this shit? was the prevailing feeling. The greatest guitar-rock band in the world doesn’t make an album like Kid A unless it’s trying to prove something. Right?
In the United States the reviews were predictably kinder. Yes, it’s true that Americans have a history of losing interest once their favorite British rock bands decide to turn down the guitar noise and make their “European” art records. But Radiohead was America’s first. Jimi Hendrix had to leave and become a star in England before he was accepted as a superstar in his home country. But the inverse was true for Radiohead—in the States, they went from the poorhouse to the MTV Beach House in almost no time at all. Thom Yorke was never a creep in America. He always belonged here.
While American critics were just as confused by Kid A as their British counterparts, at least they were willing to give Radiohead the benefit of the doubt. Billboard was among the most enthusiastic outlets. “On its fourth album, Radiohead now stands alone at the forefront of experimental rock with Kid A, defiantly tearing up the blueprints of guitar-based music and reassembling them in awe-inspiring fashion… It is, without question, the first truly groundbreaking album of the 21st century.”
Rolling Stone was more reserved but leaned in the direction of an endorsement. “Kid A is a work of deliberately inky, often irritating obsession,” wrote David Fricke. “But this is pop, a music of ornery, glistening guile and honest ache, and it will feel good under your skin once you let it get there.” Spin’s Simon Reynolds took a similar stance of qualified praise, admiring the album’s daring while also noting, in a somewhat mocking tone, that Radiohead took itself way too seriously.
“There’s always been something slightly uncool about Radiohead… Leaving hipster credibility to the Becks and Stereolabs, Radiohead lay their wares out in the stall marked IMPORTANCE,” wrote Reynolds, who concluded with some prescient prognostication. “Kid A is not the career suicide or feat of self-indulgence it will be castigated as. The audience amassed through The Bends and OK Computer is not suddenly going to vaporize: Part of being into Radiohead is a willingness to take seriously the band taking itself too seriously.”
The idea that Radiohead “takes itself too seriously” was already predominant in the conversation about the band during the OK Computer era, and had probably existed in some form from the moment that Yorke was heard singing “what the hell am I doing here?” on MTV. But it became permanently baked into Radiohead’s persona with Kid A, the band’s most overt “art rock” gesture.
In this way, the British and American press were united in depicting Radiohead as a band stuck in a kind of perpetual adolescence, forever obsessed with matters of personal identity and global instability. The implication is that the grown-ups writing about Radiohead were able to see these preoccupations for what they really were—kid stuff, silly and self-indulgent, the sort of dalliances you eventually move beyond with the benefit of perspective.
This was most famously expressed by High Fidelity author and occasional music critic Nick Hornby in a review for The New Yorker. Kid A, he wrote, “relies heavily on our passionate interest in every twist and turn of the band’s career, no matter how trivial or pretentious. You have to work at albums like Kid A. You have to sit at home night after night and give yourself over to the paranoid millennial atmosphere as you try to decipher elliptical snatches of lyrics and puzzle out how the titles (‘Treefingers,’ ‘The National Anthem,’ and so on) might refer to the songs. In other words, you have to be 16.”
In Hornby’s view, Kid A was basically just self-important crap for teenagers, the very thing that “Creep” had once been accused of being. “The music critics who love Kid A, one suspects, love it because their job forces them to consume music as a 16-year-old would. Don’t trust any of them,” Hornby concluded. “I suspect that people who have been listening to rock music for decades will have exhausted the fund of trust they once might have had for ‘challenging’ albums. Kid A demands the patience of the devoted; both patience and devotion become scarcer commodities once you start picking up a paycheck.”
I’ve always considered myself a Gen-Xer. But reading the reviews of Kid A reminds me that I’m actually a young Gen-Xer, and dangerously close to actually being a Millennial. Technically, I’m an Xennial, meaning I was born between 1977 and 1983 and share common characteristics with both generations.
For the most part, I think broad generational distinctions are dumb. Actual human beings can’t be reduced to archetypes based on when they were born. That’s not sociology, it’s astrology. However, every now and then, there are generalities that can be accurately applied to certain demographics. This is one of those times.
I wasn’t sixteen years old when Kid A came out. And I wasn’t yet a professional music critic. Here’s what I was: a twenty-three-year-old single guy who had been listening to Radiohead for more than 25 percent of his life. I was precisely the sort of person who listened to Kid A with extreme seriousness in 2000—and I did it without apology. I took it as a matter of fact that Radiohead was an important band, and that this was an important record. Because it was important to me.
Whether Radiohead took itself too seriously honestly never occurred to me. As far as I was concerned, they took themselves exactly as seriously as they should have. It’s like accusing your car of taking itself too seriously for starting up once you put the key in. Actually, the car is just doing what it’s supposed to do. And as far as I was concerned, Radiohead was supposed to make (yes) IMPORTANT albums like Kid A.
Like pretty much everybody else I knew, I was downloading music hand over fist. But I made a point of buying Kid A. I felt it deserved to be purchased. I wanted to play the CD while looking at Stanley Donwood’s foreboding artwork, taking in those spiky whitecapped mountains as I peered into that bloody, dark-red horizon. Was this a sunrise or sunset? Was a fire raging behind those mountains, or were we seeing the last floating embers of an already extinguished flame? I pondered these questions with the utmost thoughtfulness.
When you took it home, the CD jewel case felt heavier than normal. Eventually, you realized there was a second booklet behind the plastic disc holder. (If the movie had existed at the time, this discovery would’ve made me feel like Nicolas Cage in National Treasure.) Inside the booklet, there was a series of run-on sentences about climate change and fascist governments and the perils of globalization.
“WATCH THE WORLD COLLAPSE LIKE A DISCONTINUED COMPONENT IN A NEW OUTDATED APPLIANCE. YOU WILL SOON BE THROWN ON THE SCRAPHEAP WITH THE CORPSES AND THE FRIDGES AND THE CFCS + KILLERBEES.” This was definitely the most subversive purchase I had ever made at a Best Buy.
It’s hard to remember exactly how I heard Kid A in that moment, and what I thought about it immediately afterward. I don’t think I had heard any of the songs beforehand. I had only read about them, and what I had read primed me to expect something potentially alienating and even unlistenable. But this actually made me want to like Kid A before I pressed Play, which will seem counterintuitive only if you didn’t grow up listening to alternative rock in the ’90s. The bands I came up on were expected to make the “difficult follow-up to the smash hit” album. After Nirvana’s In Utero, Pearl Jam’s Vitalogy, and Nine Inch Nails’ The Fragile, I had been trained to expect a familiar arc—lots of poisonous pre-release buzz, followed by an album that was actually more accessible than the press had led you to believe.
That was more or less true of Kid A. I didn’t love Kid A as much as OK Computer, because I didn’t love any album as much as OK Computer. But I still really liked it, and I felt that way pretty much from the beginning. More than that, I respected it. I regarded Radiohead as my Beatles, and Kid A was their Sgt. Pepper move. The Bends had confounded me at first as a lover of Pablo Honey, and OK Computer briefly flummoxed me as an obsessive of The Bends. By the time of Kid A, I wanted Radiohead to fuck with me.
For weeks after I bought it, I listened to Kid A at least once per day. Even in the Wild West days of illegal downloading, you still didn’t have access to everything like you do during the streaming era. So, you were more likely to sit with the same album for several weeks. Plus, I considered the albums I bought to be an investment. You weren’t purchasing just a CD with your dollars, you were pledging a certain number of hours to that album to justify the financial setback. The accounting for time wasn’t specific, it was a gut check you administered to yourself. Have I put $16.99 worth of time into this album yet?
As I pored over Kid A, I fell into a ritual. I would usually listen to “Everything in Its Right Place” at least twice in a row, or sometimes just the first ten or so seconds five consecutive times. That opening synthesizer was just endlessly spellbinding.
I almost always skipped “Kid A” for the first several months, and then I listened only to “Kid A” after it was used with great effectiveness over the closing credits of a Sopranos episode. “The National Anthem” was an excellent track to play in the car, assuming I could get my janky Discman adapter to work. “How to Disappear Completely” was the choice headphone cut, especially after smoking a bowl.
Many times I would skip ahead directly to “Optimistic,” because I was still deep down a basic OK Computer bro. But “Optimistic” was also the gateway to the superior second side of Kid A. It was here that the constant criticisms about the album “not having any songs” completely fell apart. “Idioteque” wasn’t a song? “Morning Bell” wasn’t a song? Were these people even listening?
Kid A took on a different meaning one month later, when the Bush versus Gore presidential election came and refused to go. I would put Radiohead on headphones sometimes as I stayed up all night, night after night, and watched the news reports. In time, as some votes were counted and many more were discounted, the suggestion that an album referencing Animal Farm in the year 2000 was somehow beyond the pale instantly seemed like a relic of a more privileged time.
When critics claim that a band takes themselves too seriously, what they’re really saying is we’re too old to take seriously this thing that the generation behind us loves. Now that I am one of those music critics, I try to remember this whenever I write about a band like Twenty One Pilots, the Ohio-based arena-rock act that seems ridiculous to me but is profound to millions of teenagers. Talk to any of those fans, and they’ll tell you about the dense web of mythology that links each song on every Twenty One Pilots album, and how this is ultimately manifested in the onstage personas in the two (not twenty-one) core members of the band.
Frankly, it’s not something that I care about. But I appreciate how much it matters to them. They don’t take that band too seriously. They care about them just as much as I cared about Radiohead in 2000. It’s good to at least entertain the possibility that not having the time to invest in art means that you’re less qualified to comment on it. You are, at best, a tourist in a land that you will never be able to inhabit or even fully comprehend.
The reason Radiohead fans were passing around the Pitchfork review of Kid A was because it spoke to us on our level. (It was also hilarious, for not wholly intentional reasons.) Pitchfork didn’t qualify its praise or concede any of the criticisms made by the band’s detractors. The review was written by a guy young enough to believe that Radiohead had earned our devotion and therefore justified all of the time and headaches required to make, and then appreciate, Kid A. All of the mainstream critics were our big brothers and sisters, the people who thought they knew better but would forever be on the outside.
The Hornby review got passed around too—more as a rumor than anything else, a dispatch from the land of the clueless fuddy-duddies. You almost felt sorry for these people: how sad must it have been to not marvel at the exhilarating weirdness of seeing Radiohead perform on Saturday Night Live less than two weeks after Kid A was released?
Kate Hudson was the host that night. This was during her initial rush of stardom from Almost Famous, an epic about the twentieth-century rock mythology that Kid A had sought to put in the cultural rearview. Radiohead had been playing the new songs on the road then for about four months, and any early butterflies about how the material would go over were long gone.
Rather than play “Optimistic” or “How to Disappear Completely” or even “Morning Bell,” Radiohead went right for the thorniest bits from Kid A. First up was “The National Anthem,” complete with a screeching seven-piece horn section that sounded like a ska band dying a slow, painful death inside of a trash compactor. While Ed worked his Infinite Sustain guitar and Jonny plucked away on his ondes Martenot, Thom whipped his head in front of the mic for a full sixty seconds before singing a word. Later, when he started to dance during the climactic horn-section bloodbath, he flailed like a man being consumed from head-to-toe by bees.
But the performance that everybody remembers came next, when Radiohead played “Idioteque.” And what people remember the most is Jonny Greenwood playing a modular synthesizer, manipulating the cables to control the beats, though everyone thought he was actually directing long-distance calls on the East Coast in the year 1961.
Here was Radiohead doing what their critics said they shouldn’t do—not playing guitars, not playing beautiful melodies, not at all resembling a conventional rock band. Was this really happening?
“This is really happening,” Thom implored.
In the final sixty seconds, the song fizzled into full-on delirium. The beats accelerated. Feedback washed over everything. Thom was still fighting invisible bees but for a moment he seemed to be winning. It sounded like nothing but freeform noise, and utterly unlike anything that had ever blared out from Studio 8H, or any other network show.
If you got Kid A, it felt like the future—your future—had arrived.
A common complaint about Kid A for those who had seen Radiohead on the summer tour or heard the bootlegs was that many of the most Radiohead-like songs didn’t make the album.
For instance, during those early shows, “Pyramid Song” had been the most reliable showstopper, at least judging by the concert reviews and the enthusiastic responses that can be detected on bootlegs. The song was a cousin to “Everything in Its Right Place”; Yorke wrote it the same week, though he ultimately decided that it sounded better unadorned by the electronic fuckery that submerged “Everything.”
Fans originally referred to it as “Egyptian Song,” after it was performed publicly for the first time in June of 1999 at the second Tibetan Freedom Concert. The debut was stark and a little shaky, with Yorke playing alone at a piano to a quiet and fitfully interested audience, evoking John Lennon stripping himself back to the extremes of Plastic Ono Band. When Radiohead recorded “Pyramid Song,” it benefitted greatly from Phil Selway’s sensitive, swinging drumming, which recalled one of the song’s inspirations: Charles Mingus’s “Freedom,” from The Complete Town Hall Concert.
Two other regulars from the summer tour, “Knives Out” and “You and Whose Army?,” were also missing in action from Kid A. While neither song straight up replicates the sound of The Bends and OK Computer, you could place them on the same continuum as those albums much easier than “The National Anthem” or “Idioteque.” They are, essentially, pretty pop-rock songs with hummable melodies and easily discernible choruses.
Thom Yorke loathed at least one of those tracks. “For the longest time I really, really hated that song,” he said of “Knives Out” in a 2001 Mojo interview. “Knives Out” was already infamous for supposedly taking 313 hours to record, which Yorke said was the case “’cos I hated it so much.”
For those who viewed Kid A as a willful negation of Radiohead’s strengths, the knowledge that Radiohead had classic-sounding material on the back burner undoubtedly added to the feelings of frustration. Almost immediately, there was anticipation in some quarters—mainly the British press—for the next Radiohead album, which would include the songs left off of Kid A and, presumably, restore their status as a guitar-slinging arena-rock band.
That album, Amnesiac, came out just eight months later, on June 5, 2001. In England, Amnesiac was greeted as a corrective to its predecessor, sometimes in blunt, downright disrespectful terms. (“Relax: It’s Nothing Like Kid A” the Guardian promised.) In America, however, Amnesiac was praised but also treated as something of an afterthought. At least two publications, Spin and Entertainment Weekly, dubbed it “Kid B.” Rolling Stone conceded in an otherwise positive reviewed that the album can “inevitably, be heard as leftovers from Kid A.” Even Pitchfork gave it only a 9.0, a significant step down from the evangelism of the Kid A review.
As for me, I was bored with Amnesiac. In time, I would come to appreciate it as a lesser but nevertheless still pretty great extension of Kid A, the rare sequel that seems disappointing at first but gradually seems better and better each time you watch it. (It is The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift of Radiohead albums.) But in 2001, it seemed like the worst of both possible worlds for Radiohead—not a full-fledged return to ’90s guitar-rock splendor, nor a meaningful extension of the breakthroughs made with electronic and improvisational music forms on Kid A. It felt like both a retreat and an echo, a reminder of what Radiohead had just accomplished and a failure to either extend or transcend it.
Amnesiac is structured as the inverse of Kid A, which starts out weird and dark and disjointed and turns warmer and prettier and more welcoming on side two. In contrast, Amnesiac is ridiculously frontloaded. Radiohead seemed to be saying, “Oh, you want ‘Pyramid Song’ and ‘You and Whose Army?’ do you? Fine, take them off our hands. Now we can get back to the weird shit we really care about.” Along the way there is another skronky free-jazz song, “Life in a Glasshouse,” and another version of “Morning Bell.” Neither is as good as its companion track on Kid A.
Whereas Kid A works as a seamless mood piece, flowing from one song to the next with an unusual but unerring sense of interior logic, Amnesiac is all over the place. For years, I would drop out of Amnesiac after “Knives Out,” the midpoint and the unofficial conclusion of the “anti-Kid A appeasement” portion of the album. But now I find myself gravitating more to side two, which starts with the nightmarish redux of “Morning Bell/Amnesiac,” and then slips into the simmering malevolence of “Dollars & Cents.” By the time the album wraps with the migraine-inducing whirring of “Like Spinning Plates,” Amnesiac feels more like two EPs—one commercial, one experimental—that have been packaged together than a cohesive whole.
My biggest problem with Amnesiac is contextual. Radiohead knew they had more great songs than they could fit on Kid A. And they suspected that some of those songs might not work as well if they put them on the same record. They were also wary of putting out a double album—that bloated, old-world, classic-rock vehicle for conveying A Serious Artistic Statement, the sort of well-worn trope they were trying to escape. Right or wrong, Thom Yorke didn’t have any Billy Corgan–style megalomania in him, no matter his ample supply of mellon collie or his ability to conjure infinite sadness.
But putting out another album so similar to Kid A, their big break with their own past, was inevitably going to sandbag the sequel. No matter how good the songs were on Amnesiac, the boldness of Kid A was going to make those Amnesiac tracks sound worse. It’s hard to declare that you’re setting a course for the future when your next move is an album that pleasantly evokes what you’ve just done.
Again, once both albums were removed from their moment, the contradictions and tensions of Kid A and Amnesiac’s imperfect marriage would make them even more interesting. But the polarizing, love-it-or-hate-it immediacy of Kid A could only diminish the relatively safe Amnesiac in its wake.
A question that every Radiohead fan asks at some point is “Should Kid A and Amnesiac have come out as a single album?” A super LP that includes all of the best songs from both records—what would that look like, exactly?
Most of the time, the question goes unanswered. What right do we have to question our heroes? If they felt that the mountain of music they created through 1999 and early 2000 had to be released on Kid A and Amnesiac, then it was clearly the correct decision.
But let’s say, purely for the sake of conversation, that you are an A&R executive working for Parlophone in the spring of 2000. One day, Thom and Jonny walk into your office with a stack of tapes. We’ve had it, they say. We can’t figure out what in the hell to put on the next record. (Perhaps they would say “bleedin’ record,” because they’re British and this might be one of those stereotypes that proves to be true.) At any rate, they need you to help them turn this music into a brilliant, digestible fourteen-track record.
I’m not one to leave Thom and Jonny in the lurch. Therefore, I have made my own version of Kid Amnesiac. And I have to say: I think I A&Red the hell out of this. It’s not only the best Radiohead album, I think this would have been the best album of the aughts. Which is a pretty big deal, given that Kid A is already the best album of the aughts—at the very least, I don’t think that I made the album worse.
No question this was going to make it. It’s impossible to separate this song from this period in Radiohead’s career. Yorke warbling “Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon” over a sinister keyboard lick unquestionably defines the sound of this era. More than that, the conception, writing, and recording of this song is kind of the point of Kid A. However, the inclusion of “Everything in Its Right Place” means that Amnesiac’s very good but similar opener, “Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box,” has to go. If “Packt” were to make the album, it would have to go side 1, track 1, because it serves the same tone-setting role. (To make a Roxy Music analogy, Bryan Ferry is “Everything in Its Right Place,” and Brian Eno is “Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box”—two charismatic frontmen who ultimately can’t coexist in the same band.) Instead, it will have to live in an alternate universe with “beloved B-side that many fans insist should’ve made the album” status.
There’s room for only one free-jazz odyssey on my album, and I must go with the propulsive, rock ’n’ roll one over “Life in a Glasshouse,” the “draggy, kinda dull New Orleans jazz funeral” one. “Life in a Glasshouse” is one of my least favorite songs on either Kid A or Amnesiac. I don’t hate it, exactly—being one of the lesser songs on those albums only means you’ve fallen short of a very high bar. I just think that “Glasshouse” verges a bit on “experimental rock” self-parody. In a retrospective piece for Rolling Stone, Rob Sheffield called the horn section on “The National Anthem” a “cornier-than-usual art-rock cliché,” adding that the “‘bad horn section as symbol of alienation’ thing had been done a time or two before.” But I think that criticism actually applies better to “Life in a Glasshouse,” which is just one overly craggy vocal away from being a full-on Tom Waits homage.
After two defining Kid A mindfuckers, a sharp turn toward the majestic. Putting “Pyramid Song” in the third slot immediately alters the character of this mythical fourth Radiohead record. Kid A was purposely constructed to sound dim, monochromatic, and claustrophobic, creating a sensation that feels like being handcuffed to a bed in a darkened room. Once you put “Pyramid Song” in the mix, however, you have opened a window. The first two tracks here are all dread and foreboding; now, suddenly, there’s nothing to fear, nothing to doubt.
There’s something almost Zeppelin-esque about it. That’s partly due to the title: “Pyramid Song” slots neatly between “Immigrant Song” and “The Rain Song” on a playlist of tracks with self-evident fucking grandeur. I also detect a flash of “Kashmir”—Thom Yorke jumps in the river where there’s no denyin’ that Robert Plant has been flyin’ in similar waters, given that they both wound up encountering a moon full of stars and astral cars.
In the context of Kid A, “How to Disappear Completely” is the “normal-sounding acoustic ballad” track. But in the context of this imaginary record—which is a bit more dynamic and less centered on suffocating techno-horror—the oddness of the arrangement is teased out more. You focus less on Thom’s voice and guitar and more on the disoriented swirls of the orchestra that are slowly erasing him.
In 2009, Spin ran a takedown piece based on the tiresome premise that Radiohead is universally adored by critics, and therefore must be denounced as the boring and pretentious band that it really is. (Never mind that the very existence of a takedown piece instantly discredits the notion that “everybody” loves Radiohead.) At the core of the article is an argument that Radiohead is secretly a jam band, a designation that is automatically construed as an insult even if it’s never explained why it is insulting.
Even when the writer attempts to describe a recent Radiohead concert as tedious, he can’t help but make Radiohead sound amazing: “They kept going, one groovy tone poem into another, masterfully weaving beats, sound-washes, and misty vocals into an immersive experience of sound, light, pattern, rhythm, and utter, paralyzing boredom.” Somehow, only the “utter, paralyzing boredom” part feels incongruous and just plain wrong.
The fact is that Radiohead did flirt with aspects of jam-band-dom during the Kid A/Amnesiac era, most notably in “Dollars & Cents.” Though the model wasn’t the Grateful Dead, but the German rock band Can. Holger Czukay, Can’s bassist and cofounder, directed the band to jam in the studio, after which he would piece together the improvised music into songs. Radiohead attempted the same on “Dollars & Cents,” recording eleven minutes of noodling that Yorke later called “incredibly boring.” But then they chopped out about six minutes, added some strings arranged by Jonny that Thom felt were needed “to give it a sort of authority,” and this wobbly, unsettling song was born.
I couldn’t bear to split up the best pairing on Kid A. One is a straight arrow who plays by the rules. The other is a loopy rule-breaker of questionable sanity. What links them is a funky jam that sounds like the Isley Brothers sitting in with the Mos Eisley cantina band from Star Wars. I did move them together from the start of Kid A’s second side to the end of this album’s first side. Coming after “Dollars & Cents,” this feels like the appropriate conclusion to the “jammy” part of Kid Amnesiac.
My favorite B-side from this era, with all due respect paid to “Worrywort” and “Fog.” On this album, it goes from B-side to the top slot on side B. With its rollicking piano and barreling groove that keeps on chugging along for more than five minutes, “Cuttooth” always seemed a little too epic to be relegated to extra-track status on the “Knives Out” single. (It’s like U2 deciding that “Where the Streets Have No Name” would’ve been better suited as a B-side to “When Love Comes to Town.”)
It supposedly came close to making Amnesiac, showing up on a promotional copy that was serviced early to French radio. In his diary, Ed O’Brien writes about “Cuttooth” several times, describing it as “the song with little structure” where “the only certainty is a bass riff.” He likens the song credibly to yet another German band from the ’70s, Neu!, whose records uncannily replicate the sensation of flowing water traveling downstream.
In the spring of 2000, when the British press was speculating on what the next Radiohead album would sound like, there were reports that Jonny Greenwood was obsessed with Hatful of Hollow, the 1984 compilation of B-sides and BBC radio sessions by the most important British rock band of the 1980s, the Smiths. “Knives Out” was the only song to subsequently come out of the Kid A/Amnesiac sessions to even vaguely support this assertion. Though I don’t think it sounds that much like the Smiths—the only Hatful of Hollow track that’s comparable is “Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want,” though “Knives Out” doesn’t plead so much as seethe menacingly, in the style of Yorke’s old favorite, Elvis Costello. “If you’d been a dog / They would have drowned you at birth” sure makes those pleasingly jangly guitars seem a lot less sweet.
This has always been a dark-horse favorite on Kid A. It’s not the greatest track or the most adventurous or the one that best exemplifies this era. It’s simply one of the songs that I most want to hear, every single time I put on Kid A, because I never tire of it. It’s the best fusing of Radiohead’s classic ’90s “mid-tempo ballad” sound with the “forward-thinking” sensibility of the 1999–2000 sessions. It’s like “Karma Police” after a Bitches Brew phase.
In the studio, the band had to beg Jonny Greenwood to play guitar on “Morning Bell,” Yorke later claimed, because Jonny was preoccupied with putting his damn ondes Martenot on everything. Forcing Jonny to play guitar against his will has typically produced genius Radiohead moments going all the way back to “Creep.” In “Morning Bell,” there is no melodramatic ka-chunk; Jonny instead slowly releases his surliness like toxic fumes seeping out of a balloon, weaving tarantula-like lines in the song’s smoldering final moments.
Yorke claims that he wrote and recorded this song after seeing a ghost in his house. “I live on a beach and one night I went out on my own and looked back at the house and even though I knew there was nobody there, I could see a figure walking about inside,” he told Mojo. “Then I went back to the house and recorded that track with this presence still there.”
It sounds like the sort of story that became associated with David Bowie during his mid-’70s L.A. period, when he was snorting enough cocaine to keep all five members of Fleetwood Mac standing upright and having all kinds of dark hallucinations. But the only thing messing Yorke up was his ambivalence about his own success.
“When someone’s constantly trying to help you out and you’re trying to express something really awful, you’re desperately trying to sort yourself out and you can’t—you just can’t,” he said. “And then one day you finally hear them—you finally understand, after months and months of utter fucking torment: that’s what that song is about.”
The obligatory “political” song. The spooky echo effect on the vocal—which was intended to evoke the Ink Spots, a popular vocal group from the 1930s and ’40s who predated doo-wop—was created in part by something called the Palm Speaker. It makes “You and Whose Army?” sound like a prewar blues record, as future generations will come to understand prewar blues in the year 2900, when all humans are living on Mars.
When Radiohead first started playing “You and Whose Army?” in the summer of 2000, Yorke would pointedly dedicate it to Tony Blair. By the end of the tour cycle in 2001—at which point the world had been turned upside down by September 11—he was directing the song to George W. Bush. What started as a snarky tweak had turned into a fearful, and trenchant, prayer against self-inflicted mass destruction. That’s one hell of a journey for a song to take during the course of one tour.
Purists will protest about separating this song from “Morning Bell,” as that transition is nearly as perfect as “Optimistic” melting into “In Limbo.” But my instinct is to put “Idioteque” in the penultimate slot. It is part of the trio of most essential tracks from this period, along with the prominently situated “Everything in Its Right Place” and “The National Anthem.”
Just as Kid Amnesiac can have only one undeniable opener, it can have only one inarguable closer. It was either this or “Motion Picture Soundtrack,” and I’m going with the one that reminds me of experiencing a low-level tinnitus hum after hours of screamingly loud music. (But in a good way.)
“I think ‘Spinning Plates’ is the best of all the record for me,” Yorke claimed. “When I listen to it in my car, it makes the doors shake.” There’s also something fitting about ending this album with a track that is based on a backward recording of “I Will,” which eventually appeared on the next Radiohead record, Hail to the Thief. They probably nicked that idea from Revolution in the Head, Ian MacDonald’s book breaking down the recording of every Beatles song, which Yorke was reading during the sessions.
In their own way, Radiohead took twentieth-century rock music, flipped it over, turned it into a heady blur, and then charged forward.