Future dystopias look that way only from a distance. When you’re actually living inside of one, it feels more like… a late-night talk show.
In the year 2019—the setting, coincidentally, for Blade Runner, the 1982 Ridley Scott film that most influenced how a generation of kids, burnouts, sci-fi freaks, and English rock musicians envisioned the future—the talk show in question is The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. And tonight’s guest is the tiny, wizened singer for the most respected rock band in the world.
With his long, sandy brown hair and mostly gray beard set against delicate, almost feminine features, he comes bracingly close to resembling a younger, more agitated Willie Nelson. But when he strides out from stage left to the half-enthusiastic applause of an audience partly stocked with Radiohead fans, Thom Yorke doesn’t exactly strike one as having a stoned, Zen-like presence. He’s fairly relaxed for him, casually dressed in a black jacket, black pants, and white sneakers with no socks. But otherwise his vibe is reminiscent of a lyric from the song “Talk Show Host,” which he wrote nearly twenty-five years prior: “I want to be someone else or I’ll explode.”
But Thom doesn’t explode. Instead, he shakes Stephen Colbert’s hand, takes a seat, and attempts to approximate the affable demeanor of a normal late-night talk-show guest. But he can’t quite pull it off. His banter game is inadequate. He looks down a lot. Picks lint off of his pants. Falls easily into awkward pauses.
When Colbert asks Thom—at the request of his sons, who are apparently huge Radiohead fans—for his favorite R.E.M. song, Yorke mumbles so low that Colbert asks him to repeat his answer.
“‘So. Central Rain,’” Thom says again.
Colbert nods and smiles. Then he pivots hard to the first question of the interview.
“For decades you’ve been writing music that is uneasy and anxious with regards to society, our government, technology, the general direction of the world,” Colbert says, carefully setting up his punch line.
“How does it feel to be right?”
The audience bursts into applause. Thom chuckles, but it’s one of those chuckles where you laugh because it’s true, not because it’s funny. It is decidedly not funny, in fact, but what can you do but laugh?
If a time traveler from the early aughts had somehow ended up in the studio audience that night, she might have noted the oddness of Thom Yorke’s walk-on music: A lounge-jazz, sorta-peppy rendition of one of Radiohead’s most pulverizing and—here’s a word forever linked to Radiohead—bleakest tunes, “The National Anthem.”
There are no vocals, so the audience is spared the Thom Yorke lyric that truly seemed prescient nearly two decades later, during a time when the apocalypse has been reduced to fodder for tweets, stand-up comedy, and campaign commercials: “Everyone is so near / Everyone has got the fear / It’s holding on / It’s holding on.”
When you live inside of a future dystopia, you can’t really stop and comment on the omnipresent bleakness. When “bleak” is right there, it is no longer bleak. The fear is so near you can’t even see it. It is just… normal.
Cue the APPLAUSE sign.
While Stephen Colbert didn’t mention it by name, the Radiohead album that most epitomizes the “music that is uneasy and anxious with regards to society, our government, technology, the general direction of the world” is Kid A, the band’s fourth LP, released in 2000.
Kid A was the first Radiohead album to top the charts in the United States, and in Britain—where the band had initially struggled to find an audience, even as “Creep” made them stars in the States in the early ’90s—it went platinum within just one week. Kid A later won a Grammy for Best Alternative Album, along with garnering a nomination for one of the night’s top honors, Album of the Year. It was the band’s second nod in that category, after OK Computer in 1998.
In time, Kid A would come to be regarded as one of the best albums of the aughts, and then a defining record of the early twenty-first century. Even as rock music receded from the mainstream of music culture, Kid A remained one of the only rock records to be considered truly important, a landmark touchstone for the modern era.
And yet these statistics and accolades belie what was, in the fall of 2000, a highly contentious release. Kid A was Radiohead’s grand digression from the guitar-rock splendor of their previous two albums, 1995’s The Bends and 1997’s OK Computer. A chilly, insular work in which the band’s melodic, larger-than-life dynamics were muted, and the catchy choruses were garbled like dial-up signals. A self-consciously “difficult” work meant to usher Radiohead into a new century, though it also struck many listeners as merely a pretentious, anti-pop provocation.
“Kid A is like getting a massive eraser out and starting again,” Thom Yorke declared upon the album’s release. “I find it difficult to think of the path we’ve chosen as ‘rock music.’”
While critics were divided on the merits of Kid A, the passion of those who hated it outweighed the relatively cautious regard of its admirers. The most memorable pan dismissed Kid A as “tubby, ostentatious, self-congratulatory, look-ma-I-can-suck-my-own-cock whiny old rubbish.” While other reviews weren’t quite that insulting, the skepticism of music writers toward Kid A nonetheless was pronounced, and often withering.
Fans were also polarized. Some felt Kid A was a bold experiment that pushed Radiohead into an exciting new sonic dimension, while others lamented that the finest guitar band of their generation had abandoned what they were best at—stirring, arena-filling anthems.
What couldn’t be denied is that Kid A, love it or hate it, was very much a product of its moment. It was the definitive musical statement about how it felt to live at the start of an uncertain new era, right after the end of an old, fraught one. In that way, it was tied to the cinema of the time. Movies like The Matrix, Fight Club, and Vanilla Sky arrived between 1999 and 2001, and were infused with deep apprehension about modernity and how technology disconnected people from one another, as well as a core essence of themselves.
For those of us who treated the album as an event, Kid A signified a cultural turning point. Even if you didn’t get the how of Kid A, you intuitively understood the why. It was a confusing album for a deeply confused time.
The anxiety at the start of the twenty-first century wasn’t unique. In the late 1800s, the French called it fin de siècle, which translates simply to “end of the century,” but more broadly describes the pervasive feelings of wariness and pessimism about the onset of the twentieth century. For citizens of the late nineteenth century, this ennui was driven by the changes wrought by the Second Industrial Revolution, in which new systems—including railroads and telegraphs—were implemented that connected people across vast tracts of land like never before, in a way that must have felt as revolutionary as the dawn of the Internet seemed one century later.
People in the late 1800s also felt unmoored by works of scientific scholarship like On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin’s 1859 book postulating that evolution, and not God, was the guiding force of the human race. What if God… wasn’t real? What, then, was the point of life? Was there a point at all? If we are really just semi-intelligent beings descended from monkeys, what makes us special?
Numerous religions historically had already attached apocalyptic significance to the end of a millennium, believing it was a time of judgment and deliverance. But the sense that foundational ideologies, if not an entire way of life, were in the process of being dismantled as the year 1900 loomed must have felt overwhelming. What could possibly lie ahead?
Everything, all of a sudden, was not in its right place.
The artists of the time put these collective worries into their work. One of them was a twentysomething English writer who wrote prolifically in a number of genres and styles. Though in time, H. G. Wells would become known as one of the early progenitors of science fiction. In 1895, he serialized one of his most famous stories, The Time Machine, about a scientist who travels to the year 802,701 and discovers that society has been divided into a rich class of pampered and innocuous creatures called the Eloi and a subterranean group of ill-mannered and impoverished monsters called the Morlocks.
In the manner of all classic science fiction, The Time Machine was actually a commentary on the present, reflecting Wells’s socialist critique of how industrialism and emerging technologies were dehumanizing the populace, deadening their souls as they robbed them of dignity and agency. It proved to be influential in the “Dying Earth” genre of sci-fi, preoccupied with end-times stories about how modern-day dysfunction eventually leads to Armageddon in the distant (though sometimes not-so-distant) future.
We never tire of telling ourselves these stories as we fret about our own destinies. For rock fans who came of age during the first two decades of the twenty-first century, Kid A was our version of this ancient, recurring narrative. A forward-thinking work that at some point stopped being about the future as it gradually came to strongly evoke everything vital and terrifying and unknowable about now.
When I think back to the release of Kid A, what once was up is now down. In 2000, record labels still cared about selling physical CDs by a rock band, and the Internet was a utopian place in which fans gathered to share esoteric music. As for Thom Yorke and his compatriots, they seemed to be leading the charge for a new kind of music that would finally bury classic rock.
Two decades later, the opposite of all these things is true. The record industry has all but given up on physical sales, in order to focus on streaming. The Internet is oppressive, fostering division and inflaming entrenched resentments. And Radiohead is the epitome of an arena-filling, classic-rock band that was finally inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2019.
How did this happen? Why did it happen? And what, exactly, is happening?
This book is a detective story. And like all detective stories, it is rooted in obsession—in this case, with an album that has remained a touchstone for members of my generation for two decades. In another nod to Raymond Chandler, this tale is also a bit convoluted, with three intertwining narratives that ultimately connect into a single plot—about Radiohead, the record industry, and the Internet.
Musically speaking, Kid A isn’t the most influential album of the twenty-first century, nor does it come close to approaching the sales of the most popular music of its time. Kid A is not even the most beloved Radiohead album of the past twenty years—that distinction probably belongs to 2007’s In Rainbows, the LP that was embraced by Millennials in the same way that OK Computer remains a touchstone for Generation X.
And yet Kid A transcends all of these trends and debates, because what it embodies goes beyond just music. In terms of the culture and mood of the times, Kid A is the most emblematic album of the modern era.
To explain why that is, we need to go beyond just the record. It’s important to look at Radiohead’s career before Kid A, and the band’s path after the album, to understand that Kid A stands at the fulcrum of Radiohead’s work. It’s also vital to explore the state of the record industry before and after that record, and the ways in which Radiohead influenced the gradual shift from the physical world to the cloud. And we must also discuss the Internet, and how it has fostered the widespread communication breakdown that Kid A signaled.
Along the way we will celebrate Kid A, as well as critique it. But we will also revisit parts of our own lives that have since been lost—often without us noticing. Because as much as Kid A enticed listeners in 2000 because it seemed to herald an exciting, shadowy future, we keep returning to Kid A all these years later because it radiates like a beacon illuminating distant versions of ourselves. What is this record still trying to tell us? Maybe it’s not too late to heed the warnings of Kid A.
Now, is it possible that I take Kid A way too seriously? It’s not possible—it is certain. But I’m guessing you take Kid A way too seriously too. If there are thousands of other people like us out there, maybe we truly can pull something profound out of the fourth Radiohead record—about the band, our world, and us.
So, punch up Kid A on your preferred streaming platform. Push the Play button. Let that menacing synthesizer riff from “Everything in Its Right Place” wash over you. Detect the clutter of the multi-tracked, electronically altered vocals. Feel the tension rise in your body, along with (perhaps) a rush of nostalgia.
Pleasure and discomfort are now commingling freely. This is the past, present, and future coming together—your life as a pessimistic rock record laced with the hope of an escape route and the fearful suspicion that all roads ultimately lead back to captivity.