When I was 15, I fell in love with Radiohead. I heard the song High and Dry and realized that they were far more capable than the song Creep, which I never liked in the first place. I told my dad “this song is so sad” and he told me that Radiohead were one of the quintessential “sad” bands. Thus began my decade-long infatuation with this band, the most well-loved group by hipsters and other music hobbyists. Fake Plastic Trees was the first song I ever learned on guitar on my own. Radiohead was my first “favorite band” and me loving Radiohead became one of my known personality traits throughout high school. My love for them has cooled in recent years, but I still have a soft spot for them in my heart.
Kid A, what is usually considered the pinnacle of the band’s lust for experimentation and a beautiful representation of artistic freedom, is a fucking disaster. I hate this shit. It’s completely disjointed, it’s bloated with cheap filler despite being less than 50 minutes long, and it’s nothing more than the band throwing at a dartboard while occasionally landing on the bullseye. Please listen to me.
After the success of OK Computer, the band was given permission to do whatever the hell they wanted. A dream come true for most bands, but this initially felt like a limitation, as chief songwriter Thom Yorke was suffering from severe writer’s block. Yorke and his mental illness was, and still is, vastly underestimated by the general public as well as the fans. A man who despised being in the limelight was thrust into it over a few short years, and he got there by writing songs about his own mental illness. Now his managers were demanding he write more songs about his mental illness. Brutal. He was clearly worse for wear. This resulted in two major changes to the songwriting process. For one, there is almost no guitar on Kid A. Yorke had been listening almost exclusively to electronic music in search of a new creative spark. The entire band upended their foundational structure with some roles being changed or removed entirely, as Radiohead’s three guitarists were writing songs with zero guitar, and some songs had no drums for Phil.
The other change is that he would write down strings of words on paper, cut them out, and assemble song lyrics by drawing them out of a hat. Classic dadaist move. An immensely popular band taking cues from that playbook is impressive, and I must respect it. But I don’t have to like it. Before this album, Radiohead often had lyrics that conveyed a sense of dystopia, hopelessness, or otherwise futile resistance. When the band finds a good tune, such as the interesting chord progression here, I find myself wishing they would back it up with more interesting, human lyrics. A juxtaposition between soulless instrumentation and intrinsically creative lyrics may be a chance to represent a human’s experience living in an evolving digital age, as Radiohead was at the time. At the time of Kid A’s release, the world had just narrowly avoided the Y2K “bug.” Much of the band’s marketing took advantage of the developing Internet technology. They knew how to write about the world in which they lived. And yet, on the iconic opening song "Everything in Its Right Place,” Yorke mutters “yesterday I woke up sucking on a lemon / there are two colors in my head / what was that you tried to say.” That’s it. That’s the joke.
Sometimes the band managed to strike gold. The first truly fantastic song on Kid A is How to Disappear Correctly. Lo and behold, it’s also the first song on the record that doesn’t have randomly assembled lyrics. It comes from a real experience Yorke had, one in which he was struggling to stay grounded and present while on a tour bus. He asked Michael Stipe of R.E.M fame for help. His response? Closing all the windows, shutting your eyes, and repeating to yourself “I’m not here. This isn’t happening.” Those two sentences form the basis of the song, along with string passages that are absolutely soaked in sorrow. There’s nothing robotic about it! It resonates entirely as human. Loneliness, alienation, invisibility. This lovely song represents one portion of how the album could sound if it had a stronger foundation of ideas, or a tighter structure. But it doesn’t, not in the slightest. This song is preceded by The National Anthem, whose selling point is an absolute traffic jam of a brass section and a bassline that Yorke wrote in middle school which, unfortunately, sounds like it was written in middle school. The song is then followed by Treefingers, a little ambient interlude, even though the album is so short that an interlude is unnecessary. There are satisfying songs on Kid A that are longer than Treefingers, a song in which nothing happens. It does not need to be there.
While How to Disappear Completely showcases the human side of the record, another song demonstrates the robotic side to perfection. That would be Idioteque: a song built on samples, a sequenced beat, and the cut-up lyrical technique Yorke uses throughout the record. It’s a very interesting take on the sort of “club banger” track that would be worked into DJ sets across Europe. The lyrics here are just as jumbled as most other songs on the record, and even though they don’t mean anything, they feel like they do. “Ice age coming, ice age coming / Let me hear both sides / We’re not scaremongering / This is really happening.” Despite it being completely unintentional, it seems like an indication of their future work, especially on Hail to the Thief, the most overtly political of all their albums.
Idioteque is an example of the other half of Kid A, the soulless mechanical side, working out very well. If only the whole album married this with the human side, but it doesn’t. Nearly every song leans too far to one side or the other. I firmly believe Kid A, even though it has a few fantastic Radiohead songs, is too disconnected and experimental for its own good. It feels like forcing something into existence when nothing had to be there at all. It’s equivalent to panning for gold. Sure, there’s some treasure to be found. But most of what you’ll find is a whole lot of dirt.
Tl;dr I think the album mostly sucks, but it’s Radiohead so it’s still kinda good. Idioteque and Disappear kick ass. In Limbo sucks. Treefingers pointless. Best version of Morning Bell. Ends weird.
