Album Review: "Kid A" by Radiohead

 Radiohead: Way Deep-A** Down Coal Miners of Classic Rock
Dec 12 '00 (Updated Apr 19 '01)

[NOTE: This review originally appeared at Epinions]

Author's Product Rating
Product Rating: 4.0

Pros
A Disturbing, Unsettling High Art Piece, Drenched In Irony

Cons
Won't Bring Up Your Mood Much I'm Afraid

The Bottom Line
The sound of HAL from 2001 slowly dying...and that's a good thing.

Full Review
Well, kids, you may be sick to the very rising of your gorge with the rantings of ol' Grandpa Rather_Ripped by now...about how he remembers when records were made on big plastic frisbees and played with a needle...how cars used to run on gasoline...how computers used to be made of wood...

But I'll skip all that and get to the album in question, KID A. If you're looking for a straight-ahead album review, you may want to move along to the next one. But if, like me, you like to dig a little deeper under the surface looking for slimy little subtexts, stick around. First, let's look at it in context with the whole Radiohead ouvre as a post-gen-X revisitation of classic rock.

If you listen to the first four Radiohead albums end to end, besides having extremely red eyes and a throbbing headache, you realize that it is a compendium of angst-ridden introverted stoner/glam rock deeply influenced by such bands our forefathers listened to as Pink Floyd, Van der Graaf Generator, Be Bop Deluxe, Roxy Music circa Brian Eno, etc. etc. This may seem frightening to you young revos out there (or just confusing to you kids who are too young to even know who I'm talking about)--weren't those the evil dinosaurs that "cool" bands people "like us" listen to were "supposed to destroy"?

Yes. And that's the delicious, twisted delight of KID A.

Johnny Rotten never could have put on an "I HATE PINK FLOYD" t-shirt if he hadn't at least once had a bad experience LISTENING to Pink Floyd. And I'm sure there are many of us out there who have, even those of us who have had good ones as well. KID A is quite literally a tone poem so closely resembling "Welcome To The Machine"-era Floyd it's scary. What they are demonstrating is that the natural progression of the bogus 70's nostalgia of a consumerism-overdriven youth culture too young to actually remember what an evil, despicable decade it was, is straight down a sodden pill hole into hell.

Many of us who wonder, "How the hell do we bring back the awakeness and aliveness of the punk era in the midst of this numb electronica-infested cultural torpor?" may do well to examine the profoundly ironic soundscape of this record. KID A is like the inoculation against a disease with the dead cells of that same disease. By showing the kids out there that, well, no, you see, the 70's style wasn't really about fun and hedonistic glamor, it was about suicide and decadence, KID A kickstarts a new level of pop-musical awareness. "I'm not here" says the answering machine-like voice of Thom Yorke, which flows easily into "this isn't happening"--insinuating that the technology we love so dearly has caused us to completely dissociate.

It also underscores an important point of divergence for Yorke and Co. from the original music they so ruthlessly plunder. While Floyd ranted on and on in a used-up and deadened 60's fashion about a faceless machine steamrolling over our lives..."It's, like, the system, maaan...", Our Lads step up to the plate like modern men do and take full responsibility in their songs. It's not about some ephemeral "them", it's we that have sterilized ourselves into the robot-like voices that occupy their songs. We're like 21st Century robocops staggering around wondering who we are and how we got here.

I hope that on the next album Yorkey and the boys jolly well pull the plug. These boys are capable of a full-tilt hard rock made-of-wood-and-stone (not plastic) album that would put Pearl Jam to shame. But maybe they have to go even deeper into the sickness to save us from ourselves...................

Recommended
Yes