Defining a Decade: Radiohead Kid A (2000)

10 Reasons why Kid A Transformed Music in the 2000s

10.  Have you seen Meeting People Is Easy?  Imagine being Radiohead and having the weight of expectation bearing down on you to deliver a follow up to OK Computer.  What other band could have created an album of such stunning beauty and originality as to dispel any possible comparisons to its predecessor?  Upon hearing Kid A for the first time, there was no point in even trying to draw parallels to OK Computer.  Radiohead bettered what many considered to be their masterpiece and in turn created a new benchmark that all their subsequent albums would be compared to, without diminishing the creative accomplishment of OK Computer.  Consider for a moment that…

09.  The entire second half of the album is a modern day symphony:  The funky closing moments of “Optimistic” takes what might have otherwise been standard Radiohead fare and turns it on its head; it then segues right into “In Limbo” whose rumbling exit sets up “Idioteque” perfectly, which in turns bleeds right into “Morning Bell”.  They almost broke up over the record’s final sequencing, but it was worth it in the end, because…

08.  No other album released this decade has been so perfect from beginning to end.  Kid A single handedly reclaimed the album as an art form.  There were no “official” singles released from it (although “Optimistic” became a de facto radio track).  Instead, Kid A was released as a whole product, and effectively gave the middle finger to the whole single-video-single-video way of releasing music that had prevailed since the early 1980s.  Not only did the album not have any singles…

07.  Some of the best moments on the record are the shapeless sound-texture experiments that on a lesser record would be nothing but mindless filler.  “Kid A” the song is about as far from what you’d actually expect pop music to be.  Even the more traditional sounding songs were born from the most unlikely of circumstances.  Take for example…

06.  The Ondes Martenot played by Johnny Greenwood on “How to Disappear Completely”, “Optimistic” and “The National Anthem”.  It’s an early electronic instrument created in 1928, similar to a theremin.  That’s what I call kicking it old school.  For all its reliance on technology and modern instrumentation, there’s quite a lot of references to more traditional music styles, like jazz.  You can hear the Charles Mingus influence on…

05.  “The National Anthem” and the eight-musician horn section from the St. John’s Orchestra, conducted by Johnny Greenwood.  Apparently, he didn’t know anything about conducting, so he would jump up and down when he wanted them to play faster and made gentle gestures when he wanted things to be calmer.  Tell me you can’t hear and feel the jumping around when you listen to it.  That’s wholly indicative of the recording process.  It was noted that…

04.  Kid A was recorded by a band whose members had to learn “how to be a participant in a song without playing a note” (Q magazine, October 2000).  Not only did the band re-define their sound, they re-defined the band itself.  Press photos that accompanied the album’s release were composite photos of the band members, over-layed and interlaced, creating completely new incarnations of Thom Yorke, Johnny Greenwood, Colin Greenwood, and Phil Selway.  So what better way to market and present the world with a new band and a new sound but through a new medium?  Kid A was–to the best of my knowledge…

03.  The first album to be primarily marketed via the internet with a series of video “blips”.  That was part of Parlaphone’s intentional publicity plan.  What they didn’t intend–or probably expect–is that the first live airings of the songs would end up on something called Napster, allowing fans to hear the new tracks, and sing the lyrics back to the band at subsequent shows before the record even came out.  The finished album leaked via the same network a month before its release, prompting Thom Yorke to say that “it encourages enthusiasm for music in a way that the music industry has long forgotten to do.”  Seven years later, they would release In Rainbows via their own website on a pay-what-you-want system that signaled to the music industry that things were never going to be the same again.  That paradigm shift extended to how the band presented the music to fans in a live setting, again breaking with convention by…

02.  Touring the record in a custom made tent without any corporate logos, and made a killing by playing mostly new songs that the audience had never heard.  However, what ultimately defines Radiohead’s fourth album as a pinnacle moment in the decade’s musical history is that it…

01.  Spawned the phrase “Pulling a Kid A” which would come to be used to describe any band that takes a huge leap into unknown territory.  It would be applied to Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Bright Eyes’ Digital Ash in a Digital Urn, and countless other bold and exciting records.  When’s the last time you heard someone say, “that band’s doing an In Utero“?

MP3: Radiohead “Kid A (live)”
Myspace: Radiohead

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