Lemon of the Gods: Radiohead and Kid A
(Originally published in Spring 2009)
That there, that’s not me.
It’s deeply uncomfortable, as a Radiohead fan, to recall the fivesome’s original moniker: On a Friday. Not because it’s an embarrassingly bad name, although it certainly is that. It’s uncomfortable because it’s specific, tied down to a particular corner of the Earth and to five people we’ve all been better off not thinking of as human: five British blokes naming themselves after the only day they could practice. The only day the rest of a decentralized, messy planet massive beyond the expressive powers of anyone besides rock bands would let them get together and play. Humans like any other: ignorant of most things, thinking in shades and vague images, full of mistakes and bad jokes and memories of that time, that place. As Radiohead fans, we don’t like thinking about the band as merely one shade of a paralyzingly huge world. We put them above it all, watching like gods with voices but not faces, scornful but unifying, not taking sides among us. Orderly, well-maintained, adult, belonging to nothing yet encircling it all. The name Radiohead: no angles to play off of, no hint of a given time or location. Cool, elevated, everything in its right place.
Cut the kids in half.
The band that would become Radiohead came out of the Britpop movement of the early and mid-1990s, one of the earthiest movements in pop music history. Not “earthy” in the American sense, with its dirt and five o’clock stubble. These were British bands, full of breathy accents, rhythm sections more indebted to disco than to the blues, and lines like “We don’t look the same as you, we don’t do the things you do, but we live around here too.” You weren’t even supposed to get Pulp or Suede unless you were like them, let alone revere them as gods and play them for your kids. There was nary a hint of the universal appeal and stadium-sized grandeur increasingly common in American rock—for all the comparisons Oasis earned to the Beatles and the Stones, the brothers Gallagher and their cohorts don’t play like the greatest band in the universe. They play like the most accessible one, like potential best mates you could easily see puking on you amiably after a long night of lager. “Earthy”, in the sense that they came from Earth, rather than sent as the Hammer of the Gods.
We’ve got heads on sticks.
Around the time of Radiohead’s first album, Pablo Honey, the band released a poster featuring singer Thom Yorke flipping us the bird. Ironically, it’s powerful only because it seems so inauthentic in retrospect for Yorke to be angrily taking a side rather than wallowing in millennial dread. It’s deeply uncool, and far from what one generally associates with Radiohead. Perhaps this is why the Radiohead story tends to neatly snip Honey out as an inconvenient outlier, a messy protrusion to be corrected. Then the story gets to begin with The Bends, whose flawless guitar lines and undeniable songwriting cast the band as a product of the ether. By comparison, their Britpop contemporaries look like squabbling mortals, each only a corner of the whole Radiohead encompassed so easily.
I introduced someone to Radiohead through The Bends. The first few times they listened to it, Thom Yorke’s voice made their throat close up painfully. I was flabbergasted, not just because it was weird, but because I had gotten so used to the traditional talk on Radiohead: the colossal grandeur, the nonspecific, relatable dread and paranoia, the sheer irresistibility of the vocals and guitars. How could there be such an outlying, individual, mortal reaction?
Eventually, their throat stopped closing, and they got around to liking the band. They didn’t realize Radiohead was British until I told them.
Ice age coming, ice age coming.
On the same day Radiohead released OK Computer, the Verve released their single “Bittersweet Symphony.” The wall of strings, the ascending melody, the absolutely neutral classic-rock drumbeat, all add up to a song without gravity, in either sense. It hovers in the clouds, where everyone can marvel at it but never touch it. It’s absurdly appropriate that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards wrote the lyrics: “Symphony” is edge-less enough to float pristinely beside its fellow giants on watered-down classic rock radio. Why shouldn’t it be there? Nothing about it would keep it here with us.
This was 1997, and British pop music was rapidly changing. Pulp had gotten, if possible, more difficult to market. Blur had released an unstoppable single with the least specific title ever and a riff ripped straight off the Pixies, Nirvana, and Weezer. Oasis’ suckiness had become officially impossible to ignore. There was a hole to fill, and dear God did it get filled. The big-beat spazzes and the Spice Girls divided audiences between fervent acolytes and the haters that grew louder every day. The latter were Boomers and the ever-ready imitation Boomers, dismissive of singles, techno, and the flighty, sensational pleasures of pop. There will always be a market for those who disdain pop music culture post-London Calling, even if they were born in 1982. These people bought the Verve’s Urban Hymns in droves, but it was OK Computer that made them sing to the heavens.
I’m on your side, nowhere to hide.
OK Computer is arguably the single most adored LP since Kurt Cobain died and evidently ended the great revival of rockist Boomer values (those guys are way into symbolism, you see.) It was a big, guitar-driven, highly conceptual Work that betrayed grim ambition and classical virtuosity. It was everything to get behind and more, if you hated everything about big-beat and teenybopper and emo—in other words, if you hated populism and music from Earth. It didn’t take sides with a particular generation or side of the Atlantic—even its supposed anti-technology dread was vague enough to fit any general sense of alienation. OK Computer, then, was the last great message from the gods, the final gasp of whatever random drunk spirit last inhabited ambitious, world-conquering rock and roll.
Because arguably the most revered and brand-creating of 21st century rock bands consists of a drummer who can barely play and a singer who can barely sing—for all that the White Stripes nick riffs from Physical Graffiti and Exile on Main Street, their music is largely ambition-free, and their Elephant’s platinum status was widely viewed as an incredible fluke. The Internet has decentralized it, the ease of self-made laptop music has trumped it, and the refreshing minimalism and accessibility of modern guitar music has humanized it—rock and roll, more than 30 years after punk predicted, has completely dropped out of the domain of the gods.
I think you’re crazy…maybe.
In the first year of the new millennium, as these events began to lock into place, Radiohead allowed Napster to stream their follow-up to OK Computer. The criticisms began to roll in, and what was interesting was that they came from those at the vanguard of the file-sharing revolution as well as from those who had seen OK Computer as the endgame of good music. Obviously, an album that largely abandoned the Floyd/Bowie guitars and classic-golden throated vocals of their earlier work was going to piss off the rockists, who had seen Radiohead as their last hope. This was an album with dominant synthesizers and openly fucked-with vocals. But many of the techno kids seemed just as underwhelmed. They had spent hours in front of their monitors, wrestling with agonizingly slow dial-up downloads, for the sake of a motionless ambient instrumental named “Treefingers” and a deconstructed, barely-there ballad aptly titled “How to Disappear Completely.” They had put together the new Radiohead together piece by piece, and it didn’t feel like a revolution. Anyone who had ever listened to Brian Eno or Aphex Twin already knew this kind of sound, and outside of “Idioteque,” none of the songs were remotely danceable. The album’s catchiest, most conventional track—“Optimistic”—was not released as a single.
So it was too electronic and non-anthemic for some, and not progressive or digestible enough for others. So what was it, then?
Yesterday I woke up sucking on a lemon.
Almost everyone missed the point with Kid A. It was not a massive evolutionary step for modern music. Nor was it a mediocre, half-baked hybrid crossover attempt. It was not consistently steeped in electronic music. It was not more challenging than OK Computer—after all, deified rock albums are not necessarily easy listening.
It was not robotic or distant or emotion-free. And while, like OK Computer, it didn’t take sides, it didn’t do so by towering above it all as a pristine monolith. It was among us, part of our ears, brains, hearts, and inboxes.
It was emblematic of its era, something those who had bestowed OK Computer with the double-edged sword of “timelessness” failed to understand as a plus. 90s pop music post-Nevermind was an explosive culture war, as waves of hype-backlash sprang up for grunge, g-funk, pop-punk, trip-hop, East Coast hip hop, big-beat, alt-country, and Ricky Martin. There was more music than ever, and some rarities earned consensus (OK Computer chief among them), but the battle lines were largely rigid. Indie kids took pride in not dancing. Old Deadheads worshipped Eddie Vedder and bemoaned rap. Beck’s Odelay was viewed as the triumph of exclusive slacker “irony” rather than the ahead-of-its-time genre-buster it was. Weezer’s Pinkerton simultaneously earned the most rabid haters and most devoted fanbase of the decade.
Now, we still have our niches, but they’re incestuous, constantly evolving, and absurdly numerous. Everything is decentralized, and we’re somehow more relaxed even as we grow more obsessive. Hipsters learned how to dance and then promptly forgot, and pretty much everyone amiably agrees that Is This It was a damn good record.
Kid A predicted all that, which is why it’s culturally, rather than sonically, progressive. It’s a record that sprawls horizontally, rather than following the great upward peaks of the genres it absorbs without reverence. Sonically, it pulls together disparate strands of Warp Records fuzz, jazzy dissonance, and its own dense, gorgeous discography into a whole that carries weight without ever seeming aloof or manipulative. It means something, but it refutes every classic-rock ideal of full-band virtuosity and portentous lyrics. It came at the beginning of the greatest DIY period in music history, and every inch of it was made by humans, with in-jokes and fragmented passions and a deep desire to tear into and remake the canon. For a record endlessly criticized as inscrutable, made by a band so often misinterpreted as pretentious, it’s the greatest coup in pop music history. On a Friday’s material may have sounded closer to Pablo Honey, but the spirit of that band is most clearly preserved in Kid A, the great humanist record of the new millennium.
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