Kid A Is still the greatest album of all time
Just checked. It’s still the case. Just thought you should know.
Comments
Having over the past 2-3 months made a conscious effort to more thoroughly absorb and make a more concerted go at trying to “get” their post OK Computer output, coupled with the live show, I’m definitely more on board with what they’re doing. However I have to say that Kid A and Amnesiac with a few exceptions still feel too much like a band trying too hard to act out (so to speak) but ultimately missing. I think Hail and Rainbows are definitely more fully realized albums that more effectively cover the ground that it seems like they want to.
Having gotten familiar with a lot more of their influences over the years, from Ligetti to Lansky to Coltrane to Can, it sounds much more to me like them finally making the album they wanted to make (or at least, Greenwood and Yorke wanted to make). The songs aren’t just some band just trying to be weird for the sake of being weird. It’s what they were listening to. It’s five guys who holed up in a studio for a year listening to all their most favorite and most unique music and letting it come out naturally.
I think the perfect evidence is the whole end of National Anthem. It’s weird, it’s atonal, it’s totally jarrying, and it completely and absolutely fits the music. It’s perfect. It’s not the result of someone going “you know what would be crazy?” It’s the result of saying, “You know what this needs?”
All over the album, that keeps happening. Things pop up that are exactly what the song needed, but that a more inhibited band might have shirked away from.
I still think a lot of it despite being awesome still feels forced. Like when a teenager discovers a new band or a new style of music and then EVERYTHING is about that and they become a caricature of that thing and try to hide that a few years earlier they weren’t into that thing. And if their earlier albums or their earlier interviews and press stuff had any indications that they were really into all that stuff all along but were hiding it then I might buy it. I just think that slightly before or after O.K. Computer they really delved into all that stuff you mentioned and Kid A is the sound of them playing with their shiny new toy. I just think the 2 more recent albums have much more of a sense of “O.K. we used to do that, and that’s o.k….. and then we did more of this, and that’s o.k. too….and we don’t need to prove anything to anyone….so let’s try and combine them and show the whole thing.” That clicked with me when they did that Radiohead TV thing where they covered the Smiths and New Order, and Bjork.
Radiohead is awesome. Kid A is an incredible album.
Still, I agree that Radiohead is distant, isolated, and inscrutable. Not surprising, I guess, since most of their music seems to ornament those themes. It never feels pretentious to me, but it borders on unwelcoming at times. Took me a long while to get into Kid A.
I don’t think their music has anything to do with being daring or brave (they’re not causing riots like Stravinsky or anything here), it’s just that their ideal target audience is a group of very specific dead or famous music people. Like kids scribbling their own superhero comic books and fantasizing the entire time about how awesome it would be if Steve Ditko or Chris Claremont were to read them.
I can’t find the thread it’s in now, but on another blog someone posted a link to a New York magazine article where they talked about how they come up with their set lists over lunch each day. One of them talked about how what inspired them to do that was the tour they did with Alanis Morrisette prior to going into the studio to record OK Computer, because every day for a month and a half her band had to play the same set every night. So even up until that album they were still going through everything they needed to in order to be a famous, mainstream rock band including opening for Alanis Morrisette. So I mean it’s comendable that they were inspired by all that stuff to try and do something different and bold and listen to other music and all that, but up until 3 albums into their career they were still playing mainstream rock music to mainstream rock audiences and not doing the willfully obscure thing. Which is why I don’t buy that all these avante garde influences were always there just waiting to come out. I mean someone like Bjork has from day 1 of her career, from age 18, has been playing willfully weird, experimental, moderately dissonant avant garde influenced music clearly influenced by all these weird, obscure artists and became famous despite that. It’s awesome that Radiohead took the left turn they did mid career and found inspiration in all that stuff, and have chosen to really challenge people musically who may have discovered them through their more mainstream efforts. But when people try and convince me that it’s something they always had in them and always wanted and always listened to, that’s where I call bullshit.