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Kid A
Reviews The decade of minimalism begins... Rating: 3/5 To examine Kid A's influence (and it is influential), let's look at "The National Anthem." This song starts with a simple bass line, not even a bass line so much as a very basic bass rhythm. This rhythm is then played unswervingly for the rest of the song. No other melodic elements are ever added. Where a rock band might gradually raise the tension with a developing guitar solo, where a club-oriented dance band might build up many different layers to crescendo, Radiohead adds a whole bunch of blaring trumpets, squealing cacophonously all at the same time all of a sudden. The surprise and the volume attempt to make up for the lack of music. In recent years, this sort of thing occurs all the time in popular music, when albums are largely defined by the adjectives assigned to them in reviews or interviews, and their musical content consists of very common, basic stamps, simple stand-ins for the explanations offered in the reviews and interviews. You know the type, when "musical diversity" means that someone bought a couple of exotic instruments, strummed a few idle and disconnected notes, then tweaked them in ProTools until they sounded palatable. "Making nonsense seem profound," to paraphrase the editorial blurb, is the defining quality of popular music throughout the 2000s. If you want to see the downside of Kid A's influence, listen to something like Blur's 2002 album Think Tank. "Crazy Beat" is a more ingratiating take on "The National Anthem," based on the same exact kind of dull repetition. This approach is heavily inspired by the "artistic" trend in nineties electronica: Aphex Twin, Autechre, Bjork, etc. This type of music was already extremely susceptible to adjectives and mystique, even in the nineties. Look at some of the essays written about the Warp Records catalog in the early nineties, and you'll see what I mean. Kid A synthesized many of those sounds and made them mainstream. Put Bjork in front of the microphone in "Motion Picture Soundtrack," and you get an absolutely typical example of one of her "harpsichord songs" like "Cover Me" or "Like Someone In Love," where she sings over incidental strumming. "Idioteque" recalls Autechre with a mechanical dance beat that you can't dance to, with a few dissonant, droning synth waves (again, no other melodic elements) laid on top. And just about any electronic band has done something like "Treefingers," a moody ambient drone with no musical progression. The title track, in particular, is a flawless Aphex imitation. He did this kind of playful/wistful music-box lead many times, both before Kid A ("In The Glitter Part 2" from 26 Mixes For Cash) and after it ("Nannou," on the Windowlicker EP). The distorted, croaking vocals, half-creepy and half-innocent, as well as the jittery drumbeat, are also straight out of his playbook. I guess it's a testament to how deeply Radiohead buried themselves in the part. But, in Radiohead's hands, this stuff became oblique enough for countless adjectives, and sounded serious enough to create mystique. The best musical moments occur in the mid-tempo tracks, where it's possible to ease into the mood and zone out. "Everything In Its Right Place" is quite original in the way the moody piano is arranged into an oscillating loop, backed by buzzing vocal samples and Yorke's neurotic lead. "How To Disappear Completely" takes the quiet acoustic guitar from "Exit Music For A Film," and adds whale-song synths to match the drifting vocals -- pretty and detailed for a rock band, inventive for a techno band. "Optimistic" also has a pretty simple guitar line, but the aggressive rhythm section creates a powerful churn. 'Churn' is one of those meaningless rock-journalist words, but here it's apt. There's a chaotic and ramshackle feel to the song that gives it the energy that was lacking in "The National Anthem." Of all the songs on the album, this one is closest in spirit to OK Computer. "In Limbo" is quieter, back to drift mode, but keeps that chaotic churn, now given form by a faint keyboard line. Take those four tracks, add "Kid A," and you have five very good songs that genuinely make use of some of the strengths of Warp-style electronica. But the album's reputation claims so much more. The lyrics play a key role in the mystique of Kid A, and here too, we run into some trouble. Lyrically, Yorke's focus has constricted to oblique, demonstrative statements of isolation, things like obsessively repeating, "there are two colours in my head." OK Computer is also an introspective album, but most of it somehow reacts to the outside world: to lovers ("Exit Music For A Film," "Lucky"), politicians ("Electioneering"), insufficiently sensitive bourgeois ("Fitter Happier," "The Tourist"), or outside events ("Airbag"). By contrast, Kid A shuts out everyone and everything other than Yorke. The only reaction Yorke has to anyone other than himself is stated in the first song: "What, what was that you tried to say?" Any possibility of meaningful communication is immediately, categorically denied. Yorke's exclusion of the outside world is so total that it begins to sound very deliberate. The loneliness of modern man is no longer enough to explain it. It takes a sustained, deliberate effort to drown out the outside world so completely. This type of thing has its appeal, in one's self-pitying moments ("the best you can is good enough," Yorke reassures in "Optimistic"), but it's important to realize that it's not all that sympathetic. And then, one can't help but get a bit fidgety. Gentle reader, are you really patient enough to want to help someone who seems to delight in rebuffing your efforts? Kid A is not so much an "experimental" work as it is a collection of many then-contemporary ideas in electronic music. In a way, it set the tone for the decade. However, one might wonder if that was entirely a good thing. Monumental Radiohead KID A Radiohead Enter A New Realm ...I see where you're all coming from...but this isn't shocking and inaccessible...
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