Albums of the Decade: Kid A
by Vijith Assar
Lord, how I hated it at first. I quite adored Radiohead, or at least I had up through "OK Computer," but the heights (er, depths?) of alt-rock obsession in the teenage guitarist I once was would only allow the slightest deviation from MTV Buzz Bin tunnel vision, and watching the band that gave "Creep" to the world (or, directly to me, it seemed sometimes, the still more depressing "Prove Yourself") put out an album where the closest they got to a genuine guitar riff was in "Optimistic" felt like low-grade treason.
I still remember the day that all changed for me: the following year, shortly after September 11th, with the airy click of the "Idioteque" drums as the background behind some logo-filler spot on MTV. All of a sudden, it was as if the dystopian world they'd been mumbling about since the days of "Karma Police" and even "Fake Plastic Trees" was actually coming true. The future, in other words, was no longer a vague abstraction to be feared and somehow infinitely mentally postponed--it was something that actually happens when you're not paying attention, and you'd better fucking learn to deal with it. From then on, it was probably OK to replace guitars with synthesizers.
It was all downhill from there. For a long time it felt like nobody else had come close to publishing a more exciting opening figure than the descending keyboard line in "Everything In Its Right Place," probably still the album's definitive gut-punch and the hook which was so savagely plunged through my lip from the first moment I revisited the album with fresh ears and enough time elapsed for my silly hurt feelings to have scabbed over, but I realize now that it probably has just as much to do with the excitement of knowing what is to follow.
Most immediately at least, that would be the title track, likewise at first a hard-knock of blippy percussion and abstract vocal warps (in comparison, the second song on the preceding album was the concrete, multi-movement -- and, yes, guitar-driven -- lead single "Paranoid Android") which would eventually morph into what might just be the most successful use of nursery bells in rock, if you could even call it that anymore. But you couldn't, really; Radiohead, having long cultivated and complained about and composed around these nebulous fears about our souls being liposuctioned out from beneath us -- "Heat the pins and stab them in/You have turned me into this/Just wish that it was bullet proof," and so on -- had finally decided that since nobody was quite getting the message, they needed instead to embody it, themselves becoming something too challenging to be ignored, too terrifying not to at least be remembered, whether by way of a temple or a crater.
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