Radiohead's Kid A Read Online Free PDF

Rubber.” Thom was even a DJ and a member of techno group Flickernoise back in his Exeter university days.
    But while
Kid A
was undeniably influenced by electronic-based music — “Everything in Its Right Place,” “Kid A,” and “Idioteque” being the most obvious examples — the “electronica” tag never quite stuck. Besides, guitars and drums were featured prominently throughout, and the structure of the songs remained largely rooted in rock narratives. Still, the more dramatic fans acted as if Radiohead’s predilection for electronic rhythms drowned out the rest of the instruments, so blindsided by the beats that their critiques became circular. “I think the debate was redundant, because the band ultimately kept doing what it has always done — zigzagging between extremes,” said Godrich. “Whenever we really did try to impose an aesthetic from the outside — the aesthetic being, say, electronic — it would fail.”
    If anyone knows a thing or two about redundant debates, it’d be a music critic. Beyond the “electronica” tag, critics began kitchen-sinkin’ all over the place, hyphenating and shit-slinging like their jobs depended on it: CDNOW called it “the ultimate 3 a.m. stoner-headphone music;”
Nude As the News
, an “electric-emo hybrid;” and
Village Voice
, “the biggest, warmest recorded go-fuck-yourself in recent memory.” “Sublimely restless mood music,” said
Entertainment Weekly
; “the weirdest album to ever sell a millioncopies,” according to
TIME
; “dinner music,” sayeth Robert Christgau. Some, like
Spin
, put it bluntly: “Essentially, this is a post-rock record.” Others, like the nascent
Pitchfork
, weren’t so blunt: “[
Kid A
] sounds like a clouded brain trying to recall an alien abduction” and “like witnessing the stillborn birth of a child while simultaneously having the opportunity to see her play in the afterlife on Imax.”
    It got crazier too, with writers treating the album like a blank canvas on which to project their profundity. In a 188-page dissertation, Marianne Tatom Letts, Ph.D., “investigate[s] the ways in which the band’s ambivalence toward its own success manifests in [
Kid A
and
Amnesiac
’s] vanishing subjects.” She interprets the first half of
Kid A
as the “full articulation and immediate dissolution of the subject,” with an “existential death of the subject” occurring halfway through the album. She stops here to examine more closely “Treefingers,” which is where, she argues, the subject is “reconstituted in order for the album to continue.” (Even odder: she discusses how “Treefingers” anticipates the hiatus between
Kid A
and
Amnesiac
.) Her final argument focuses on the remainder of
Kid A
, where the subject is “revived and given a second chance at negotiating life’s travails, but ultimately fails again and ‘dies’ at the end of the album,” a move intended to link
Kid A
to French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s idea of “two deaths.”
    My favorite? In his book
Killing Yourself to Live
, Chuck Klosterman went next-level on us by arguingthat
Kid A
inadvertently foretold the events of 9/11: “I am certain
Kid A
is the official soundtrack for September 11, 2001, even though it was released on October 3, 2000.” He goes on to describe, track by track, how each song serves this wider theme, from the morning Manhattan skyline of “Everything in Its Right Place” and the plane crashes in “The National Anthem,” to “how Al Qaeda members think Americans perceive international diplomacy” in “Optimistic” and “faith that there is something greater than this world” in “Motion Picture Soundtrack.” Instead of concluding with a good ol’ wink and nudge, Klosterman ends his quixotic interpretation quixotically: “A genius can be a genius by trying to be a genius; a visionary can only have a vision by accident.”
    And, finally, there was that dork who claimed
Kid A
was “like an organism