Kid A

Kid A
Radiohead
CD
Parlophone Records, 2000

What is the message of this album? Radiohead's critique of contemporary life, signalled by songs such as Fake Plastic Trees, found its most eloquent expression of their last album OK Computer. They became the band who told us that it was okay to be frightened, to be scared of modern life, to be deeply discontented with nothing in particular but profoundly dissatisfied nonetheless. And they remain amazingly popular.

Radiohead's lyrical technique has always been to mix allusions to facts, accusations, and striking phrases into a rich soup spiced up with a good measure of irony. In the resulting maelstrom of words meaning be-comes accessible only by impressions, and not always then. With Kid A this reliance on general impression as the means to access the lyrics has been applied to music as well. They achieve something like musical coherence only by daringly mixing dance beats, brass bands, electronic organs and digitally sampled voices. 'All melodies to me were pure embarrassment', declared Yorke in an interview with Q magazine (October 2000, p.100). And so we are left with 'tunes' glued together from a number of musical sources and lyrics which, at the propositional level, often appear to mean little or nothing: 'Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon.'

Communication impossible

Effective communication has become impossible: 'What is that you tried to say?' asks the opening track 'Everything in its Right Place'. Then comes Kid A and Yorke's voice is deliberately distorted beyond comprehension. All messages have disappeared beyond the horizon and storm clouds fill the sky. The inlay card contains no lyrics but disturbing pictures of impending catastrophe - a new ice age, alien invasion or environmental meltdown. The writing is on the wall for humanity but the family trying to read that writing finds themselves frustrated that the wall has been partially whitewashed.

Meaning remains tantalisingly out of reach while our world collapses around us. 'We're not scaremongering. This is really happening, happening', sings Yorke on Idioteque. On The National Anthem he asks that 'everyone stop the fear'. He longs for release into a world he can define and control , the perfect world of his dreams - a reality less real portrayed on How to Disappear Completely: 'I'm not here. This isn't happening'. For there is no way into our world from the outside. Gone are the rescuing extra-terrestrials of Nice Dream and Subterranean Homesick Alien; no more is Yorke cast as the karmic messiah figure he played in Airbag and Lucky. It hardly needs to be added that God has yet to appear on a Radiohead album and his absence has inevitably left us cut off from one another as we await the looming disaster. Only his advent can rescue us from rampantly selfish dreams in which we tell everyone else, 'don't bother me' (In Limbo), can connect us with other people and can guarantee that we survive the end of the world.

What's the message of this album? There can be no messages and we are left to construct our own hotchpotch, dreamscape meaning. That's the message of this album. Or at least, that's my personal impression.

I'd like to acknowledge the fan site followmearound.com for their very useful lyric archive.

Simon Wheeler

© Evangelicals Now - November 2000
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