COMM 380: Media Criticism
Kid A. An Album Review
by Ryan Persinger
Major: English, Linguistics and a minor in Japanese language.
Out of all entertainment media, there is perhaps none more subject to differences in personal perspective
than music. One person may be thrilled by the high intensity progressive rock of The Mars Volta,
while another may be more inclined to cover their ears to escape what they consider nothing more than
lawless cacophony. Likewise, one person may find Neil Young’s folk rock tremendously compelling, while
others may find his voice whiny and his music boring. Sometimes, it just depends on the lifestyle of the
individual. Many people in the south and midwest United States tend to enjoy country music and generally
dislike the rap genre, while people in more urban coastal areas tend to enjoy rap and hip-hop, and generally
dislike country music. No other media is quite this polarizing. It would be quite odd indeed to come across
someone who loves action films but is thoroughly repulsed by comedy films, and yet that is often the case
with music genres. It is this highly disparate and often unforgiving landscape that makes the incredible
success of Radiohead’s 2000 album Kid A, an album that subverted the expectations not only of the rock
genre, but of Radiohead’s own fanbase, so fascinating. Despite defying so many industry norms and
implementing a radical change of musical direction, the band managed to connect with a consumer
audience and premiere at No. 1 for the first time in the band’s history (Evangelista, 2000), along the way
crafting one of the most creative, intelligent, and challenging records of the entire decade.
But to understand just how severe a departure Kid A was, it’s vitally important to understand Radiohead’s
past discography. The band had previously released three full length albums, 1993’s Pablo Honey, 1995’s
The Bends, and 1997’s OK Computer, all of which more or less adhered to the standards associated
with 90’s rock. They were all “guitar albums” and Radiohead was a “guitar band”, using the typical
guitar/bass/drums/vocals setup and 4/4 or 6/8 time signatures that most people are comfortable with. Contrast these expectation of the group with the opening track from Kid A, “Everything in its Right Place”, and you get a sense of just how different this new direction was. Instead of guitar and bass and drums, the only instruments present in the song are electric piano and a drum machine, and in addition to singer Thom Yorke’s vocals are extensive computer manipulations of his voice forming counter melodies. Instead of a comfortable 4/4 or 6/8 time signature, “Everything in its Right Place” utilizes an unusual 10/4 time signature; one that most people would find odd or confusing. Rather than use the tried and true verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus song structure, the song simply builds up around the same progression for nearly the entirety of its 4:11 runtime, with only brief deviations into a secondary progression. And yet somehow all these atypical musical elements coalesce very naturally, the odd time signature disappears, and the result is something that at least singer Thom Yorke found to be single-worthy; that is, if Radiohead had opted to release a single from Kid A.
Yet another peculiarity about Kid A was its release without an accompanying single or music video with which to publicize the album, a characteristic nearly unheard of with bands of Radiohead’s popularity at the time. For comparison’s sake, Pablo Honey had three singles release from it, The Bends had five, and OK Computer had another four. The function of a single is to act as sort of a “trailer” to the album as a whole, and entice consumers into buying the record proper. The lack of such a “trailer” only served to make Kid A’s commercial success that much more difficult to achieve; that is, in addition to its aggressively unconventional songwriting.
As mentioned before, the opening track of Kid A plays around with the traditional concept of a vocal lead. That said, there is still a conventional lead vocal portion to “Everything in its Right Place” alongside the manipulated voices. But that’s not always the case on this album. The titular “Kid A” has a thoroughly muffled vocal lead throughout, and “Treefingers” lacks vocals altogether. This, in particular, is a dangerous gamble to take if you wish for your album to have decent commercial success. Many acts live and die by the strength of their vocals (how many acts these days are one singer accompanied by an anonymous and interchangeable backing band?), and it can be argued that, at least in the interest of selling copies, vocals are the most important part of the music. Even the guidelines for this assignment and its focus on assessing vocal performance corroborate the narrative that indeed, vocals are the paramount facet
of contemporary music. So Radiohead even further undermine their chances for commercial attainment with their distortion or omission of vocal leads, and potentially off-putting lyrics such as “yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon” or “cut the kids in half”.
But now that we’ve thoroughly explored the ways in which Kid A does things in an unorthodox or “wrong” way, let’s discuss how these same experimental behaviors are to the album’s benefit. Most, if not all, of the aforementioned schismatic musical elements are only to the disadvantage of Kid A’s commercial potential due to differing from the general public’s expectations of rock or alternative music and even music in general. But these elements don’t necessarily make the music on Kid A somehow inherently inferior. The 4/4 and 6/8 time signatures aren’t the most prevalent time signatures in music because they are somehow “more correct” than a 5/4 or a 10/4 time signature. Rather, 4/4 and 6/8 are the most common simply because they’ve been explored so thoroughly, and songwriters know how to easily construct music that sounds good within them. Similarly, simplistic chord structures that never stray from a particular key (like the ubiquitous C-G-Am-F progression) are so common because their virtues have been so exhaustively tested. It’s not that atypical time signatures and chord progressions that ignore the “laws” of a particular key are wrong, just that they are underdeveloped. Admittedly, it is more difficult to write a song with a natural and easy to follow beat in 5/4 than 4/4, but I believe that is because the 5/4 time signature hasn’t been adequately explored. This exploration of musical possibilities and the expansion of musical boundaries is precisely why Kid A is such an important and challenging album.
As I mentioned, the first track of the album, “Everything in its Right Place”, possesses a 10/4 time signature yet never sounds like something is out of place or unnatural. In “Morning Bell” later in the album, drummer Phil Selway plays a beat in 5/4 in such a way that makes the track’s time signature simple to comprehend and the timing of chord transitions properly predictable and natural sounding. The normal issue with utilizing time signatures like 5/4 and
10/4 is that listeners often become confused and the music more becomes too difficult to follow. Part of the problem is that most listeners do not come across many songs that use these time signatures, and are thus unprepared when a song does use them, but the larger portion of the onus is on the songwriters themselves to create chord rhythms and percussion beats that make those time signatures feel natural. This is what Radiohead so triumphantly accomplishes in doing on Kid A: making the unorthodox feel so comfortable and familiar.
Whether it’s with novel chord progressions or the unusual time signatures I’ve harped on about, Kid A never sounds like it breaks any musical “rules” or thrusts the listener into unfamiliar waters without a guide. It expands musical horizons by finding ways to make neglected or underused musical elements every bit as listenable as the typical formulas. This, I think, is a vitally important practice to the progress of music writing as a whole. If songwriters restrict themselves only to what has been tested and proven, then they risk succumbing to banality (and in nearly every case do). For music to escape its current malaise of industrially manufactured and utterly uniform music, it needs pioneering bands like Radiohead and particularly pioneering albums like Kid A to pull it kicking and screaming to another level. But this progress only happen if the public responds positively to these albums.
Kid A’s commercial success is somewhat debatable. Its initial sales figures are undeniably stellar, surpassing all expectations and setting new records for the band. But long-term, the album failed to sell even half of what its predecessor, OK Computer, sold. Some speculate that this could have been due to Kid A’s wanton unpaid disbursement through now defunct peer-to-peer file sharing service Napster. Nevertheless, its critical and influential successes remain unquestioned. Kid A topped both Rolling Stone and Pitchfork Media’s albums of the decade in 2009 (“100 Best Albums,” 2009) (Pitchfork, 2009), and came runner-up in The Guardian’s list of the same (Thomson, 2009).
Interestingly, Kid A’s releasing record label outside the U.S. is Parlophone, the same label that hosted The Beatles up until the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The parallels between The Beatles and Radiohead are fairly obvious. The Beatles were musical pioneers, inventing methods of recording and composing in styles that had never been used or heard before. Their lasting influence on popular musical as a whole is well catalogued. It remains
to be seen if in the end, Radiohead will attain even a fraction of the impact that The Beatles did. But if any of Radiohead’s albums is to remain looked upon fondly for its sheer inventiveness in the years to come, I’d wager that album would be Kid A, the aberrant disruption that modern music needed, and still needs.
References
Evangelista, B. (2000, October 12). CD Soars After Net Release / Radiohead's `Kid A' premieres in No. 1 slot. SFGate. Retrieved July 14, 2014, from
http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/CD-Soars-After-Net-Release-Radiohead-s-Kid-A-2701966.php
Radiohead. (2000). Kid A [CD]. Paris, France. Copenhagen, Denmark. Gloucestershire, Oxford, England: Parlophone Records, Ltd., Capitol Records, LLC. (January 1999-April 2000)
100 Best Albums of the 2000s: Radiohead, 'Kid A' | Rolling Stone. (n.d.). Rolling Stone. Retrieved July 22, 2014, from
Pitchfork. (2009, October 9). Staff Lists: The Top 200 Albums of the 2000s: 20-1. Pitchfork. Retrieved July 22, 2014, from
http://pitchfork.com/features/staff-lists/7710-the-top-200-albums-of-the-2000s-20-1/2/
Thomson, G. (2009, November 27). Albums of the decade No 2: Radiohead - Kid A. theguardian.com. Retrieved July 22, 2014, from http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2009/nov/28/album-decade-radiohead-
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