Radiohead's Kid A by Marvin Lin Read Free Book Online

notes and rhythms, beyond being “just music.” Some groups in Africa, such as the Douala of Cameroon, don’t even have a word for music, as the idea of musicking is so ingrained in their social practices that there is no need to delineate a term for it. But in Western society, the ideological divisions between artist and audience, producer and consumer have become so pronounced that we overlook the fluidity of these relationships and the music itself, negating the relationship between music and time. But how we listen to music, how we consume music, how we experience music over time is crucial to understanding just how fluid our conception of music, like time, really is.
    In his essay “Deforming Rock,” Mark B.N. Hansen attempts to tackle this temporal relationship in terms of listening:
    Radiohead returns the question (what is music?) to the domain of listening. If, in the wake of its experimentation, any sound (noise) can potentially become music, what makes a sound music has something fundamentalto do with the body, with the process through which sound is embodied. What Radiohead learns, in a sense, is that music is the embodiment of sound. Put another way, it learns that music is a temporal object.
    Hansen asserts that accounting for “music as a temporal object whose origin is listening” makes any constructed binary — rock vs. electronica, music vs. noise, authentic vs. artificial — pointless, because if music “comes into being through the embodied process” of listening, then
what
sounds are used or
what
classifications are employed are inconsequential: it is the
act of listening
that makes music quintessentially “music.” That is, “listening quite literally produces the music.” This notion of listening-as-performance is at the heart of Small’s concept of musicking: he wasn’t simply talking about the performance of music; he believed that when we “do music,” we are creating meaning, affirming identity, celebrating humanity, and creating structure for our experiences, whether as an artist or listener. In other words, we are together articulating sets of relationships that create the very “meaning” of the work.
    While it’s easiest to see this temporal embodiment of sound in works that depend wholly on audience participation/interaction (see: The Flaming Lips’
Zaireeka
, Francisco López’s
Buildings [New York]
, or John Cage’s
4′33″)
, “
Kid A
the album” can also be reoriented as a musicking process the moment we conceive of it, not as a “perfect” ten-track set of sacred music that shall neverbe violated, but as both a documentation of Radiohead’s dynamic songwriting methodology and something that can and will be reprocessed, remixed, and recontextualized in a perpetual, ever-changing cultural dialogue. This is exemplified not only in the many commissioned remixes of their music, but also in Radiohead cover bands (The Karma Police, Rodeohead, The Vitamin String Quartet), in the musicking efforts of so-called prosumers (Jaydiohead, YouTube remixers), even when we sing, say, “Morning Bell” in the shower.
    Here, music starts looking more like a script, rather than a text. As Cook observes, “Thinking of music as ‘script’ rather than ‘text’ implies a reorientation of the relationship between notation and performance.” Indeed, it’s easier to envision Radiohead “musicking” when the very foundation of the music — the so-called “text” — becomes “a series of real-time, social interactions between players: a series of mutual acts of listening and communal gestures that enact a particular vision of human society.” Just compare the studio versions of
Kid A
songs with their live interpretations: how “Everything in Its Right Place” transforms into an extended “jam,” how the second verse of “Morning Bell” becomes more dramatic and performative, how the title track’s lyrics are sung rather than processed, how “Idioteque” hinges on