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

Thom’s frantic dancing for its heightened spectacle. Can you even imagine what a text might look like for “Treefingers”? The script, then, serves to remind us not only that change is of music’s nature, but also that change
is
nature.
    Small’s concept of musicking captures this inevitability of change, taking music away from the reductive reification efforts of the media and music industries and places it back into the realm of time. Music doesn’t sit stoically, frozen in time, as if it were simply a product to be foisted upon the masses, as if consumption were an end unto itself. Music brings us
through
time, forcing us to accept that our tastes will eventually change, to accept that technological and ideological shifts will define how we listen to and react to music in a temporal fashion. As Cook wrote, “It is only when you have started thinking of music as performance that the peculiarly time-resisting properties of works in the Western ‘art’ tradition come fully into relief.” And if listening to music from the last century has proven anything, it’s that the “time-resisting” concepts of the “original” and the “authentic” are leftovers from a bygone era, vestigial remains from the proto-capitalist idolization of the individual, replaced instead by versions and scripts, fleeting performances and transient moments of cultural change.
    What we are listening to, then, is not just the change that music engenders, but also that which allows us to experience this change: time itself.
    * * *
    Revisiting the primary question from the previous chapter (what is
Kid A
supposed to “be”?) under this new conceit, the desire to classify
Kid A
was clearlypredicated on the reification of music. But by toppling this rigidity, not only is the concept “music is just music” doubly exposed, but so too are the futile attempts to define it as “rock” or “electronica.” Our very motivation to rationalize music, to rank and file, to shrink-wrap and sell, becomes suspicious, revealing more about our economic and ideological slant on aesthetics than the latent possibility of invoking aesthetics as critical insight. (For example, while taste could be just as easily repositioned as an outgrowth of critical thought — that is, taste as discernibility — it is instead considered a form of class or hierarchical distinction: the more discerning you are, the more “pretentious” you are.) It’s the difference between describing what
Kid A does
in the socio-political sense and simply proclaiming what it
is
for reasons a, b, and c.
    But it’s not worth getting into ontological debates or semantic arguments. Even though Small argues that music does not “exist,” we still treat and talk about music as if it indeed existed. In fact, this is precisely the point. Like the construction of race, music “exists” because of its inextricability from our attitudes toward it. But just because race is considered a social construction, it doesn’t mean we should pretend that we live in a color-blind society. And with our musicking displaced into tangible objects (CDs, LPs, etc.), controlled and regulated by multinational conglomerates, music exists in a very “real” sense, one that can be quantified, measured, and mass-produced.
    Rather than advocating the elimination of the word“music,” the idea of “musicking” — whether practicing, composing, performing, dancing, or listening — simply situates music back into a proper temporal context, reminding us of the processes that inform our conception of it and counteracting the notion that music, like time, is universal and static, as if it could somehow exist outside of change. “Musicking” is, in other words, a step toward awareness. Sure, it’s easy to think of
Kid A
as a product that made its mark in 2000 — a “been there, done that, next please” sort of thing — but this ignores all the relationships that have since been enacted through the