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

album over time. And while we were pinning attributes onto
Kid A
and trying to figure out what it “is,” we were actually alienating ourselves from the dynamic relationships that produced its significance in the first place, the very processes that continue to shape our reactions to it temporally.
    Observes Cook: “To call music a performing art, then, is not just to say that we perform it; it is to say that through it we perform social meaning.” And now, after recognizing the pitfalls of trying to define
Kid A
, perhaps we can start to see what kind of social meaning has been performed through it over time.

Kid Acclaim
    You can’t eat critical acclaim.
    Stephen Colbert
    Needless to say, I didn’t always think of my relationship with
Kid A
as an activity. Growing up, I believed, like most people, that music was immutable, static, something to be bought and listened to, something that
just was
. It’s the same way I felt about all that other silly constructed stuff — gender, race, love. When I was filling my formative ears with songs like “Exit Music (for a film)” and “My Iron Lung,” I didn’t care whether or not I was engaging in a cultural process or, as I argued in the previous chapter, that music is an activity, rather than a thing — I was simply identifying, I thought, the musical elements that made the songs “work.” Context didn’t matter because it was “about the music.” I almost had it down to a science: Oh, they should’ve exaggerated the tension with an augmented fourth. Oh, the chorus could’ve benefitedfrom a ride cymbal rather than a hi-hat. Oh, this track should’ve been swapped with the second for maximum flow.
Why don’t these artists get that?
    A similar essentialist attitude was peppered throughout the media’s reactions to
Kid A
. When more defined reifications get exhausted, the easiest route is to throw shit on the wall and see what sticks, to grasp onto ambiguity as if there was anything there to actually grasp. Many critics, therefore, chose to articulate the album’s negotiations with pop. The
New York Times
called
Kid A
“as musically vast and hard to navigate as mainstream pop gets.”
Rolling Stone
asked, “This is pop?” and proclaimed it as “a kind of virtual rock in which the roots have been cut away.” Others were left head-scratching:
PopMatters
said
Kid A
was “thrilling” but “confusing”;
Melody Maker
insisted that
Kid A
will leave you “dazed, bemused, and musing over [its] motives”; and
Record Collector
argued that it’s “the most coherent, yet confusing album in their history.”
    I could relate to the confusion. At the time, I was more familiar with
Charles in Charge
and Oliver Twist than Charles Mingus and Olivier Messiaen, so listening to
Kid A
had quite a dislodging affect on me. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not like I was listening to Top 40 at the time — I had a fairly solid awareness of independent/punk music, and I had just started delving deeper into modern classical, jazz, and more “experimental” musics — but to hear a band so well established, so acclaimed, take such a dramatic artistic risk shook my belief in the idea that sounds alone, removed from context, couldimpart the information needed to inform my tastes.
Kid A
’s experimentation might’ve been seamless, but it was no less jarring for a naïve college student.
    I’m not saying experience and education were prerequisites to “enjoying”
Kid A
. Yet the degree to which it was deemed “weird” hinged on the twin luxuries of
having heard
and
having known
. In fact, the more I listened to
Kid A
, the more confused I became. I even started questioning my aesthetic preferences: if the supposed function of music is to “entertain,” then why was I so unsure of whether or not I was being entertained? What did I “like” about
Kid A
, and why did I like it more with repeated listens? What does it even mean to “like” something? Is it about enjoyment?