In his book Killing Yourself to Live, Chuck Klosterman wrote an article abouthow the album Kid A accidentally predicted 9/11. Do I believe it? Not completely. Did it respark my interest in Kid A? Fuck yeah. I listened to it constantly the night I read the
article, and had it playing on my iPod when I fell asleep. The next day, I
listened to it on the bus. Needles to say, I was engulfed. It was then when the
album really clicked with me. Seeing the possible narrative
behind all of the vocoded droning really got me interested. Kid A went
from being the most overrated album of all time to being one of my favorite
albums of all time. Now, I understand that the
article might have been an excuse to wank over Radiohead; but it was an
interesting read. While Chuck Klosterman explicitly says it's about 9/11, I have
a different approach. Kid A is about the human reaction to catastrophic
disasters in general. If you really care enough1 about my theory,
here's a song-by-song interpretation of Kid A.
Everything In Its Right Place
This should be rather obvious. Everyone wakes
up; it's business as usual, and the disaster (your pick) has yet to begin.
There's nothing out of place, as Thom Yorke says. The deep synth proceeds to
fill the room, and it feels like you're drowning in a sea of pillows (interpret
that any way you want.)
"Rats and children follow me out of town."
Every one's going to work (or school) now. This is the part of the day everyone
will have to alter (or suppress) after the [insert disaster here] because they
were so calm in retrospect. Obviously they aren't to blame for feeling so
normal, but it's kind of sickening to think that everything unfolds when you
leave your house, and you don't even know. Then...
The National Anthem
This is when the shit hits the fan. The bass
kicks in, the music gets heavy, and impromptu jazz solos kick in. "Evey one is
so...near." Every one's so crowded; what's going on? In one specific part of the
globe, it's utter chaos. The insanity of this song can't be overstated,
especially when it follows after a song like Kid A. The track ends with a
haunting violinesque sound and a guy saying "What's
wrong2?"
Every one's so crowded; what the hell just
happened? The shock is too great for us to handle at first, so we give reality
the benefit of the doubt and assume this is just a horrible dream. "I'm not
here/That's not me/This isn't happening." Everyone grows a gizzard and stares at
the sky in a tranquilized state.
would be the intermission. It's a lyricless track that divides the album in two
parts: the world before/during, and the world after. Grab your popcorn and get
back to your seat.
sounds like a song against capitalism3 (The big fish eat the little
ones/You can try the best you can, the best you can is good enough.) Optimistic
is a song about waking up, mainly because that's what the first 30 seconds feel
like. It's not as sudden as The National Anthem, but it's considerably heavier
than Treefingers. We're realizing that this is indeed a reality, but we're still
a little dazed.
And now the government kicks in. The song as a
whole feels like a mix between the softness of How to Disappear Completely and
the speed of The National Anthem. "You're living in a fantasy," in other words,
this is much worse than what you think. Much, much worse. In fact, the
government might be overplaying it a bit, but you're really living in a fantasy,
man. Wake up.
Idioteque4
Holy shit, this is really happening.
I mean, I knew it was real, but Christ, this is serious. That's what's in the
mind of the logical folk out there. The others, however, are caught up in the
hysteria. "Who's in the bunker, who's in the bunker?" Who can we blame/who's
doing this? People are flipping out, and making split-second decisions based off
of this fear ("Women and children first, and children first.) The beat is
erratic, glitchy, and vaguely threatening.
Now that the worst is behind us and people
have calmed down, there's a fake, somewhat tacky feeling of unity across the
globe (the beat is kind of frantic, but it doesn't reach the level of
Idioteque.) "And everybody wants to be your friend" Does it really take a
disaster to unite us? Perhaps. The worst is behind us now, but what about the
future? Every one's trying to look happy and friendly, but that doesn't erase
what happened ("The lights are on/But no body's home.")
The end and the epilogue. A depressed
Thom Yorke sings over an accordion playing a slow, melodic tune. Now living in
the supposedly post-disaster world, there are voids that we have to fill (maybe
with red wine, cheap sex, and sleeping pills, as the lyrics suggest.) "It's not
like the movies/They fed us on little white lies." Hollywood will undoubtedly
cash in on a disaster that reopens old wounds. These movies have a happy ending
so the moviegoers aren't completely depressed, but we know that it's all a lie.
"I will see you in the next life."
About a minute-and-a-half gap of silence, and
then a chorus slowly starts to drone. Two minutes of
silence, and the song ends.
There's just one thing that kills my whole
theory: the lyrical process. Thom Yorke had a major case of writer's block after
the insane success of OK Computer, so it was time for experimentation.
Yorke wrote lyrics and verses on scraps of paper, crumpled the up, and threw
them at a top hat. The scraps that made it in were the lyrics he
used5.
Footnotes, footnotes,
footnotes!:
do!
one of my favorite moments in any album ever.
sense, considering Yorke is very involved with politics.
best track on the album
David Byrne used when he was writing the lyrics to Remain in
Light.
No comments:
Post a Comment