Radiohead's Kid A and the Anti-Globalization Movement

1 Radiohead’s Kid A and the Anti-Globalization Movement. Essay for Open University MA in Popular Culture, Summer 2001. You have to work at albums like Kid A. You have to sit at home night after night and give yourself over to the paranoid millennial atmosphere as you try to decipher elliptical snatches of lyrics and puzzle out how the titles (‘Treefingers’, ‘The National Anthem’, and so on) might refer to the actual songs. In other words, you have to be sixteen. Anyone old enough to vote may find that he has competing time – a relationship, say, or a job, or buying food, or listening to another CD he picked up on the same day. He may also find himself shouting at the CD player, ‘Shut up! You’re supposed to be a pop group!’[...]. I suspect that people who have been listening to rock music for decades will have exhausted the fund of trust they once might have had for ‘challenging’ albums. Kid A demands the patience of the devoted; both patience and devotion become scarcer commodities once you start picking up a paycheck. Nick Hornby1 People want to have fun. A fully concentrated and conscious experience of art is possible only to those whose lives do not put such a strain on them that in their spare time they want relief from both boredom and effort simultaneously. The whole sphere of cheap commercial entertainment reflects this dual desire. It induces relaxation because it is patterned and pre-digested. Its being patterned and pre-digested serves within the psychological household of the masses to spare them the effort of that participation (even in listening or observation) without which there can be no receptivity to art. Theodor W. Adorno2 How did it come to this? A situation in which Theodor W. Adorno is not only proved right, but in which people demand from popular music the very ‘pre-digested’ qualities that he condemned. Moreover, it would seem that Nick Hornby’s is not a lone voice. Jason Evans comments that ‘the mixed response Kid A garnered in the UK revealed how the Britpop era has weakened the rock audience’s [...] ability to handle anything not blatantly singalong’.3 Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood puts it like this: ‘people basically want their hand held through twelve “Mull of Kintyre’s”’.4 A case can certainly be made for looking at the contemporary rock audience in this way. Taking the dominant acts of the past ten years, we move from the 1960s retro sound of the Stone Roses, to the punk retro sound of Nirvana, through to the Beatles retro sound of Oasis (who tellingly won the Brit-pop battle against the more innovative Blur), to the 1960s retro sound of Travis. There is nevertheless a gap in this list. In between Oasis and Travis came Radiohead and their album OK Computer, the success of which ‘announced the closure of an entire era of Britrock’.5 It would be hard to argue that the songs on OK Computer are either standardized or pre-digested. Just taking the singles released off the album, the audience is served notice that this will not be conventional listening: ‘Paranoid Android’ features several changes of tempo and time-signature and lyrics like ‘the crackle of pig skin/the yuppies networking/the vomit/the vomit’;6 ‘Karma Police’ ends with the squalls of Jonny Greenwood’s guitar; ‘No Surprises’ is a savage lullaby with the opening lines ‘a heart that’s full up like a landfill/a job that slowly kills you/bruises that won’t heal’.7 Nor can these features be dismissed as being mere pseudo-individualization, a characteristic 2 of popular music that Adorno argued is called into existence because of ‘the standardization of the framework’.8 The frameworks for the majority of the songs on the album are far removed from conventional rock song structures. The fact that this album has been voted the greatest of all time by the readers of the magazine Q would suggest that it is not yet time to join with Adorno and dismiss rock music and its audience out of hand.9 If we wish to assess the impact and reception of Radiohead’s work then different theories need to be applied. Using Antonio Gamsci’s concept of hegemony we could argue that the ‘ruling class’ amongst the record industry would be happiest with precisely the audience that Adorno delineates. However, as Gramsci argues, there are always oppositional voices to the ruling class (such as the audience that wants the ‘challenging’ sound of OK Computer) and in order to retain power, the dominant order must make concessions to these interests. A hegemonic struggle takes place to determine the form that these concessions will take. John Storey has outlined the different futures that the opposition can expect: ‘marginalization, disappearance, or incorporation into the system’s profit-making concerns’.10 Following on from this, we can see that bands such as Travis, Muse and Coldplay have carried out the work of incorporating Radiohead’s music into the dominant order.11 They have taken elements of Radiohead’s music and made it more palatable for the mainstream audience. For example, they have toned down some of the more disruptive features and added ‘singalong’ qualities. Furthermore, the sound that these bands make is by its own nature pre-digested, the audience having become familiar with it through Radiohead’s work: ‘Paranoid Android’ has become ‘Mull of Kintyre’. However, this still does not account for Radiohead’s own success. While Travis’s watered down version is undoubtedly being embraced and encouraged by the recording industry (it now out-performs Radiohead sales wise), Radiohead’s own original music is not being forced to the margins. Why is it that the business should still encourage this oppositional music? The answer lies in the fact that it is imbued with Romantic ideology. It is music of innovation, opposition and individuality; qualities that the recording industry has long encouraged. In Culture and Society Raymond Williams illustrates how the Romantic movement arose in direct response to industrialisation. He concludes that what resulted from this development was ‘the embodiment in art of certain human values, capacities, energies, which the development of society towards an industrial civilization was felt to be threatening or even destroying’.12 Nevertheless, as Simon Frith and Howard Horne have pointed out, ‘the irony of this position was that the Romantic critique of industrial capitalism became the source of the bourgeoisie’s own evaluation of art’.13 Art was held up as representing qualities that were removed from the corrupting hand of commerce. In the process it found itself elevated as something to be valued all the more. When rock stars began to take on board Romantic ideology and position themselves as sensitive outsiders standing in opposition to the capitalist industry, the music business was quick to see this as a solution to preserving the ‘aura’, and thus the marketability, of their mass produced goods. As Jon Stratton explains: Romanticism, whilst lived as being in opposition to capitalist concerns founded on rationality and standardisation, in fact supports capitalism by providing both an enabling rationale for invention and a sustaining emphasis on the individual which allows cultural products to be viewed as something other than simply more commodities.14 3 It should be noted, however, that the recording industry and its artists have changed since Jon Stratton wrote his article in 1983. Many leading musicians are now active in the commodification of their work. In the present climate: Bands are increasingly being conceived – and test-marketed – as brands first: the Spice Girls, the Backstreet Boys, N’ Sync, All Saints and so on. Prefab bands aren’t new to the music industry, and neither are bands with their own merchandising lines, but the phenomenon has never dominated pop culture as it has at the end of the nineties, and musicians have never before competed so aggressively with consumer brands. Sean ‘Puffy’ Combs has leveraged his celebrity as a rapper and record producer into a magazine, several restaurants, a clothing label and a line of frozen foods, and Raekwon, of the rap group Wu-Tang Clan, explains that ‘the music, movies, the clothing, it is all part of the pie we’re making. In the year 2005 we might have Wu-Tang furniture for sale at Nordstorm’.15 If we take Raymond Williams’s concept of ‘dominant, residual and emergent’ cultures and apply it to the music business, this ‘branding’ concept can be seen as the new dominant. It has been marketing dogma since the mid-1980s that ‘corporations should primarily produce brands, as opposed to products’.16 This situation has profited musicians and record companies alike. Media saturation puts recording artists in a position whereby they can market themselves as brand names. Consequently their music is now only a part of their promotional agenda. Furthermore, the mainstream audience has not opposed this, instead standing back and watching its favourite bands indulge in cross-branding activities. Fans do not appear to be disturbed when the groups they like appear in Gap commercials; Moby’s album Play was not tainted when he licenced every track to different advertisers. Therefore, we can see that those bands still infused with Romantic ideology have become the ‘residual’ element within the recording industry, with their hostility to commercialisation and belief in invention giving them an ‘alternative or even oppositional relation to the dominant culture’.17 In response to a fan’s question on their website, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke summed up the situation in this way, ‘we ended up inside the perimeter fence when the music business decided to stop having faith in new music and fatten itself off for the big merge, lucky us’.18 But who wins in this situation, other than the recording industry? The dominant bands are happy to make pre-digested music and view their work as product; the residual bands oppose this, but it is this Romantic ideology allows their ‘art’ to be branded. Let us return to Radiohead. Graña has listed some of the features of Romantic ideology: The ideal of self-expression…The freedom of self-expression…The idea of genius…The rejection of general or rational causality…‘Cosmic selfassertion’…The social alienation of the literary man…The hostility of modern society to talent and sensitivity…World-weariness and ‘the horror of daily life...19 This could double as a list of the characteristics of Radiohead at the time of OK Computer (an album which could almost have been subtitled ‘world-weariness and the horror of daily life’). These characteristics were supposed to demonstrate to the world that the band stood against industry and commerce. However, if it is these same qualities that made them marketable, where does this leave a group that hates all the ‘kicking, squealing, Gucci little piggies’?20 Radiohead seem to have been unaware that each anti-capitalist gibe they were making - entitling their first video collection Seven Television Commercials for example - was only helping to further their own commodification. Following OK 4 Computer, they went on to make the tour documentary Meeting People is Easy. In keeping with their desire to expose the industry’s marketing machinations, this film focuses on an unglamorous side of the record business: the endless rounds of interviews, photo shoots and industry award ceremonies, all to promote their ‘product’. The band are shown as being forced into a promotional world that is as unavoidable as it is depressing. One band member complains that ‘the wheel’s start turning again and the industry starts moving again, this time bigger and more terrifying, it just keeps going, basically outside of our control’.21 The text on the video sleeve provides another dig at the consumerism that has the band. It declares to the consumer, ‘you are a target market’.22 Nevertheless, during the film you do get the sense that the band is becoming tired of its status as wounded artists, protesting about ‘the hostility of modern society to talent and sensitivity’. At one point Thom Yorke performs a new song, later to appear on Kid A as ‘How to Disappear Completely’. This song was written in Ireland on the eve of Radiohead’s biggest gig to date. Yorke later described its genesis: That song is about the whole period of time that OK Computer was happening. We did the Glastonbury Festival and this thing in Ireland. Something snapped in me. I just said, ‘That’s it. I can’t take it anymore’.23 The lyrics to ‘How to Disappear Completely’ are addressed inwards to the singer as he pictures himself on stage: ‘that there/that’s not me/I go where I please/I walk through walls/I float down the Liffey/I’m not here/this isn't happening’.24 They provide a potential answer to Radiohead’s dilemma. If Romantic ideology has helped to put them in the situation where they have become a tool of the marketing machine, then why not deny ‘cosmic self-assertion’ and the ‘ideal of self-expression’? It would be foolish to claim that this is precisely the thought process that Radiohead went through, yet the group was certainly aware that for them to continue a new approach would be needed. The OK Computer tour was followed by the recording sessions for Kid A, at which point Thom Yorke found that he was unable to write in his old style. As he later explained, ‘at the time, the whole global marketplace thing was a major preoccupation of mine. I was reading a lot of stuff about it and it really become a massive part of my writer’s block’.25 It is possible to view this block as resulting from the end-game of Romanticism: how could he write and posit himself in opposition to the global marketplace if this heroic stance furthered his own commodification? The core reading matter for Radiohead was Naomi Klein’s No Logo. The group mentioned this book in almost every interview for the promotion for Kid A, and at one time No Logo was rumoured to be the title for the album. Ed O’Brien, Radiohead’s guitarist, wrote an online diary during the making of Kid A, which included an instruction to his audience to ‘please read No Logo by Naomi Klein.26 This book contains themes that would naturally appeal to Radiohead: the corporate takeover of the world; how big companies are now more powerful than many governments; how it is branding that has given the companies this tremendous economic power; how branding has found its way into every corner of our society. The main purpose of No Logo is nevertheless to document the growing opposition to this process. Naomi Klein states: Anticorporatism is the brand of politics capturing the imagination of the next generation of troublemakers and shit-disturbers, and we need only look to the student radicals of the 1960s and the ID warriors of the eighties and nineties to see the transformative impact such a shift can have.27 This anti-globalization movement targets the multinational corporations’ carefully nurtured brands, believing that the image of a brand can be forever tarnished by 5 exposing the sweatshop labour, worker exploitation and political corruption that lies behind the products on sale. The movement’s beliefs coincide with Radiohead’s own politics, but the difficulty the band faced was how to align themselves with these protestors when each anti-capitalist move they were making increased the strength of their own brand. Where could the group turn when their ‘sound’ had coalesced into a product ripe for plagiarism by imitators who are happy to co-operate with the corporate machinery of the record business? Stratton has suggested a possible answer: It is within this context of Romantic individualism that one must place the importance in the popular music aesthetic discourse of terms such as ‘liking’ and ‘involvement’. This terminology, which is based on a taken-for-granted human individual essentialism, operates to counteract the ‘distancing’ associated with the music’s commodification and substitute for it an essential unity between artist and consumer which elides the function – and existence – of the record companies and thus of the capitalist process which has called the music into being.28 Radiohead could reverse this. If Romantic individualism results in more branding, why not turn it on its head and actually make a point of ‘distancing’ yourselves? Moreover, it had long been part of Radiohead’s agenda to expose the capitalist process. In this manner they might be able to answer Naomi Klein’s challenge: ‘where do you have the guts to draw the borders around your brand?’.29 Whether consciously thought out or not, this was Thom Yorke’s cure for his writer’s block. He has said of the new project, ‘Kid A was really deliberately cold, because we wanted to project distance – as if someone was saying, I don’t want to get involved in this’.30 This distancing was primarily achieved by perverting or removing the features that had helped to make up the Radiohead brand: the guitar, bass and drums line-up; Jonny Greenwood’s guitar sound; structured ‘songs’; the voice; the lyrics. Prior to recording Kid A, Radiohead immersed themselves in the electronica of Warp Records, and the group consequently utilized computers as a prime musical and compositional tool. This provided a means to counter Romantic individualism. As Frith and Horne have claimed, ‘it is [...] with the development of electronic and computer-programmed instruments and recording devices, that the musician’s authority, as composer and performer, has come into doubt’.31 With electronics the imagined physical presence of a band is removed; the listener will no longer picture the group playing on stage, the musicianship having become depersonalised. Thom Yorke has stated, ‘what I find interesting in taking on programming and editing and sampling is it stops you trying to emote’.32 The electronica approach is manifested on several tracks. The title track ‘Kid A’ is devoid of guitar and bass and features programmed drums and vocals; the keyboards and overall sound recalling the ambient work of Warp artists such as Aphex Twin and the Boards of Canada.33 The music to ‘Idioteque’ is also entirely programmed; however there is an interesting tension between the electronic backing and what is the most impassioned singing on the album. ‘Treefingers’ is the apex of the electronica approach. This beat-less composition consists entirely of long drones of treated guitar sounds, and not surprisingly it is the track that has most alienated fans of the Radiohead of old. It is ‘Kid A’s aimless lowpoint’ according to John Harris.34 It is not only through electronica that Radiohead have repudiated their past. Guitars are absent from the opening track, ‘Everything in its Right Place’, the backing of which consists entirely of what sounds like Fender Rhodes but which is in fact electronically treated piano. Several commentators have taken the title to be a pun, stating that with this new sound everything is deliberately in the wrong place. ‘The 6 National Anthem’ comes from somewhere else entirely. Once again guitar is missing, but here a dirty bass riff is repeated over and over to provide the basis for a Can-inspired track which climaxes with Charlie Mingus-style horns. It is not what Radiohead fans had come to expect.35 ‘Motion Picture Soundtrack’ features the instrumental line-up of wheezing pump organ and the celestial sound of harps. Even where tracks do use the drums, bass and guitar line-up, they do so unconventionally. The drumming on ‘Optimistic’ (frequently referred to as the most conventional song on the album) is played almost entirely on the tom-toms, with the snare drum and cymbals only appearing fleetingly. ‘In Limbo’ is based on a looping arpeggio in an unorthodox time-signature. Nowhere on Kid A do we find Jonny Greenwood’s distinctive lead guitar sound. Described as both ‘the greatest guitar player alive’ and ‘a chronic upstager’, his contribution to this album ranges from playing the recorder to composing the string arrangements for ‘How To Disappear Completely’. The instrument that he plays most is the Ondes Martenot, a machine that predates the digital computer, but which can be used to create a vast array of unearthly sounds. In terms of song structures, part of Radiohead’s approach with Kid A was to enter the studio with unfinished pieces of music. This led to a move away from songs based around verses and choruses and opened up the opportunity to experiment with different sounds, there being no pre-established space for bass, drums and guitar. It follows that tracks such as ‘Kid A’ and ‘The National Anthem’ develop their own inner logic of progression as opposed to the traditional build, climax and release of verse, chorus, middle eight. It also led to what is perhaps the most important aspect of Kid A’s structure: these separate, occasionally fragmental pieces were to be pieced together as a whole suite, and it was this idea of Kid A as being a larger, complete work that dictated which tracks from the sessions were to be included. As Jonny Greenwood explains, ‘several more “tradition-based” songs [...] were left off the album and saved for a later project to preserve the continuity and flow of Kid A’.36 The structure of Kid A reveals much about Radiohead’s intent. The more ‘conventional’ songs are held back for the second half of the album, whereas the opening salvo of ‘Everything in its Right Place’ and ‘Kid A’ serve notice that the Radiohead of old are no longer with us. The point is made by the manner in which these two songs use Thom Yorke’s voice, traditionally the most instantly recognisable aspect of the Radiohead brand. In both tracks his vocals are treated electronically, throwing the listener off guard. Jason Evans describes the process that has taken place: Bored with the standard tricks of vocal emoting, Yorke decided to interface voice and technology and develop what he’s called ‘a grammar of noises’. The first two tracks on Kid A, ‘Everything In Its Right Place’ and the title track, are especially striking in this respect, almost a declaration of intent. The words are drastically processed in order to thwart the standard rock listener mechanism of identify and interpret (the very mode of trad rock deep-and-meaningfulness that OK Computer had dramatically revived).37 The vocals on these tracks, as on the rest of the album, are placed low in the mix, thus being denied their usual prominence in the hierarchy of sounds. On ‘Everything in its Right Place’ the main voice is phased in and out focus, and merged into stuttering processed backing vocals; on ‘Kid A’ the vocals were spoken and the melody created by having them vocodered through the Ondes Martenot, giving an equivalent texture to the electronic backing; on ‘The National Anthem’ the vocal line is shadowed by a scraping electronic sound which buries it; ‘How to Disappear Completely’ begins more traditionally, but as it progresses the vocal is once again superseded and shadowed by the backing track; on ‘Optimistic’, ‘Morning Bell’ and ‘Motion Picture Soundtrack’ the 7 voice has to weave its way through guitars, electronics and harps respectively; and on ‘In Limbo’ and ‘Idioteque’ the lead vocal has to compete against conflicting backing vocals. The listener is left at sea. Brian Eno has helped to explain why mixing music in this way can have a disorientating effect: When you listen to [the] music your focus is shifting all the time because there’s no ranking, which doesn’t only reflect the internal structure of the music, but also the structure of your attention to it. It’s not the extremes of strict ranking and focus, or no ranking and disorientation that interest me, but how much of each. I want the thing to have a certain amount of ‘perceptual drift’ where the ranking is being shuffled all the time, so at times you’re not sure what you’re meant to be listening to.38 The confused reaction of many critics to Kid A encourages the belief that Radiohead managed to achieve a perceptual drift of this kind. Thom Yorke was after a similar effect with his lyrics for the album. By transforming his voice into another textural instrument he was free ‘to sing things I wouldn’t normally sing’.39 He was searching for the effect that David Byrne achieved on the Talking Heads album Remain in Light, where from one line to the next you are not sure if he is singing in his own voice or through the voice of one of several actors taking part. As Thom Yorke explains, ‘the real problem I had was with the “identity’ bit” [...] by using other voices I guess it was a way of saying, “obviously it isn’t me”’.40 This effect is enhanced by the fact that there is no narrative to the lyrics; instead phrases appear in fragments, some of which could appear to be comments on the current state of society: ‘the big fish eat the little ones’,41 ‘ice age coming/let me hear both sides’.42 The new writing method undercuts any sense of polemical Romantic critique, instead the music is left to convey the sense of what is taking place. One further effect of writing in this manner, and of placing the vocals low in the mix, is that added emphasis is given to those lines that do manage to fight there way to the surface. Many of these convey a sense of being adrift: ‘I’m lost at sea’,43 ‘holding on’.44 Perhaps the most startling moment occurs in ‘Idioteque’ when Thom Yorke declares ‘we’re not scare mongering/this is really happening’.45 (Here we have the counterpoint to the earlier lyric: ‘I’m not here/this isn’t happening’.) This is when the sound of the whole album suddenly makes sense: it has evolved as a direct response to the artistic and societal pressure that Radiohead found themselves facing. The question nevertheless remains: if the event that really is happening is the enforced deconstruction of Radiohead as a band, why would anybody want to listen to it take place? There certainly was an audience. On its release the album reached the top of the album charts in both Britain and America. Much has been made of the fact that Radiohead have revived the idea of artistic growth as pioneered by the Beatles in the 1960s, and the appeal of the album has been placed here. However, to me this album is not so much about making a progression, as about making a U-turn. It is not as though Radiohead’s new music came out of nowhere - the influences on each track are quite easily traced - but what they are doing is stepping away from their own past and from the bands they have influenced. They are realigning themselves, and part of this process has involved an identification with the anti-globalization movement. Moreover, whilst wishing to avoid making easy homologies, I do believe that Radiohead’s move away from Romantic individualism – the answer to their own artistic crisis - has resulted in a music that captures this movement’s ‘structure of feeling’. Anti-globalization protesters distrust heroes and sloganeering; they have seen heroes of the counter-culture turned into figureheads for brands, while old revolutionary slogans have become advertising copy. Indeed ‘the very process of naming a trend, or 8 coining a catchphrase, is regarded [...] with deep suspicion’.46 This echoes the suspicion that Thom Yorke held for putting his own identity into his vocals, and for putting forward the traditionally marketable aspects of the Radiohead brand. The antiglobalization movement has grown because of its pluralism and its amorphousness. As Naomi Klein has stated, ‘not only is the confusion deliberate, but it is precisely this absence of rigidity that has helped [...] to capture the imagination of thousands of young people around the world’.47 This absence of rigidity is mirrored by Radiohead’s desire to confound their audience’s expectations by moving away from the comforting structure of guitar, bass and drums and pre-composed songs. If we return to Raymond Williams’s concept of ‘dominant, residual and emergent’ cultures we can see that Radiohead have moved into a new category. No longer are they part of the residual, ‘at some distance from the effective dominant culture’;48 they are now in alignment with this generation’s emergent culture, at the vanguard of which we find the anti-globalization protesters. The potential and range of this movement should not be underestimated. As Roger Burbach states: Not since the 1960s has there been such a sweeping rebellion against the established order. It is ‘back to the future’, and this new future is profoundly internationalist and diverse, linking up environmentalists and trade unionists, university students in the North and sweatshop workers in the South, mainline churches and destitute Third World governments, indigenous groups and human rights activists. It is an embryonic movement that will go through many unforeseen twists and turns as we agitate, organise, and construct new alternatives to globalisation from the bottom up.49 Radiohead’s website is helping people to make these connections. Once inside the user is not confronted with Radiohead’s own opinions, but instead offered links to the websites of a vast array of campaigners and organisations.50 As an alternative to corporate globalization, the band ensured the tour they undertook to promote Kid A was conducted in a logo-free environment. They are also continuing to point fans towards the books that document the corporate dominance of our society. Appearing on the British music programme Later, Thom Yorke introduced ‘No Surprises’ by saying ‘I’m reading a book at the moment called Captive State which is by George Monbiot, it’s a very good read, and this is dedicated to that book’.51 However, Radiohead’s activism would be in vain if their music and the antiglobalization movement were not ‘articulating’ together. In order to communicate, they needed to find a corresponding ‘form’. Raymond Williams underlines the importance of this type of fit: What matters, finally, in understanding emergent culture, as distinct from both the dominant and residual, is that it is never only a matter of immediate practice; indeed it depends crucially on finding new forms or adaptations of form. [...] It is to understand more closely [...] the more evident forms of the emergent, the residual, and the dominant, that we need to explore the concept of structure of feeling.52 Williams writes that each ‘new generation responds in its own ways to the unique world it is inheriting [...] feeling its whole life in certain ways differently, and shaping its creative response into a new structure of feeling’,53 adding that ‘we are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone, [...] no generation speaks quite the same language as its predecessors’.54 Radiohead’s Romantic individualism would have been a dead language to the anti-globalization movement, but the band’s new found pluralism and their wilful obfuscation mean that the two parties can speak as one. 9 This is not to say that the dialogue that is taking place is restricted to Radiohead and those proselytising the core beliefs of the anti-globalization movement. Rather, both of these parties are communicating in the same manner as a broader emergent culture, one that is not politically specific, but which is rejecting the rampant egoism and branded homogenisation of the dominant culture. This wider dialogue, in part, accounts for the success of Kid A. However, it is not without its consequences. The new language that Radiohead are speaking has left many former supporters alienated and confused. And it is in this sense that we should re-read Nick Hornby’s opening remarks. He is wrong: Radiohead’s new work is not ‘challenging’. Kid A is not an album that you need to ‘work at’. On the contrary all that you need to do to understand it is to share the emergent culture’s structure of feeling. Footnotes 1 Nick Hornby, ‘Beyond the Pale: Radiohead Gets Farther Out’, New Yorker, 30 October 2000, p. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On Popular Music’ in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, ed. by John Storey, 2nd edn, (London: Prentice Hall, 1998), pp. 197-209 (p. 205) 3 Jason Evans, ‘Walking on Thin Ice’, Wire, 209 (July 2001), 26-33 (p. 32) 4 Evans, p. 32 5 Evans, p. 28 6 Radiohead, ‘Paranoid Android’, track 2 on OK Computer (Parlophone CDNODATA, 1997) 7 Radiohead, ‘No Surprises’, track 10 on OK Computer (Parlophone CDNODATA, 1997) 8 Adorno, p. 203 9 OK Computer was voted as the greatest album of all time in a reader’s poll in 1998. This should not be dismissed as fervour generated in the wake of its release. The October 2001 edition of Q has another readers poll, voting for the greatest albums of the last 15 years. OK Computer once again comes top. 10 John Storey, ‘Rockin’ Hegemony: West Coast Rock and Amerika’s War in Vietnam’ in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, ed. by John Storey, 2nd edn, (London: Prentice Hall, 1998), p 225-235 (p. 229) 11 For the influence of Radiohead on Travis, Coldplay and Muse listen to The Man Who (Independiente ISOM9CD, 1999), Parachutes (EMI 5277832, 2000), and Origin of Symmetry (Mushroom MUSH 93 CD, 2001) respectively. 12 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (London: Hogarth Press, 1993), p. 36 13 Simon Frith and Howard Horne, Art into Pop (London: Methuen and Co. Ltd, 1987), p. 32 14 Jon Stratton, ‘Capitalism and Romantic Ideology in the Record Business’, Popular Music, 3 (1983), 143-56 (p. 156) 15 Naomi Klein, No Logo (London: Flamingo, 2001), p. 50 16 Klein, p. 3 17 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: University Press, 1977) p. 122 18 www.radiohead.com/spinframes.htm [Question and answer page on radiohead.com, Radiohead’s official website] (accessed 20.09.01) 19 Quoted in Stratton, p. 149 20 Radiohead, ‘Paranoid Android’, track 2 on OK Computer (Parlophone CDNODATA, 1997) 21 Radiohead , Meeting People is Easy: A Film by Grant Gee about Radiohead, EMI Records Ltd 492129, 1998 22 Meeting People is Easy 23 www.ateaseweb.com/songs/howtodisappearcompletely.htm [Song page on ateaseweb.com, an unofficial Radiohead website ] (accessed 19.09.01) 24 Radiohead, ‘How to Disappear Completely’, track 4 on Kid A (Parlophone CDKIDA 1, 2000) 25 Quote taken from the article ‘Happy Now’ Mojo, June 2001 archived on www.followmearound.com/press/124.html [The press page of followmearound.com, an unofficial Radiohead website] (accessed 24.09.01) the author’s name is unfortunately not given. 26 www.ateaseweb.com/extra/eddiary.htm [Ed O’Brien’s Kid A diary archived on ateaseweb.com, an unofficial Radiohead website] (accessed 20.09.01) 27 Klein, p. xix 2 10 28 Stratton, p. 148 Klein, p. 50 30 John Harris, ‘Everything in its Right Place’, Q, 179 (August 2001) 90-99 (p. 99) 31 Frith and Horne, p. 172 32 Thom Yorke interviewed on Lola-da-musica, Dutch TV (VPRO), October 19th 2000, archived on www.followmearound.com/press/107.html [The press page of followmearound.com, an unofficial Radiohead website] (accessed 24.09.01) 33 For the Aphex Twin influence see Selected Ambient Works Volume II (Warp WARPCD 21, 1994), for the Boards of Canada see Music has the Right to Children (Warp WARPCD 55, 1998). 34 John Harris, p. 92 35 For the Can influence see Tago Mago (Spoon SPOONCD006/7, 1971), for Charlie Mingus see The Very Best of Charlie Mingus (Atlantic, 8122799882, 2001). 36 Greg Kot, ‘Radiohead sends out new signals with Kid A’ review of the album archived on http://www.metromix.com/top/1,1419,M-Metromix-Music-0!ArticleDetail-9295,00.html [metromix.com, an online music journal] (accessed 24.09.01) Most of the songs that didn’t make it onto Kid A were included on Amnesiac (Parlophone 5327672, 2001). This album was released less than nine months after Kid A. Despite being touted as a more commercial follow-up to, the songs on this album are almost as wilfully obscure as those on the earlier release. 37 Evans, p. 32 38 Quoted in Frith and Horne, p. 117 39 Evans, p. 32 40 Evans, p. 32 41 Radiohead, ‘Optimistic’, track 6 on Kid A (Parlophone CDKIDA 1, 2000) 42 Radiohead, ‘Idioteque’, track 8 on Kid A (Parlophone CDKIDA 1, 2000) 43 Radiohead, ‘In Limbo’, track 7 on Kid A (Parlophone CDKIDA 1, 2000) 44 Radiohead, ‘The National Anthem’, track 3 on Kid A (Parlophone CDKIDA 1, 2000) 45 Radiohead, ‘Idioteque’ 46 Klein, p. 296 47 Klein, p. 316 48 Williams, Marxism and Literature, p. 123 49 Roger Burbach, ‘North America’, in Anti Capitalism: A Guide to the Movement, ed. by Emma Bircham, Emma and John Charlton (London: Bookmarks Publications Ltd, 2001), pp. 159-169 (p. 168) 50 See various links on www.radiohead.com 51 Later Dir. by Janet Fraser Crook. BBC, 2001. 52 Williams, Marxism and Literature, pp. 126-7 53 Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Hogarth Press, 1992), p. 49 54 Williams, Marxism and Literature, p. 131 & 132 29 Bibliography Bircham, Emma, and John Charlton, eds., Anti Capitalism: A Guide to the Movement (London: Bookmarks Publications Ltd, 2001) Dalton, Stephen, ‘How to Disappear Completely’, Uncut, 51 (August 2001), 42-66 Evans, Jason, ‘Walking on Thin Ice’, Wire, 209 (July 2001), 26-33 Frith, Simon, Performing Rites: Evaluating Popular Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) Frith, Simon, Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock (London: Constable and Company Ltd, 1983) Frith, Simon and Andrew Goodwin, eds., On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word (London: Routledge, 1990) Frith, Simon and Howard Horne, Art into Pop (London: Methuen and Co. Ltd, 1987) Harris, John, ‘Everything in its Right Place’, Q, 179 (August 2001) 90-99 Hertz, Noreena, The Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy (London: William Heinemann, 2001) Hornby, Nick, ‘Beyond the Pale: Radiohead Gets Farther Out’, New Yorker, 30 October 2000, pp. Klein, Naomi, No Logo (London: Flamingo, 2001) Middleton, Richard, Popular Culture: Understanding Pop Music, (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1997) Middleton, Richard, Studying Popular Music (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990) Monbiot, George, Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain (London: Macmillan, 2000) 11 Storey, John, ed., Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, 2nd edn, (London: Prentice Hall, 1998) Stratton, Jon, ‘Capitalism and Romantic Ideology in the Record Business’, Popular Music, 3 (1983), 143-56 Williams, Raymond, Culture and Society (London: Hogarth Press, 1993) Williams, Raymond, The Long Revolution (London: Hogarth Press, 1992) Williams, Raymond, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: University Press, 1977) Discography Aphex Twin, Selected Ambient Works Volume II (Warp WARPCD 21, 1994) Boards of Canada, Music Has the Right to Children (Warp WARPCD 55, 1998) Can, Tago Mago (Spoon SPOONCD006/7, 1971) Coldplay, Parachutes (EMI 5277832, 2000) Mingus, Charlie, The Very Best of Charlie Mingus (Atlantic, 8122799882, 2001) Moby, Play (Mute, CDSTUMM 172, 1999) Muse, Origin of Symmetry (Mushroom MUSH 93 CD, 2001) Radiohead, Amnesiac (Parlophone 5327672, 2001) Radiohead, Kid A (Parlophone CDKIDA 1, 2000) Radiohead, OK Computer (Parlophone CDNODATA, 1997) Talking Heads, Remain in Light (Sire SBK 6095, 1980) Travis, The Man Who (Independiente ISOM9CD, 1999) Broadcast Sources Later, Dir. by Janet Fraser Crook. BBC, 2001 Radiohead , Meeting People is Easy: A Film by Grant Gee about Radiohead, EMI Records Ltd 492129, 1998 Radiohead, Seven Television Commercials, Websites www.ateaseweb.com www.followmearound.com www.metromix.com www.radiohead.com