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Kid A breaks rules in an artistically creative act of transgression that remains, at its core, ambiguous. Unlike other famous concept albums (such as Pink Floyd’s The Wall, or Animals), there is no seemingly clear or definitive message that unwinds through the playing of Kid A. Instead, Radiohead deconstructs the very idea of a conceptually themed album in a way that connects directly to what French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998) calls our postmodern condition.

Lyotard says, “Postmodern (or pagan) would be the condition of the literatures and arts that have no assigned addressee and no regulating ideal, yet in which value is regularly measured on the stock of experimentation.”69 Kid A is precisely this—an album whose value lies in its experimentation. The band had no intention to play things commercially safe when they released it in 2000. Although a couple of tracks were released for radio play (mainly “Optimistic”), none stands out as a radio-ready pop single and none gained any lasting success on the pop charts. Reception for the album was initially mixed, as well. One reviewer said it was, “just awful,”70 another said, “plain frustrating.” Even Nigel Godrich, the album’s producer, had his doubts. Thom Yorke recounted Nigel’s first impression by saying, “He didn’t understand why, if we had such a strength in one thing, we would want to do something else. But at the same time he trusted me to have an idea of what I wanted, even though he didn’t understand what it was for ages.” The fact that the album’s producer had no idea why Radiohead wanted to create that particular album shows how challenging the band was becoming.

What Was That You Tried to Say?

According to Lyotard, the key postmodern concept of “the differend” refers to “the unstable state and instance of language wherein something that must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be . . . What is at stake in a certain literature, in a philosophy, or perhaps even in a certain politics, is to bear witness to differends by finding idioms for them”71 Kid A begins by bearing witness to something like this by undercutting the idea of a stable language. In sharp contrast to the cataclysmic opening track on OK Computer, the otherwordly “Airbag,” Kid A begins with the quiet, calm mood of “Everything in Its Right Place.” For a few moments as the song takes shape, everything can be taken into account. All is perfectly situated within a pristine, predictable, knowable sonic order of things. Nothing outside of the ordinary has occurred yet. Then the tone of the song changes and it becomes slightly ominous. Yorke sings “Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon,” and then questions, “There are two colors in my head, what was that you tried to say?”

Something unpredictable, some event, has happened. The predictable order has broken down, leaving the singer with a sour taste in his mouth. The “two colors in my head” are a way of attempting to make sense of the unexpected event by resorting to binary oppositions. But there’s no sense to be made, it seems, because Yorke cannot understand what it was “you tried to say.” As the music swells, what was once a pleasant song about a perfect order of things becomes a kind of organized chaos while Yorke’s vocals grow more and more desperate. The message that is being conveyed is not so easily put into words that once made sense, when everything was stable and predictable. Here we have our first encounter with the postmodern condition. When we slip into an unpredictable, inexplicable or uncanny situation, we find ourselves squarely within the postmodern condition. When this condition occurs, Lyotard continues from the earlier quotation, it’s “measured by the stock of its experimentation, in which it is measured by the distortion that is inflicted upon the materials, the forms and the structures of sensibility and thought. Postmodern is not to be taken in a periodizing sense.”

So the postmodern is not simply some period or epoch after modernism, but