Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [91]
Yes, rightful place—I know people who cringe when I tell them that I love Pablo Honey. Of course, I agree that The Bends is brilliant and that OK Computer and Kid A are masterpieces. But I still love Pablo Honey not only because “Anyone Can Play Guitar” is beautiful and “Creep” (despite what anyone—even Radiohead themselves—says about it) is one excellent song. I love it also because of the sounds of the springs in Brandon’s bed squeaking as he got up, because I loved hearing him tap along when he sat back down, because I loved his dog, Benny, and because I’ll never know what got Benny so excited so as to run up and down the hallway, paws clacking the length of their apartment. I loved that Brandon’s mother called him over to eat. It reminded me that someone made this for me.
But it wasn’t until I heard Kid A that any of this made sense to me.
Surprises and Alarms
As most Radiohead fans remember, Kid A was kind of shocking when it was released. One friend of mine, when I asked him what he thought, said that he couldn’t listen to their old stuff anymore. Their core sound had changed. Radiohead had evolved. They’d picked up electronic music, yet couldn’t quite be called “electronic” themselves. They had abandoned the naturalistic realism of rock albums and embraced the very technology used to record them. They weren’t pretending that a person playing an acoustic guitar and singing into a microphone was any less technologically determined than a band that drew from drum samples, distorted vocals, and software. When we hear Thom Yorke’s voice at the beginning of “Everything in its Right Place,” we hear it disfigured—cycled frontwards and backwards through some machine. It’s spooky, weird, and clearly marked a new direction for the band.
One thing that I still love about Kid A—and which is, no doubt, one of the shocking things about it—is that you’re always reminded that someone made this. The music doesn’t disappear into the transparency of recording technologies—even “How to Disappear Completely” uses guitars as easily as it does studio effects. At nearly every turn, we’re reminded of the synthetic quality of the songs and the technology used to compose the album—or, at least, the texture of that technology. Years after its release, when I was teaching writing, one of my students was surprised that I had never seen the band live. I was (relatively) young at the time, but my response was, I don’t think I have to.
I said that because seeing the band live didn’t seem to be the point. (Later, when I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings came out, I learned that I might be wrong about that.) At the time, though, the whole point was artifice. Radiohead had long been lamenting the artificiality of things early in their career (with, for example, “Fake Plastic Trees” and “Fitter, Happier”) and Kid A, as shocking as it was, seemed like a logical step: use the technology that alienates us, crawl into it, and turn it into something else from the inside. For the media-saturated youth-culture that rallied around Kid A, the album seemed to speak simultaneously from within the technology wrapped around us as well as about it. Where OK Computer was about the low-level panic and anxiety produced by living in “the information age,” Kid A was an artifact of that information and that age, the first child born from the very technology rock music traveled. (Okay. Maybe not the first. But let’s not get hung up on origin myths.)
To me, the album is inseparable from the artifice used to compose it. And it’s inseparable from what I see as Kid A’s technologically determined conundrum—the question: how does the withdrawal and making-evident of artifice shape anything Kid A might say? Does this inseparability of music