In Michael Lydon’s absorbing biography of Ray Charles, the author observes that our musical habits changed with the advent of rock and roll. We were no longer interested purely in song. Lydon points out that the big TV music show of the fifties, “Your Hit Parade,” suffered a fatal drop in ratings because audiences lost interest in bland, invariably “white” cover versions of the current Top Ten; we wanted to listen to the record itself. This was entirely understandable; it’s hard to imagine wanting to hear anyone but Elvis singing—and Scotty Moore playing—“Baby Let’s Play House.” In retrospect, however, it’s also easy to see that this transfer of allegiance brought with it an awful lot of trouble and disappointment. We had, in effect, decided to trust the artist, not the material; within a couple of decades, rock fans would be trotting off to Sam Goody to buy Lou Reed’s “Metal Machine Music.”
“Metal Machine Music,” you may recall, consisted of sixty-odd minutes of feedback noise, and was utterly contemptuous of anyone who had ever shown an interest in Reed’s work. If there was justice in the world, the record would have resulted in a large fine and possibly even a short prison sentence for its creator; instead, it has achieved something approaching cult status among Reed’s devotees—the customer reviewers on Amazon.com are perversely approving. One says, “Best to say this is Reed’s cynical anti-art statement to his fawning public,” before awarding it the maximum five stars. Another declares flatly, “The greatest album made by anyone—Ever!” (The same writer also claims to hear feedback versions of Neil Diamond’s “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” and Alicia Bridges’ disco classic “I Love the Nightlife” hidden away on songs two and four of the record, even though neither of these songs existed until years after “Metal Machine Music” was released, in 1975.) Heaven forbid that Reed should not be able to profit from what sounds like an afternoon’s idleness. In the end, every burp that finds its way onto a rock recording simply becomes part of the narrative of a rock star’s career. Neil Young produced the screeching “Arc”—another feedback classic, although metal machine noise can’t always be blamed for career lows. Bob Dylan crooned his way through “Self Portrait,” apparently to amuse himself and annoy his fans. These albums are not bad music by talented people. They’re scary scenes in a gripping movie, a twist in an endlessly fascinating bio-pic—that’s how “legends” like Dylan and Young get away with it.
It is only fair to say that Radiohead’s new album, “Kid A,” is nowhere near as teeth-grindingly tedious as “Metal Machine Music.” It has its attractive and compelling moments—every so often something gorgeous floats past—and those Radiohead fans who are hellbent on loving it will not be reduced to convincing themselves that they can hear future Ricky Martin hits buried somewhere in the passages of ambient drone. It does, however, start from the same premise as the Reed album: it relies heavily on our passionate interest in every twist and turn of the band’s career, no matter how trivial or pretentious. 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 songs. In other words, you have to be sixteen. Anyone old enough to vote may find that he has competing demands for his 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!” (The music critics who love “Kid A,” one suspects, love it because their job forces them to consume music as a sixteen-year-old would. Don’t trust any of them.) 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.
There is nothing wrong with making albums for sixteen-year-olds, but Radiohead’s previous efforts had more inclusive ambitions. The first one, “Pablo Honey,” may have been patchy, but it contained one song, “Creep,” that gave voice to everyone who has ever felt disconnected, alienated, or geeky—just about anyone who has ever used rock music to get through the day. “I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo,” the singer Thom Yorke piped with unnerving sincerity. “What the hell am I doing here? I don’t belong here.” The genius of the song was its mournful anguish, and the fact that it struck a chord with real creeps—people locked away in penal institutions, for instance—served only to underline the brilliance of the conceit. It wasn’t the lyrics of “Creep” that were significant but the thrilling little chukka-chukka guitar noise that foreshadowed the song’s chorus. Radiohead’s second album, “The Bends,” was a masterpiece. In recent years, only Nirvana has come close to matching its flair with the old-fashioned dynamics of rock. “The Bends” had it all: electrifying tunes, real drama, and a band that seemed equally committed to both the enormous climactic guitar riffs of the title track and an assortment of spooky, pretty ballads. With “The Bends,” Radiohead found its voice, and, despite the album’s conventional trappings, it turned out to be unique: no other contemporary band has managed to mix such a cocktail of rage, sarcasm, self-pity, exquisite tunefulness, and braininess.
Its successor, “OK Computer,” had some extraordinarily lovely tracks—the operatic “Lucky,” the menacingly slinky “Karma Police,” the hymnal “No Surprises.” Its centerpiece, however, was the six-minute opus “Paranoid Android,” a rather clumsy chunk of dystopia (Radiohead, political and anti-consumerist, is big on dystopia) with symphonic ambitions—which is what rock critics always say when there are quiet bits bolted shakily onto noisy bits. Older listeners may have heard “Paranoid Android” and been uncomfortably reminded of experiences they would rather forget—such as sitting in a field somewhere and nodding appreciatively to the sounds of King Crimson or Emerson, Lake & Palmer, best-forgotten seventies bands whose songs and solos were way too long. Still, “OK Computer” sold millions, and was voted the best album of all time by the readers of the English rock magazine Q.
Who knows what earned Radiohead its huge audience? One could argue that it was the longer, chancier parts of “OK Computer,” but it seems just as likely that it was the more straightforward songs that really connected. Whatever it was, Radiohead now has a fervent audience who will give the band all the license it needs. We have been served plenty of notice to the effect that Radiohead is bored with its enviable facility for writing melody and well-structured songs; in various interviews, the band has warned us that “Kid A” would be markedly different from its predecessors, and apparently all sorts of blips and splodges and squeaks, fragments of a bellicose work in progress, have been emanating from Radiohead Web sites.
It comes as something of a relief, then, when you put “Kid A” into the machine and hear the fruity (and beautifully recorded) sound of an electric piano, playing a sweet, churchy intro. “Hey! I can handle experimentalism!” you think, but your confidence is immediately knocked flat by the lyrics of the first song, “Everything in Its Right Place,” which consists mostly of the lines “Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon” and “There are two colors in my head.” The title track is an inconsequential piece of sci-fi soundscape—five minutes of treated voice and eerie synth noises. “The National Anthem” is an unpleasant free-jazz workout, with a discordant horn section squalling over a studiedly crude bass line. Only once on the album, I think, does Radiohead come close to creating anything that electrifies in the way that great chunks of the previous two albums do: “Idioteque” is a twitchy, hypnotic nursery rhyme that you can imagine twenty-third-century children with two heads and green skin singing in their underground kindergarten. A whole album of that and “Kid A” could have been something—something you wouldn’t want to dig out too often, true, but something strikingly ominous.
What is peculiar about this album is that it denies us the two elements of Radiohead’s music that have made the band so distinctive and enthralling. For the most part, Thom Yorke’s voice is fuzzed and distorted beyond recognition, or else he is not allowed to sing at all; and Jonny Greenwood’s guitar, previously such an inventive treat, has been largely replaced with synths. One explanation may be the band’s enthusiasm for the sort of music it has recently been listening to—Messiaen, apparently, and Charles Mingus, and all sorts of things that don’t sound anything like “Creep.” The result is that there’s no room for anything approaching conventional pop music, and though the band might want to show us its impressive breadth of taste, it’s hard to understand why we should be any more interested in Radiohead’s version of Charles Mingus than we would be in its versions of Joyce or Fassbinder—many of these influences seem semi-digested, at best, and there is very little on “Kid A” that is remotely memorable.
Another explanation is that this is a band that has come to hate itself—or, at least, the gurgling echo of itself that one hears in the countless baby Radioheads that have been spawned in the past few years. Radiohead is as imitated now as Nirvana was a decade or so ago, and though this kind of imitation must be depressing and irritating (imitators are able to photocopy the surfaces but not the soul and the guts and the intelligence), to retreat from its formerly accessible self in this way seems a failure of courage. In any case, it’s hard to be yourself when everyone else is trying to be you, too.
Radiohead reportedly spent more than a year recording one song that it eventually decided not to include on “Kid A.” The album is morbid proof that this sort of self-indulgence results in a weird kind of anonymity, rather than something distinctive and original. (The CD pamphlet, incidentally, contains a splenetic attack on Tony Blair, who may feel entitled to ask himself how a band that spends a year failing to come up with an album track would have responded to the Kosovo crisis or the floundering Northern Ireland peace process.) Nobody is asking Radiohead not to grow, or change, or do something different. It would be nice, however, if the band’s members recognized that the enormous, occasionally breathtaking gifts they have—for songwriting, and singing, and playing, and connecting, and inspiring—are really nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, they might even come in handy next time around. ♦