So why is Radiohead’s Kid A on this best 1,000 albums ever thing?
I wouldn’t say I was a massive fan of Radiohead at the turn of the millennium. I liked them quite a lot, and thought OK Computer (#63 of best 1,000 albums ever) was quite an achievement. Underwhelming words of praise, of course, for true Radiohead heads, though rest assured my admiration for the band has grown much over the years.
This sets the scene for me buying Kid A on compact disc shortly after it was released in October of 2000. I clearly recall that I put it on a few times, gave it a short listen, and then promptly popped it back into one of those ubiquitous CD racks everyone had during that era.
And there the Kid A CD sat for quite a few years, gathering dust. Another album that was purchased in the hope it would be good based on past output from the artist or band, only to suffer the fate of languishing in physical media purgatory.
Until I popped it back into my stereo – I think we had one of those three-CD changers with a rotating tabletop in that era – to give it another chance.
And thankfully I did, because for reasons I can’t explain, when I heard the strange nearly-alien tones of “Everything in Its Right Place,” my jaw dropped.
Maybe I had caught up to the moment when I was ready to appreciate it, who knows?
It was one of those super rare, everything-just-clicked moments where you go from completely not getting it to completely getting it.
If Kid A was religion – chilly, slightly foreboding, deeply mesmerizing – I had found it.
And now I’m here to speak on it.
More than most albums featured in the best 1,000 albums ever project – and this is particularly true of those ranked in this elite territory – Kid A is much less about hooks or specific moments or songs and is more an album meant to be appreciated as a whole. And maybe there’s an analogy there too with modern art.
“Maybe you’re just supposed to experience it,” as Kenny Cosgrove muses about Bert Cooper’s Mark Rothko painting on Mad Men.
In four concise sentences, Wikipedia sets the scene for what Radiohead was up to with Kid A while also pinpointing a moment in time – the new millennium, early days of mass adoption of the internet, and just prior to 9/11:
Departing from their earlier sound, Radiohead incorporated influences from electronic music, krautrock, jazz and 20th-century classical music, with a wider range of instruments and effects. The singer, Thom Yorke, wrote impersonal and abstract lyrics, cutting up phrases and assembling them at random.
In a departure from industry practice, Radiohead released no singles and conducted few interviews and photoshoots. Instead, they released short animations and became one of the first major acts to use the internet for promotion.
Given how cutting edge and forward-leaning the sound of Kid A remains in the 2020s, it’s astonishing that it just reached a full quarter century since its release as of this writing.
During the nine-month research phase for this project, I jotted down that Kid A is an immersive, strange, beautiful, and slightly haunting masterpiece. And those same adjectives flit around my mind while revisiting slow and brooding “The National Anthem.”
Then there are moments when the horns swirl and nearly shriek, like the madness (within the nation?) that had heretofore only barely been contained is now breaking out. Like we’re all on the verge of cracking up, but not at all in the oh man this is so hilarious way.
Sidenote here that “The National Anthem” is a title shared with the first episode of Black Mirror’s first season. And it’s worth noting that that episode is iconic and infamous for being the one you recommend people not to start with the science fiction anthology show.
If it’s not clear by now, Kid A is an album that particularly lends itself to being listened to as a complete body of work. Doing so will allow you to fully appreciate what I feel is the album’s high point – the three-track sequence that runs through “Optimistic,” “In Limbo,” and “Idioteque.”
There’s something about “Optimistic” that feels quintessentially Radiohead to me. Is Thom Yorke conveying wistfulness, despair, hope? The way electric pulses play against a driving, slightly mechanical-feeling guitar riff makes it somehow feel foreboding and deeply gorgeous at the same time.
Is the song title ironic or earnest? The lyrics offer only cryptic clues. “The best you can is good enough,” Yorke repeats throughout the song, but then we get allusions to “floating around on a prison ship” and “dinosaurs roaming the Earth.”
And that’s not even getting to the “nervous messed up marionette.”
“In Limbo” is dense and layered and ultimately beautiful. And “Idioteque” reminds me of the best work of Aphex Twin in some ways – sputtering electronic and industrial sounds and beats – but then we get a Thom Yorke and Kid A vibe injected as well.
My favorite Aphex Twin song is simply called “4,” off of the Richard D. James Album.
I have a Spotify playlist called “higher place” that I throw on when I absolutely 1,000% need to focus, and tracks like “4” help me to dial in.
Anyway, Kid A’s closing tracks feel like a denouement after we’ve been through one hell of a strange journey. “Morning Bell” is at turns mesmerizing and strange, while “Motion Picture Soundtrack” might be the music Radiohead imagines playing at the end of the world.
I can’t figure out if it’s funereal or a lullaby.
Is Kid A asking us if we should feel dread or hope for what might come next?
Ultimately, we all must decide for ourselves. But I can’t help but think that the album’s closing track, bracingly called “Untitled,” sounds suspiciously like what the afterlife might be like.
Or perhaps a transition to another world, another kind of experience.
Some stats & info about Radiohead’s Kid A
- What kind of musical stylings does this album represent? Rock Music, British Bands, Britpop, Alternative Rock, Electronic Music
- Rolling Stone’s greatest 500 albums ranking – #20
- All Music’s rating – 5 out of 5 stars
- When was Kid A released? 2000
- My ranking, the one you’re reading right now – #17 out of 1,000
Radiohead’s Kid A on Spotify
A lyrical snippet from Radiohead’s Kid A that’s evocative of the album in some way, maybe
I’m not here, this isn’t happening.
What does the “best 1,000 albums ever” mean and why are you doing this?
Yeah, I know it’s audacious, a little crazy (okay, maybe a lot cray cray), bordering on criminal nerdery.
But here’s what it’s NOT: a definitive list of the Greatest Albums of All-Time. This is 100% my own personal super biased, incredibly subjective review of what my top 1,000 albums are, ranked in painstaking order over the course of doing research for nearly a year, Rob from High Fidelity style. Find out more about why I embarked on a best 1,000 albums ever project.