33 1/3 - Kid A
Entering the studio without a clear aesthetic purpose is commendable, but to act on impulses of both depersonalization and renewal for an astonishing 18-month recording session nearly justifies the deification of Radiohead. -Marvin Lin, Kid A
Before I talk about why this book, even for its flights into academic fancy, is so compelling, I think it’s important to mention why our editors started Synconation. It was to write about the revelation and bliss–the emotional spark–of music without resorting to a critic’s cynical hyper-analysis. But be warned: The book’s author, Marvin Lin, does veer into hyper-analysis. He even wrote for Pitchfork, the hipster Bible of music snark. A magazine that Lin says compared Kid A to “witnessing the stillborn birth of a child while simultaneously having an opportunity to see her play in the afterlife on Imax.”
Indeed.
BUT WAIT. While I bet the critic felt some smug satisfaction coming up with that simile, the point of Lin’s book is that such critiques miss the significance of Kid A specifically and music in general, which he defines not as a “thing,” but an activity. Music is performing, recording and listening. And though I’m getting ahead of myself here, I want to hold onto this concept that music is not a product, but an experience both ephemeral and magic. This is what Synconation wants to express!
Incidentally, Pitchfork went on to name Kid A the best album of the year and one of the best of the decade, so maybe they meant “stillborn” as a compliment? Anyway, let‘s unpack.
Without a Clear Aesthetic Purpose
Lin’s music critic cred is actually a great asset to this book, which attempts to explain not only Kid A, but how people (and critics) digest music over time and what it meant for the band’s evolution. I know this might sound dry (and admittedly, it is for several pages), but stay with me–I’ll only give you the good stuff.
First off, he culls everything from history books to children’s books to piece together what Radiohead was trying to accomplish. Essentially, Thom Yorke had a vision for what he didn’t want to do, which was everything that Radiohead had done before. But in doing that, the band wasn’t sure where to go. Lin describes Yorke’s Dadaist approach to writing lyrics–how he cut drafts into pieces and rearranged the words to create new songs—and how this experimental approach was mimicked throughout the process of making the album.
Painful in a lot of ways, as Nigel Godrich said they had to unlearn a lot of what they’d done in the past. But the result was something almost simultaneously without context (completely different from what Radiohead had done before) and universal, because it accomplished Yorke’s goal of “hybridizing influences.” The aesthetic included everything, which made it sound not quite like anything else.
Depersonalization
Lin makes great use of various interviews to reveal Radiohead’s goals and the dissatisfaction that led them to Kid A. One of my favorite quotes has Yorke explaining how the album was a backlash against the Radiohead mythos that had been built on their previous work: “If you actually start to believe that you are what you write, then you have fucking had it … To assume that everything is about somebody’s life is to assume that that person is inherently stupid and isn’t capable of absorbing anything else. The whole point of creativity is that you spend your whole life absorbing things almost to where it is unbearable. The way you deal with it is [to] get it out.”
Yorke sums up the tired model of rock’s tortured artist, and how he wanted to get away from being that character. This is the act of depersonalization–when Radiohead set out to distance themselves from, well, themselves.
