TM 2

Music as an art form is able to convey nearly every single emotion humans have the ability
to express purely because music, like most works of art, are a method of expressing oneself.
It even has the ability to convey complex themes and ideas that make a musical project
even more interesting. The first thing that pops in my head when I think of this ability music
has, is an album that defied every single convention that had been set before by the band
and by other musicians at the time. It was essentially going to be commercial suicide for the
band yet it did well in terms of sales and even went on to win a grammy. A famous critic at
the time said that the band had essentially climbed onto a extremely high branch with a
hacksaw and somehow instead of falling to their demise they crafted a beautiful treehouse.
The album im talking of is Radiohead’s “KID A” and in the brief time I have I’ll try and
illustrate why it was and still is heralded as one of the best bodies of music ever created.
Radiohead has always been a band that hasn’t been afraid to push the envelope and try
new things. In fact, their previous album “OK Computer” was one of the first rock albums to
heavily use electronic sounds with traditional rock instrumentation. They were known for
their excellent guitar work which created amazing melodies for their lead singer Thom Yorke
to deliver his oddly esoteric yet understandable and relevant lyrics in terms of the social
climate. The album was so successful that it backfired on the band. After this release the
excessive touring most musicians have to do completely burnt out the band. They ran into a
massive creative blockade and would struggle to even create a single tune due to
disagreements. Thom yorke wanted to abandon their signature styler and try something
new but the band wasn’t able to cohesively function due to the burnout. Over time his
mental health declined and the band nearly broke up before finally something clicked and
Radiohead were able to create music again.
KID A is an album that is the most esoteric Radiohead has ever been and is very difficult to
digest in terms of the actual content of the lyrics. After OK Computer’s success and the
following disillusionment with the way celebrities were treated and how society at large
functioned and continues to so till this day heavily affected the tone of the album. The
album has several layers of irony and sarcasm and because of the extremely vague lyrics the
listener is left with an incredibly interesting dichotomy to deal with. The somber tunes the
band plays soothes the listener but on hearing the lyrics a strong feeling of unease starts
stirring within them because of their threatening nature providing a great experience that
unveils the various concepts the album leaves with the listener. KID A was written at thom
yorkes lowest point when he was incredibly frustrated with the world and its ability to
distract themselves from every issue that had actual repercussions. Climate change being
ignored alongside several societal issues whose effects we can see for ourselves nearly 20
years later. People were and still content with distracting themselves with reality tv shows
and what the most popular musicians were up to, the latter being something he had to
contribute to as well adding to his feelings of suicidal tendencies and self-loathing displayed
in the album after getting used up and burnt out by what essentially was the capitalistic
system that has turned us into slaves that are continuously experimented on by giant
corporations. We were essentially experiment 0516, KID A, B, C. This treatment of the
masses as market statistics is one such theme put across and remarkably this was all done
way before social media algorithms were even a possibility. What amazes me is the accuracy
with which this still continues. We only need to look at the websites we visit daily to know
how much of ourselves we’ve given away to these corporations for temporary happiness.
The second major theme is the mental state that thom yorke was in after the success of OK
Computer and how he had essentially traded his state of mental peace for fame. Once
again, a concept that still stays relevant to this day. Our ability to conform to whatever
society asks of us was something that genuinely worried him and kept him awake many
sleepless nights. I’d like to also make a note about the album art. A vast desolate landscape
that’s frozen but we can clearly see fire in the background and a volcano off to the side of
the same set of mountains somehow still have snow. It’s a perfect representation of how
cold our world has been getting while simultaneously heating up in the literal sense because
of how we’ve been slowly killing it, forcing it to finally kill us someday.
To me KID A is a genuine masterpiece that still surprises me with bits and pieces of
information even after god knows how many listens. There are several other interpretations
to the album due to the complexity of this project but this is what I was able to gather over
time. Hopefully I haven’t been a bore but this is something I’m truly passionate about and
thought would be cool to share. I’d like to end with a lyric that really stuck with me and its
probably going to seem very random but its something that has a much larger meaning in
terms of the album itself. But for context’s sake it relates to the feeling of disassociation that
also permeates through a large chunk of the album.

“I’m not here

This isn’t happening
I’m not here
I’m not here”