Kid A
Kid A is the fourth studio album by the English rock band Radiohead, released on 2 October 2000 by Parlophone. It was recorded with their producer, Nigel Godrich, in Paris, Copenhagen, Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire.
Kid A
2 October 2000
4 January 1999 – 18 April 2000[1]
- Guillaume Tell, Paris
- Medley, Copenhagen
- Radiohead studio, Oxfordshire
49:56
- Nigel Godrich
- Radiohead
After the stress of promoting Radiohead's 1997 album OK Computer, the songwriter, Thom Yorke, wanted to depart from rock music. Drawing influence from electronic music, ambient music, krautrock, jazz and 20th-century classical music, Radiohead used instruments such as modular synthesisers, the ondes Martenot, brass and strings. They processed guitar sounds, incorporated samples and loops, and manipulated their recordings with software. 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. Bootlegs of early performances were shared on filesharing services, and Kid A was leaked before release. In 2000, Radiohead toured Europe in a custom-built tent without corporate logos.
Kid A debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart and became Radiohead's first number-one album on the Billboard 200 in the US, where it sold more than 207,000 copies in its first week. Its new sound divided listeners, and some dismissed it as pretentious, deliberately obscure or derivative. However, at the end of the decade, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork and the Times ranked it the greatest album of the 2000s, and in 2020 Rolling Stone ranked it number 20 on its updated list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time". Like OK Computer, Kid A won the Grammy Award for Best Alternative Album and was nominated for the Grammy Award for Album of the Year. It was certified platinum in Australia, Canada, France, Japan, the US and the UK.
A second album of material from the sessions, Amnesiac, was released eight months later. Kid A Mnesia, an anniversary reissue compiling Kid A, Amnesiac and previously unreleased material, was released in 2021.
Background[edit]
Following the critical and commercial success of their 1997 album OK Computer, the members of Radiohead suffered burnout.[2] The songwriter, Thom Yorke, became ill, describing himself as "a complete fucking mess ... completely unhinged".[2] He was troubled by new acts he felt were imitating Radiohead[3] and became hostile to the music media.[2][4] He told The Observer: "I always used to use music as a way of moving on and dealing with things, and I sort of felt like that the thing that helped me deal with things had been sold to the highest bidder and I was simply doing its bidding. And I couldn't handle that."[5]
Yorke suffered from writer's block and could not finish writing songs on guitar.[6] He became disillusioned with the "mythology" of rock music, feeling the genre had "run its course".[5] He began to listen almost exclusively to the electronic music of artists signed to the record label Warp, such as Aphex Twin and Autechre. Yorke said: "It was refreshing because the music was all structures and had no human voices in it. But I felt just as emotional about it as I'd ever felt about guitar music."[2] He liked the idea of his voice being used as an instrument rather than having a leading role, and wanted to focus on sounds and textures instead of traditional songwriting.[3]
Yorke bought a house in Cornwall and spent his time walking the cliffs and drawing, restricting his musical activity to playing the grand piano he had recently bought.[7] "Everything in Its Right Place" was the first song he wrote.[7] He described himself as a "shit piano player", with little knowledge of electronic instruments: "I remember this Tom Waits quote from years ago, that what keeps him going as a songwriter is his complete ignorance of the instruments he's using. So everything's a novelty. That's one of the reasons I wanted to get into computers and synths, because I didn't understand how the fuck they worked. I had no idea what ADSR meant."[8]
The guitarist Ed O'Brien had hoped Radiohead's fourth album would comprise short, melodic guitar songs, but Yorke said: "There was no chance of the album sounding like that. I'd completely had it with melody. I just wanted rhythm. All melodies to me were pure embarrassment."[6] The bassist, Colin Greenwood, said: "We felt we had to change everything. There were other guitar bands out there trying to do similar things. We had to move on."[9]
Music[edit]
Style and influences[edit]
Kid A incorporates influences from electronic artists on Warp Records[6] such as 1990s IDM artists Autechre and Aphex Twin;[2] 1970s Krautrock bands such as Can;[6] the jazz of Charles Mingus,[29] Alice Coltrane and Miles Davis;[3] and abstract hip hop from the Mo'Wax label, including Blackalicious and DJ Krush.[42] Yorke cited Remain in Light (1980) by Talking Heads as a "massive reference point".[43] Björk was another major influence,[44][28] particularly her 1997 album Homogenic,[45] as was the Beta Band.[46] Radiohead attended an Underworld concert which helped renew their enthusiasm in a difficult moment.[47]
The string orchestration for "How to Disappear Completely" was influenced by the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki.[2] Jonny Greenwood's use of the ondes Martenot on several songs was inspired by Olivier Messiaen, who popularised the instrument and was one of Greenwood's teenage heroes.[48] Greenwood described his interest in mixing old and new music technology,[48] and during the recording sessions Yorke read Ian MacDonald's Revolution in the Head, which chronicles the Beatles' recordings with George Martin during the 1960s.[3] The band also sought to combine electronic manipulations with jam sessions in the studio, saying their model was the German band Can.[6]
Kid A has been described as a work of electronica,[49][50][51] experimental rock,[52] post-rock,[53][54] alternative rock,[55] post-prog,[56] ambient,[57] electronic rock,[58] art rock,[59] and art pop.[60] Though guitar is less prominent than on previous Radiohead albums, guitars were still used on most tracks.[3] "Treefingers", an ambient instrumental, was created by digitally processing O'Brien's guitar loops.[38] Many of Yorke's vocals were manipulated with effects; for example, his vocals on the title track were simply spoken, then vocoded with the ondes Martenot to create the melody.[3]
Lyrics[edit]
Yorke's lyrics on Kid A are less personal than on earlier albums, and instead incorporate abstract and surreal themes.[61] He cut up phrases and assembled them at random, combining cliches and banal observations; for example, "Morning Bell" features repeated contrasting lines such as "Where'd you park the car?" and "Cut the kids in half".[62] Yorke denied that he was "trying to get anything across" with the lyrics, and described them as "like shattered bits of mirror ... like pieces of something broken".[22]
Yorke cited David Byrne's approach to lyrics on Remain in Light as an influence: "When they made that record, they had no real songs, just wrote it all as they went along. Byrne turned up with pages and pages, and just picked stuff up and threw bits in all the time. And that's exactly how I approached Kid A."[3] Radiohead used Yorke's lyrics "like pieces in a collage ... [creating] an artwork out of a lot of different little things".[6] The lyrics are not included in the liner notes, as Radiohead felt they could not be considered independently of the music,[63] and Yorke did not want listeners to focus on them.[3]
Yorke wrote "Everything in Its Right Place" about the depression he experienced on the OK Computer tour, feeling he could not speak.[64] The refrain of "How to Disappear Completely" was inspired by R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe, who advised Yorke to relieve tour stress by repeating to himself: "I'm not here, this isn't happening".[65] The refrain of "Optimistic" ("try the best you can / the best you can is good enough") was an assurance by Yorke's partner, Rachel Owen, when Yorke was frustrated with the band's progress.[6] The title Kid A came from a filename on one of Yorke's sequencers.[66] Yorke said he liked its "non-meaning", saying: "If you call [an album] something specific, it drives the record in a certain way."[5]
Artwork[edit]
The Kid A artwork and packaging was created by Yorke with Stanley Donwood, who has worked with Radiohead since their 1994 EP My Iron Lung.[67] Donwood painted on large canvases with knives and sticks, then photographed the paintings and manipulated them with Photoshop.[68] While working on the artwork, Yorke and Donwood became "obsessed" with the Worldwatch Institute website, which was full of "scary statistics about ice caps melting, and weather patterns changing"; this inspired them to use an image of a mountain range as the cover art.[69] Donwood said he saw the mountains as "some sort of cataclysmic power".[70]
Donwood was inspired by a photograph taken during the Kosovo War depicting a square metre of snow full of the "detritus of war", such as military equipment and cigarette stains. He said: "I was upset by it in a way war had never upset me before. It felt like it was happening in my street."[68] The red swimming pool on the album spine and disc was inspired by the 1988 graphic novel Brought to Light by Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz, in which the number of people killed by state terrorism is measured in swimming pools filled with blood. Donwood said this image "haunted" him during the recording of the album, calling it "a symbol of looming danger and shattered expectations".[71] Yorke and Donwood cited a Paris exhibition of paintings by David Hockney as another influence.[72]
Yorke and Donwood made many versions of the album cover, with different pictures and different titles in different typefaces. Unable to pick one, they taped them to cupboards of the studio kitchen and went to bed. According to Donwood, the choice the next day "was obvious".[73] In October 2021, Yorke and Donwood curated an exhibition of Kid A artwork at Christie's headquarters in London.[74]
Sales[edit]
Kid A reached number one on Amazon's sales chart, with more than 10,000 pre-orders.[82] It debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart,[80] selling 55,000 copies in its first day – the biggest first-day sales of the year and more than every other album in the top ten combined.[80] Kid A also debuted at number one on the US Billboard 200,[102] selling more than 207,000 copies in its first week.[103] It was Radiohead's first US top-20 album, and the first US number one in three years for any British act.[82][104] Kid A also debuted at number one in Canada, where it sold more than 44,000 copies in its first week,[103] and in France, Ireland and New Zealand. European sales slowed on 2 October 2000, the day of release, when EMI recalled 150,000 faulty CDs.[80] By June 2001, Kid A had sold 310,000 copies in the UK, less than a third of OK Computer sales.[105] It is certified platinum in the UK, Australia, Canada, France, Japan and the US.