Social Graffiti: “Kid A,” Radiohead

By Charles Young
George Washington High School

Since I grew in the 90s and am a music aficionado, I love Radiohead. When I first conceived this column, I made a list of all the albums that I felt have shaped me or had an impact on my life. Radiohead is featured prominently on it with four albums.

Radiohead is on of those bands like The Beatles — almost every album is considered classic, and there are endless arguments over which one is the greatest.

For some it is 1995’s “The Bends,” the guitar-driven college rock smash, which built upon lead vocalist/ lyricist Thom Yorke’s growing personal civic frustrations. For others, it is 1997’s “OK Computer” with its envelope-pushing technological innovations and bold new sounds.

But for me, the greatest Radiohead album has always been 2000’s “Kid A.”

I bought “Kid A” when I was 13 because of my almost obsessive love of “OK Computer.” When I opened the CD, I flipped through the liner notes, taking in their bleak images. The glossy pages held computer-generated images of jagged snow-covered mountains and fires consuming land and trees.

The band has said that images from the 1999 war in Kosovo inspired the art. I found these dark, foreboding pictures hypnotic and enchanting. And they fit the album, which is itself a beautiful nightmare — the prophetic vision of chaos and the disturbing path that world events are leading us down.

The album is a paranoid dirge for a society headed straight for the apocalypse. Its cryptic lyrics contain Orwellian undertones of power and corruption, and Yorke exhibits his social claustrophobia and anti-globalization, left-wing politics.

In the song “How To Disappear Completely,” he sings quietly, “This isn’t happening,” while a few songs later, on the thumping “Idioteque,” he screams, “This is really happening.”

The album’s glitchy techno sound washes over listeners, soothing them just before the end of the world.

“The National Anthem” is the record’s pinnacle with its pounding, instantly recognizable bass line and hurricane of free-form jazz toward the song’s end.

This album is darkly beautiful and very dear to me. It has become a very important part of the soundtrack of my youth.