Tuesday, Dec 28, 2021 • 52min
The prophecies of Radiohead's 'Kid A' and 'Amnesiac,' 20 years later
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Our friends at NPR's Throughline podcast take a deep dive into the Radiohead albums Kid A and Amnesiac, examining the ways the band confronted the monsters around us and within us at the dawn of a new millennium.
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Thom Yorke
Alex Ross
Ramtin Arablouei
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Transcript
Verified
Break
Robin Hilton
01:59
I'm Robin Hilton with a special episode from our friends over at NPR History podcast
Throughline
. It's all about the legacy of Radiohead's
Kid A
and Amnesiac
albums. When the band first released the records 20 years ago, they were initially panned by critics but they still became huge hits for Radiohead
and are now considered to be among the band's greatest work.Share
02:22
And that's partly because
Kid A
and Amnesiac
so brilliantly captured what the new millennium felt like and they signaled a new and ominous direction that the world seemed to be headed in on this episode Throughline
talks with Radiohead's
Thom Yorke
and others about the ways the band confronted the monsters around us and within us, the prophecies of Kid A
and amnesiac and how they've played out in the last 20 years.Share
Thom Yorke
02:53
I keep thinking of this phrase. I kept writing in one of my books, I have born a monster.
Share
03:01
You can see it when you look out your window.
Share
03:03
People walk past me and say get a job.
Share
03:06
Or when you turn on your television.
Share
03:08
The American people can remain confident in the soundness and the resilience of our financial system.
Share
03:14
It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.
Share
Thom Yorke
03:22
Somehow we mutated. And it was not necessarily a good thing.
Share
03:26
The A and then the ring around it. That's what I said, that she thought it was about. Thank you so much
Facebook
for hosting.Share
Thom Yorke
03:34
You know, progress was not necessarily a good thing. Our success was not necessarily a good thing.
Share
03:50
The level right, still struggling to be free.
Share
Thom Yorke
03:55
There's no question that we must feed the monster.
Share
04:06
Because the monster is clearly one.
Share
04:12
It's like a movie, but you can't stop it unless you wake up.
Share
Ramtin Arablouei
04:20
You're listening to
Throughline
from NPR
.Share
04:25
Folks, please welcome one of our favorites
Radiohead
.Share
Thom Yorke
04:33
I'm
Thom Yorke.
Share
Stanley Donwood
04:36
I'm
Stanley Donwood
.Share
Thom Yorke
04:38
Uh you have to say what we do for a living?
Share
04:41
Probably not. But I mean...
Share
Stanley Donwood
04:43
I'm not quite sure what it is that I do for a living for a long time.
Share
Thom Yorke
04:48
In between these, isn't it?
Share
Rund Abdelfatah
04:49
Radiohead
fans need no introduction to these two.Share
Ramtin Arablouei
04:54
And I'm the biggest
Radiohead
fan of all.Share
Rund Abdelfatah
04:57
But for everyone else,
Thom Yorke
is the lead singer and a songwriter for the band Radiohead
and Stanley Donwood
has created all the artwork for the band since 1994, including the album art for Kid A.
Share
05:11
Hauntingly beautiful creatures...
Share
Rund Abdelfatah
05:12
Which they released in the year 2000.
Share
Stanley Donwood
05:17
It was it was a difficult time for many reasons.
Share
05:20
Even before the year 2000 rolls around, panic itself could cause problems.
Share
Stanley Donwood
05:26
The clock was going to take over from the last day of the 20th century. It's the first day of the 21st.
Share
05:38
Each turn of the millennium has produced cults and strangeness and disturbances. And we were all part of that.
Share
Rund Abdelfatah
05:51
So often on this show, we're trying to understand not only what happened in the past but also how it felt. And this is one of those rare times when many of you listening may remember what it felt like the turn of the millennium, the year 2000. For some, it isn't very long ago, just one generation in the past and for others, it's an entire lifetime familiar yet foreign.
Share
Ramtin Arablouei
06:16
The sociologist
Zygmunt Bauman
wrote a book called Liquid Modernity that year, in which he argued that technology was advancing faster than culture could adapt to it. He said this cultural shakiness was causing people a ton of mental stress amid that shakiness, Radiohead
created their album Kid A
and his companion album, Amnesiac
.Share
06:38
They in many ways are the band of the turn of the millennium, because they captured what that moment represented what it felt like.
Share
06:57
And the music sounds pretty different from anything they've done before. Strange, experimental. A total surprise to people expecting more songs like this.
Share
Rund Abdelfatah
07:12
If you've heard only one
Radiohead
song, this is probably it: Creep
.Share
07:32
Do you hate the media's obsession with
Creep
?Share
Thom Yorke
07:35
Yes, so, don't ask me about it because I won't let her.
Share
Rund Abdelfatah
07:40
We didn't ask tom about
Creep
. Which was part of an earlier era of Radiohead
. We were interested in knowing more about what it took to make those albums of the new millennium Kid A
and Amnesiac
.Share
Ramtin Arablouei
07:56
This episode of
Throughline
like those albums is a little unconventional. It's all about capturing the mood of the moment and confronting the monsters around us and within us.Share
Rund Abdelfatah
08:10
I'm Rund Abdelfatah
Share
Ramtin Arablouei
08:14
And I'm Ramtin Arablouei
Share
Rund Abdelfatah
08:16
Coming up. We dial back the clock to the turn of the century.
Share
08:27
Hi, I'm Claudine. I'm calling in from Kingston Jamaica. And you're listening to through line on
NPR
Share
Ramtin Arablouei
08:44
Part one: is this really happening?
Share
Stanley Donwood
08:54
You know, it's a little bit like looking through old photograph album that you've forgotten you had.
Share
09:09
But as soon as you look at it, it becomes incredibly familiar. And you can remember all of the surrounding around that album.
Share
09:18
Repeating once again our top story, Soviet President
Mikhail Gorbachev
has been removed from power.Share
Thom Yorke
09:32
And we are the Children of the end of the
Cold War
when there was no longer an enemy when there was no longer.Share
Robin Hilton
09:40
Someone on the other side of that wall, that wall comes down.
Share
09:44
The
Berlin Wall
doesn't mean anything anymore. The wall of the East Germans put up in 1961 to keep its people in will now be reached by anyone who wants to leave.Share
Thom Yorke
09:58
Then... You're still left with this fear.
Share
Alex Ross
10:14
The atmosphere especially in
America
at the end of the 90s, we had been through this extended period of relative prosperity and kind of relative peace. The fall of the Berlin Wall
supposedly democracy spreading further around the worldShare
Bill Clinton
10:37
By the words we speak and the faces we show the world we force the spring.
Share
Alex Ross
10:44
America's
position is sort of the epitome of democracy.Share
Bill Clinton
10:50
A spring reborn in the world's oldest democracy
Share
Alex Ross
10:53
And kind of inclusive capitalism, whatever you wanna call it, you know, a challenge
Share
Bill Clinton
10:58
Life, Liberty, the Pursuit of happiness.
Share
Alex Ross
11:05
The idea started floating that I would follow the band and do a big piece about them, which I did. My name is Alex Ross. I am the music critic of the
New Yorker
. I ended up calling my article. The searchers just felt like they were, you know... just always in quest of the next new sound and the next new idea.Share
David Letterman
11:32
What about this internet thing, do you know anything about that?
Share
Bill Gates
11:37
Sure.
Share
David Letterman
11:39
What what the hell is that exactly?
Share
Bill Gates
11:41
Well, it's it's become a place where people are publishing information so everybody can have their own homepage companies are there? The latest information. It's wild what's going on... You can send electronic mail to people. It is the big new thing.
Share
11:56
If you ain't on the information, superhighway baby, where is it?
Share
Stanley Donwood
11:60
What is this thing? What is this thing? How does this work?
Share
Alex Ross
12:04
This was the the time of the
dot com boom
. There was this tremendous optimism about the internet. It was going to connect everyone. You know, it was going to be this wonderful democracy where everyone gets to express their point of view.Share
12:17
Some are from Japan, some are from
Australia
, some from New Zealand
all over the world.Share
Stanley Donwood
12:24
We definitely felt as if we were living in a world that previous generations just wouldn't have got. You know, the idea that history is over and everything's gonna be fine. But it wasn't, everything was fraying at the edges.
Share
12:47
The refugees came through in eleven covered trucks. Here on these faces, these broken bodies, hard evidence of the previous day Serb onslaught on
Srebrenica
.Share
13:10
History is over.
Share
Robin Hilton
13:20
The world took a long time to realize that genocide had occurred in the Bosnian town of
Srebrenica
. Srebrenica
was a refuge for tens of thousands of Muslims fleeing the Serbs. The Serbs decided to seize Srebrenica
.Share
13:35
This would force the Americans to bring peace to
Bosnia
, but only after the people here have been sacrificed.Share
Stanley Donwood
13:43
Places that had been completely stable was suddenly like rent with the worst kind of inter-ethnic violence. It was horrible.
Share
13:58
He says, they did absolutely nothing to protect us.
Share
14:01
We came there with a will to do as much as we could do. But we failed.
Share
14:09
It soon became clear that the Serbs had slaughtered thousands of Bosnian men and buried them in mass graves.
Share
Thom Yorke
14:16
Who's making these decisions? And why are we not involved? Because especially our generation at that time, we were about to have children, were having children.
Share
14:27
We had some place in the hierarchy of things. We had some success. We had all these things, but at the same time, most of these important ethical decisions about how does the society look after its weakest? How does, how does our society see itself in connection with the rest of
Europe
or the world or or Kosovo
or Africa
?Share
14:51
Every Sunday Angelique Kabuki, thanks God for her deliverance. She hasn't much else to thank him for.
Share
14:59
Her parents are dead. Her husband is dead. Her two young children are dead.
Share
Thom Yorke
15:09
Who's deciding this? And why the fuck... excuse me... Why the hell are they asking us?
Share
15:15
There have been massacres in plenty in the tortured history of
Rwanda
. But this was something different. This was genocide.Share
Thom Yorke
15:41
So when we did, when we were working on
Kid A
and Amnesiac
, the shift was not necessarily one of just dread. There's, there's two sorts of shift. There was the dread of the millennium coming up. But there was also a shift, which was sort of saying, we now no longer have to talk about this. Everything has already been decided. You know, progress is what it is. There's nothing you can do.Share
16:05
We came to
Kyoto
to find new ways to bridge our differences.Share
16:14
You the parties now stand before the eyes of the world.
Share
16:19
We will reduce our own emissions by nearly 30%.
Share
16:22
Entrusted with the decisions needed.
Share
16:24
To do what we promise rather than to promise what we cannot do.
Share
16:28
Will recommend the adoption of this protocol to the conference by unanimity.
Share
Thom Yorke
16:41
The U. N. Climate Change Report was 1994 and us being us, I think we would have read that probably 20 years old, 30 years old. This bit of scientific research and the craziness of people still being Climate Change deniers now is almost it's unimaginable.
Share
17:07
The way I was working at the time was was was very much lines would go into a hat. And get taken out. And when they worked they worked. So, I can't tell you if I was trying to write a song about global warming. I very much doubt it. I think probably it was more like I was writing down my neurosis wives and listening, someone may have said we're not scaremongering on the radio saying it or whatever. And then it gets absorbed and then comes out.
Share
Alex Ross
17:53
There is this kind of constant sense of tension of questioning in the lyrics sense of kind of examining the state of the world, the climate, the planet and crisis information technology, the seduction of technology and then how it seems to kind of take over and and sort of take over our our kind of beings. The the album just kind of challenged complacency. It's sort of challenged the world as it was.
Share
Stanley Donwood
18:25
It's like trying to create beauty from, from nightmares. You've got to weave some beauty because that's where you live. That's where your spirits got to live. You can't live in dread. It's not. No one could do that. It's like death.
Share
Alex Ross
18:42
There was this quiet intensity to that music that, in retrospect, it feels like it has a slightly prophetic edge to it.
Share
18:52
You can feel it in the air. There is a buzz you hear that sound, they know it's going to happen.
Share
19:06
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Share
Rund Abdelfatah
19:11
Before we entered the New century. Before
Radiohead
could release their prophetic albums, Kid A
and Amnesiac
. They had to face down fame and their own success. Because Radiohead
, like our world was teetering on the edge of a cliff, staring down into the canyon of the unknown. What would this new millennium bring? Where we barreling towards collapse? Or Reinvention.Share
19:38
In 1997
Radiohead
released an album called OK Computer
, an album that would launch them into mega-stardom. But that stardom came with dread and unease it pushed them into difficult places and uncharted territory. Just like the world, they were stuck between success and collapse.Share
Ramtin Arablouei
20:00
When we come back we fall off the cliff.
Share
Break
Ramtin Arablouei
20:49
Is there Part 2? I might be wrong.
Share
21:01
Radiohead
have chartered a unique course across the international sonic and social mark.Share
Thom Yorke
21:14
Because basically I find myself I don't wanna be.
Share
21:37
For the first time since The Beatles the band has redefined what popular music is and what it can be.
Share
21:44
One of the best bands in the world. Really? Congratulations! Every morning I get up and I think that.
Share
Thom Yorke
21:50
What we always try and do is challenge people's preconceptions of the band.
Share
21:55
They have created music without the accepted furniture of rock and roll.
Share
21:60
You were considered one of the greatest rock bands in 1997.
Share
Thom Yorke
22:05
God help us if we fucking were. Because even being called a rock band was a bit of a nightmare.
Share
22:11
Really. Why?
Share
Thom Yorke
22:12
Because it sucks fucking rock music sucks man. I hate it.
Share
Alex Ross
22:21
So I started listening to
Radiohead
. It wasn't right when they first started. It was sort of after a couple of years that they had been on the scene, although it was really OK Computer
that I was just really thought: "oh my God, this is really quite something"Share
22:51
OK Computer
was a huge, huge record. It was, it was a phenomenon. It became one of the defining records of that period, and it was the kind of album where just people listened to all the way, through.Share
23:21
Just people became obsessed with the band and seemed to be ready to follow them wherever they were going to go.
Share
23:35
It really launched them to about as big as you can get in the rock world, short of being, you know, a complete sort of stadium act.
Share
Thom Yorke
24:30
The previous record have been very successful and I think on a lot of levels, the record company would have loved another one of those.
Share
24:40
What happened when you came back from the
OK Computer
?Share
Thom Yorke
24:44
It's a mess. Really bad mess for quite a while.
Share
Stanley Donwood
24:52
And I got asked to recreate, recreate the artwork I did for
OK Computer
by various people. Several times, we had no interest in those things.Share
25:03
You know, that was in some ways, kind of a perverse antagonistic position to take, but it was also the only one we could have taken to be honest and true to ourselves.
Share
25:18
There was kind of expectations and probably disappointment um at the record label when it became clear that they were not going to come up with a sort of another
OK Computer
.Share
Thom Yorke
25:33
It wasn't like everybody was on board with moving off into uncharted territory equally because it's it's scary.
Share
Stanley Donwood
25:41
But with that, when you strike out on your own against what everyone else wants you to do, if you don't have a lot of self-confidence in the first place, then you will be riddled without with everything you're doing because you think you might be just shooting yourself in both feet
Share
Ramtin Arablouei
26:01
Shooting yourself in both feet. Self-sabotage. If you've had any success doing anything really, you've definitely thought about that, you might have asked yourself do I do the same thing that brought me attention and affirmation, or do I push myself and try something new and risk losing the success that I've built. This was a question that members of
Radiohead
were actually tackling in the late 1990s.Share
26:27
They went from a successful band to perhaps the most revered band in the world, and their album,
OK Computer
was largely responsible for that. It was that rare combination of commercial and critical success, yet it had also nearly ripped the band apart.Share
26:44
The sudden onslaught of fame. The constant touring. It all took its toll, and they had pressure on them to repeat the success of
OK Computer
. Remember this was the late 1990s, and even though Napster
and other illegal downloading platforms were around the music industry was still making tons of money by selling actual records and CDs.Share
27:06
So naturally another
Radiohead
album would have meant more money. And so back to that choice for Radiohead
. Try and make another OK computer and enjoy success again, or go in a totally different direction and risk alienating the audience and potentially the bottom line, they chose the latter, riskier move. It's a decision that makes more sense when you understand where the members of the band come from.Share
Alex Ross
27:43
They met at school, they met at this boy's school called
Abingdon
which is in the area of Oxford
. And it is not one of these super elite british public schools. Members of Radiohead,
all came from basically middle class families.Share
28:14
And they weren't part of, you know, Oxford University which is the dominant presence in the area. They were sort of townies. They were sort of outside that very, very elite rarified world.
Share
28:35
They had this amazing music teacher Terrance Gilmore James who's very serious, kind of classical music-oriented guy. But I really liked what
Radiohead
was trying to do.Share
28:47
And even in high school they were experimenting and kind of trying out some unusual things in their music and you know, that teacher just welcomed them and they were just encouraged.
Share
29:04
And quite rapidly, you know, they ended up getting signed with
EMI
and, you know, were launched, and had their first big hit, not too long after.Share
29:19
And, and so it was a very rapid development from a bunch of kids just playing together in high school to becoming, you know, one of the bigger rock bands of the early nineties.
Share
Thom Yorke
29:32
There was something quite fundamental in the way that we had grown up, which I think maybe is peculiar to our sense of Britishness, that we were always taught that any success you have is because you've cheated.
Share
29:57
Any band that comes out of
Britain
is um, the social class, whether they'll admit it or not is an important consideration.Share
Thom Yorke
30:10
Which is what we internalized because that was the attitude of the press. Pick up a music magazine or anything, even talking about an actor and actors, essentially an idiot who gets filled with the ideas of somebody else. This is the kind of attitude that we grew up with.
Share
30:33
So one's response to success when you don't feel you merit it. Thinking about the people who totally subscribe to their own myths and disappear, disappear up their own cocaine-fueled ask or the ones who go the other way who can't handle it.
Share
30:50
So they do the next best thing, which is go berserk trying to work ahead and preempt any of their own mistakes and work all the time and never stop them just producing and producing stuff like all the time. Not thinking about it, because that's their response to a situation that they can't compute.
Share
Rund Abdelfatah
31:13
When the members of
Radiohead
went into the studio to record what would be the album's Kid A
and Amnesiac
. They knew they wanted to throw off convention, they wanted to feel free, they wanted to create something that they felt was true to where they were in their lives and where they felt they were fitting in the world with a generous amount of class born skepticism about the myth building around their previous work. They worked for months in defiance of expectations. But what would this new direction be?Share
Alex Ross
32:00
It was a very complex process. Um there was a lot of debate in the band over what direction they were going to go in next.
Share
32:16
So, did you have to be one around? Like, there's three songs on kids with guitars on them. If I said that to you six months before the album was released, would you be like, "oh my God, I can't do this"?
Share
Thom Yorke
32:25
No, no. Because what happened is that it's a it's a process what happened on
Kid A
be is the process of everything breaking down over time. So, what we basically did good at that, we reduced everything to a pile of rubble and ashes.Share
Alex Ross
32:38
So the debate was, are we going to go in a different direction, and obviously the different direction went out.
Share
32:47
The guitars were really receding into the background, disappearing altogether in some of these songs, electronics much more to the forefront.
Share
33:09
This kind of fuzzy aesthetic bordering on kind of experimental electronic music basically.
Share
Stanley Donwood
33:45
We had all of these paint paintings that we've now got down at
Christie's
. The record company, they came and picked them up from the studio and they took them to London
, I can't remember where it was but they put them all up on the wall in this big place in London
where they were having an industry playback of Kid A
so all of the big bias for record shops saw them.Share
34:06
And they were all there and they played they listened to the
Kid A
for the first time. And honestly, I've never seen a more load of people politely smiling expecting it at all. They thought they were going to get OK Computer Part Two and they totally didn't.Share
Alex Ross
34:27
And yeah there was a lot of opposition. There were a lot of reviews came out that that projected it. That said they've gone completely off track, where are the guitars? Uh what is this kind of arty nonsense? Um you know, a sense that that the band really might have blown it or sort of taken a complete wrong turn.
Share
Thom Yorke
35:04
In the U. K.
Kid
A got absolutely panned in the press. They destroyed us.Share
35:12
I have to say that upon first listen
Kid A
is just awful. Kid A
sounds like a bit of a wank.Share
Thom Yorke
35:23
Yeah, I just wanted to do a fixed with blah blah blah...
Share
35:28
In the time since.
Ok Computer
, Radiohead
seems to have built up reservoirs of fresh bile and listen to a lot of Aphex Twin
records.Share
Thom Yorke
35:40
Where's the hits? Where's this? Where's the acoustic guitars?
Share
35:42
You can almost hear the cry go up at the start. Come on guys, let's underachieve!
Share
Alex Ross
35:52
They were marked, they were marked for sort of always predicting doom and kind of, you know, there goes
Thom Yorke
again, you know, trying to save the planet, you know, blah, blah blah.Share
36:03
Why can't they just play fun pop songs with, you know, good guitar licks, you know, why do we have to get kind of bombarded with these issues, you know? And so that was like a very standard critique of
Radiohead
when they took this turn.Share
Thom Yorke
36:39
And there was this moment where we all these reviews had come in and I had never read them. So, I was just sitting in a room with everybody else in the band had read them and they were like stone faces, like "uh oh dear".
Share
Ramtin Arablouei
36:54
Radiohead's
album Kid A
was released on October 2, 2000, many months into the new millennium, a new millennium that started to see cracks in the facade. Economic growth in the U. S. had slowed more and more questions were coming up about the downsides of this new thing called the internet.Share
37:23
Yet, despite all the fears brought on by the end of one millennium and the start of another, the
Y2K
apocalypse had not happened. The world had not fallen apart.Share
37:33
But based on initial reviews, it looks like
Kid A
might not fare so well. When we come back the dread and hope of a new album and a new millennium.Share
38:06
Part 3, you must name it.
Share
Rund Abdelfatah
38:10
Radio had released two albums in the span of a year,
Kid A
in 2000 and a follow-up Amnesiac
in 2001. Initially, critics didn't respond positively to the albumsShare
Alex Ross
38:23
But as it turned out that was not the reaction from the audience. And I think that's the really remarkable thing that happened that this experimental offbeat record which blatantly refused to continue where
OK Computer
had left off was a huge success and actually really connected with a wider public.Share
38:50
You forgot, didn't you
Share
Thom Yorke
38:52
What? Oh right. Um what was the question again?
Share
39:03
There's a great story that one of our managers Bryce says that when they first played it to the publishing company, we just re signed with them and they're expecting like you know, guitars. And so you know the first song, everything is the right place, not a guitar.
Share
Alex Ross
39:24
Everything in the right place is just one of my favorite songs of theirs because it's sort of lovely in the surface and it has kind of you know, upbeat feeling to it.
Share
39:41
And that the message in the lyrics is also like everything is okay, but is it? You know, uh you don't quite believe it as you're listening to the song. So there's like an irony.
Share
40:12
Their feelings of melancholy and resignation, kind of temporary burst of energy that kind of then trail off.
Share
40:28
It actually puts me under a spell, you know, when those chords kick in. But this is uneasy music. It's not happy music.
Share
Ramtin Arablouei
40:51
Radiohead's moody contemplated emotional album quickly became a massive hit in the
United States
. It debuted number one on the Billboard
charts and eventually sold over 1.4 million copies. The American press fawned over the album.Share
41:08
The experience and emotions tied to listening to
Kid A
are like witnessing the stillborn birth of a child while simultaneously having the opportunity to see her play in the afterlife on Imax
.Share
Robin Hilton
41:20
Including this notoriously over-the-top review from the music website
Pitchfork
.Share
41:26
It's an album of sparkling paradox. It's cacophonous yet tranquil, experimental, yet familiar, foreign yet womb-like spacious yet visceral, textured, yet vaporous, awakening, yet dreamlike, infinite yet 48 minutes.
Share
Alex Ross
41:45
It's pretty rare case of you know, someone working in the commercial arena trying something new, challenging um the audience and succeeding holding their audience, bringing their audience with them. And yeah, it just doesn't happen very often.
Share
Thom Yorke
42:30
There were these moments of like, "oh my God, I can't believe we've done this". My favorite moment of the whole of that period was when kids went to number one in the US, like, almost by accident, you know, that this little monster that we created was suddenly everywhere, and everyone's going, what's what's that doing there, and it was so exciting, I found that so exciting, I took into this lovely guy um
Mr Fricke
from Rolling Stone
, and he's literally sitting there going, how the hell did you do that? You know, it's like, it was like a once in a lifetime opportunity.Share
Stanley Donwood
43:13
Because I knew a lot of people who in various sort of, kind of, electronic music subcultures, and that was the it's the music that I was listened to before and during, and for a lot of them, they were like "oh,
Radiohead"
and for the first time, I was just like, "yes, yes, yes" that's that's right, "yes, yes, yes". Because the rock and roll thing was not something that most of the people I knew responded to, and it felt like that I was doing something that they kind of like "Oh, well, that's ok"Share
43:53
You mean, you got accepted into my mate's house?
Share
Stanley Donwood
43:57
They made some music that sounded like
Kid A
.Share
Rund Abdelfatah
44:08
Okay, so the obvious question is hanging here. How did an album that on the surface might seem like a bummer, too many people, especially at a time when there were these competing visions of what progress means do so well? According to Alex Ross, it's because the unease that
Radiohead
Thom
and Stanley
were expressing with the albums was an unease many people were feeling.Share
Alex Ross
44:34
And I think perhaps and this is just my totally kind of random speculation that the popularity of the records may have connected with people's unconscious or semi conscious unease and sense that there was something superficial about that sense of complacency and well being. Um and that something else was coming, which indeed, it did.
Share
45:07
Looking back on it, well, that doesn't seem so problematic anymore, that they were insisting that people sort of think about climate change, that they were bringing up these issues around technology and that they were just generally challenging complacency. And then these records came along, which did not really echo at all that general spirit of optimism and complacency.
Share
45:39
And I would say that that the music itself is actually the primary arena in which all this is happening. The songs lull you and then challenge you, I think, which is just a great dynamic. And it was an experiment that people wanted to where people were ready for, you know?
Share
46:01
And and so, I kind of think of all this music as I feel like they're premonitions of what was coming in the early 21st century and all kinds of issues and all kinds of dimensions.
Share
Stanley Donwood
46:16
9/11
was it was a sharp reminder that all was not well and and it has not really recovered that, you know, the 90s now looks like some kind of almost victorian era. When everyone was just sort of dancing around to kind of smiling. But it wasn't like that for everybody.Share
Ramtin Arablouei
46:45
When I first heard kid a and amnesiac back in the early 2000, it stopped me in my tracks. The glitchy since, the bass drum thump in my chest. The lyrics, the mood. They all made me feel like someone else was seeing what I was seeing. This group of English musicians who I had almost nothing in common with at the time seemed to understand my anxiety about the world that awaited me.
Share
47:13
I'm an old millennial. I went from being a child to an adult at the same time. The 20th century turned into the 21st a time when for many of us in
America
, everything felt possible yet very little felt right. Everything was getting better.Share
47:28
We were told the
Cold War
was over and the internet was here yet everywhere. It seemed like our leaders were throwing coins in a wishing well. And with every listen to those albums, I felt like I could better articulate the feelings that I struggled to find words to describe liquid modernity.Share
47:47
That concept from
Zygmunt Bauman
that we talked about earlier in the episode basically theorizes is that the anxiety and uncertainty many people feel in the modern world is caused by the fact that technology and life are constantly changing faster than our culture and minds can keep up with. It feels like the earth is unstable beneath our feet. And that feeling was captured by Kid A
an Amnesiac
.Share
Thom Yorke
48:14
The moment we're at this particular fulcrum right now where dread and division has become an economically useful algorithm, whatever you wanna call it. Like a we've developed this new form of interacting with each other which is a form of sickness and now finally it's being talked about and so as soon as it's named its power will rescind, you know, because that's what happens if you, if you want to, if you want to take some things power where you have to name it.
Share
Rund Abdelfatah
49:51
But is it enough to just name it? Who does it serve to just describe an issue and then walk away. For
Thom Yorke
, it isn't enough. In the process of making Kid A
and Amnesiac
wasn't only to put words to the angst, he and his bandmates were feeling, it was about projecting another world. It was and still is about possibilities.Share
Thom Yorke
50:24
One has to imagine a form of progress or a form of living which is more beneficial to the way human beings want to be rather than being reduced to these two-dimensional avatars that appear on your phone, like the moment we adopt, adopt modes of behavior that mirror our avatars but we are at the same time, now. finally formulating ways to think beyond that and going, "well, hang on a minute, I don't want to be that".
Share
Ramtin Arablouei
51:02
It's a challenge many of us still face. How do we find a way through the complexity of a world that feels like it's balancing on the edge of a blade and still imagine a different world for ourselves and those who come next.
Share
Thom Yorke
51:16
There's always a sense of dread and there's always then the need to find an adaptive language to get beyond that, a way of expressing what it's gonna look like in a world that is different.
Share
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🇮🇹 Made with love & passion in Italy. 🌎 Enjoyed everywhere
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Robin Hilton
Thom Yorke
Ramtin Arablouei
Stanley Donwood
Rund Abdelfatah
Alex Ross
Bill Clinton
David Letterman
Bill Gates