In a little while, I’ll be gone – Radiohead, “How To Disappear Completely”
Sadly, I can’t recall my initial reaction to Radiohead’s stunning critique and deconstruction of modernity, “Kid A,” from 2000. I just remember thinking that whatever this was, I needed to hear more of it, and so I enthusiastically gobbled up the band’s followup record, “Amnesiac,” upon its release a year later. I was working at a Clemson University souvenir shop called Mr. Knickerbocker at the time and told a fellow employee as I was opening the CD package something to the effect of, “I expect to be amazed at what I was about to hear” in light of the greatness that was “Kid A,” greatness of which I hope to elucidate in this post. Amnesiac continued the artistic and musical themes of “Kid A,” but it was the latter that captured my imagination and my heart.
I came to appreciate and adore Radiohead’s musical innovation and lyrical power fairly late in the game. Somehow I missed a lot of the hype surrounding the band’s first single, “Creep,” and its first record, “Pablo Honey” (1993). I also largely missed out on the band’s 1995 release, “The Bends,” and didn’t listen until sometime in the late 1990s after a friend recommended it. And even when I listened, I was on the fence about whether I actually liked most of it or not. I was a big fan of “Fake Plastic Trees,” but the rest of the album took some time for me to process. It grew on me by slow degrees. In fact, Radiohead’s DVD release, “7 Television Commercials” (1998), which was a collection of music videos from “The Bends” and the band’s next album, “OK Computer” (1997), had a lot to do with me getting into the band in more than just a casual way. The video for “Paranoid Android,” much like the song, was a wild and frantic ride, while the production for “Fake Plastic Trees,” all bright and colorful juxtaposed against the rather dull backdrop of a grocery store or retail outlet, punctuated a statement about the often artificial and superficial nature of society and culture.
But it was the video for “No Surprises” that spoke to me in ways that I hadn’t experienced before that point with Radiohead.
“Twinkle” is more of a visual word, but the opening guitar riff twinkles with the same beauty as the opening flashes of light reveal that Thom Yorke is inside a glass chamber or helmet that is slowly filling with water, which could symbolize the opening lines:
A heart that’s full up like a landfill
A job that slowly kills you
Bruises that won’t heal
As the song continues, the singer is sinking literally and figuratively under the weight of life until he makes the fateful decision:
I’ll take the quiet life
A handshake with carbon monoxide
With no alarms and no surprises
No alarms and no surprises
Silent
And finally, there is a moment of release at the end when he rises out of the water and relishes the sight of a “pretty house” and “such a pretty garden.” Watching this video was one of the most touching and inspiring moments of my early adulthood such that I could write an entire essay on this song alone, but the point is that this particular video symbolized for me the sense of existential dread that I was beginning to feel about life — trapped in this world and this life, surrounded by peril and knowing full well that there was only way out of the world, as Dave Matthews wrote. The feeling was made stronger by the fact that I was suffering from severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease at the time and, however much I felt isolated and alone in my social life, I was even more depressed by my health situation. I couldn’t walk very far without getting tired, and I felt physically trapped by my circumstances. In a word, I was drowning, and no one could stop my slow march toward the grave. So, in this video, in just three minutes, Radiohead summarized for me, in a very personal way, my own struggle and hopeful liberation from certain annihilation. (After living with breathing problems for all of my childhood and most of my adult life, that liberation finally came in the form of a lung transplant three years ago.)
In any case, this is the backdrop for which I arrived at “Kid A” in the early 2000s. I listened to “Kid A” three times all the way through to prepare to write this piece because, number one, it’s a joy to let the pulsating beats and rhythms wash over me again and again, but number two, I wanted to listen for things that I might have missed before or open myself up to any new revelations about the music.
I chose “Kid A” for this list over “OK Computer” because, while the latter certainly has more than a few sublime songs, among them “Exit Music (For a Film),” “Let Down,” “Karma Police,” “Lucky” and the aforementioned, “Paranoid Android,” “Kid A’s” aesthetic and artistic direction spoke to me in the ways that few albums have. First, consider the artwork, which was created by the band’s longtime artist, Stanley Dunwood. The darkened and almost sinister looking background beyond the snowcapped mountains. The erupting volcanos. The rough-hewn lines and jagged edges. The void and barren landscape. The viewer brought almost to eye-level with the mountain peaks, as if floating in suspended animation as the artwork trails off in an ocean of white space and fractured lines.
This approach echoes that of the music, and generally, listeners get a sense that modernity itself is fractured, and the songs, awash with drum machines, synths, sparse guitar and Thom Yorke’s sometimes confident and buoyant, sometimes barely audible falsetto drowned out in a wail of noise, is all part of the plan.
Everything in its right place.
This album holds the position of number three on my list because first, it represents elements of my own existential philosophy, which I more or less adopted as a student at Lander (Greenwood, S.C.) and Clemson University (Clemson, S.C.) after studying the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Albert Camus and others. For more on Radiohead’s tie to philosophy, see The Pennds: An Academic Approach to Radiohead:
Here is how it goes: In OK Computer, we stare into an impending and growing nihilistic despondency. In Kid A and Amnesiac, we are submerged in it. In Hail to the Thief, we are lamenting over it and losing faith. In In Rainbows, we accept it and trudge forward nonetheless. This is the story of a band that grew up and got comfortable, as much as they could, living in a world in which they felt they did not belong.
That leads me to the second reason why “Kid A” holds such a revered position with me. “Kid A” is about not belonging. It’s about losing one’s individuality and identity in a world consumed by consumerism, by popular culture, by all of the trappings of modernity. It’s about being drowned out in the claptrap. It’s about feeling invisible and the erasure of self. And it’s about disappearing completely.
The combination of the tracks, “Everything In Its Right Place;” “The National Anthem” with its blaring cacophonous wonder; “How To Disappear Completely,” with a swirl of strings and falsetto; “Optimistic;” “Idioteque;” “Morning Bell” and “Motion Picture Soundtrack” present a relatively cohesive and bleak musical aesthetic of one who is lost in the modern collective, never to be found.
Finally, I come to the album’s final song, “Motion Picture Soundtrack,” a devastating — devastating — song, with the accompanying video, that never fails to send chills up and down my spine.
The speaker in the song, presumably Thom Yorke or a character of his creation, is addressing his unrequited love and describing how desperate he is for her:
Red wine and sleeping pills
Help me get back to your arms
Cheap sex and sad films
Help me get where I belong
She interjects and says, “I think you’re crazy, maybe” and in the beginning of the video for the song, the words, “I’d really like to help you,” are etched into the sky, as if to suggest that the subject of this guy’s affections really cares for him but nonetheless sees how desperate he has become and must stay away. The music video for the song, which I watched over and over ad infinitum in my Mr. Knickerbocker days, pans through the bleak “Kid A” artwork landscape as if it was a real place. The camera then changes to a wintry scene in which a person is laying in the snow and another person, presumably the subject of the speaker’s forlorn desires, is gingerly walking away from the dying man as frozen precipitation cascades down.
Thus, the one thing that matters above all other more cerebral concerns — philosophy or statements about societal status or individuality — is love, but even in that, the speaker feels lost, alone, isolated and abandoned. What “Kid A” lacks in comfort or optimism — despite a song that is actually titled “Optimistic” — it makes up for in emotion, power and a coherent aesthetic. This album, and knowing that others have struggled with feeling small, alienated and lost by circumstances or by the culture, has helped me through many a dark day and because of that, “Kid A” will always hold a treasured place in my heart.