Radiohead's "Kid A" (33 1/3 excerpt)

So what about Thom Yorke?

While he's decidedly full of personality, he's certainly not winning any awards for affability. In a Kid A-era interview with the Observer, he admitted to still receiving hate mail from fans he upset during the OK Computer tour (one letter said it was a pity Jeff Buckley died instead of him), and during the Kid A recording sessions he posted on Radiohead's official website, “I got beaten up in the middle of Oxford last week by someone who recognized me and saw me as an easy target.” Just try to find an interview with Thom that isn't prefaced with a jab at his personality. Everyone seemed to have an opinion, and they were often high profile too: Kelly Jones of the Stereophonics called him a “miserable twat”; Noel Gallagher said he was a “cunt”; and Ronan Keating of Boyzone not only called him a “muppet” but also said he'd love to throw him off a mountain (metaphorically). At 2009's 51st Annual Grammy Awards, Kanye West “sat the fuck down” during Radiohead's performance after supposedly being snubbed by Thom, while Miley Cyrus claimed she was going to “ruin [Radiohead]” and “tell everyone” after the band refused to have a “sit down” with her. (Perhaps Cyrus should've had a “sit down” with West since he “sat the fuck down” anyway.)

And these are only the criticisms that made headlines.

Thom is clearly no stranger to having his personality stretched out and laid bare, but nowhere was this character examination more overblown than during OK Computer's “Running From Demons” world tour. The press wasn't concerned with the album's commentary on the speed of human interaction in a hyper-capitalist technological landscape. It wanted to get to know him, as if the lyrics were purely autobiographical, as if they came from a tortured artist, a visionary, a depressed outcast on the brink of self-destruction who — hey, what do you know — just so happened to be artistically “brilliant.” How many times have both Radiohead's music and Thom been described as “moody”? How many times have both been described as “paranoid”? To many, including me, OK Computer's lyrical content and Thom's psychology were one and the same.

But, ironically, not only were OK Computer's lyrics overtly skittish but also they were purposefully designed to stray from The Bends' introspection and to function more like Polaroids. As Thom told Q magazine in 1997, “It was like there's a secret camera in a room and it's watching the character who walks in — a different character for each song. The camera's not quite me. It's neutral, emotionless.”

However, Thom's intent with OK Computer was immaterial to an industry that masqueraded as “neutral” and “emotionless.” As depicted in Meeting People Is Easy, the indelible 1998 documentary directed by Grant Gee, the media's insistence on marketing a downtrodden yet noble artist in fact engendered the very conditions of alienation, disconnection, and simulacrum that OK Computer was lambasting, kick-starting a vicious downward spiral: Why is Thom wallowing in despair? Why is he always so angry? Perhaps it stems from the lingering trauma due to his drooping eyelid? Thom's aversion to celebrity culture was mistaken for misanthropy, and the journalistic cheap shots aided in part to a nervous breakdown after OK Computer. He had trouble even speaking. As Thom admitted in a Rolling Stone interview,

The industry, as it tends to do, reduced Thom to a manufactured personality, to the point where fictitious storylines seemed to coalesce out of thin air, where consumers could hardly separate the value/function of the band from any other packaged goods on the shelf.

But as the lens focused more vigorously on his personality, Thom was already devising ways to increase the distance.

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It wasn't surprising, then, when I discovered that Radiohead had actually posted Tzara's instructions for a Dadaist poem on their official website in the fall of 1999, roughly a year before Kid A's release. It also wasn't surprising to find out that Thom in fact employed a similar poem-making technique during the Kid A sessions to combat a two-year case of writer's block. As he stated on a Dutch television show,

If one of the benefits of the Dadaist poem is the removal of personality and the distancing it provides, then randomly drawing cut-up lyrics from a hat seems like a reasonable reaction. With this new lyrical technique — influenced in part by David Byrne's like-minded approach to Talking Heads' Remain in Light — Thom was able to mount a critique that couldn't be mistaken as autobiographical, couching his lyrics in obfuscation and ambiguity in order to distance himself from rock's self-important mythologies. It was a lateral technique that provided links, however tenuous, to Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies, to John Cage and the I Ching, to Guy Debord's Mémoires. “The vocal parts are really interesting,” said guitarist Ed O'Brien, “because it's the first album that we — as a band — haven't been aware of what Thom's singing about. He didn't talk about his lyrics.”

When compared side by side, the lyrical differences are compelling. On OK Computer, for example, the invectives were clear, concise, purposeful:

Although still purposeful and full of meaning, Kid A's lyrics were anything but clear and concise. In fact, they often read like Dada poetry. On “Morning Bell,” Thom sang:

The title track's lyrics were similarly disconnected:

Even when Thom did embrace his subjectivity on
“How to Disappear Completely,” he sang:

Kid A's lyrics functioned more like detached allusions rather than penetrating indictments, impressionistic encryptions rather than scathing pronouncements. As Mark B.N. Hansen described it in his essay “Radiohead's Plunge into the Sonic Continuum,”

According to Thom, Kid A was about “bearing witness,” describing the album as “deliberately trying to keep everything at a safe distance”: “I managed to preserve whatever emotions were in the original writing of the words, but in a way that it's like I'm not trying to emote.” He expounded further in an interview with Pulse:

But it wasn't enough to just distance himself lyrically; Thom sought to alter the very color of his voice, what one might call Radiohead's bread and butter, their je ne sais quoi, their It factor. With new sequencers, new recording software (Pro Tools, Cubase, Auto-Tune, Logic), and a new frame of mind, Thom was able to dislocate his voice ad infinitum, to obscure its emotive signifiers and emphasize texture, to reposition it from a privileged status to just another instrument, to, as Thom put it, “do anything, frankly, to not sound like me.” Under producer Nigel Godrich's suggestion to do weird things “then and there” rather than “in the mix afterwards,” Thom pulled out all the stops (Amnesiac tracks included here to underscore the point): He sang through a ring modulator on “The National Anthem” and an eggbox on “You and Whose Army?” He sampled and then manipulated his own voice on “Everything in Its Right Place.” He used Auto-Tune software for both “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors” and “Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box,” and on “Kid A” he streamed his vocals through the Ondes Martenot (an early electronic instrument popularized by French composer Olivier Messiaen), mouthing lyrics drawn from a hat while multi-instrumentalist Jonny Greenwood improvised the vocal melody in unison. Thom even sang backwards on “Like Spinning Plates.”

Rather than playing to rock's preoccupations with authenticity and the construct of the artist, Thom's vocals emphasized aural sound rather than oral meaning, a distinction that evened out the sonic field for an audience typically accustomed to lead-singer adulation. It was about as blasphemous to their fans as Dylan going electric or Merzbow going digital, as shocking as Lou Reed releasing Metal Machine Music or The Beatles dabbling in the avant-garde (“Revolution 9”). As Thom explained in an interview with The Wire: “Even now, most interviews you do, there's a constant subtext: ‘Is this you?' By using other voices, I guess it was a way of saying, ‘Obviously, it isn't me.'”

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