Over time it seems to have stood up in its own right for its sweetly melodic sensibility. The track Kid A itself might not amount to plagiarism, but it’s certainly outlandishly derivative of Aphex Twin’s Flim. On first hearing Kid A in 2000 it felt somewhat like the band were shamelessly ripping off Aphex Twin, Autechre, Modeselektor and the like. There is a school of thought that the widening obscurity and abstraction of their work is just a way of avoiding litigation from R.E.M. It was recently ripped off by Lana Del Rey to the tune of a court case – an extended irony being that Radiohead were themselves forced to concede credit to the Hollies for lifting a whole sequence from The Air That I Breathe. Their breakthrough 1992 QUIETloudQUIET complaint-rock anthem Creep has become canon and been duly beaten into submission by everyone from Tears For Fears to Amanda Palmer. Kid A was an album that worked to destabilise the dominance of vocals by chopping and screwing and effecting every phrase, yet it’s still very much a vocal-centric album you can play and sing. Radiohead managed to make it seem like they’d gone wholly into that, but as Jonny Greenwood has been at pains to point out, they in fact retained concise pop structures for the most part.
Ten years ago Timothy Gabriel wrote about The Degeneration of the Voice in Radiohead’s ‘Kid A’, exploring influences from dance music and krautrock from the late seventies which realigned the conventional hierarchies of music, supplanting the primacy of the voice, leaning on rhythm over melody, exploding structure into extended 12” jams. It still seems like a radically successful move towards the left of field for a mainstream rock act. Since then it’s been acclaimed by Rolling Stone (of all places) as the best album of the 2000s, and revisited with hindsight as an album that changed everything. Despite critical ambivalence, the album was a hit, getting to Number One in the USA and UK without any singles or videos. It was a curveball album with glacial textures and an apparently anti-pop auto-iconoclasm. Released in October 2000, Kid A was the follow-up to one of the masterpieces of rock music, OK Computer (1997). Since 2000 they’ve been applying pop writing and rock production to ideas from electronic music with a judicious use of filler to make sonically diverse suite-like album experiences. Radiohead… National treasure and/or failed dance act, the groundbreaking Oxford group founded in the eighties and fronted by miserabilist millionaire Thom Yorke, is still one of the biggest names in music to have successfully embraced a journey towards experimentalism. Rick Simpson – Everything All Of The Time: Kid A Revisited
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