Post by t***@mireo.hrHi
I tried
http://members.nbci.com/greedorr/kida.html
but link is broken.
thanx
an excerpt (taken from
http://www.bmxmusic.com/articles/articles/excerpt_from_beyond_the_pale.htm )
and, hehe, i'd never read it before, but wow what a whining tart, i didn't
like radiohead BEFORE kid a
i still vastly prefer httt/amnesiac & kid a to their previous stuff, so
hornby seems nearly entirely wrong to me.
----------------------
Nick Hornby on Kid A.
Excerpt from "Beyond The Pale" in The New Yorker, October 20, 2000
[Abridgement Note: The first three hundred words or so of this article
discuss the ascent of the LP and the problems that accompanied
this trend: once performers become more important to the public than songs,
the public might be duped into buying awful records
because they like the artists that produce them. He cites Lou Reed's "Metal
Machine Music", Bob Dylan's "Self Portrait, and Neil
Young's "Arc" as examples of this. I didn't care to type it all in.]
It is only fair to say that Radiohead's new album, "Kid A," is nowhere as
tedious as "Metal Machine Music." It has its attractive and
compelling moments - every so often something gorgeous floats past - and
those Radiohead fans who are hell-bent on loving it will not
be reduced to convincing themselves that they can hear future Riccky Martin
hits buried somewhere in the passages of ambient drone.
It does, however, start from the same premise as the Reed album: it relies
heavily on our passionate interest in every twist and turn
of the band's career, no matter how trivial or pretentious. You have to work
at albums like "Kid A." You have to sit at home night
after night and give yourself over to the paranoid millenial atmosphere as
you try to decipher elliptical snatches of lyrics and
puzzle out how the titles ("Treefinger," "The National Anthem," and so on)
might refer to the songs. In other words, you have to be
sixteen. Anyone old enough to vote may find that he has competing demands
for his time - a relationship, say, or a job, or buying
food, or listening to another CD he picked up on the same day. He may also
find himself shouting at the CD player, "Shut up! You're
supposed to be a pop group!" (The music critics who love "Kid A," one
suspects, love it because their job forces them to consume
music as a sixteen-year-old would. Don't trust any of them.) I suspect that
people who have been listening to music for decades will
have exhausted the fund of trust they once might have had for "challenging"
albums. "Kid A" demands the patience of the devoted; both
patience and devotion become scarcer commodities once you start picking up a
paycheck.
There is nothing wrong with making albums for sixteen-year-olds, but
Radiohead's previous efforts had more inclusive ambitions. The
first one, "Pablo Honey," may have been patchy, but it contained one song,
"Creep," that gave voice to everyone who has ever felt
disconnected, alienated, or geeky - just about anyone who has ever used rock
music to get through the day. "I'm a creep, I'm a
wierdo," the singer Thom Yorke piped with unnerving sincerity. "What the
hell am I doing here? I don't belong here." The genius of
the song was its mournful anguish, and the fact that it struck a chord with
real creeps - people locked away in penal institutions,
for instance - served only to underline the brilliance of the conceit. It
wasn't the lyrics of "Creep" that were significant but the
thrilling little chukka-chukka guitar noise that foreshadowed the song's
chorus. Radiohead's second album, "The Bends," was a
masterpiece. In recent years, only Nirvana has come close to matching its
flair with the old-fashioned dynamics of rock. "The Bends"
had it all: electrifying tunes, real drama, and a band that seemed equally
committed to both the enormous climactic guitar riffs of
the title track and an assortment of spooky, pretty ballads. With "The
Bends," Radiohead found its voice, and, despite the album's
conventional trappings, it turned out to be unique: no other contemporary
band has managed to mix such a cocktail of rage, sarcasm,
exquisite tunefulness, and braininess.
Its successor, "OK Computer," had some extraordinarily lovely tracks - the
operatic "Lucky," the menacingly slinky "Karma Police,"
the hymnal "No Surprises." Its centerpiece, however, was the six-minute opus
"Paranoid Android," a rather clumsy chunk of dystopia
(Radiohead, political and anti-consumerist, is big on dystopia) with
symphonic ambitions - which is what rock critics always say when
there are quiet bits bolted shakily onto noisier bits. Older listeners may
have heard "Paranoid Android" and been uncomfortably
reminded of experiences they would rather forget - such as sitting in a
field somewhere and nodding appreciatively to the sounds of
King Crimson or Emerson, Lake and Palmer, best-forgotten seventies bands
whose songs and solos were way too long. Still, "OK
Computer" sold millions, and was voted the best album of all time by the
readers of the English rock magazine Q.
Who knows what earned Radiohead its huge audience? One could argue that it
was the longer, chancier parts of "OK Computer," but it
seems just as likely that it was the more straightforward songs that really
connected. Whatever it was, Radiohead now has a fervent
audience who will give the band all the license it needs. We have been
served plenty of notice that Radiohead is bored with its
enviable facility for writing melody and well-structured songs; in various
interviews, the band has warned us that "Kid A" would be
markedly different from its predecessors, and apparently all sorts of blips
and splodges and squeaks, fragments of a bellicose work
in progress, have been emanating from Radiohead Web sites.
It comes as something of a relief, then, when you put "Kid A" into the
machine and hear the fruity (and beautifully recorded) sound
of an electric piano, playing a sweet, churchy intro. "Hey! I can handle
experimentalism!" you think, but your confidence is
immediately knocked flat by the lyrics of the first song, "Everything in Its
Right Place," which consists mostly of the lines
"Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon" and "There are two colors in my head."
The title track is an inconsequential piece of sci-fi
soundscape - five minutes of treated voice and eerie synth noises. "The
National Anthem" is an unpleasant free-jazz workout, with a
discordant horn section squalling over a studiedly crude bass line. Only
once on the album, I think, does Radiohead come close to
creating anything that electrifies in the way that great chunks of the
previous two albums do: "Idioteque" is a twitchy, hypnotic
nursery rhyme that you can imagine twenty-third century children with two
heads and green skin singing in their underground
kindergarten. A whole album of that and "Kid A" could have been something -
something you wouldn't want to dig out too often, true,
but something strikingly ominous.
What is peculiar about this album is that it denies us the two elements of
Radiohead's music that have made the band so distinctive
and enthralling. For the most part, Thom Yorke's voice is fuzzed and
distorted beyond recognition, or else he is not allowed to sing
at all; and Jonny Greenwood's guitar, previously such an inventive treat,
has been largely replaced with synths. One explanations may
be the band's enthusiasm for the sort of music it has recently been
listening to - Messiaen, apparently, and Charles Mingus, and all
sorts of things that don't sound anything like "Creep." The result is that
there's no room for anything approaching conventional pop
music, and though the band might want to show us its impressive breadth of
taste, it's hard to understand why we should be any more
interested in Radiohead's version of Charles Mingus than we would be in its
versions of Joyce or Fassbinder - many of these
influences seem semi-digested, at best, and there is very little on "Kid A"
that is remotely memorable.
Another explanation is that this is a band that has come to hate itself -
or, at least, the gurgling echo of itself that one hears in
the countless baby Radioheads that have been spawned in the past few years.
Radiohead is as imitated now as Nirvana was a decade or
so ago, and though this kind of imitation must be depressing and irritating
(imitators are able to photocopy the surfaces but not the
soul and the guts and the intelligence), to retreat from its formerly
accessible self in this way seems a failure of courage. In any
case, it's hard to be yourself when everyone else is trying to be you, too.
Radiohead reportedly spent more than a year recording one song that it
eventually decided not to include on "Kid A." The album is
morbid proof that this sort of self-indulgence results in a weird kind of
anonymity , rather that something distinctive and original.
(The CD pamphlet, incidentally, contains a splenetic attack on Tony Blair,
who may feel entitled to ask himself how a band that
spends a year failing to come up with an album trackwould have responded to
the Kosovo crisis or the floundering Northern Ireland
peace process.) Nobody is asking Radiohead not to grow, or change, or do
something different. It would be nice, however, if the
band's members recognized that the enormous, occasionally breathtaking gifts
they have - for songwriting, and singing, and playing,
and connecting, and inspiring - are really nothing to be ashamed of. In
fact, they might even come in hand next time around.
-Nick Hornby, The New Yorker, October 30, 2000
Return to Bad Monkeyx's review of Kid A.