Kid A

Background

After the OK Computer tour, the group was close to disbanding due to creative pressures. However they remained together and not only saw the project through, they recorded the tracks for what would become their follow-up album, Amnesiac (2001), at the same time.

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After a year of recording sessions, Kid A was finished in April 2000, though no singles were released. Instead, the album was promoted mainly though the internet. This is where Radiohead's infamous relationship with Napster came into play. Three months prior to the release of Kid A MP3 tracks of the entire album made their way onto the file sharing service. As Richard Menta of MP3 Newswire detailed in his essay "Did Napster Take Radiohead's New Album to Number 1?" , millions of fans had possession of this music by the time the CD hit stores. The record industry assumed the album was now doomed to failure since fans already had the music for free. Instead the opposite occurred and the band, which had never hit the US top 20 before, captured the number one spot in Kid As debut week. With the record's absence of radio airplay, big time marketing, or any other factor that may have explained this stunning success, Menta declared this was proof of the promotional powers of file trading and of word-of-mouth generated through the internet.

Related Topics:
April 2000 - Napster - MP3 - MP3 Newswire

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Even Oasis' chief Noel Gallagher admitted that Kid As great marketing scheme was its lack of any promotion: "If you refuse to talk about your own album, that just stirs the pot and makes everyone else start talking about it." While others agreed with Gallagher's assessment, it ignored any potential effect of Napster despite the fact it distributed Kid A to a huge number of music fans. Whatever the reason for the record's success on the charts, Kid A spread the band's popularity outside the indie scene and rendered them a burgeoning supergroup.

Related Topics:
Oasis - Noel Gallagher

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Kid A offers a melange of modern and experimental music, including electronica, post-rock, indie, art rock, and jazz. The album is a distinct departure from Radiohead's usual work in that it features less of Thom Yorke's vocals or Jonny Greenwood's guitar work. While it may have disappointed some of the fans, Kid A certainly brought Radiohead critical and popular acclaim from those attracted to the musical directions the band was exploring. Many fans see the album as a parallel to U2's Zooropa, both sonically and in terms of the band's sudden and radical change in musical style. Stylistically, a more fruitful point of comparison might be Talk Talk's Laughing Stock, which features a groundbreaking mix of rock, jazz, and ambient. "The National Anthem", in particular, seems indebted to the one-note guitar solo and abrupt silence that end Laughing Stock's "Ascension Day."

Related Topics:
Electronica - Post-rock - Indie - Art rock - Jazz - Thom Yorke - Jonny Greenwood - U2 - Zooropa - Talk Talk - Laughing Stock - Rock - Ambient - The National Anthem

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The album nods at an anti-commercialist and anti-capitalist viewpoint, and in some cases espouses this directly. A possible explanation for this is some members of the band were reading the book No Logo prior to recording the album, and mentioned this on an internet weblog.

Related Topics:
No Logo - Weblog

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In Chuck Klosterman's recent book "Killing Yourself To Live" he puts forth a theory that Kid A could very easily be a soundtrack to all the happenings of September 11th and beyond. Granted the album was released a little over a year before Sept. 11th, but once you listen to it after reading his little theory, it does change things a little bit.

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He claimed that during that time he was listening to Kid A quite a bit, so the question is, at such a time of high emotion wouldn't pretty much anything you listen to create a relationship to that which is the cause of the emotions?

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