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Reviews
This Isn't Happening: Radiohead's 'Kid A' and the Beginning of the 21st Century by Steven Hyden
drewbagelz's review against another edition
informative
reflective
medium-paced
3.75
I loved this, but if you want a straight-up narrative history, look elsewhere. This is more of a stream-of-consciousness account of the band's history told in rough chronological order. I had a pretty significant Chuck Klosterman phase back in college, so this type of writing is very comfortable to me.
ursineultra's review
2.0
Things I took away from this book:
1. You shouldn't read a book about something you think you know better than the author.
2. I think I know far too much about Radiohead.
3. King of Limbs is criminally underrated and in no way the 'worst' Radiohead album.
4. Everyone else in the world continues to be too enthusiastic about In Rainbows. It's a mess.
5. It is nice to be reminded of things. 'Kid A' (the song) from the 4/7/00 bootleg was such an incredible thing, and this guy gets it. 'Cuttooth' is indeed too good to be a b-side (and is in fact the best song they ever wrote.)
6. Whilst this book strays wildly and aimlessly from its topic and is kind of all over the place, the sort of thesis that 2000 internet was a beautiful thing and 2020 internet is a hellscape is entirely correct.
1. You shouldn't read a book about something you think you know better than the author.
2. I think I know far too much about Radiohead.
3. King of Limbs is criminally underrated and in no way the 'worst' Radiohead album.
4. Everyone else in the world continues to be too enthusiastic about In Rainbows. It's a mess.
5. It is nice to be reminded of things. 'Kid A' (the song) from the 4/7/00 bootleg was such an incredible thing, and this guy gets it. 'Cuttooth' is indeed too good to be a b-side (and is in fact the best song they ever wrote.)
6. Whilst this book strays wildly and aimlessly from its topic and is kind of all over the place, the sort of thesis that 2000 internet was a beautiful thing and 2020 internet is a hellscape is entirely correct.
sweetcuppincakes's review
4.0
Naturally to have a 200+ page book - a minimum for most books - you have to fill it out with a bit more than just one album. So Hyden does have to spend some time on the background of Kid A, which takes us surprisingly further back to talk about Pablo Honey and Radiohead's origins, and also on post-Kid A , of its legacy, impact, and some interesting stories about In Rainbows genesis which I hadn't considered or known before. If you were going into this expecting a Revolution in the Head-style take on Kid A, this is not that. And I did find that missing - some of the nerdier minutiae of recording, or musical ideas and theory expressed through their music would have been welcome.
But having said that, it's still a great read and I was transported back to October 2000, a sophomore in college, in that week before Kid A's release with the high anticipation that had been met like no other highly-anticipated thing has ever since been met in my life! I particularly liked his discussion on the changing internet, as the album is an "internet album" in any way you look at it.
For the Radiohead fan, it's a lightning-fast read that doesn't give you too much extra if you already were a Radiohead Fan™. But it contextualizes and situates the album well to remind us if (after twenty years!) we've drifted a bit further from who we were twenty years ago. And he makes that excellent point of Radiohead's relevance and longevity - that they were able to make quintessential albums for Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Zers - those albums that landed around the time you turned 20, so even if it was Kid A for you, if it was In Rainbows for lots of you, we can all come together from these different lodestones that center our Radiohead universe and appreciate other generations' gravitational and magnetic pulls. Or something.
But having said that, it's still a great read and I was transported back to October 2000, a sophomore in college, in that week before Kid A's release with the high anticipation that had been met like no other highly-anticipated thing has ever since been met in my life! I particularly liked his discussion on the changing internet, as the album is an "internet album" in any way you look at it.
For the Radiohead fan, it's a lightning-fast read that doesn't give you too much extra if you already were a Radiohead Fan™. But it contextualizes and situates the album well to remind us if (after twenty years!) we've drifted a bit further from who we were twenty years ago. And he makes that excellent point of Radiohead's relevance and longevity - that they were able to make quintessential albums for Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Zers - those albums that landed around the time you turned 20, so even if it was Kid A for you, if it was In Rainbows for lots of you, we can all come together from these different lodestones that center our Radiohead universe and appreciate other generations' gravitational and magnetic pulls. Or something.
nofinersteiner's review
4.0
Well, I think based on the preternatural forces of who I am as a person, I was bound to love this book: I love Radiohead, I love Kid A, I love Steven Hyden, and I loooove to think way too hard about music.
It's a great cultural piece on the album: informative on the industry structures and narratives that got the band in there, how the album was received, and why it became what it is today, i.e., The Kid A Of Radiohead Art Rock Album. The album got this sediment of cultural meaning from layers of criticism and discussions after it. But maybe the most enlightening argument that the book makes is that Kid A doesn't actually say anything. It creates a sonic space for us to insert our own 21st century anxieties and paranoias into. In a way, Kid A is the ultimate vibes record, if the vibes in question are fear and discomfort.
I loved the perspectives on various bands through the lens of a cultural critic at the time. Interesting to see how a band like The Strokes could be recontextualized in the post-Kid A rock music landscape. How the way that fans consumed and toiled over Radiohead made it an album worth toiling over. That crazy Pitchfork review is part of the myth--Kid A became the quintessential Difficult Art Rock piece because so many people had so mythologized it.
Hyden is just an incredibly readable and friendly writer. I would like to learn how to write about music like him.
Quotes I Like
"Kid A was our version of this ancient, recurring narrative. A forward-thinking work that at some point stopped being about the future as it gradually came to strongly evoke everything vital and terrifying and unknowable about now" (7).
"Now, is it possible that I take Kid A way too seriously? It's not possible -- it's certain. But I'm guessing you take Kid A way too seriously too. If there are thousands of other people like us out there, maybe we truly can pull something profound out of the fourth Radiohead record -- about the band, our world, and us" (9) .
(This is so important! This is my philosophy on so many albums I like, so many Albums of the Year. Do I take BCNR way too seriously? Yes. Does that mean it can't be important though?")
"Pleasure and discomfort are now commingling freely. This is the past, present, and future coming together--your life as a pessimistic rock record laced with the hope of an escape route and the fearful suspicion that all roads ultimately lead back to captivity" (9).
'He writes a song ("Everything In Its Right Place") inspired by that night in Birmingham, at the NEC Arena, when he realized that he was now living in the future that he had always dreamed about, and found that it was his own private hell" (21).
"When people hear "Everything In Its Right Place" in the future, it won't sound alien or cold or difficult; it will evoke glitchy cell reception and patchy Wi-Fi and decontextualized social-media updates and the modern reality of omnipresent technological interconnectivity at the expense of genuine human connection. It will eventually seem logical--even the parts that aren't supposed to seem logical. It will sound like screaming at your neighbors and never being heard, in an online landscape that is as dark, disorderly, and foreboding as a Stanley Donwood album cover. Or as inescapable as an arena you can't ever leave. In time, many of us will feel like the singer in the successful rock band -- surrounded by every convenience, and yet thoroughly alienated by this supposedly inviting world" (23).
"For Radiohead, "Creep" was the trap and Kid A was the escape plan" (43).
"Maybe that's why I can still hear the Radiohead of Pablo Honey in the band's subsequent work. They're still the band that relentlessly grasps for emotional jugular, leading with the heart rather than the head, and putting ultimate value on what must be intuited over what can only be intellectualized. They just got better at not making it so damn obvious" (53).
"The internet used to be a place where some people went to feel good about themselves. Now it's a place where everyone goes to feel bad. Kid A now seems weirdly prescient about the latter statement. A tone poem about our 'doomed-to-be-extremely-online' lives" (94).
"For Radiohead, Kid A was an attempt to sidestep the mainstream media. They wanted to escape the burden of 'meaning,' of signifying a specific idea that quickly became an albatross after being repeated 10,000 times, a fear ingrained from being a potential one-hit wonder. Here was a record that was as opaque as "Creep" was obvious. It was designed to find a discerning audience. Anyone who found it merely frustrating was not the sort of person worth engaging with anyone. In this way, the Internet would help Radiohead find the audience they wanted" (94).
"Back in the year 2000, hearing a record for free before it came out, and then reading thousands of words written about it by people who were more like you than the typical rock critic, truly seemed revolutionary. It made you want to spend as much time as you could in the digital world, parsing songs by your favorite band with dozens upon dozens of strangers who had more in common with you than anybody in your "real" life. Kid A didn't register as a warning about the dangers of the online world back then. It was an invitation to a place that seemed better than the one you were in. We argued with strangers for fun. We laughed until our hands came off. And we swallowed till we burst" (103).
"In this way, the British and American press were united in depicting Radiohead as a band stuck in a kind of perpetual adolescence, forever obsessed with matters of personal identity and global instability. The implication is that the grown-ups writing about Radiohead were able to see these preoccupations for what they really were -- kid stuff, silly and self-indulgent, the sort of dalliances you eventually move beyond with the benefit of perspective" (109).
"This was most famously expressed by High Fidelity author and occasional music critic Nick Horny in a review for The New Yorker. Kid A, he wrote "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 millennial atmosphere as you try to decipher elliptical snatches of lyrics and puzzle out how titles might refer to the songs. In other words, you have to be 16...The music critics who love Kid A, one suspects, love it because their job forces them to consume music as a 16-year-old would. Don't trust any of them" (109-10).
"I wasn't sixteen years old when Kid A came out. And I wasn't yet a professional music critic. Here's what I was: a twenty-three-year-old single guy who had been listening to Radiohead for more than 25 percent of his life. I was precisely the sort of person who listened to Kid A with extreme seriousness in 2000--and I did it without apology. I took it as a matter of fact that Radiohead was an important band, and that this was an important record. Because it was important to me.
Whether Radiohead took itself too seriously honestly never occurred to me. As far as I was concerned, they took themselves exactly as seriously as they should have. It's like accusing your car of taking itself too seriously for starting up once you put the key in. Actually, the car is just doing what it's supposed to do. And was far as I was concerned, Radiohead was supposed to make (yes) IMPORTANT albums like Kid A" (111).
"When critics claim that a band takes themselves too seriously, what they're really saying is we're too old to take seriously that the generation behind us loves. Now that I am one of those music critics, I try to remember this whenever I write about a band like Twenty One Pilots, the Ohio-based arena-rock act that seems ridiculous to me but is profound to millions of teenagers...Frankly, it's not something I care about. But I appreciate how much it matters to them. They don't take that band too seriously. They care about them just as much as I cared about Radiohead in 2000. It's good to at least entertain the possibility that not having the time to invest in art means that you're less qualified to comment on it. You are, at best, a tourist in a land that. you will never be able to inhibit or even fully comprehend" (114).
"Rock concerts are typically described as avenues for collective catharsis, where people can leave their troubles behind and experience community with strangers who have temporarily abandoned their own traumas. But there is no such release apparent when you listen to this concert. What you detect instead is a burgeoning, ineffable feeling of doom--not just for what might happen on September 12, but for what might happen in the years and decades that lie ahead in the twenty-first century" (138).
"While Kid A was remembered after the fact as an album that foreshadowed the gloom of the post-9/11 world, in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy no band dominated the music press like the Strokes. In the moment, an album like Kid A that hit the nose on collective dread so directly was simply intolerable. Of all the stages of grief, the first is denial, and that was manifested by the first Strokes record, Is This It.
Here was a band that reinstated everything that Kid A had seemingly sought to dismantle: guitars, leather jackets, curly hair and perfect cheekbones, clanking beer bottles, cocaine afterparties, machismo, all that classic-rock hero bullshit...And where better than in New York City, our nation's most fantastic metropolis, a stand-in for old American ideas about reinvention and boundless possibility that we all still wanted to believe in and Is This It personified" (139).
"With the Strokes, people really wanted to believe that they could (and did!) change the world. And that continued even after the Strokes proceeded to fall apart in the wake of Is This It. I remember reading a tenth-anniversary retrospective piece about Is This It in which the writer claimed that the Strokes "kicked the nu-metal blight to the curb." This somehow became the conventional wisdom was the "return of rock" era itself became the subject of romantic nostalgia. But what were we actually missing?" (142).
"as projecting mystique. was what they [the Strokes] were always best at" (142).
"But while the Strokes achieved eternal fame, they weren't actually popular. AS it its with so many critics' darlings, what made the Strokes an obsession for the press proved to be a liability commercially. The Strokes were a band for people in their twenties. They sounded best played loud in a bar at closing time. They were referencing things that Gen-Xers thought were cool--Lou Reed, CBGB, acting glamorous and lazy simultaneously.
But popular rock bands have always been for teenagers. They have to articulate a point of view that speaks to teens universally ("life sucks") and also address youth culture at this specific moment" (142-3).
"Upon the release of Kid A, Thom Yorke declared that 'alternative rock' needs bludgeoning to death on a big stick and left on a bridge to warn passers-by.' But this was just rhetoric. Kid A was still a rock album, and it was part of a classic continuum that included the Beatles, David Bowie, Talking Heads, and U2. The very idea that rock needed 'bludgeoning to death' was part of the melodramatic, life-death-rebirth cycle that's at the very heart of rock mythology, whether it's punk, grunge, or the 'return to rock' bands of the '00s. The desire to demolish the paradigm was part and parcel of the belief that the paradigm still mattered" (144).
"As one of those meddlesome close listeners, I'm also skeptical about how my reading of Kid A happens to line up with what I already believe. Am I thinking way too much about this? Is it possible that there really isn't anything here? Only a critic who is lying to himself doesn't worry about this sort of thing" (152).
"Kid A unfolds exactly as the Internet does. It is obscure and inexplicable and moves relentlessly forward without bothering to explain itself, offering no context outside of our own personal biases, opinions, and limited consciousness. And yet...we understand it intuitively. We've all become postmodern interpreters of the world, gleaning meaning from the accidental juxtapositions of disconnected data that come across our social media feeds.
Things no longer have to make sense for us to make sense of them" (154).
"Kid A merely puts you in a headspace to experience your own dissatisfaction in a heightened sonic environment" (154).
"When you heard Radiohead, you were reminded that no matter how cool you looked in shades and a leather jacket, or how entertained you were by watching VH1 for five hours straight, it would not make the world any less frightening" (165).
"[The songs on In Rainbows] appear, they move throughout the world, and then they fade out. They live out the same arc that human beings do, which is why they feel and sound so natural and organic. They aren't telegraphing the moments when you're supposed to feel a surge of adrenaline or an unstoppable compulsion to weep. There is enough space and air in this music to put whatever you want into it" (191-192).
"In 2000, you went on the Internet to learn about Kid A. It's where you heard the album stream, downloaded the concert bootlegs, and read the album reviews. It was a tool that you used to make your life better.
But by the end of the aughts, it seemed like the opposite had been true all along: Kid A had really just been a way to get you on the internet. The tool was now using you. You didn't live there. You were stuck there. And there was no place else left to go" (202).
"Yorke's role now is to explore his own past, to dialogue with it, to reconnect with what was lot and how we were changed by what we gained. You can call that nostalgia. But it's more akin to excavation, uncovering long-lost worlds s that we might once again be connected to that which we can no longer see or touch, and yet still feel is elemental" (227).
"But the vibe of this record--the uncertainty, the darkness, the abject fear that things will only grow worse--has felt like a constant in our world ever since" (228).
It's a great cultural piece on the album: informative on the industry structures and narratives that got the band in there, how the album was received, and why it became what it is today, i.e., The Kid A Of Radiohead Art Rock Album. The album got this sediment of cultural meaning from layers of criticism and discussions after it. But maybe the most enlightening argument that the book makes is that Kid A doesn't actually say anything. It creates a sonic space for us to insert our own 21st century anxieties and paranoias into. In a way, Kid A is the ultimate vibes record, if the vibes in question are fear and discomfort.
I loved the perspectives on various bands through the lens of a cultural critic at the time. Interesting to see how a band like The Strokes could be recontextualized in the post-Kid A rock music landscape. How the way that fans consumed and toiled over Radiohead made it an album worth toiling over. That crazy Pitchfork review is part of the myth--Kid A became the quintessential Difficult Art Rock piece because so many people had so mythologized it.
Hyden is just an incredibly readable and friendly writer. I would like to learn how to write about music like him.
Quotes I Like
"Kid A was our version of this ancient, recurring narrative. A forward-thinking work that at some point stopped being about the future as it gradually came to strongly evoke everything vital and terrifying and unknowable about now" (7).
"Now, is it possible that I take Kid A way too seriously? It's not possible -- it's certain. But I'm guessing you take Kid A way too seriously too. If there are thousands of other people like us out there, maybe we truly can pull something profound out of the fourth Radiohead record -- about the band, our world, and us" (9) .
(This is so important! This is my philosophy on so many albums I like, so many Albums of the Year. Do I take BCNR way too seriously? Yes. Does that mean it can't be important though?")
"Pleasure and discomfort are now commingling freely. This is the past, present, and future coming together--your life as a pessimistic rock record laced with the hope of an escape route and the fearful suspicion that all roads ultimately lead back to captivity" (9).
'He writes a song ("Everything In Its Right Place") inspired by that night in Birmingham, at the NEC Arena, when he realized that he was now living in the future that he had always dreamed about, and found that it was his own private hell" (21).
"When people hear "Everything In Its Right Place" in the future, it won't sound alien or cold or difficult; it will evoke glitchy cell reception and patchy Wi-Fi and decontextualized social-media updates and the modern reality of omnipresent technological interconnectivity at the expense of genuine human connection. It will eventually seem logical--even the parts that aren't supposed to seem logical. It will sound like screaming at your neighbors and never being heard, in an online landscape that is as dark, disorderly, and foreboding as a Stanley Donwood album cover. Or as inescapable as an arena you can't ever leave. In time, many of us will feel like the singer in the successful rock band -- surrounded by every convenience, and yet thoroughly alienated by this supposedly inviting world" (23).
"For Radiohead, "Creep" was the trap and Kid A was the escape plan" (43).
"Maybe that's why I can still hear the Radiohead of Pablo Honey in the band's subsequent work. They're still the band that relentlessly grasps for emotional jugular, leading with the heart rather than the head, and putting ultimate value on what must be intuited over what can only be intellectualized. They just got better at not making it so damn obvious" (53).
"The internet used to be a place where some people went to feel good about themselves. Now it's a place where everyone goes to feel bad. Kid A now seems weirdly prescient about the latter statement. A tone poem about our 'doomed-to-be-extremely-online' lives" (94).
"For Radiohead, Kid A was an attempt to sidestep the mainstream media. They wanted to escape the burden of 'meaning,' of signifying a specific idea that quickly became an albatross after being repeated 10,000 times, a fear ingrained from being a potential one-hit wonder. Here was a record that was as opaque as "Creep" was obvious. It was designed to find a discerning audience. Anyone who found it merely frustrating was not the sort of person worth engaging with anyone. In this way, the Internet would help Radiohead find the audience they wanted" (94).
"Back in the year 2000, hearing a record for free before it came out, and then reading thousands of words written about it by people who were more like you than the typical rock critic, truly seemed revolutionary. It made you want to spend as much time as you could in the digital world, parsing songs by your favorite band with dozens upon dozens of strangers who had more in common with you than anybody in your "real" life. Kid A didn't register as a warning about the dangers of the online world back then. It was an invitation to a place that seemed better than the one you were in. We argued with strangers for fun. We laughed until our hands came off. And we swallowed till we burst" (103).
"In this way, the British and American press were united in depicting Radiohead as a band stuck in a kind of perpetual adolescence, forever obsessed with matters of personal identity and global instability. The implication is that the grown-ups writing about Radiohead were able to see these preoccupations for what they really were -- kid stuff, silly and self-indulgent, the sort of dalliances you eventually move beyond with the benefit of perspective" (109).
"This was most famously expressed by High Fidelity author and occasional music critic Nick Horny in a review for The New Yorker. Kid A, he wrote "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 millennial atmosphere as you try to decipher elliptical snatches of lyrics and puzzle out how titles might refer to the songs. In other words, you have to be 16...The music critics who love Kid A, one suspects, love it because their job forces them to consume music as a 16-year-old would. Don't trust any of them" (109-10).
"I wasn't sixteen years old when Kid A came out. And I wasn't yet a professional music critic. Here's what I was: a twenty-three-year-old single guy who had been listening to Radiohead for more than 25 percent of his life. I was precisely the sort of person who listened to Kid A with extreme seriousness in 2000--and I did it without apology. I took it as a matter of fact that Radiohead was an important band, and that this was an important record. Because it was important to me.
Whether Radiohead took itself too seriously honestly never occurred to me. As far as I was concerned, they took themselves exactly as seriously as they should have. It's like accusing your car of taking itself too seriously for starting up once you put the key in. Actually, the car is just doing what it's supposed to do. And was far as I was concerned, Radiohead was supposed to make (yes) IMPORTANT albums like Kid A" (111).
"When critics claim that a band takes themselves too seriously, what they're really saying is we're too old to take seriously that the generation behind us loves. Now that I am one of those music critics, I try to remember this whenever I write about a band like Twenty One Pilots, the Ohio-based arena-rock act that seems ridiculous to me but is profound to millions of teenagers...Frankly, it's not something I care about. But I appreciate how much it matters to them. They don't take that band too seriously. They care about them just as much as I cared about Radiohead in 2000. It's good to at least entertain the possibility that not having the time to invest in art means that you're less qualified to comment on it. You are, at best, a tourist in a land that. you will never be able to inhibit or even fully comprehend" (114).
"Rock concerts are typically described as avenues for collective catharsis, where people can leave their troubles behind and experience community with strangers who have temporarily abandoned their own traumas. But there is no such release apparent when you listen to this concert. What you detect instead is a burgeoning, ineffable feeling of doom--not just for what might happen on September 12, but for what might happen in the years and decades that lie ahead in the twenty-first century" (138).
"While Kid A was remembered after the fact as an album that foreshadowed the gloom of the post-9/11 world, in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy no band dominated the music press like the Strokes. In the moment, an album like Kid A that hit the nose on collective dread so directly was simply intolerable. Of all the stages of grief, the first is denial, and that was manifested by the first Strokes record, Is This It.
Here was a band that reinstated everything that Kid A had seemingly sought to dismantle: guitars, leather jackets, curly hair and perfect cheekbones, clanking beer bottles, cocaine afterparties, machismo, all that classic-rock hero bullshit...And where better than in New York City, our nation's most fantastic metropolis, a stand-in for old American ideas about reinvention and boundless possibility that we all still wanted to believe in and Is This It personified" (139).
"With the Strokes, people really wanted to believe that they could (and did!) change the world. And that continued even after the Strokes proceeded to fall apart in the wake of Is This It. I remember reading a tenth-anniversary retrospective piece about Is This It in which the writer claimed that the Strokes "kicked the nu-metal blight to the curb." This somehow became the conventional wisdom was the "return of rock" era itself became the subject of romantic nostalgia. But what were we actually missing?" (142).
"as projecting mystique. was what they [the Strokes] were always best at" (142).
"But while the Strokes achieved eternal fame, they weren't actually popular. AS it its with so many critics' darlings, what made the Strokes an obsession for the press proved to be a liability commercially. The Strokes were a band for people in their twenties. They sounded best played loud in a bar at closing time. They were referencing things that Gen-Xers thought were cool--Lou Reed, CBGB, acting glamorous and lazy simultaneously.
But popular rock bands have always been for teenagers. They have to articulate a point of view that speaks to teens universally ("life sucks") and also address youth culture at this specific moment" (142-3).
"Upon the release of Kid A, Thom Yorke declared that 'alternative rock' needs bludgeoning to death on a big stick and left on a bridge to warn passers-by.' But this was just rhetoric. Kid A was still a rock album, and it was part of a classic continuum that included the Beatles, David Bowie, Talking Heads, and U2. The very idea that rock needed 'bludgeoning to death' was part of the melodramatic, life-death-rebirth cycle that's at the very heart of rock mythology, whether it's punk, grunge, or the 'return to rock' bands of the '00s. The desire to demolish the paradigm was part and parcel of the belief that the paradigm still mattered" (144).
"As one of those meddlesome close listeners, I'm also skeptical about how my reading of Kid A happens to line up with what I already believe. Am I thinking way too much about this? Is it possible that there really isn't anything here? Only a critic who is lying to himself doesn't worry about this sort of thing" (152).
"Kid A unfolds exactly as the Internet does. It is obscure and inexplicable and moves relentlessly forward without bothering to explain itself, offering no context outside of our own personal biases, opinions, and limited consciousness. And yet...we understand it intuitively. We've all become postmodern interpreters of the world, gleaning meaning from the accidental juxtapositions of disconnected data that come across our social media feeds.
Things no longer have to make sense for us to make sense of them" (154).
"Kid A merely puts you in a headspace to experience your own dissatisfaction in a heightened sonic environment" (154).
"When you heard Radiohead, you were reminded that no matter how cool you looked in shades and a leather jacket, or how entertained you were by watching VH1 for five hours straight, it would not make the world any less frightening" (165).
"[The songs on In Rainbows] appear, they move throughout the world, and then they fade out. They live out the same arc that human beings do, which is why they feel and sound so natural and organic. They aren't telegraphing the moments when you're supposed to feel a surge of adrenaline or an unstoppable compulsion to weep. There is enough space and air in this music to put whatever you want into it" (191-192).
"In 2000, you went on the Internet to learn about Kid A. It's where you heard the album stream, downloaded the concert bootlegs, and read the album reviews. It was a tool that you used to make your life better.
But by the end of the aughts, it seemed like the opposite had been true all along: Kid A had really just been a way to get you on the internet. The tool was now using you. You didn't live there. You were stuck there. And there was no place else left to go" (202).
"Yorke's role now is to explore his own past, to dialogue with it, to reconnect with what was lot and how we were changed by what we gained. You can call that nostalgia. But it's more akin to excavation, uncovering long-lost worlds s that we might once again be connected to that which we can no longer see or touch, and yet still feel is elemental" (227).
"But the vibe of this record--the uncertainty, the darkness, the abject fear that things will only grow worse--has felt like a constant in our world ever since" (228).
duparker's review against another edition
2.0
I felt about this book when I feel about the album kid a that it's fine and if you're into it you are super into it, but if you just find it to be fine then you won't remember it when you're done. The author clearly writes as a music critic and possibly for other music critics who also fans of this album. In general I appreciate his writing and enjoy it but here it was a little too much fanboy.
poxav's review against another edition
3.0
Radiohead is my favorite band, and seeing this randomly crop up in searching my library’s catalogue made me give in to fate and give it a whirl. It’s well-written for sure, with particular care given to structure and form, but it’s definitely not a read with great impact or anything resembling that. In a sense, it’s a series of eloquent reflections on the Greatest Left Turn in Music History and how it set the mood for the new century, as well as the place of Kid A in the band’s ethos for years to come.
Did this change my appreciation of Radiohead at all? Not really. I’ve already been appreciating Kid A more and more recently (although it definitely takes the no. 3 spot for me after OK Computer and In Rainbows), but the extent of its monumentality was somewhat blurry to me. I guess in that regard, This Isn’t Happening helps to fill in the gaps of knowledge I had and make me understand with greater clarity the chaos of the 00’s (during which I was smol and clueless). Overall, not a waste of time for sure.
3/5
Did this change my appreciation of Radiohead at all? Not really. I’ve already been appreciating Kid A more and more recently (although it definitely takes the no. 3 spot for me after OK Computer and In Rainbows), but the extent of its monumentality was somewhat blurry to me. I guess in that regard, This Isn’t Happening helps to fill in the gaps of knowledge I had and make me understand with greater clarity the chaos of the 00’s (during which I was smol and clueless). Overall, not a waste of time for sure.
3/5