further…
(Continued from this post from the other day…)
Then why doesn’t it feel right to call Radiohead the band of the decade? Listening to Kid A for the first time in years, I’m struck in the same way I’m struck with ALL of Radiohead’s albums this decade: yeah, it’s good, but it’s not really compelling. The idea of willfully putting Radiohead on just for the hell of it elicits a kind of mental groan, like I’m getting ready to sit down and watch a Tarkovsky film. Get ready to experience a Work of Art. It’s not a slog once you’re in deep, but getting the stamina just to put it on requires me to overcome the notion that I’m embarking on a joyless exercise. (Yet I consider myself a fan!)
That’s because there’s a level of alienation that comes with every Radiohead record. Too listen to Radiohead—to desire to listen to Radiohead—is to wish a feeling of alienation on yourself. OK Computer seemed to rage against it, and Kid A seemed to be defeated by it—probably what made both albums so thrilling in their own ways. All the subsequent albums, on the other hand, wear it like an old jacket. Alienation just comes with the territory.
Alienation really worked in the 90s, mostly because so many artists seemed to be railing against—or championing—their role as outsiders. Nirvana, Rage Against the Machine, Fugazi, Pearl Jam, Henry Rollins, and Radiohead (among others) all had a fight entwined with their music. Maybe fighting the government, maybe fighting fame, maybe fighting themselves, maybe fighting their own community, maybe fighting some unarticulated feeling of being outside. You could make a strong argument that this was the defining element of rock in the 90s. They whittled it down to one word at the time: angst.
It’s no surprise, really, that that morphed into a kind of solipsism in the 00s. Is it any accident that music lost its angst in the same decade that so many millions of people embraced virtual friendships, in the same decade that saw the U.S. get involved in real fights and made most of these angsty kids realize they liked it better when the country was a little more chill? Who didn’t want to escape from the real world in the 00s?
Thus it seems all the more attractive to call Kid A the album of the decade. It’s the most solipsistic of Radiohead’s career, and probably the most popular album of the decade that is so interior-minded. And yet I so rarely feel any real desire to put it on.
