Radiohead's Kid A (15 page)

Yet because an experience of music is also an experience of time, using what composer Charles Ives described as its own “transcendental language,” music has the ability to alter our perception of time without getting bogged down by logical coherency. While music has often served to perpetuate linear narratives through the arousal and channeling of desire, much of the musical innovation in the last century has evinced new temporal dispositions — from the adventurous rhythms of jazz (Albert Ayler), modern composition (Iannis Xenakis), and math rock (Don Caballero), to the cyclical expressions in electronic (Matmos), hip-hop (A Tribe Called Quest), and process music (Steve Reich); from the expansions/contractions in noise (Burning Star Core), drone (Sunn O)))), and ambient (Brian Eno), to the deconstructions/reconstructions of
musique concrète
(Edgard Varèse), sound collage (John Oswald), and improv (nmperign); from the “lost in time” quality of psych-rock (Acid Mothers Temple), afrobeat (Fela Kuti), and trance (The KLF), to the temporal exaggerations in Krautrock (Neu!), minimalism (Terry Riley), and punk rock (The Ramones).

Together, these musics can be heard as an aggressive attack on linear time, where incendiary tempos, bizarre rhythms, narrative displacement, and teleological short-circuiting nullified impressions of forward-moving time. In an essay entitled “New Approaches to the Organization of Time,” composer Elliott Carter
critiques the “linear succession” of music, suggesting that

the matter of musical time is vastly more important than the particulars or the novelty of the musical vocabulary, and that the morphological elements of any music owe their musical effect almost entirely to their specific ‘placing’ in the musical time-continuity.

The stakes of this musical collision with time is examined further in author Richard Klein’s essay “Theses on the Relationship Between Music and Time”:

A single moment is at stake here, an impulse, a tendency against the ‘universalization and affirmation’ of time, not the process as an emphatic totality or ‘progress.’ Without this impulse against time, against successivity, against its own passing, music would not be music. The temporal art
par excellence
thrives on its confrontation of the very thing which makes it art.

Kid A
, more than any other Radiohead album, thrives on this confrontation with time. You can hear it in “Everything in Its Right Place,” where the digital sampling of Thom’s voice removes itself from the conventionally linear autograph of time and is instead
cut up and randomly distributed throughout with little concern for narrative coherence. You can hear it in “Idioteque,” as Jonny plunders 1970s electronic music (Paul Lansky and Arthur Kreiger) and loops to infinity while Thom further accentuates temporal displacement through vocal repetition and lyrics cut off mid-sentence, defying our expectation of a forward trajectory and approximating the aesthetics of the sample. You can hear it in “The National Anthem,” in which the insistent bassline slices through the fabric of sequential time, imposing a cyclical hypnosis that transcends its immediate context and undercuts the typical chronology of Western aesthetics for a blurred sense of beginning, middle, and end. You can hear it in “In Limbo,” where the standard rock beat becomes elongated and exaggerated, where the polyrhythmic overlaps poke holes in the idea of synchronized rhythm to produce a gap in our sense of time. You can even hear it in “Treefingers,” where the feeling of time becomes so expansive, so dilated that its passage seems to slow time to a snail’s pace and the sounds start veering toward the qualities of space.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that time is being subverted by the very art form whose existence hinges upon it. Time, after all, is music’s biggest enemy: it wants to destroy art, to ensure that all human distinctions will be erased over time. This is why musicians will often aim for the timeless rather than the timely — they fear transition, irrelevance, extinction. It’s also why recorded music can serve as a technological
way for musicians to transcend context and project themselves into the future. But if music is, indeed, both a reflection and prophecy of society, becoming increasingly preoccupied with stimulating new perceptions of time, then perhaps this temporal battle is a sign that time, like space, will also some day cease to be the “uncontrollable mystery”; perhaps it indicates a revolt against the schedules, uniformity, and linearity that followed the 1853 train crash; perhaps modern transcendence should be viewed not as an escapist retreat but as a cultural decision, in which its practitioners subconsciously seek sensations not typically experienced through the hierarchical ticking of capitalist production.

Perhaps this attack on time, then, is a political attempt to reclaim it, to democratize it. As Jeremy Rifkin states in his book
Time Wars
:

In a hierarchical time culture, status is often delineated in terms of how valuable a person’s time is. The time poor are made to wait, while the temporally privileged are waited upon. […] In a democratic time culture, everyone’s time is valuable and no one’s time is any more expendable than another’s.

If one of music’s main functions is to reflect social cohesion, then those musics that outwardly defy conventional categorization, that go against music’s linear
narratives, that go against the traditional pulse of time, can be heard as a protest against the status quo, as a futuristic rupture of the kind that Attali described. It doesn’t matter whether or not
Kid A
’s political content is picked up by its audience; the sounds themselves are political. Its sonic irreverence, however dubious it may be, isn’t an indication of anarchy; it’s an aesthetic reaction against imposed patterns, cookie-cutter templates, and harmonic imperialism. It’s a sonic nod to what could be, what may be. To paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson: its weirdness was tomorrow’s reason why.

Listening to
Kid A
for moments of transcendence, then, provides the opportunity to feel something beyond those dictated by our power structures; to feel unrestrained, uninhibited, emancipated; to sublimate our desires for sensory ecstasy; to use aesthetics for perceptual awareness, not for conceptual distinction. To recite Thom, it’s “like knocking a hole in the wall so that you can see out on another place you didn’t know existed,” as a way to stop us from feeling “trapped.” This approach to transcendence doesn’t involve using music to escape our political situation for passive entertainment; it desires to use the resulting cognizance to enact a future that resides beyond our traditional conception of time; to not get “lost” in music, but to become more perceptually aware; to listen critically, but to remain critical of being swept away; to become more attuned to our temporal and therefore political constructions, inching us closer to fully realizing Marcel Duchamp’s astute suggestion
that “[a]rt is an outlet toward regions which are not ruled by time and space.”

Neither resigned to the ear candy of most commercialized music nor relegated to the esoteric avant-garde,
Kid A
reminds us how time is embedded in its aesthetics, in our shifting conceptions of it, in our subjective judgments, in its politics, in the media through which we consume it. You can hear it, too: listen as
Kid A
subverts the static commodification of music; listen as
Kid A
shapes our conceptions, our tastes, and even our brains over time; listen as
Kid A
smears distinctions between the past and present; listen as
Kid A
envisages our future through its medium and through its aesthetics.

I don’t, by any means, intend to discount the intellectualization of music and advance the idea of perception as the be-all, end-all: this interpretation is just one of many impulses over the last century; impulses that have emancipated our bodies, our sexuality, our subjectivities; impulses that have questioned our morality, our values, our culture. But what we could benefit from is balance — between conceptualizing and perceptualizing, between the eye and the ear, between individualism and collectivism, between academic analysis and aesthetic transcendence, between stroking our chins and staring into the abyss, between political engagement and the knowledge that withdrawing in disgust is not the same thing as apathy.

I can’t claim to truly understand the relationship that music has with time, but I do know this: we spend
much of this fleeting currency performing, listening to, and thinking about music. This, I believe, says something special about our valuation of music, how it’s beyond “escapism” and beyond a way to simply “pass the time,” no matter how ideologically indoctrinated we are or how snobby we project ourselves to be. In fact, with a fresh perspective, its purpose can be quite the opposite. As Attali observed, “For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible.” Listening to
Kid A
for moments of transcendence, then, is to not only hear the album itself but also to hear a rupture elongated over time, one that will hopefully forecast a future unlike the terrifying apocalypse articulated so vividly in
Kid A
.

Thanks to David Barker and everyone at Continuum for this amazing opportunity.

A big thanks to friends/writers/colleagues who helped with the book: Alec Johnson, Kasey Majorowicz, Dave McHugh, Jay Sitter, Judy Berman, Elliott Sharp, Keith Rankin, Joseph Davenport, Jeff Roesgen, Scott Thompson, and Justin Spicer. Also thanks to my family and friends for their patience and support: Chris and Linna Lin, Sophie and Carlo Gulbranson, Jeff and Aleta Lin, Randy and Kris Meyers, Justin Meyers and Natalie Kern (and Denny), Elma/Lana/Nina Johnson, Perry Senjem, Mike Thompson, Dave Fishel, JoMarie Sutton, and Rachel Damiani.

I’m particularly indebted to Adriaan Pels (At Ease), Hugh Newsom/Beryl Tomay (Follow Me Around), Ranya Hatzipanayioti (The Radiohead Article Archive), Green Plastic, the Radiohead message boards, and especially Michael Weber (
www.citizeninsane.eu
) for the resources, help, and suggestions. And I couldn’t have done this without the support and inspiration of Chris Ruen, Erik Westra, Tony Duepner, Timothy Brennan, Gary Thomas, American hops, and the Tiny
Mix Tapes staff (particularly Grant Purdum, Michael Squeo, Mark Starr, and Kyle Smith).

Special thanks to Thom Yorke, Ed O’Brien, Jonny Greenwood, Colin Greenwood, and Phil Selway of Radiohead for writing such a rich and compelling album.

And, most of all, thanks to my partner in crime Katie Lin, who indulged my insecurities and helped endlessly with the book. Wo ai ni!

1.
Dusty in Memphis
by Warren Zanes

2.
Forever Changes
by Andrew Hultkrans

3.
Harvest
by Sam Inglis

4.
The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society
by Andy Miller

5.
Meat Is Murder
by Joe Pernice

6.
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
by John Cavanagh

7.
Abba Gold
by Elisabeth Vincentelli

8.
Electric Ladyland
by John Perry

9.
Unknown Pleasures
by Chris Ott

10.
Sign ‘O’ the Times
by Michaelangelo Matos

11.
The Velvet Underground and Nico
by Joe Harvard

12.
Let It Be
by Steve Matteo

13.
Live at the Apollo
by Douglas Wolk

14.
Aqualung
by Allan Moore

15.
OK Computer
by Dai Griffiths

16.
Let It Be
by Colin Meloy

17.
Led Zeppelin IV
by Erik Davis

18.
Exile on Main St.
by Bill Janovitz

19.
Pet Sounds
by Jim Fusilli

20.
Ramones
by Nicholas Rombes

21.
Armed Forces
by Franklin Bruno

22.
Murmur
by J. Niimi

23.
Grace
by Daphne Brooks

24.
Endtroducing …
by Eliot Wilder

25.
Kick Out the Jams
by Don McLeese

26.
Low
by Hugo Wilcken

27.
Born in the U.S.A.
by Geoffrey Himes

28.
Music from Big Pink
by John Niven

29.
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
by Kim Cooper

30.
Paul’s Boutique
by Dan LeRoy

31.
Doolittle
by Ben Sisario

32.
There’s a Riot Goin’ On
by Miles Marshall Lewis

33.
The Stone Roses
by Alex Green

34.
In Utero
by Gillian G. Gaar

35.
Highway 61 Revisited
by Mark Polizzotti

36.
Loveless
by Mike McGonigal

37.
The Who Sell Out
by John Dougan

38.
Bee Thousand
by Marc Woodworth

39.
Daydream Nation
by Matthew Stearns

40.
Court and Spark
by Sean Nelson

41.
Use Your Illusion Vols 1 and 2
by Eric Weisbard

42.
Songs in the Key of Life
by Zeth Lundy

43.
The Notorious Byrd Brothers
by Ric Menck

44.
Trout Mask Replica
by Kevin Courrier

45.
Double Nickels on the Dime
by Michael T. Fournier

46.
Aja
by Don Breithaupt

47.
People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm
by Shawn Taylor

48.
Rid of Me
by Kate Schatz

49.
Achtung Baby
by Stephen Catanzarite

50.
If You’re Feeling Sinister
by Scott Plagenhoef

51.
Pink Moon
by Amanda Petrusich

52.
Let’s Talk About Love
by Carl Wilson

53.
Swordfishtrombones
by David Smay

54.
20 Jazz Funk Greats
by Drew Daniel