Treble 100: No. 1, Radiohead – Kid A

I’m doing my best not to start this with an overture. It’s hard though; too many things are coming together, from this being the apex, the final work, the number one record among all of us here at Treble in a ranked list not of best records but of favorite, the ones that mean the most, that did the most to us, that cracked the hardened shell of the self and buried themselves inside us deepest, alchemically con-fused themselves to our psyche the most thoroughly, to this being a work that, well, did exactly that to a tremendously profound degree to me. At times, I worry that I talk around the record rather than through it, circle it like a dog hungry and whimpering in hard rain rather than shining through it like a prism. But this is the result of a work that becomes so ingrained in your psyche and your life that it flips itself inside out; it no longer is itself; it is everything else.

***

Growing up for me was hard. I must have known I was autistic at a young age, well before the diagnosis. I used to get in trouble for reading in school, ignoring the assigned work for work of my own. When I was younger, this admonishment came with an obligatory smirk and sense of congratulation from them, the way teachers encourage precocious kids punching above their weight. Eventually, though, it became a problem, as I would be so thoroughly checked out of my surroundings that I’d miss sometimes simple questions. I could throw them off most of the time; I’ve always been a quick study, good as hell at the specific kind of regurgitory book smarts that are valued in that environment, so I wasn’t even so much faking it as I was particularly skilled at that one narrow wedge of what it means to be smart. The issue was that I didn’t want to be there. The second, perhaps bigger, issue was I didn’t want to be anywhere at all.

I was a weird kid. I graduated, at least in a certain sense, from the books my peers were interested in fairly quick, as much from actual interest as rejection of what was around me. I’m not even sure what at that young an age, single digits, made me so repulsed by my peers and acting my age. I had an older brother, and he started school early which made his peers and friends even older, but we had such a rocky relationship that mere emulation doesn’t account for all of it. There was, to a degree, a hunger in me for identity, to not feel so much like an unnamed variable or, at times, the far worse thing, an archetype, the weird one, the funny one, the smart one, all ways to truncate humanity, to deprive you of the messy fullness of life and, especially for then, youth. It didn’t help that I never really fit in. At that young an age, I didn’t even understand why. I liked all the same things, could be conversant in sports, did my best to shoot and bat and pass the ball, liked the same video games and cartoons, everything in its right place, but little of it amounted to much. There was this invisible shell of arctic ice surrounding me, miles thick, keeping my peers from me. One year, two people came to my birthday; the next year, it was about the same amount, but no one returned from the previous year.

Combine this with the complex home life. Two parents, white ’90s executive types, accidental absentee parents. My brother had the fucking shit beaten out of him by a neighbor, literally our backdoor neighbor, when he was about four or five; he never was the same after. A paranoia set in, an intense combination of agoraphobia and necessary aggression. This was exacerbated by my parents’ functional alcoholism, or at least my mother’s, as my dad’s worsened precipitously over the years until one day it fucking killed him, dropped dead from a heart attack in the hospital when he went in to have his abdominal cavity drained. They don’t tell you some of the nasty stuff of cirrhosis of the liver. Your liver, overrun with scar tissue, becomes unable to process all of the toxins in the blood successfully, starts storing it in fat deposits as far from your brain as possible, the fat of the toes and feet and ankles and calves, which causes them to swell up, killing the capillaries to prohibit the toxins from going back to the brain. This kills the nerves. That’s how you get neuropathy. But eventually, if you keep drinking, which my dad did, the liver stops even being able to do that very effectively, starts weeping fluid filled with gunk from its scars, filling your abdominal cavity with this rotten pus, rounding out your belly like some kind of ugly negative pregnancy. (My life has always been riven by the most bullshit on-the-nose symbolism, like a bad gothic novel.) So, you go to get it tapped, like a beer keg. And, one day, he died during it. A deep vein thrombosis, a thick saddle-shaped clot formed in his femoral artery deep in the thigh, formed from the neuropathy the alcohol gave to him, dislodged and traveled to the heart. The last thing that happens to you before a heart attack is a sudden sense of dread; your brain, knowing it is about to die, floods you with neurochemical panic. My father dialed the nurse, told them he was scared as hell that he was about to die. What were the nurses supposed to do? They put him to bed. He died.

For years, I was too young to face this directly. My father was contained in his outbursts, never physically abusive, but apparently he’d say some really rotten shit to my mother. My brother was old enough for it to piss him off; they’d get into shouting matches, my father and my brother, with my mom weeping in the corner like a wax candled shaped like the virgin Mary, her mother’s name, another sign of the stupid symbolic heft of common life. Shit rolls ever downhill; my brother, lacking a way to channel his traumatic aggression and efflorescing rage from my father, began over time to pour it into me. The alienation of my days from peers became physically manifest, disallowed often from leaving the house not by parents but by my brother, who would visit cruel tortures unto me, once branding my neck with a heated socket wrench in our shared bathroom as he pinned me to the floor. It was bad, and it stayed bad, for years. I had next to no kinship with my peers, much to my perennial vexation (who does not want to be accepted? to be loved?) but home was hell, a constancy of conflict and torn clothes, bruises always placed on the trunk of my body so they wouldn’t be seen at school or friends’ parents. I wanted only, singularly, to disappear.

This all went away, though, in the presence of music. The contour of life is, the longer I live, less and less reasonable, inflected on axes that make little sense. You can reflect back on why a friendship exploded, why you were ousted from a friend group where you were once treasured, why you got that book deal or that job offer, how the fuck you met someone as wonderful as your wife and what the hell they even saw with you when you were that poor and that fractured and ill, but it never really makes sense, requires a kind of Borgesian aleph-eye, a system-completed vision, that just isn’t something we’re granted in this life. It would make more sense to me, I suppose, if the house was devoid of love, but it wasn’t. The pain of youth and generational trauma is rarely so simple. Music was the perennial glue that bound us; when my brother and I played in bands together, there was no conflict, at all, which seemed miraculous; when my brother put on records, my dad would get enthused and get into the bands alongside us, whether they were heavy metal or hip-hop; we all learned the lyrics and notes together, played our own version of Name That Tune, read the Columbia Record Club catalog like it was a novel every month. My brother and I watched a hell of a lot of MTV and VH1. We had to; it was music, and that was one of the few things that really made sense, intuitive, complete, emotional sense, bypassing the image of us as savants and boy-geniuses, which never offered much in the way of love or camaraderie or personal salvation anyway.

So one night we were up late, snuck out from our mutual bedrooms to the guest room and its 10-inch TV propped up on the dresser, volume turned low. MTV would play midnight music videos then, sometimes playing the debut of a new video many hours before its officially slotted debut at 8 p.m. It was like a cheat, a reward for those hopelessly devoted to catching 120 Minutes and Headbanger’s Ball and all the other music-driven shows like we were. That’s how we saw “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” and later “Tonight, Tonight,” which had such a profound effect that we pooled our allowance to buy the CD of Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness together, our first joint purchase. It’s where I first saw Tool’s music videos supporting Aenima, which I tried and failed to pitch to my brother, who didn’t listen to me until we saw “Schism”‘s video the exact same way. When we got MuchMusic, the Canadian equivalent, that entered the rotation, as did MTV2. “Bulls On Parade” by Rage Against the Machine, “Spiders” by System of a Down, “Where The Slime Live” by Morbid Angel, “California Love” by Tupac; this isn’t news for people of the generational window, but we lived through those channels. That night, we caught something animated, something strange, like Queen or Pink Floyd but stained deep with the alternative rock we were absorbed with. It was too late in the evening; we couldn’t remember a thing.

The next day, we were sitting in the living room, TV turned to MTV. The video premiere stinger played, technically the second showing of the video after the midnight reveal. All we could remember was that we liked it but had forgotten to catch the name. On plays “Paranoid Android.” In the fullness of waking consciousness, we were floored. It was the culmination of so many of our interests, from the progressive rock our dad had gotten us into to the alternative rock my brother’s friends and older siblings had gotten us into. We both strove for a sense of stable identity, reaching beyond our years for something to ground us. I wore baggy JNCOs and Billabong shirts in the fourth grade, a comically young age to dress like a teenage skater, and this was an affect pinched from my brother who was dressed like that as a 12 year old emulating the older brothers of his own friends. My brother and I made a point to get OK Computer, eventually going back to pick up the first two as well, even nabbing the Iron Lung EP from an indie record shop in town. We were obsessed.

This, however, is not an essay about OK Computer.

This obsession carried forward for years. In the late ’90s, Radiohead’s esteem seemed to exponentiate year on year, from the breakthrough of “Creep” and the hefty guitar-driven alternative rock of Pablo Honey to the arthouse reconfiguration of The Bends to this, a record which seemed to be implacable at the time. This was before prog had come back in vogue as something you could openly claim, forcing the band to famously disavow the labeling during an interview from the time. In retrospect, this is obviously comical. What else could we call Radiohead? Hell, they almost singularly were the archetype of the whole wing of progressive alternative music which has, in the nearly 30 years since OK Computer‘s release, been largely the force that made prog no longer a dirty word anymore, allowed bands from The Decemberists to Wolf Parade to MGMT dabble in it openly and finally crack the NME/Pitchfork enforced embargo of the style. The expansiveness of OK Computer was immediately apparent to everyone, though, wracking up near-instant canonization as one of the greatest albums of all time, forgoing most music awards for that greater zeal, and even ping-ponging across pop culture between “Exit Music”‘s inclusion in Romeo + Juliet half a year earlier as well as the near-ubiquity of “Karma Police.” “Airbag” and “Climbing up the Walls,” always my favorites, seemed conspicuously absent from the lips of those I knew who discussed the record. They became, along with “Electioneering,” my songs, places of identity, clearings in the dark woods of the world where I could sit and gather starlight in my palms. I hadn’t yet reckoned with my gender bullshit, knew I wasn’t really a boy but didn’t know what the fuck else I could even be, dabbled in wearing dresses and makeup in private and felt nothing but the same absent confusion, hadn’t reckoned with my wavering sexuality. But I could feel something, a kernel, something hard and solid. A sense of self.

So it was with bated breath that my brother and I followed the slow trickle of news before the release of the new Radiohead album Kid A. Our family was quick to adopt the internet, at least relatively speaking; we have a PC that was a work computer for my father’s home office in the early ’90s, again due to executive stuff, replete with its own phone line and fax line, with the family getting our own shared computer only a few years later. Like most of America, we were subscribers to AOL, first installing it with floppy discs before mounding a million or more drink-coaster CDs of the installer. This meant that when Radiohead began their online-driven campaign leading up to the new record, my brother and I were able to follow it, albeit in a child’s way. My brother was 11 at the time, me 8, and we weren’t able to make heads or tails of the cryptic half-sentences and menacing cat faces.

We were, however, still enamored. This experience, that deep de profundis of the mysteries, is something that’s always resonated with me as someone on the spectrum, where so much of the world is humbling in its opacity, so much obscured behind darkening waters, waters which others seem so casually capable of peering through but to me are stark impenetrable curtains prohibiting all light. These ARGs have never been frustrating to me; they remind me of the curiosity of the urban cryptography of spray paint tags and stickers on street signs and poles, the encoding of parallel layers of the world superimposed upon the real, all those virtual lives lived by others that make every apartment building and city block a braided lattice of homotopical joy and pain and confusion and desire. It’s the same great numinous aura that drove my brother and me, much to the bewilderment of our atheist father, to religion at a young age; it was pursuit of answers to those mysteries that, in time, led us out. The rollout was a fascination to us, a puzzlebox, like the Lamentation Configuration of one of our favorite films.

It did not make sense to me when my brother didn’t buy it on release. Heard from friends it was electronic garbage, not rock at all. This shocked me that it would bother him. After all, we’d snuck in an order for The Downward Spiral on cassette from the Columbia Record Club, had to sit on the porch waiting for the package so we could sneak the extremely obscene tape from the box and toss the inventorying order sheet before our parents saw, and that record sure as hell was electronic to its bone. Then again, I’m chanced to recall how impressed my brother was by the sticker on those old Rage Against the Machine albums which touted that every sound you heard was made by guitar, bass, and drums—no keyboards. It would be years until he bought it, after working through the back catalog of Metallica and Megadeth, Sublime and Green Day, a million other guitar-driven bands that caught his attention (and sometimes mine).

He threw it on in the computer room, letting it play from the relatively decent speakers we had hooked up to the computer on the off-chance that he liked it enough to burn it to the hard drive. He discarded the jewelcase. He’d never been one for lyrics booklets or poring over the art where I always had been, nurtured in this love by my father handing me the great big vinyl gatefold for The Wall, his favorite album of all time, in my too-small child’s hands, encouraging me to open it and see that garish compelling cartooning that marked the psychodrama of that brilliantly melodramatic epic. As part of my early spectrum fixations on music, I had set myself to memorizing lyrics, tracklists, track lengths, release dates, lineups, every single stray fact I could possibly find; it was me who pointed out to my brother that these booklets often contained thank you lists that included other bands, other albums, and those were often fruitful paths of inquiry.

***

My earliest writing, which I began to do obsessively as far back as four or five, was writing lyrics to songs I would hum to myself or play on the miniature electric keyboard my dad got me and into which I programmed my first song. Lyrical studies, their rhythms and cadences, the efflorescence of language and the subtle brushstroke of a properly placed semi-colon, breathy pause or phonetic clustering in the mouth felt like a yawning door bleeding bright light. This is not to mention the artwork, which for me in my sense-addled autistic brain was often a far better map and decoder ring of the material that the lyrics. Lyrics always to my ears felt like a brocade around the substance whereas the art associated with a record was central to its emotional and imagistic character, the things which lingered in the heart far longer. I recall my brother glancing at the booklet for Kid A, seeing only images, no words, and placed it on top of a squat black column we kept in the computer room, a pedestal from which I, Prometheus before the flame, snatched it for myself.

Inside: mountains of ice, jagged glitchy landscapes, beneath black skies. Pools of red blood, distant, glowering; the stroke of the jagged lightning cracking open the sky. Clouds like ghosts cluster and cross over one another, mouthless. Black-eyed angels torn through rivers, like the figures trapped in the crashed cars in the booklet for OK Computer. A narrative formed in my head: something was happening in OK Computer, some rumbling calamity, people frantic and harried, technology on the loose, uncontrolled. It wasn’t stopped. Hell had come. It was apocalypse. Here, Kid A, the belly of the beast.

My brother flit through the tracks, skipping ten or 15 seconds into each one, not letting a one finish before his judgment fell. Of the songs, only “The National Anthem” grabbed him, with its throbbing krautrock bassline and immediate hooks. He frowned, then scowled. Waste of money, he said. Took the CD, put it in the case he tore from my hands, and threw it away.

Once more, a crow, I plucked it from the trash, stole away to my room, and hid it. Where he had been turned off by the sounds, I most certainly had not. I felt in those flickering moments the same startling static rattling in my chest, in my heart, that I had the first time I heard Ummagumma, that I felt when I heard Ride the Lightning or Born to Run, that I would come to hear in Meddle and Yessongs and Miles Davis and Tribulation and Prince. The thunder of the divine voice rattles your bones; you are begged to answer in surrender. Late at night, whether that day or sometime later I do not remember, I put on the album low, laid my head next to the speaker, opened the booklet, and entered the dream.

From the opening moments of “Everything In Its Right Place,” I knew I had found something that spoke to some quiet flickering spirit inside of me. Its electronic pads, thrumming in 10/4, felt to me genderless and trembling, an identity without qualia, seeking to be recognized only for itself. There was a mournful quality shot through with a perverse euphoria, Its repetitions layered like a mantra for me. Onward this tumbled into the functionally instrumental “Kid A,” the twinkling of technology after the collapse of the world. I could hear the ice and snow in these tracks, broken machines calling through their tinny speakers for some human to respond back, an image of the world without us. There is something about it still that feels like aquarium song, like peering into the seas of compounding life so alien to ourselves. “The National Anthem” in this narrative context is rendered motorik, trancelike; suddenly, the electronic aspects of it take more presence than that driving drum-and-bass groove. Even the horns feel more like repeating dead video, looping television screens and cellphones, of the last days of the world. You can practically feel the fire licking at you. This collapses into the heartbreak of “How to Disappear Completely,” a lone figure on the ice after the end of everything paralleled with the sense-addled autistic shut up in a subway car, too many people quickly becoming too few, the knife-plunge of alienation and isolation in all moments and spaces, the form inverting but its interior never changing. “Treefingers,” the ambient interlude breaking the album in two; the silent penitent heart, after the heartbreak, so far after the end of things that all that’s left inside and out is the ice, the peaks, the black sky, empty space.

“Optimistic” opens the second half of the album in a perverse way, sounding like something that could have been an album cut on OK Computer or a lead single of a more typically-shaped record. It splits the difference of all their previously stated influences; you can hear bits of David Bowie and The Smiths, bits of REM and Nick Drake, all wrapped in a contemporary alternative/arthouse rock direction. It always would have the quiet menace of that distorted guitar and ghostly choir behind it, a sullen atmosphere like the devilish leering face of a demonic laughing cat, mocking and cruel, that Radiohead always excelled at. In the context of the record, it feels far uglier, the sentiments of businessmen and politicians at the edge of climate collapse and world wars, oblivious or at least unperturbed by the hell the world was (is) about to undergo. “In Limbo” returns to the future, after the collapse, an existential malaise in electronica, hovering between life and death, between realms of the afterlife. Dante’s Divine Comedy paints the limbonic state as one of earthly paradise, an island with a mountain in the middle and many gardens among its many terraces, a peace and tranquility merely devoid of heavenly light, but not pleasure. Bardo per Buddhism paints a more harrowing and complex picture, the metempsychosis through realms of adventure and abstraction to arrive back, inevitably, in the body, in a failed bid to escape samsara. This limbo feels something closer to the latter than the former: trapped in a black room with no walls but no other bodies, wandering in fog banks, voiceless, absent. It’s an abstract funk/soul piece, one that in other hands would be overlaid with laid back rap verses but here is left to hover, hover, hover: “Trap doors that open / I spiral down.” You’re living in a fantasy world indeed.

“Idioteque” places us more centrally into the days of collapse, with imagery of driving civilians into safety bunkers, walls of ice approaching, a doomsday scenario. It is here that the closest tie to OK Computer comes, feeling along with the album opener like the nearest to a true sequel to the sounds of that previous record. The first of the children, after everything. “Morning Bell” is a doomsday in Bowie abstraction, feeling like an application of his particular use of Burroughs’ cut-up technique to a flashback of disarray in the days before the war. Which ends then in two parts: “Motion Picture Soundtrack,” the church organ hum of fading lights, “I will see you in the next life,” I think you’re crazy, a brief pause, and then “Untitled”, originally a stinger after some silence but on current issues a separate track, a brief watery drone of synthesizer we now know as an interlude before the true second act of the album.

While Kid A had no singles associated with it, Amnesiac did, material recorded in the same sessions but segmented to another album. There is, famously, a small red pool in the artwork for Kid A, like a distant burning house, the ruins of the on-going catastrophe as depicted in the artwork of OK Computer. The cover of Amnesiac depicts this pool, a weeping body submerged in human blood. If OK Computer is the days before collapse and Kid A is the world after, the title itself referring to the unnamed archetypical first child after everything falls apart, then Amnesiac is the collapse itself. We are not here to discuss Amnesiac of course but it brocades, like the immediate predecessor to Kid A, the proceedings here. This sentiment was half-conjecture, half-allusion from the band for years, with some of their words being taken as elaboration more on the shared sessions for the two records, themselves notably sharing songs scrapped during the OK Computer sessions, until their communal co-release as the KID A MNESIAC set.

In the moment of Kid A‘s release, with its opaque artwork and impenetrable icy walls, we did not know this. It was only in the passing of time, the release of its sister album, the singles for Amnesiac with reams of B-sides, the rerelease showcasing even more material, that the previously skeletal imagery began to accumulate to something like a concrete view of the implied narrative, the warnings of ecological collapse, already a known existential threat 25 years ago and more, of the rising fascism of the West which now is common life, of a foreboding sense of dwindling humanity some would call doomerism and others would call reading the fucking news. Kid A is not itself; at least, not itself alone. It is the album and the space around it; it is the lineage of art rock that it severed Radiohead from and the future of experimental and progressive rock that followed; it is the burning cars and cryptic images of animals in OK Computer and Amnesiac as much as it is the endless black skies, icy peaks, feelings of threat and isolation, the alienation of both its surrounding albums collapsed into a tight blackhole that, paradoxically, opens wider in a yawn than either.

I was floored.

What had once been my brother’s quickly became mine, the first album I can think of that was well and truly mine and mine alone. My friends at the time didn’t understand it; my family sure as hell didn’t. Suddenly, all this mounting sense of the alien within me, segregated from my peers, from my family, from senses of safety either out there or in here, from my sense of gender, from even my own body (the long-tail of physical abuse: you look in the mirror and do not see you; you see the vestibule of your punishment; you see the thing that receives its beatings) had a clear calcified image to cleave to. I have discussed often my radical love of extreme metal and progressive rock. Yet, per Last.fm, a must-have for people of the era, my three most listened to albums of my teenage years were, by a country mile, Violator by Depeche Mode, Three of a Perfect Pair by King Crimson and, at number one, this, Kid A by Radiohead.

***

I had my wisdom teeth removed in a grueling four-hour procedure. My dentist did not believe in putting people under, regardless of the surgery, so he opted always for novocaine, an injectable painkiller often used for dental work that, due to the blessings of my curious biology, has always been weaker on me. The body, it turns out, becomes resistant to novocaine under situations of extreme anxiety where the body, in an attempt to escape, burns through the painkiller in rapidity. The source of my anxiety was, of course, not the dentist but the shape of my life: the isolation both in friendships and romance, the sense of monadic singularity. I sat in the chair, weeping. After it was over, my mouth was stuffed with gauze, which I was not to remove for six hours, and a week’s worth of Vicodin for the pain. Given my dad’s long issues with addiction for decades and my brother’s own rapidly accelerating issues with drug abuse, I was frightened. But, feeling the pain just once, I caved and took the pills.

For that next week, I was so profoundly out of sorts that my father preemptively called me out of school. After my brother had left home, fled the state with his girlfriend he married in only two months to begin the life that would, one day, lead him to true reckoning with himself, to face his sins, to break down, to try to kill himself and, failing that, to reconcile with me and begin our now-loving and supportive relationship, I had taken over his bedroom, reconfigured into a space purely for me. I wanted to erase him. I wanted to blot out the beatings and screaming matches, the memories of being bound by ropes with the door blockaded so my parents couldn’t get in to help me. I would spend hours in that room, immersed in painful memory. Like grabbing an electric fence. I put on Kid A on loop for that whole week, my dad later told me; I laid on the couch, the AC not working, baking my brain alive in the unbearable heat of that ugly room, and dreamed of ice and the black of the sky and that great nothing. When I finally came to, I lurched to my computer and wrote for hours.

Prior to that, I had been a writer of science fiction and fantasy, tales of adventure. Something in that heat and those tremulous visions break something inside of me; I poured out skeletal patterns of the fears of children and mothers, sky cracking open, ice and ice and ice. Years later, revisions of that story would become my first published piece of fiction professionally while constant work over the years on the meat of that always half-finished novella would be buffeted by Thom Yorke’s first solo album as I pushed myself further and further into the realms of the avant-garde, the stream of consciousness, the concatenation of density and airy opacity.

Kid A did not just become a core anchor for the breaking waves of the black water and black stones of my disintegrating self; it strongly shaped my narrative voice, this thing like billowing angel wings I found inside of myself in the pit of everything.

I could talk about how this album is the middle record of Radiohead’s own Berlin trilogy, following in Bowie’s footsteps to incorporate avant-garde electronic work into their own art rock. In a journalistic and even critical sense, this would be perhaps a worthwhile and incisive comment, connecting their legacy to Bowie as much as the oft-repeated position of Radiohead as the true Beatles of the ’90s over their peers Oasis, who sounded like the Beatles but did not inspire so much radical change, did not push the envelope and permanently reshape what was pursued in the world of music in their wake the way Radiohead did. But this is not an essay about the album by its lonesome. Because Kid A, like all art, is not itself. The text is a dead thing, empty lines on absent pages. Art is a weapon, a wall of knives that embeds itself in you, shrapnel that takes root and bursts like seeds out of the skin. Kid A changed my life in a very literal way. I would not be the writer I am now without it; the discovery of that literary voice inside of me is what dragged me out of the shallow hell of my soul and into difficult light, to therapy, to loves that reshaped me, to the reforging of my voice and this, the act of writing, which has become my central sense of peace and purpose and, eventually, to my wife, my bedrock, whom I love more than anything else in the world. How could this not be number one? Everything is a griefsong, everything is a lovesong, if you wait long enough.

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