Radiohead's Kid A

by Lin, Marvin

  3 When Capitol heard OK Computer for the first time, the label “downgraded sales forecasts from two million to 500,000.”

  But everything changed once OK Computer proved both critically and financially successful. After seeing how horrifying the industry could be during the OK Computer tours, Radiohead realized they no longer had to be at the whim of the music and media industries; on the contrary, they were in the prime position to reshape these industries, to subvert them from within. But how exactly does a band so knowledgeable and impassioned voice their gripes within an industry that controls the means and modes of communication? How do Radiohead engage with the industry without getting swallowed whole?

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  One way is to fight for more cultural space.

  Around Kid A’s release, Radiohead’s views on the mainstream music industry seemed at its most tumultuous. While the industry thrives on pearly-toothed celebrities regurgitating an established aesthetic, the problem Radiohead had was one of appropriation, in which the industry would focus on Thom’s “tortured” personality while presenting facsimiles of Bends-era Radiohead through their distribution channels. But because Radiohead had learned from the media tornado of OK Computer, they were at that point better able to see through the industry mechanizations that threatened to co-opt anything and everything it found beneficial. And given Radiohead’s inability to assert their own context throughout most of their career — from the fridge-buzz of “Creep” to the unexpected success of OK Computer — it’s not surprising that they’d use their cultural potency to finally try to regain control over both their identity and their artistic direction. Radiohead had been face-to-face with co-option many times, and Kid A was an opportunity to create their own cultural spaces in which to artistically and politically express themselves.

  From July 1999 to June 2000, Ed maintained an online diary on Radiohead’s official website. The primary purpose was to update fans on the recording process for Kid A and Amnesiac. Alternately tense (“what a fucking week. sometimes i feel like the nature of this band is that we have to do things the hard way.”), celebratory (“[it’s] great to be in our band.”), and boring (“nigel got what seems like a good mix of ‘dollars and cents’. more work on t+j’s drum thing.”), Ed’s posts attempted to, as he put it, “de-mythologise this whole process of making a new record.” Most entries detailed songs we hadn’t heard before and therefore didn’t affect us in any immediate way, but occasionally an interesting over-the-shoulder moment would come through, offering a taste of the pressure the band was working under. As Ed wrote in one entry, “[It’s] taken us seven years to get this sort of freedom, and [it’s] what we always wanted, but it could be so easy to fuck it all up.”

  Of course, this being Radiohead and all, Ed would also occasionally veer into politics. On February 25 — seven months before Kid A hit the streets — he posted an update on the frequently mentioned track “Cuttooth” (which eventually became an Amensiac B-side). He concluded with a short but pointed request: “please read ‘NO LOGO’ by Naomi Klein.” Given the abruptness and unexpectedness of the recommendation, it was hard not to take note.

  No Logo is an anti-corporate treatise that arrived in stores in early 2000, roughly a month after the pivotal WTO (World Trade Organization) Ministerial Conference protests in Seattle, where a massive amount of activists, workers, and youth took to the streets to publicly voice their opposition to economic globalization. The book is divided into four chapters: “No Space,” “No Choice,” “No Jobs,” and “No Logo.” The first three detail the implications of our brand-oriented culture, with particular focus on the consequences of switching the primary mode of businesses from “hawking products” to “selling lifestyles” with little regard for the cultural, social, and environmental consequences of their actions. The book intimates a time in which corporations are accountable to shareholders, not the public; an environment in which stained corporations like AIG, Philip Morris, Enron, and WorldCom can rebrand themselves to evade unfavorable perception; a marketplace in which you’re buying cool, not a shoe. Klein argues that companies like McDonald’s, Nike, Coca-Cola, Gap, Starbucks, and Microsoft target increasingly younger audiences by occupying cultural space (highways, living rooms, schools), push out competition through tactics like mergers and “predatory franchising,” and foster labor markets reliant on part-time “McJobs” and outsourcing.

  But it’s not all gloom and doom. Against this backdrop, Klein finishes the book with a passionate chapter entitled “No Logo,” which documents the burgeoning underground movements that have stood in firm opposition to this branding of the globe. Here, Klein gives voice to the anti-corporate activists who she believes are “sowing the seeds of a genuine alternative to corporate rule,” exemplified by McUnion organizers and internet corporate watchdogs, ‘culture jamming’ and Adbusters magazine. Klein concludes: “[The demand] is to build a resistance — both high-tech and grassroots, both focused and fragmented — that is as global, and as capable of coordinated action, as the multinational corporations it seeks to subvert.”

  The book struck a deep chord with Ed, so deep in fact that Kid A was at one point rumored to be titled No Logo. As he commented in an interview with Q, “No Logo gave one real hope. It certainly made me feel less alone. I must admit I’m deeply pessimistic about humanity, and she was writing everything that I was trying to make sense of in my head. It was very uplifting.”

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  The ideas expressed in No Logo segue perfectly into Radiohead’s attempt to create their own cultural spaces during Kid A. Because Radiohead and their management wanted to avoid the publicity-by-numbers promotional machine, they decided not to release any official singles during the marketing of Kid A. This meant no promo cycles, no B-sides, no videos, no exhausting world tours. In place of conventional videos, the band disseminated throughout the internet a slew of promotional “blips” — 10- to 40-second animated shorts created by visual artists The Vapour Brothers and Shynola. Intended explicitly as “throwaway” advertisements, the blips spread like a virus, and fans soon internalized the imagery and started slapping “genetically modified bear” stickers on binders and hanging Kid A posters in college dorms to ensure their tastes were thoroughly broadcast.

  Part of defining new cultural spaces is to avoid those that are most susceptible to spin, so it’s not surprising that the band limited interviews to only a handful of publications. In fact, it would have been less had Jonny not convinced Thom of their responsibility to the fans. But even when they did agree to an interview, Radiohead didn’t just let the press call the shots. For example, instead of doing a routine photo shoot for Q, Radiohead submitted distorted, computer-manipulated images of each band member, where facial features were embellished and elongated, and eye colors changed. Why these images? According to Thom, “I’m fed up of seeing my face everywhere. It got to the point where it didn’t feel like I owned it. We’re not interested in being celebrities, and others seemed to have different plans for us. I’d like to see them try to put these pictures on a poster [giggles].” Radiohead also submitted a composite image of the band dubbed “Kid A Mutant Specimen.” Explained Thom, “That’s Phil’s head, obviously, Jonny’s eyebrows, my nose and mouth. It’s like a human mutation, not a comment on the GM [genetically modified] thing as such, though you can’t really ignore the GM issue. It’s everywhere, innit?”

  Radiohead’s subversion reached a national television audience on October 14 with an appearance on Saturday Night Live (SNL). Even if you caught Radiohead on their OK Computer tour, it probably wouldn’t have prepared you for this performance (which, unless you scored tickets to one of the three Kid A shows in North America, was the only chance Americans had to see them live). Needless to say, the frenzied performances of “The National Anthem” and “Idioteque” sideswiped many of us. Here we had a guitar-less Thom, dancing so bizarrely during the songs that I’d be surprised if anyone, Radiohead fan or not, could flip the channel; and then there
was Jonny, who spent most of his time kneeling on the floor, manipulating Thom’s voice in real time and playing with beat-makers to create violent rhythmic textures rarely, if ever, heard on national television. As if the music wasn’t “weird” enough for a mainstream audience, Radiohead also used this opportunity to get political: during the show’s end credits, when the SNL cast groups with the guests to wave goodbye, Thom held up a “Let Ralph Debate” placard, in reference to the exclusion of then Green Party candidate Ralph Nader from the 2000 US presidential election debates. (One can only wonder what guest host Kate Hudson and the SNL cast were thinking as this weird little British guy politicized a moment that couldn’t be edited out.)

  Outside of the off-the-cuff commentary in Ed’s diary, other areas of Radiohead’s website clued us in to some of their more obvious political passions. Their website, self-created and controlled by the band since 1996, is considered by Radiohead to be an extension of their music, a place where they can speak directly to their fans without fearing appropriation or misquotes. Featuring links to organizations like Free Tibet, the World Development Movement, People & Planet, Fair, and Corporate Watch, the website served as an ideal medium for Radiohead to communicate their political concerns directly to fans, unmediated by a transnational conglomerate. While many artists have no clue how to act when they’ve stumbled onto such a large platform, Radiohead used their visibility to raise the profiles of underground political movements as if it was second nature.

  The unabashed politics on their website expanded outward too: ask Thom about Kid A’s songwriting process and you might get a terse answer; ask him about the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), WTO, or Tony Blair, and you’d get a thoughtful, engaged response. And not all of it was roped into a marketing campaign: Ed marched in protest against the WTO in April 2000, while Thom, alongside Bono and Youssou N’Dour, made an appearance at the G8 Summit with the Jubilee 2000 campaign to cancel Third World debt.

  It was also around this time when Radiohead created their W.A.S.T.E. online store, which further exemplified their desire to carve their own cultural space without completely alienating themselves from the industry. As Colin wrote in the first W.A.S.T.E. email to fans, “We’ve also opened our own store, called w.a.s.t.e. on-line […] We’re doing this because we want to try and use this amazing communication thingie to matter directly to you and not via any corporate third party bollocks with spinning car ads …”

  But the political gesture that garnered the most controversy was the Kid A “tent tour,” Radiohead’s first major trek in three years. The tour stood in direct opposition to the commodified, industry-puppet tours for OK Computer. As if it weren’t bold enough to lug around and perform in a portable, custom-built tent designed to hold 10,000 people (complete with video screens, lighting effects, and a laser projector), Radiohead didn’t allow any advertising or corporate sponsorship in the tent. Indeed, if there was ever a clear example of Radiohead wanting to claim their own cultural space, it was on this tent tour. As Ed explained, “It’s about controlling our environment. It’ll be good to get to play somewhere that isn’t covered in logos.” Jonny echoed the same notion in a radio interview: “We don’t want to play in those venues that are designed for sport and have Coca-Cola adverts everywhere. That’s not what we want to do really. We’ll make our own neutral space that’s got nothing in it and play some concerts like that.”

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  Not everyone was impressed. More than just solidifying Radiohead’s anti-globalization sentiments, the no-logo tent tour ignited a wider discourse on the politics of Radiohead, where finding contradictions in their political convictions was like finding Waldo. If Radiohead didn’t want to release an official single, then why did they bother to send promotional copies of “Optimistic” for radio play? Why would they allow MTV, which is owned by media conglomerate Viacom, to air exclusive promotional blips and an alternate studio version of “Idioteque”? Why would they let MTV2 play Kid A in its entirety? Why would they license music to film and TV shows like Vanilla Sky (“Everything in Its Right Place”), Memento (an extended version of “Treefingers”), and The Sopranos (“Kid A”) when they’re also connected to enormous multinational conglomerates?

  Like the criticisms lobbed at No Logo author Klein, in which she was lambasted for publishing an anti-corporate book through a multinational corporation, Radiohead were (and still are) criticized for being whining hypocritical millionaires. As Douglas Wolk wrote in CMJ,

  The punch line is that, despite Radiohead’s all-permeating abhorrence of the ultimate rock-band banality, the consumerist machine — it turns up in everything from their packaging to their advocacy of Naomi Klein’s anti-branding book, No Logo, to the ‘non-branded environment’ of their European tour last summer — they’ve got a more finely honed brand identity than any other band of the moment.

  Q writer Danny Eccleston shared a similar view: “Logofree tents or not, Radiohead are bound by contract to the vast global entertainment conglomerate EMI/Time Warner/AOL [sic], and their records do battle with Britney Spears and her fellow synergised icons in the market-place.” And in an essay about the “improbability” of Radiohead’s resistance, Davis Schneiderman asked, “How can we be sure that Radiohead, for all of its deliberately muddled articulation and innovative studio work, is not a toll of this same endlessly looping beat of the marketplace?”

  Radiohead’s peers fashioned similar critical observations. As Stuart Braithwaite of Mogwai told Careless Talk Costs Lives (a short-lived British magazine that aimed to “bring down the UK music press”):

  We’re not particularly angst-y. What have they got to moan about? It’s the Thom Yorke syndrome: being a complainer and a hypocrite. Well-channeled brilliant angst like The God Machine is amazing, but pointless angst is not good. […] Radiohead’s stance against corporations and globalization is ridiculous when their t-shirts cost more to buy than our records.

  Braithwaite later claimed he was joking (likely due to pressure from Radiohead fans), but Efrim Menuck (of Canadian group Godspeed You! Black Emperor) was clearly not: “Radiohead [are] nothing but a bunch of hypocrites and liars. They are crazy enough to think that everything they say is taken seriously, despite the fact that they belong to a multinational.” After Radiohead fans lashed out (oh, by the way, watch out for Radiohead fans; they’ve got flamethrowers!), Menuck penned an open letter to justify and reiterate his comment:

  We don’t know Radiohead, we’ve never met them or communicated with them in any way, some people in Godspeed like their music others don’t … the fact remains, Radiohead are owned, part and parcel, by a gigantic multinational corporation, and their critique of global corporatism is tainted by that one harsh reality.

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  If you’re worried about Radiohead’s feelings, don’t be: you’re more likely to see them nodding their heads in agreement with these criticisms than weeping under the covers. And despite the fact that many of the marketing decisions were made by the label (and not the band), the contradictions of a politicized artist feeding off the industry it openly critiques isn’t lost on Radiohead: “We’re screaming hypocrites. No, we are!” admitted Thom to The Wire. This internal struggle has been a recurring subject throughout their musical career, and it’s only exacerbated by Thom’s inability to reconcile the hypocrisy with public expectation. This problem was addressed in an early Bends-era interview in which Thom, cleverly enough, interviews himself:

  What really fucks me up in the head is that basically I’m supposed to be endorsing this sort of pop star, “Wow, lucky bastard, he’s got it all” existence. What frightens me is the idea that what Radiohead do is basically packaged back to people in the form of entertainment, to play in their car stereos on their way to work. And that’s not why I started this but then I should shut the fuck up because it’s pop music and it’s not anything more than that. But I got into music, because I naïvely thought that pop music was basically the only viable art form left, because
the art world is run by a few very extremely, um, privileged people and is ultimately corrupt and barren of any context. And I thought that the pop music industry was different and I was fucking wrong. […] All my favourite artists are people who never seem to be involved in the industry and I found myself getting involved in it, and I felt really ashamed to be there.

  His feelings of shame complement his feelings of guilt, which he claims to be a driving force throughout his life. “I’ve had a very privileged upbringing. […] I’ve had a very expensive education. And it took me years to come to terms with that. A long, long, long time.” That Radiohead have only continued to prosper both financially and socially could indicate how the seemingly exponential well of do-good-ism from the Radiohead camp may be directly related to this recognition of cultural sway. There’s no hiding the fact that the bulk of Radiohead’s demands since OK Computer — the marketing of Kid A, the limited touring, the “green” requirements, the distribution method of In Rainbows — were only made possible by their cultural and economic clout. They voice this luxury rather frequently in interviews. “We are a little fascistic in how and where our music is heard, but then we can be,” remarked Jonny. “If we were struggling, I’m sure we’d sell our music to anybody just to carry on.”

  “People think we’re control freaks, and maybe we are a bit,” said Ed. “But there’s an awful lot that’s just horrible about the process of the music business, and when you’re a young band, you can’t do much about it. Now we can. And we’ve stopped having that conquer-the-world sort of feeling. It’s less important to us than doing things our way.”

  Who could blame them? In a time when the channels of mass communication are controlled by only a handful of conglomerates, when subversion has become so dull it couldn’t penetrate butter, when opposition to the dominant culture is too often expressed through commodity (buy these pre-ripped jeans and you too can be subversive!), it’s no wonder that Radiohead have always kept the industry at arm’s length. Appropriation threatens them at every corner, and there has been little wiggle room to freely communicate their ideas, political or otherwise; the industry needs a band like Radiohead to sell both the disease and the cure, and Radiohead know this. While critics like culture writer Thomas Frank believe there is no real solution to this problem but to maintain oppositional autonomy, others like Radiohead feel that some level of engagement is necessary to fight the system within the system, to show faith in the masses to affect mass change. As Johnny Temple, bassist for Girls Against Boys, wrote in his essay “Noise from Underground,” “Punks, for their part, need to stop romanticizing isolation, or they may find their political endeavors, along with their music, doomed to perpetual obscurity.”