Fair enough, but there’s really nothing new to say about Kid A, other than the fact that it still sounds as alien and revelatory today as it did on its arrival. Sure, it might be useful to revisit an organic five-piece rock band’s move from the rehearsal studio to hard disk as its primary canvas, and to explore what that might connote about the rest of us migrating to virtual spaces not long afterwards, or to take another look at message boards populated by fans of groups like Radiohead and analyze them as a precursor to social media. Not to mention that we were also privy to periodic in-game commentary from the horse’s mouth, as guitarist Ed O’Brien kept an online studio diary from July of 1999 to June of 2000. In other words, this is music that’s been analyzed to death from the moment it saw the light of day. Chuck Klosterman, meanwhile, went so far as to suggest that the album’s song sequence somehow presaged the events of 9/11. (He devoted his 2020 book This Isn’t Happening, excerpted here, to the same premise). Steven Hyden, for example, has long advanced the idea-via outlets like Billboard, Grantland, etc.-that Kid A changed the paradigm, not only at the level of music consumption, but also with respect to how the entire music-opinion ecosystem operates.
Of course, culture pundits haven’t exactly held back from making bigger-picture connections. Which is not to say that we shouldn’t read between the lines to spot the unease that attended our transition into a new millennium, but only that we should be cautious in doing so. Kid A, on the other hand, remains strangely untethered from time. Listening to both albums in hindsight, OK Computer dates itself with elements that telegraph the ’90s sensibility it was born out of. In a sense, you could say that the digitized froth at the beginning of album opener “Everything In Its Right Place” was the sound of the future arriving at our doorstep. As much as OK Computer had been heralded as a turn into the uncharted-a signpost pointing the way to the future-the sound the band introduced in October 2000 with Kid A was something else entirely. Still, no one (perhaps not even the band themselves) had any idea how radical Radiohead’s next move would be. Radiohead circa 1997 hadn’t become a quote-unquote progressive rock band, but their music was progressive in a broader sense. Never mind that that’s an oddly definitive declaration to make while you’re living through a moment-the fact is, OK Computer spoke to something deep and pervasive running through the nervous system of modern culture at the time, and the framing of the album as a ’90s answer to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon made sense on a number of levels.
In OK Computer, critics saw an era-defining work that we would forever look back on as a crucial turning point in the evolution of music. No surprise, then, that both “Man of War” and “Nude” slotted right in with the style and mood of OK Computer, an album that generated rapturous, near-universal praise from a music press that was eager to anoint Radiohead as the future of rock. But setting aside the fact that “Nude” did resurface years later, it wasn’t actually a new song, either. Likewise, the live footage that closes out the film, a Radio City Music Hall performance of the “new” song “Nude,” is supposed to leave the audience with a tingle of suspense, a device set up to have viewers thinking “I wonder what they’ll do next” as the credits roll. The inclusion of this work-in-progress turns out to be something of a fake-out, though, as the song in question, titled “Man of War,” had already been recorded multiple times dating back to 1994.
Towards the end of the Radiohead documentary Meeting People Is Easy, which captures the English quintet growing increasingly confined within the comet trail of hype following their third album, 1997’s OK Computer, the audience gets a glimpse of the band in the studio in what appears to be a foreshadowing of things to come.
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