Radiohead's Kid A (10 page)

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.”

* * *

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.

* * *

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.”

But can Radiohead live with the contradiction? As Thom told
Uncut
:

Not really, I’m pretty touchy about it. But if you want to actually have your record in a shop, then you’ve got no way round it because you have to go through major distributor and they’ve all got deals and blah blah blah. There isn’t a way around it. Personally, one of the reasons that I wanted to be in a band was actually to be on the high street. I don’t want to be in a cupboard. I write music to actually communicate things to people.

Clearly, Radiohead’s desire to communicate their ideas trumps the threat of appropriation and commodification. Swallow the contradictions, and the critiques will circulate more widely and more vigorously than ever possible outside of the mainstream. As with the band’s seventh album, 2007’s
In Rainbows
, which was released as a pay-what-you-want downloadable album straight from their website, Radiohead were not trying to disengage from the industry; they were simply engaging with it on their own terms, underscoring the symbiotic/contradictory dialectic of their subversions within the very industry that sustains them.

Which is precisely where we get to the stakes of Radiohead’s Trojan Horse approach to the industry: given all the energy the band puts into the process of releasing and promoting their music, including all the
contradictions that come with it, is their subversive behavior even effective? According to Klein in a 2001 interview with
Hot Press
magazine:

I guess the testimony for me is that I know, in a way that I think few people can know, how much they have politicized their fans because they come to my lectures. There are always three people in Radiohead T-shirts in the front row of every lecture I do. Like, every single … and I get a lot of letters from them as well, particularly after
Kid A
first came out, saying, “You know, I usually don’t read books like this, but I did, because I read that the band read it.” And I think that everybody needs entry points, everybody needs doorways. And I know that these guys are very quietly providing all kinds of doorways, and they’re doing it in a very humble way. Like, if you go to their website, they immediately link you to Indymedia or whatever. I have a tremendous amount of respect for the way they’ve chosen to do this. Not as preachers, not politicizing their music, not telling people what to do, but just providing gateways, and portals, and bridges.

While Radiohead have had to fight for cultural space in order to provide these gateways, portals, and bridges, they have at the very least prevailed in relaying political insights to their fans without being patronizing or overbearing. Whether facetiously dedicating songs to
George W. Bush, openly criticizing Clear Channel/S.F.X, or simply hyperlinking independent outlets, Radiohead don’t need to immerse us in their soundworld to signify the extent to which politics are integrated in their lives. Even their least political fans — those who can hardly discern between Guantanamo Bay and eBay, between Karl Marx and Groucho Marx — are well aware of their recent efforts to shake us from the cobweb-like dream-state of global warming denial.

With
Kid A
, however, Radiohead were signaling something even more compelling. Sure, they weren’t able to entirely shirk co-optation and appropriation, and sure their political efforts didn’t influence every fan to chuck bricks at the powers that be, but the cultural spaces in which they voiced their critiques ensured not only that the industry machinations generated during
OK Computer
wouldn’t be repeated but also that subversion in the mainstream, however dubious or contradictory, was still possible on the artist’s terms. And similar to what
No Logo
provided for Ed, Radiohead’s engagement with the industry gave their fans “real hope” for a more democratic future.

But one must wonder: if Radiohead were so keen on providing gateways, portals, and bridges, why didn’t they explicitly politicize
Kid A
’s lyrics?

Listening to music is listening to all noise, realizing that its appropriation and control is a reflection of power, that it is essentially political.

Jacques Attali

Writing political lyrics can be a risky venture these days. Not only do they require audiences be familiar with the described events to be understood, but they also risk alienating fans on ideological grounds: unlike a love song’s implicit striving for longevity and “universal” appeal, a political song is purposefully confrontational, delineating an artist’s stance on the status quo while investing stock in both the immediate absorption of its ideals and the impact of its content. In other words, the goal is to be timely, not timeless.

But this also means that, theoretically, the timeliness of political lyrics will eventually expire. Here’s the problem: if the issues raised are in the headlines, the lyrical
content is considered relevant. But as soon as they’re filed in the archives, the content becomes something “of the past.” Mention NAFTA and you’ve already established a clear temporal relationship; name-drop Dick Cheney and you’re quickly tick-tocking your way to anachronism. While it’s unnecessary to understand the lyrics to enjoy a song, the content of political music can become topically irrelevant in a snap.