Radiohead's Kid A (11 page)

Were Radiohead trying to be timely or timeless with
Kid A
?

For a band so politically engaged, trying to discern the level of politics in Radiohead’s music can be frustrating: some fans champion how political their lyrics are, while others flat-out deny these interpretations as wishful thinking from hopeful subversives. Thom doesn’t particularly help clear things up, either. On the one hand, Thom has said that “[it’s] difficult to ignore wider issues … it’s hard to sing about ‘humping your baby’ when you’re seeing all this other stuff; it’s difficult to live with a bad conscience.” He’s also described
Kid A
as partially about “the generation that will inherit the earth when we’ve wiped evrything [
sic
] out,” even citing George Monbiot’s
Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain
as an influence on the album.

And yet Thom refuses to label
Kid A
as a “political” album. In fact, if there was any question about Radiohead’s political intentions, he clarified it rather bluntly in a dual interview with Howard Zinn in 2003:

I don’t think we are [political] at all. I think I’m hyper aware of the soapbox thing. It is difficult to make political art work. If all it does is exist in the realms of political discussion, it’s using that language, and generally, it’s an ugly language. It is very dead, definitely not a thing of beauty. The only reason, I think, that we go anywhere near it is because, like any reason that we buy music, these things get absorbed. These are the things surrounding your life. If you sit down and try to do it purposefully, and try to change this with this, and do this with that, it never works. […] I don’t think there is much that’s genuinely political art that is good art.

Whether it’s due to the fatigue of the same old political message or to finding new outlets for political expression, Thom’s clearly concerned about the overlap from more sociological and aesthetic vantages: How can one use political language “tastefully”? Should musicians shoulder the weight of political responsibility? Can political art be “good” art? As he explained in an interview with the
Scotsman
: “If you try and write anything political, it’s just … shite. Unless you’re The Clash, in which case you can get away with it. But we can’t, and have no intention of doing [so].”

* * *

Kid A
’s artwork, however, sings a different tune. In fact, if we were to judge the album by its artwork alone, we
might pigeonhole the entire release as a timely political statement (the cover, in fact, was influenced by the 1999 war in Kosovo).

Created by longtime friend/artist Stanley Donwood and Thom (credited as “Tchock”),
Kid A
’s “apocalyptic imagery,” as the latter described it, proves remarkably different from the Rauschenberg-esque visuals of
OK Computer
. Instead of the zoomed-in, truth-in-the-details approach, where images were intended to translate sterility and conformity, Donwood opted to create large oil paintings full of vibrant reds, oranges, and blues for
Kid A
. “I wanted to make big paintings because I’d spent so long making little pictures on a computer, mostly for
OK Computer
,” said Donwood. “All that pointing and clicking was driving me crazy. So I wanted to really go crazy.”

The transition from computer monitor to large-scale canvas serves as an apt metaphor for
Kid A
’s newfound reach. Whereas
OK Computer
’s artwork and lyrics presented a hyper-capitalist society wrestling with its internal contradictions and moral bankruptcy — relationships disconnected by the image, communication made impenetrable by mediation, policy mired in corruption —
Kid A
reaches so far that its purview expands beyond the sunny sidewalks of suburbia to the dark vistas of an apocalyptic future. And the outlook is terrifying: barren wastelands and empty battlefields, burning cityscapes and frozen terrain, blood smeared throughout. It is a projection of a world that has been disregarded, decimated, then ditched. It is the fallout
of consumer-capitalism unchecked. It is our buildings on fire, our world covered in ice.

The most compelling narrative weaved throughout this bleak depiction appears in the special-edition version of
Kid A
. Here, Donwood and Thom evoke the apocalypse through the oversized, thick cardboard, picture-heavy format of a children’s book. And unlike the somewhat abstracted presentation of the regular version’s artwork, the special edition articulates these ideas under the very premise of a children’s book: to educate through story.

NOBODY LIKES NOTHING
I CERTAINLY WISH WITH ALL MY HEART
THAT IT DID NOT EXIST

BUT WISHING IS NOT ENOUGH
WE LIVE IN THE REAL WORLD WHERE
NOTHING DOES EXIST
WE CANNOT JUST DISINVENT IT

NOTHING IS NOT COMPREHENSIBLE
NEITHER YOU NOR I HAVE ANY HOPE OF
UNDERSTANDING JUST WHAT IT IS AND
WHAT IT DOES

IT IS HARD TO KNOW IF NOTHING IS
ACTUALLY NOTHING
AND THUS DIFFICULT TO KNOW IF A POLICY
OF DOING NOTHING IS SUCCESSFUL

NOTHING
HOWEVER EFFECTIVE IT MAY HAVE
PROVED UP TO THE PRESENT CAN HARDLY
CONTINUE TO DO SO INDEFINITELY

IF I HAD TO CHOOSE
BETWEEN THE CONTINUED POSSIBILITY OF
NOTHING HAPPENING
AND OF DOING NOTHING
I WOULD UNQUESTIONABLY CHOOSE THE
LATTER

OR THE FORMER.

While the narrator’s rhetoric reduces policy-making to a binary of “doing nothing” and “nothing happening,” the moral of the story is revealed in the following two pages. The first shows an image of the ubiquitous “genetically modified bear” — which is depicted heavily throughout
Kid A
’s visual world — floating on an iceberg. The image seems innocuous at first, almost random, until we reach the next page, which lists “selected examples of ice melt around the world.” Black text on a white background, the list provides nine examples (with statistics) of ice melt, from the Columbia Glacier and Glacier National Park in the US to West Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier and New Zealand’s Tasman Glacier. It concludes with the
Antarctic’s Larsen A and Prince Gustav ice shelves, both of which “disintegrated completely in 1995,” and a web address pointing to the Worldwatch Institute for further examples of ice melt.

You don’t have to watch Al Gore’s
An Inconvenient Truth
to sniff out the artwork’s political undercurrent. In fact, the message is even more obvious today than it was in 2000, as, ten years since
Kid A
’s release, the threat of global warming has become such a pervasive topic that not only does the intellectual foundation of the so-called “green revolution” have currency now, but also even capitalism is furiously capitalizing on it, a sure sign of its ideological heft and omnipresence. But both the policy of “doing nothing” and the possibility of “nothing happening” remain as pertinent today as in 2000. Gas and oil companies still have an unprecedented amount of political power, exemplified most disturbingly for Thom in December 2009 when he posted commentary on the band’s website during his trip to the Copenhagen summit on climate talks. While his posts showed glints of hope early on, they soon exhibited his frustration with the US, anger over the “display of rhetoric,” concerns over the closed-door discussions, and disgust over the summit’s outcome that, according to a letter he posted written by Ben Stewart from Greenpeace, was “beyond bad” and a “historic failure that will live in infamy.”

Radiohead’s concerns here are clear: As long as corporate lobbyists are directing conversation toward a “green” future powered by fossil fuel companies, there
will only be “symbolic” attempts to reduce carbon emissions through renewable energy. As long as politicians are influenced by corporate money, there will be little to no substantial legwork done to assert bold emission standards. As long as companies continue to spend billions in marketing and advertising to skew public perception, there will always be that cousin in your family who peers out the window, notes the disproportionate amount of snowfall for that time of year, and exclaims “Ha, so much for ‘global warming’!” Meanwhile, ice caps will keep melting, sea levels will keep rising, and weather patterns will shift even more dramatically and violently, destabilizing not only the ecological balance of our planet but also the very patterns and dependencies of life. And throughout, oil and gas companies like ExxonMobil will continue to post record-breaking profits, even in times of serious economic strife.

But it isn’t just the iceberg beneath the genetically modified (GM) bear that explodes with meaning; the GM bear itself has plenty of symbolic power too. Responding to the rumor that
Kid A
was about cloning humans, Thom explained the origins of the GM bear:

Early on, Stanley Donwood, who does our artwork, and I started doing this thing, Test Specimen, a cartoon about giving birth to a monster, the Frankenstein thing. For example, the bear logo — that is a test specimen, the first mutant. The idea was loosely based on stuff we were reading about genetically modified food. We
got obsessed with the idea of [a] mutation entering the DNA of the human species. One episode was about these teddy bears that mutate and start eating children. It was this running joke, which wasn’t really funny. But in our usual way, it addressed a lot of our paranoias and anxieties.

Dramatic, sure, but the fear of a GM future is not without precedent. Much of the food consumed worldwide, and especially in the US, is now genetically modified — that is, produced either by combining genes from different organisms or through genetic crosses from plant and animal breeding. But is it safe to consume sweet corn that self-produces poison to kill insects or margarine that contains genetically modified rapeseed? Do we really want to eat strawberries that can survive frost, apples that contain vaccines, and beef beefed up with bovine growth hormones? How long is too long for tomatoes to last? Aside from the troubling fact that some countries — again, most notably the US — do not require the labeling of GM foods in grocery stores (ensuring customers remain in the dark about what they’re swallowing), the concern of GM opponents is that the food hasn’t been tested rigorously enough, independently or otherwise, for governments and “regulatory” agencies to so confidently proclaim their safety for humans and the ecosystem. Under current law, independent studies can’t even be published in peer-reviewed journals without approval from agritech companies.

Beyond safety concerns stemming from allergenic confusion to the possibility of reduced fertility from GM maize consumption, GM foods are also connected in
Kid A
’s artwork to the same entities that stall the full embrace of global warming: corporations. On the cover of the “secret” booklet (hidden beneath the CD tray of early pressings), a basket full of bear heads with a $50 price tag sits above a single bleeding bear head served on a dinner plate. The image is underscored with text that reads “Take the money and then run,” which provides an aesthetic link between GM foods and corporate powers like Monsanto, a US-based biotechnology corporation that sells 90 percent of the world’s genetically engineered seeds, a corporation that has a vested interest in “doing nothing” to address the growing outcry over GM foods. While public health concerns haven’t motivated action, the desire for increased profits certainly has: biotech corporations are now stealing and then patenting centuries-old bio knowledge from farmers, charging the same farmers enormous fees to use them, and even suing some who unknowingly used “bio knowledge” without consent after GM crops inadvertently slipped into their farms.

It is quite fitting, then, that
Kid A
’s “secret” booklet would feature modified and unmodified rats squeaking “™” and “©”: the politics of GM foods has as much to do with private ownership as public health. Who says what can or cannot be owned, and under whose terms? The threat of a GM future exposes the power that megacorporations have in taking ownership of
not just products and services, but the constituent elements of life itself. Since 1970 in the US, biotech and genomic companies have the right to legally claim living organisms as intellectual property. Corporations are now scouring for DNA all over the world, attempting to secure corporate rights to these genes through patents. No DNA is immune to their corporate reach, either; even DNA from the human genome is fair game. Genes related to breast cancer, obesity, even bone creation have been isolated and patented. In fact, an estimated 20 percent of the human genome has now been claimed as intellectual property, which means that, without intervention, the very blueprints of life, the very essence of humanity could be owned by (and at the whim of) a handful of corporations.

As Ed remarked,

A lot of the time, now, it would seem that the power doesn’t reside with politicians. So much power has been given over to corporations. I think a lot of people are finally waking up and realizing that we don’t live in a democracy.

* * *

Media theorists say that reactions to cultural texts are dependent on what audiences bring to them. For instance, when Archie Bunker from
All in the Family
used words like “fag,” “chink,” and “Jew” to underscore
his bigotry, one viewer might have cringed at how outdated his views are, while another might have sympathized and agreed with his ahistorical racism. Both could love the show, but for vastly different reasons. Bunker’s bigotry could therefore be simultaneously critiqued and perpetuated, depending not only on the show’s context, but also on the viewer’s. I’m not suggesting that we should all be seeking out the “right” context, as if uncovering the intent of the directors and writers of
All in the Family
was a prerequisite to “properly” view the show. But if what equally matters is the context
you
provide, that
you
impose, that
you
align with the object in question, then there is an implicit responsibility involved with any general consumption of pop culture that, at worst, results in political appropriation and, at best, prevents gross misunderstandings between the creator and receiver.