This Isn't Happening

November 1, 2020
A study of Radiohead's 2000 classic album and how two decades have validated its dystopian vision. Uproxx cultural critic Hyden, author of Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me, among other music books, believes that Kid A, the British band's fourth album, is a masterpiece. For music fans today, that's an unprovocative, almost banal assertion. But as he notes in detail, the album received mostly middling and hostile reviews at the time, with the notable exception of Pitchfork, a then-little-known tastemaker that awarded the album its highest grade of 10.0. Like all innovative works of art, Kid A baffled many at first. Radiohead's blend of proggy structures and glitchy electronics was new; the obsessive internet music culture that leaked the album early was new; singer Thom Yorke's cynicism about our tech-sodden existence was new. And all of it was "weirdly prescient," a "tone poem about our 'doomed-to-be-extremely-online' lives," as Hyden puts it. His book is partly standard-issue band history, covering Radiohead's path from "Creep," the early megahit that threatened to make them one-hit wonders, to their present-day efforts to maintain their perch as innovators. But Hyden also argues that the album captured the zeitgeist both then and now. The author finds a Kid A sensibility in contemporary movies like Vanilla Sky and Fight Club as well as in the twitchy discomfort delivered by our social media addictions. Today, Radiohead's push-me-pull-you relationship with the traditional record industry is the norm. Though Hyden extrapolates too much cultural import from one album--Kid A wasn't alone in railing against "soul-destroying remnants of omnipresent corporate culture," after all--he is an intelligent and often amusing guide to its creation. The original reporting is slim, but the author writes like the best kind of music fan: informed and inviting. A knowledgeable, earnest, always persuasive testament to a cultural touchstone.

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