This Isn't Happening

The past is at once familiar and weirdly unfamiliar. If you delve deep enough, you might find that you don’t really know who you ever really were. You’ll also discover the ways in which you’ve never changed, even from the time you were a child, your very own Kid A.

Kid A didn’t register as a warning about the dangers of the online world back then. It was an invitation to a place that seemed better than the one you were in. We argued with strangers for fun. We laughed until our heads came off. And we swallowed till we burst.

Kid A unfolds exactly as the Internet does. It is obscure and inexplicable and moves relentlessly forward without bothering to explain itself, offering no context outside of our own personal biases, opinions, and limited consciousness. And yet… we understand it intuitively.

Yorke credited Blood & Chocolate as “the album that made me change the way I thought about recording and writing music. Lyrics, too.” You can hear that influence loud and clear in “Creep.”

When you’re a person who thinks about music too much, you use it as a way to mark time.

This is how it is with this band—most Radiohead fans would agree that they did a perfect “True Love Waits,” way back in Brussels, the first time they ever played it live. But that was also the simplest, most direct, most obvious version. Radiohead couldn’t let themselves be satisfied with it.

Kid A would similarly be credited with “predictive” powers in relation to 9/11 in a passage from Chuck Klosterman’s 2005 book, Killing Yourself to Live. Klosterman writes about how “Everything in Its Right Place” evokes the city waking up, just as Crowe associated it with Tom Cruise crawling out of bed. “Kid A” is the sound of people going to work,

Thinking about Kid A involves reacquainting myself with the people who I used to be, as it is for all of us who revisit art that implants itself on our lives. Over time, our past selves slip into the space between memory and fiction. We know they’re back there, but we can never be totally sure if what we remember is real. A classic album like Kid A

You sucked on a lemon yesterday, but today it tastes merely like saliva.

While the aughts were a time of massive trauma in nearly all areas of public life—caused by war, terrorism, duplicitous governments, and a mass-media system that was breaking down and drifting toward an à la carte “choose your own reality” pluralism—it still felt like the Internet was a place where truth, intelligence, and individuality might still