This Isn't Happening

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.

the world never recovered from the era between Kid A and Hail to the Thief.

Being a successful musician means playacting all of your past traumas, and retaining your old identities like a collection of ratty sock puppets.

The whole point of their records was that there were no answers, because the beasts at the door were vicious and defiantly post-logic. No rational argument or stirring protest song was going to quell them. They wanted your blood, and they were going to get it.

“To me, it’s about forces that aren’t necessarily human, forces that are creating this climate of fear. While making this record, I became obsessed with how certain people are able to inflict incredible pain on others while believing they’re doing the right thing. They’re taking people’s souls from them before they’re even dead.”

From July of 1999 up through the spring of 2000, Ed kept a semiregular online journal on Radiohead’s website documenting the recording sessions.

As the Kid A sessions unfolded, the track was nudged in a jazzier direction, inspired by the band’s shared fascination with the iconic jazz bassist and composer Charles Mingus.

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,

Kid A embodied how things would eventually come to feel, look, and sound. The mood of ubiquitous dread and digital remove that the music evokes; the non-sequitur lyrics that double as status updates (“yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon”; “I’m not here, this isn’t happening”; “the best you can is good enough”); and the overwhelming feeling that tec