You know the phrase “fuck-you money”? Radiohead will one day have “fuck-you” credibility.

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.

My mind had retconned Vanilla Sky as a 2003 film because it seems like it has the perspective of a movie made two years after September 11, in much the same way that Kid A was subsequently recontextualized as an album about (or at least linked with) September 11.

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.”

It’s one of those albums that’s permanently lodged into my brain, where it just spins on a loop. Sometimes it comes through loud and clear, where I can feel every blip, skronk, and digitally distorted vocal. Other times, it plays on a low hum, following me like a shadow, like how the string section stalks Thom Yorke in “How to Disappear

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.

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

He finds that this cold, mechanical music makes him feel alive again, giving him the same emotional connection that guitars once did. He is sick of melody. All he wants is rhythm.

Bodysong sounds very much like the ultimate sideman’s record. The pieces don’t really register as songs, but as evocative assemblages of incredible sounds—there’s some heart-stopping classical music in the style of Krzysztof Penderecki, some Bitches Brew jazz, a bit of skronky guitar, and a whole lot of irregular electronic beats.