This Isn't Happening

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

“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.”

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

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.

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 Completely.

The Internet, at that time, was outside the mainstream media, that loathsome monolith dominated by corporations and groupthink. The online world was decentralized and fostered a plurality of voices. In 2000, Kid A didn’t seem like a critique of that world. The album in a way aspired to it.

So that’s how my life (and possibly yours) turned out in the future—hooked up to a Soma machine for ten hours a day as the rest of the Internet is increasingly corporatized, consolidated, homogenized, or lobotomized.

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

After all, nostalgia has a way of embalming the past, sucking out what was once vital and messy and flushing it out with nothingness, so that it resembles what it was but is, at heart, hollow and lifeless.