Kid A

Untitled

Kid A, the fourth studio album by the English band Radiohead, was released on October 2 2000 in the United Kingdom and on October 3 in the United States and Canada. It debuted at #1 on the U.S. Billboard 200 and sold a million copies in the United States, reaching platinum sales in its first month, despite the band's refusal to release an official single or video. There was speculation that a unique marketing campaign (or even the leaking of the entire album on the Internet) may have been responsible, but the success was most clearly the result of massive anticipation after the popular OK Computer (1997).

Kid A's musical content, the result of an experimental recording process, was to prove its most startling aspect. Radiohead moved from the more classically rock-styled OK Computer as drastically as they had moved on from their early style after "Creep," this time producing electronic soundscapes with abstract lyrics; taking influence from krautrock, avant-jazz and 20th century classical music; and scrapping their traditional three-guitar lineup in favour of sometimes obscure instruments, notably the Ondes Martenot.

Kid A was seen by critics as one of the most challenging pop records ever to achieve such commercial success. But in 2000 the album inspired a storm of controversy, baffling and polarizing many - including old fans . Kid A has since been honored by the establishment with Grammy nominations and magazine list placements, hailed in experimental music circles, and widely recognized by a generation of rock listeners for introducing them to various forms of underground music. While Radiohead was already popular worldwide, Kid A solidified their status as one of the world's most successful cult bands.

Track listing

• All tracks written by Radiohead.

1. "Everything In Its Right Place" – 4:11
2. "Kid A" – 4:44
3. "The National Anthem" – 5:50
4. "How to Disappear Completely" – 5:55
5. "Treefingers" – 3:42
6. "Optimistic" – 5:16
7. "In Limbo" – 3:31
8. "Idioteque" – 5:09
9. "Morning Bell" – 4:29
10. "Motion Picture Soundtrack" – 7:01

Marketing and release

After over a year of recording sessions, Kid A was finished in April 2000, but post-production and final mastering continued as a marketing plan was drawn up. Although "Optimistic" eventually received some radio play on rock stations, no singles were planned or officially released. Instead, the album was promoted- directly and indirectly- through the internet. This is where Radiohead's infamous relationship with Napster came into play. Live performances of the band were already being bootlegged and shared by fans on p2p services, including concerts from a brief European tour of that summer previewing the new songs that would make up Kid A and Amnesiac. The band embraced this file sharing, amazed and gratified their audiences already knew the words to songs that had not yet seen commercial release, singing along enthusiastically to the new material just like the old.

However, in July, three months prior to the release of Kid A, MP3 tracks of the entire finished album mysteriously made their way onto the file sharing service. As detailed in a web posting of the time entitled "Did Napster Take Radiohead's New Album to Number 1?", millions of fans had possession of this music by the time the CD hit stores. The record industry assumed the album was now doomed to failure since fans already had the music for free. Instead, the opposite occurred and the band, which had never hit the U.S. top 20 before, captured the number one spot in Kid A's debut week - apparently the result of non-fans downloading the album at no risk and realizing they liked it enough to support the band, or fans having time to absorb the music and get accustomed to Radiohead's more complex sound, now excited enough to buy it on release day. In the UK, Kid A also debuted at #1, as had the previous album, and it debuted equally high in many countries around the world.

But with the record's absence of large scale airplay or any other factor that may have explained this stunning success in America, some declared this was proof of the promotional powers of file trading and of word-of-mouth generated through the internet. Others noted this simplified a complex issue, and even the word-of-mouth could just as easily have been generated outside the internet, as it had been when it propelled OK Computer to eventual gold status after a #22 American chart peak. Radiohead is on Parlophone/Capitol Records, which is a subsidiary of EMI, one of the world's largest record labels. The band thus has huge marketing muscle behind them, however invisible it may appear and however nonconformist their sound and image. When OK Computer came out, representatives for the label were quoted saying they wouldn't stop until Radiohead was the biggest band in the world, and the band professes to have great confidence in the small part of the conglomerate involved in promoting them.

With Kid A, that marketing muscle was employed in an innovative, under the radar way, with the aid of "blips" (see below) and also the internet. Major interviews were done, but just a few. The album was played in advance of release for rock critics, but only under carefully controlled situations. It was previewed on MTV, but only played through as a whole, with artsy graphics accompanying. A similar campaign found its way on to Are-Oh-Vee, a late night music video incarnation of Yahoo!'s launch.com

In October the band appeared on Saturday Night Live to perform two of their most uncompromising new songs. The performance was a shock to the TV audience, with guitarist Jonny Greenwood's twiddling of electronic knobs, a brass band freely soloing over "The National Anthem," and Thom Yorke's spasmodic dancing and vocal stuttering in "Idioteque," signifiers that lacked all familiarity for an audience expecting rock n' roll. Later in the fall of 2000, the band toured Europe in a circus-style tent free of all corporate logos. They also performed a mere three concerts in North America, their first in nearly 3 years; the venues were small theatres rather than stadiums, which sold out instantly and attracted many celebrities.

To some extent the album was also different enough from everything else out there at the time that it could market itself. Oasis member Noel Gallagher, not a fan of the band, admitted that Kid A's great marketing scheme was its lack of conventional market saturation: "If you refuse to talk about your own album, that just stirs the pot and makes everyone else start talking about it." Kid A was one of the first highly anticipated albums to publicly "leak" and attract much attention, because Internet music sharing had by then acquired critical mass. Whatever the reason for the record's unexpected success on the charts, which was also partially due to a lack of competition in its release week, Kid A and its unique marketing, spread the band's fame to a huge number of new potential fans, extending outside the indie scene.

Reaction

Kid A was noted for requiring multiple listens to "understand", dividing fans and critics to an extent more than did any other album of the time, in contrast to Radiohead's previous record OK Computer. Some desired a continuation of the sound of OK Computer, or even a return to the anthemics of The Bends and Pablo Honey. Others suggested Radiohead should have released their experimental work under a different name as U2 had done with Passengers, so as not to mislead the public.

Nick Hornby, writer of the novel High Fidelity and a self-described fan of Radiohead's earlier material, compared their new work to Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, an instrumental album of guitar feedback issued, according to legend, to get out of a label contract. Hornby summed up the opposition and unintentionally helped fuel the album's myth in a review for The New Yorker: "Kid A demands the patience of the devoted; both patience and devotion become scarcer commodities once you start picking up a paycheck." Some rock listeners , disgusted by Kid A's electronic sound and lack of lyrical transparency, flocked to the nostalgic U2 comeback album released soon after, or to Coldplay's emotional debut, which was said to be influenced by early Radiohead.

Finally, Kid A attracted another sort of criticism: that it wasn't as radical as some people said. Canadian post-rock collective Godspeed You Black Emperor took issue with Radiohead's nonconformist stance given their major label backing, while underground electronic hero Aphex Twin, himself an influence on Kid A, didn't get the big deal . People who had been listening to less commercial forms of music for ages didn't like the way Radiohead had "co-opted" them, and (although always giving credit to their influences in interviews) was now being credited for the innovation themselves , in reviews by a musically ignorant or close-minded mainstream media. Indie rock critics, though generally favourable, would sometimes include a dig at the band and cite a lesser known album that was similar to what Radiohead was doing but supposedly much more interesting, Hood's Cold House for example. These views, however, reflected the distinct minority of people who listened to pop music further off the radar than Kid A; and only, perhaps, a minority of that minority. In 2001 Radiohead appeared on the cover of The Wire, an experimental music magazine that usually ignores trends in alternative rock, and earned a feature interview by noted critic Simon Reynolds, championing Kid A and its follow-up Amnesiac and dismissing accusations that they lacked originality.

By the end of 2000, the album was already appearing frequently in critics' top ten lists as praise for Radiohead's "experimentation" outweighed their reservations. Even among those who didn't particularly like it, Kid A garnered respect simply for not being "manufactured pop," though ironically it was Radiohead's most self-consciously manufactured, technology-based album to date. Those who did like it were usually effusive, calling it groundbreaking and post-modern, saying it was the future of music or defined the new millennium. In 2001 Kid A received a Grammy nomination for Album of the Year, and won Best Alternative Album and Best Engineered Album. In subsequent years as Radiohead's style has continued in a straight line from Kid A and the band has performed many of its songs as a core of their live concerts (see Trivia section), fans who dismissed the album as a publicity stunt have come to appreciate it.

Since 2000, Kid A has been cited by countless musicians as an inspiration or influence, and appeared on its share of lists. Template:RS500 In 2005, two touchstones of the indie music press, Pitchfork Media [1] and Stylus Magazine[2], simultaneously named Kid A the best album of the past 5 years, above dozens of both mainstream and lesser known entries these sites promote. According to Stylus, "Radiohead stripped their threads completely, and offered us this [Kid A], an album consistently devoid of context and thus one that provides its own for the decade."

Later that year it appeared at number 48 in Spin magazine's "100 Best Albums of the Past 20 Years" (1985-2004), a list which was topped by OK Computer. In 2005, Kid A was placed at number 10 in Q magazine's greatest albums ever, with The Bends and OK Computer taking the top two spots.

Sound and influences

Kid A may have been considered a "difficult" album, but it offers a relatively pop-accessible melange of experimental music styles, at least in comparison with the original sources cited by the band. Major influences come from glitch and ambient electronica (or so-called IDM) as typified by many artists on mostly electronic Warp Records, and from the free jazz, hard bop and fusion styles of Charles Mingus, Alice Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and later Miles Davis. Other influences came from the German Krautrock bands of the 1970s, among them Can, Neu!, Kraftwerk, Faust, and Tangerine Dream; and even from one of Radiohead's earliest influences, Talking Heads, whose Remain in Light the band was "obsessed" with during this period. The string orchestration on "How to Disappear Completely" was inspired by Scott Walker and Krzysztof Penderecki, while the album's use of the Ondes Martenot is inspired by Olivier Messiaen, one of Jonny Greenwood's musical heroes. "Idioteque" actually uses samples from the work of two "classical" composers involved in computer music: Paul Lansky and Arthur Krieger. Björk, PJ Harvey, R.E.M. and Beck's then-recent genre-bending albums may also have been influential; Radiohead not only see these artists as among their closest contemporaries within the mainstream music industry, but all are personal friends of Thom Yorke.

The album's style as a whole has been characterized as art rock, or more often post-rock, a term popularized by Simon Reynolds in the 1990s to describe a new generation of bands whose experiments with ambience, orchestral music and jazz were inspired more by the spirit of punk and post-punk than by progressive rock. Radiohead, like these bands, tended to prefer evoking a mood with a minimalist groove to displays of technical virtuosity. Kid A is a distinct change from Radiohead's first three albums in that it features less of Jonny Greenwood's guitar solos, instead using guitars as if they were synths, in order to build a texture (which led some to inaccurately characterize the album as having "no guitars," although they are present on most tracks). In addition, some of Thom Yorke's vocals have been treated or distorted by digital effects, mostly lacking the impressive falsetto runs for which he was known; Yorke said he wanted his voice on Kid A to be just another instrument. While it disappointed some fans, Kid A deployed these diverse sounds in a melodic way, and brought Radiohead acclaim from those attracted to the band's new musical direction.

Many critics saw the album as a parallel to U2's Zooropa (1993), in terms of the band's radical evolution in musical style, although at least one track, "Treefingers," which manipulated a guitar sound to create ambient music, was more likely to have been influenced by the groundbreaking solo work of Brian Eno, producer of both that album and Remain in Light (1980). A more fruitful point of comparison would be Talk Talk, a band that abandoned its success with mainstream pop to explore texture with albums such as 1991's Laughing Stock, which helped inspire the creation of the term "post-rock" in the first place. However, the comparison only goes so far. Talk Talk became more and more acoustic while Radiohead became more electronic as each band's musical complexity increased. And Radiohead's "uncommercial" music met with far greater commercial success than did Talk Talk's.

Kid A has antecedents in progressive rock. Then-cutting edge bands like King Crimson had produced blends of jazz and rock as early as the late 1960s which are in many ways similar to "The National Anthem". To some, Radiohead seemed to move toward a similar crossroads between genres, but its members continued to voice little affinity for the progressive rock bands of the 1970s, with the exception of German "Krautrock" bands, which were cited as influences in nearly every interview.

Radiohead's musical style on Kid A was seen as more fragmented and less like Pink Floyd than on their last album OK Computer, but many continued to identify the mood and pacing of Radiohead's music with that band's famous album Dark Side of the Moon, for example, noting Kid A's "flow" and transitions between songs. This was likely unintentional on Radiohead's part, as countless musicians of lesser fame than Pink Floyd shared these characteristics, and any of them may have influenced the band. But the pop-accessible experiments of Pink Floyd and other "art rock" or "prog rock" bands were many rock listeners' first exposure to this genre, and with Kid A Radiohead was in the same niche for a different generation.

Some have noted Radiohead's lack of identification with progressive rock in their relatively concise song lengths. Kid A may have been seen as challenging to conventional pop listeners, but still includes no song over 6 minutes (with the exception of album closer "Motion Picture Soundtrack," whose roughly 7 minute length includes about four minutes of silence both before and after a brief instrumental; the song proper is about 3 minutes).

Lyrics and meaning

Besides its lack of singles, Kid A hints at an anti-consumerist viewpoint in its music, portraying the alleged evils of global capitalism and demagoguery of Western leaders obliquely in some of its lyrics, and directly in a booklet hidden under the CD tray in early pressings (see Trivia). Some members of the band read Naomi Klein's bestseller No Logo while recording the album and were influenced by it to the point of considering calling the album "No Logo" for a time. The band also cited George Monbiot's Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain around this time. However, according to older interviews they have held similar political beliefs since even before their career as Radiohead, and certainly since OK Computer. Such books likely put them into words, rather than inspiring them in the first place. In the '00s Radiohead has been active in environmental and anti-war causes, but has never articulated one particular radical agenda, such as anarchism or communism, seeming to focus in their music on the failings of the post-modern capitalist world rather than how they can be redressed.

Chuck Klosterman's recent book "Killing Yourself To Live" puts forth a theory that Kid A could be a soundtrack to the events of September 11 and beyond, despite the fact that Kid A was written over a year before the September 11 attacks. However, Kid A's artwork was influenced by the 1999 war in Kosovo. The album's increased critical reputation since its initial release may well be due to shadow cast by the events of 9/11 and their aftermath. Whereas beforehand the apocalyptic future of Kid A seemed right out of art rock science fiction (its evocation of chaos and violence only applying to the third world), its lyrics now seemed frighteningly real, even prophetic to some listeners. This was cited as a reason for its placement atop several lists as the best album of the decade so far.

According to one interview with Thom Yorke, the title "Kid A" could refer to the first human clone, leading to confusion among some fans as they tried to piece together a concept or narrative between the songs, involving such a character. In the same interview Yorke had also denied this was a serious subtext for the whole album, but just one possible idea: "Often, if you call it something specific, it drives the record in a certain way. I like the non-meaning." [3]. Yorke has been quoted agreeing with his friend Björk's statement that songs are like "kids" to be sent out into the world. Yorke's own first child was also born shortly after the album's release, perhaps inspiring its title and some of its lyrics. He has also said "Kid A" was the nickname of one of the synthesizers used on the album.

Yorke has often denied Kid A's lyrics had any meaning beyond their sound, claiming to have drawn many of them from a hat, and even hosting Tristan Tzara's instructions for making dada poems on Radiohead's official website. One product of Radiohead's evolution after OK Computer has been Yorke's increasing refusal to commit to his lyrics or explain them in interviews, with the band suggesting the whole arrangement and production instrumental in expressing whatever meaning is there, or the intent of the song possibly being something other than any defined "meaning." Many of Radiohead's post-punk ancestors, including Michael Stipe of R.E.M., were known to intentionally slur their words and alter lyrics live so as to frustrate attempts at literal interpretation. Kid A is the first Radiohead album since Pablo Honey whose lyrics were not printed in its liner notes, nor were they made officially available in any other form. From careful listening and with reference to tab books and live performances, fans have since come to near consensus on the words of the lyrics, which can be accessed from unofficial online sites such as Green Plastic.

Most often, when Yorke does comment on the ideas behind his recent songs, he cites global warming and a fear of no future for his children. This becomes slightly more explicit on later albums, but it could be presaged on Kid A, both in Idioteque's lyric "ice age coming" (many scientists suggest current warming could trigger a more catastrophic ice age, though the line has also been seen as an allusion to the Clash's 1979 song "London Calling") and in the artwork showing iced over landscapes. Graphic artist Stanley Donwood, who with Yorke designed and painted the album's cover and booklet, has described his work as conveying environmental disaster. Themes of genetic modification, more than cloning, are also present, with Radiohead's ironic logo during this "no logo" period being a "modified bear" with preternatural blinking eyes (see below, Blips section). Yorke is both a vegan and an opponent of agricultural bioengineering. That his imagined apocalypse would be brought on by climate change and genetic modification is a possibility.

There was also early speculation that the title referred to a set of trading cards and website entitled "Kid A in Alphabet Land" created by Carl Steadman, which draws on the concepts of Freudian philosopher Jacques Lacan.[4] Child imagery has been increasingly prevalent on recent Radiohead albums, for whatever goal, though it's found as far back as their early days. The title track of Kid A alludes to the Pied Piper story, while "Idioteque" begins: "Who's in a bunker?/Who's in a bunker?/Women and children first" The album has also been frequently noted for recurring motifs like rivers and seas, fear and confusion, ventriloquists/puppets, "white lies," and the nature of reality (one song's mantra is "I'm not here, this isn't happening" while another's is "we're not scaremongering, this is really happening"). The song "Optimistic" directly references Animal Farm by George Orwell, a favourite author of the band. The song "In Limbo" references the British shipping report. Some have seen Biblical allusions (such as the line "cut the kids in half" in "Morning Bell," which has also been widely heard as a song about divorce, though Yorke says it's about ghosts) and parallels between Kid A and The Inferno; Yorke's longtime partner is a Dante scholar. He has said it was her own words to him that inspired the chorus of "Optimistic": "If you try the best you can, the best you can is good enough."

Artwork and blips

File:Kidabear.gif

No singles were released from Kid A, and hence no conventional music videos. However, in place of these Radiohead commissioned a series of television commercial length (mostly 30 second) films set to music from the album, which they dubbed "blips" (also vide blipvert). Some blips were directed by The Vapour Brothers (Tim and Chris Bran, who also directed a web-only video of "I Might Be Wrong"). Blips, which were mostly animated, were also directed by Shynola, a collective which went on to create the award-winning "Pyramid Song" video for Amnesiac. Blips were shown occasionally on MTV as between-segments programming, but mostly distributed free on the Internet. They were originally available on Radiohead's official website, and are now available from a variety of unofficial fan sites ([5] or see sites at bottom of Radiohead article).

As expressed in an essay by Joseph Tate, the blips continued from Stanley Donwood's artwork (which often directly inspired their look and imagery, if not including his own collaboration) to tell fragmented, allegorical stories of nature reclaiming civilization from out of control technology, and global capitalism gone wrong, represented often by genetically modified killer teddy bears. Ironically, the bears ended up being a sort of commercial "logo" for the album and the band, appearing at the end of the blips and on official T-shirts and posters. Also ironic is the animated version of the bear (such as the one above) which has been a part of Radiohead's online store since the album's release: after blinking several times, his eyes briefly show a dollar-bill sign.

The Kid A cover art, by Donwood and/or Yorke, is a rendering of mountain range, with some pixelated distortion near the bottom of the image. The back cover depicts a beautiful snowscape with fires raging through forests, the whole thing tarnished by digital effects. The album comes with a thick booklet which contains various drawings and other art in the same vein, printed on both glossy paper and thick tracing paper. No lyrics are printed (the same goes for Amnesiac, although that booklet has some fragments of lyrics from the album among other text). Near the back there is also a large triptych-style foldout drawing. The first million or so copies of Kid A came with a small "hidden" booklet of artwork underneath the CD tray (which is now available online as a PDF file).

Released simultaneously with the general release, a "special edition" package of Kid A was released, containing the same music but encased in a thick cardboard "children's book" with a unique cover and different oil paintings of apocalyptic landscapes and "modified bears." Although in the same style as the album art, this time they were without digital manipulation. An essay on these 10 paintings from the special edition book, and their possible implications, is available in the book The Music and Art of Radiohead (2005) and includes interviews with Donwood.

Although no videos were widely released to promote Kid A, and music television outlets that wanted them to play were stuck with either blips or filmed concert performances, Radiohead did film a sort of video featuring a performance of Idioteque in a studio. This is not to be confused with either Saturday Night Live version, or the version found on Kid A, as it is a different recording. The video features striking camera angles and showcases Thom Yorke's bizarre dancing. An official, but not widely released, video was also made for Motion Picture Soundtrack. Yorke described it as his favourite piece of film the band had ever done, but it was made up entirely of edited together blips that had been previously available.

There is a Latin American release of a video for "The National Anthem". The video was the result of a contest made by MTV Latin America, in which contestants were asked to make an animated video for "The National Anthem". However, it is certainly not official. Countless live performances of songs from Kid A have also been played on music outlets and widely available on the Internet, many of them filmed and sanctioned by the band or label. They still do not exactly function as "videos."

Live performance

Kid A and its successor Amnesiac are unique among Radiohead albums in that their songs were created in the recording studio without live concerts in mind. Both previously and after Kid A, the band wrote songs on the same instruments they would use to perform them live, and often performed songs before live audiences of fans before completing them in the studio. Many of the songs of Kid A were also introduced to the public on the band's tour in summer 2000, before the album's release, but the band had already finished recording them.

To prepare for that tour, Radiohead had to re-learn how to play its songs, and in some cases invent an entirely new arrangement. The complex soundscapes they had created digitally or by collaborating with jazz and string players were often impossible to duplicate with five live musicians, but the band did not want to simply play back their recorded music for audiences. Thus some tracks were altered so much for live performance that many see them as different songs entirely. By the time of the album's release, Kid A material had become a major part of Radiohead's setlist, and many of the reimagined Kid A songs in the live set continue to be fan favourites at concerts.

Some of these Kid A songs were released on the I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings CD in 2001. The album includes live versions of "The National Anthem," "Morning Bell," "Idioteque," and "Everything in Its Right Place," as well as songs from sister album Amnesiac and the song "True Love Waits."

"Everything In Its Right Place"

See article for more details. The band has performed an extended version, approximating house music but featuring live manipulations of Yorke's vocal by guitarists Jonny Greenwood and Ed O'Brien, to close the main set of nearly every Radiohead live concert in recent years, or sometimes to close the whole concert. As the song draws to a close, the band members file offstage one by one until the stage is empty, but their sampled performances continue. At various radio station sessions during a tour in 2003, Yorke also performed several piano-only versions of the song.

"Kid A"

When performed live, the album's title song has featured Thom Yorke's vocals without the processed distorting effect found in the studio version, making the lyrics discernable. Some performances also feature a harmonica solo by Jonny Greenwood. The song was performed live very rarely until 2003.

"The National Anthem"

See article for more details. "The National Anthem" begins on stage with the band tuning to various radio stations, then mixing the static with the main riff, which has a much heavier "fuzz bass" sound live. The ondes martenot is also more audible in live versions. Unlike the studio recorded version on the Kid A album, the live version of the song is not performed with jazz horns, except at two 2000 performances in New York City, one of which was a taping for Saturday Night Live using the house band, and also at a 2001 performance in London for the BBC's Later with Jools Holland. "The National Anthem" opened most Radiohead concerts in 2000-2001 and continues to be played often.

"How to Disappear Completely"

The song is 2 minutes longer live, beginning with a lyrical instrumental introduction on Jonny's ondes martenot, and more audible bass and acoustic guitar. The album's string section is not heard, with the ondes playing the part instead. A version was performed for a Canal+ TV special in 2001 with Yorke's solo acoustic performance accompanied by several ondes martenots. The song has often appeared in the encore and is a fan favourite.

"Treefingers"

"Treefingers" has never been performed live. Thom Yorke has said in the past that this track is made entirely on a sampler manipulating guitar riffs of either Ed or Jonny.

"Optimistic"

"Optimistic" was performed often during an initial tour in 2000 but has fallen completely off the band's setlists. The live performance is similar to the one found on the album, featuring guitar, bass, drums, and ondes martenot.

"In Limbo"

"In Limbo" is sometimes performed, and features Thom Yorke playing tambourine. The interlocking guitar parts and complex time signature are difficult to recreate live.

"Idioteque"

See article for more details. Not initially performed along with the other Kid A songs debuted live in 2000, "Idioteque" eventually became a live concert favourite. The song is an integral part of the band's show, appearing during some 2000s tours near the close of every set, together with singles like "Paranoid Android" and "Pyramid Song." It is known for Yorke's frenzied dancing on stage during the electronic percussion break, and as an audience singalong.

"Morning Bell"

The song has been performed often, approaching the studio version but with more emphasis on the hypnotic drum rhythm, which is performed live by Phil Selway, rather than the drum machine heard on Kid A.

"Motion Picture Soundtrack"

At the time of Kid A's release, "Motion Picture Soundtrack" appeared in most live sets as a Thom Yorke solo piece with organ, and sampled harps toward the end, much like the studio version. Since then it has been performed rarely. Perhaps the song's most iconic inclusion in a setlist was a non-performance: at their 2001 "homecoming" gig in Oxford during the Amnesiac tour, Radiohead played the song "Creep" for the first time in nearly four years after Thom's organ for planned concert closer "Motion Picture Soundtrack" allegedly went "kaput." Some have speculated this was a joke staged by the band in order to allow them to play their greatest hit and albatross without seeming to be pandering to the crowd. The band have performed "Creep" sporadically since then, but have never since performed "Motion Picture Soundtrack."

Early versions

Two of the songs on Kid A were performed live before work on the album even began. "How to Disappear Completely," written during the OK Computer tour, was played twice in 1998. The song was different from both the final studio and live versions. "Motion Picture Soundtrack," a song written in the early 1990s, was debuted as an acoustic song by Thom Yorke at a radio station session in 1996 but has never been performed this way since, though the early performance and its additional verse remain legendary among fans.

Miscellanea

• According to the band, the strange vocal effect in the album's title track was actually not produced with a vocoder, as often assumed, but by running Thom Yorke's voice through the ondes martenot output. Other digital manipulation of voice and instruments on the album was made possible by a new generation of software programmes sometimes run off a single laptop, among them ProTools and Cubase. In 2000, the album's use of ProTools was often criticized by people who disliked the processed sound, although increasingly much conventional charting pop is now produced with such software, including some acclaimed for its "natural" rock sound. Jonny Greenwood has been quoted as saying: "I see it like this: a voice into a microphone onto a tape, onto your CD, through your speakers is all as illusory and fake as any synthesizer -- it doesn't put Thom in your front room. But one is perceived as 'real', the other somehow 'unreal'... It's the same with guitars versus samplers. It was just freeing to discard the notion of acoustic sounds being truer."
• The album's last track, "Motion Picture Soundtrack," is often reduced to 5 minutes in MP3 and other digital files. When the song itself ends at 3:15, it is followed by 2 minutes of silence, then an untitled 30 second instrumental interlude (which has sometimes been mislabeled as "Genchildren" because that is the handle of the group that originally leaked the album to the Internet) and then another 2 minutes of silence. This is intended to provide a respite before the album repeats. It also brings the whole album's running time to 50 minutes exactly. Some MP3 ripping software removes the silent final two minutes, leaving the song and the hidden instrumental, hence the 5 minute length.
• A slightly "extended" version of Treefingers appeared on the soundtrack CD of Memento, though it was not actually heard in the film.
• The album is dedicated to Phil Selway's son Leo, born since the release of OK Computer.
• If you play two copies of Kid A exactly 17 seconds apart, the music will sync up in some interesting ways. It is sometimes shockingly effective, but just as often garbled and dissonant. No one in the band has commented on it and it's almost certainly unintentional. Some fans call this "Kid 17" or "The 17 Second Theory". Versions of this mixed down to a single track can be found on P2P networks. This was originally discovered by Jeff Sparks (AKA Probiotic), who runs a fan site. Interestingly, on some of the earliest pressings of Kid A in certain countries, a mistake was built right into the CD: each track began with a few seconds of a Pearl Jam live performance.
• John Mayer did an acoustic-guitar version of the song Kid A as a B-side on his CD single Bigger Than My Body.
• Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins cited Kid A as an inspiration around the time he decided to break up his band because he was tired of competing with what he called the "Britneys" of the world. In 2000 and 2001, Radiohead often received this type of praise for Kid A, as much for its supposed integrity as its music. A cautiously positive Rolling Stone review by David Fricke took the same line.
• Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) said he never liked the band for their earlier work, but cited Kid A as one of his favourite albums.
• Paul Lansky, a Princeton music professor whose 1970s computer-generated piece "Mild und leise" was sampled by Radiohead in "Idioteque". The sample provides the entire harmony for the song through four looping chords taken from a few seconds of Lansky's original composition. Lansky has written an essay entitled "My Radiohead Adventure" about Radiohead that appears in the anthology The Music and Art of Radiohead, as well as online in very abbreviated form. [6]
• Jazz pianist Brad Mehldau and classical pianist Christopher O'Riley have both recorded and released versions of "Everything in Its Right Place" in their distinct styles, and have also played Radiohead songs at live concerts. O'Riley has released two full albums of classical arrangements of Radiohead songs, "True Love Waits" and "Hold Me to This". One of several string quartet tributes to Radiohead on Vitamin Records also includes renditions of Kid A material.
• "Everything in its Right Place" has attracted a wider range of cover versions and unsanctioned remixes than most Radiohead songs, including one by Osunlade found on Exit Music: Songs with Radio Heads. A version of "In Limbo" also appears on that tribute compilation, as well as a cover of "Morning Bell" produced by the Roots' ?uestlove.
• Thom Yorke said in 2003 that he regretted not having released "Everything in Its Right Place" as a single. The song remains a fan favourite, however.
• Guitarist Vernon Reid (previousely of Living Colour) and his band Masque have recently recorded a version of "The National Anthem."
• In 2005, Hanson covered the song "Optimistic" in concert, and it also appears on a recent live album.
• Kid A was covered in its entirety by Josh Richmond, under the title "Kid A Revisited."
• Several songs found on Kid A originally went by slightly different names. "The National Anthem" was known as "Everyone" or "Everyone (The National Anthem)," and the early title of another song was "How to Disappear Completely And Never Be Found." "In Limbo" was called "Lost at Sea," and sometimes "Morning Bell" has been called "The Morning Bell."
• Some copies of Kid A from the initial pressing have a hidden booklet inside the CD case. It is hidden under the piece of plastic that holds the CD. It contains various artwork from the band, more like Radiohead poster art of the time, different from that in the normal booklet, and more political. Few if any copies of this likely remain in copies of Kid A sold in stores as of 2006, but the booklet is available as a free PDF file online.
• Influential site Pitchfork Media's original review of Kid A, in which the album received a 10.0 rating, has been the subject of much ridicule in online indie music circles. Its alleged purple prose included comparisons of the sky with a "wizard's cap." The review, in which it claimed Radiohead to be the best band since The Beatles is one of very few perfect ratings given by the site to an album in initial release, was written by Brent DiCrescenzo and has been seen as an example of the notoriously indulgent Pitchfork style.
• The song "Disappear" on R.E.M.'s 2001 album Reveal was influenced by Kid A's "How to Disappear Completely." Ironically, it was R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe who partially inspired the Radiohead song in the first place, when advised his friend Thom to think, "I'm not here / this isn't happening," after the strain of touring OK Computer became too much. Later, Stipe called Yorke to ask his permission before titling his own song "Disappear."
• "Everything In Its Right Place" was appropriated for the opening of the movie Vanilla Sky starring Tom Cruise and Penelope Cruz. In fact the title of the 1st chapter in the DVD chapter selection is "Everything in its Right Place". Also during the movie, while Tom Cruise is driving in his car he asks co-star Jason Lee what band he would like to listen to, pulls out a tape and says "Radiohead?" just before he is about to get in a crash. Director Cameron Crowe and his whole cast were enamored of Kid A during the filming and played it during scenes to get into character.
• The song Kid A is featured as a credits theme at the end of an episode of The Sopranos (ep. 4-2)
• "Everything in Its Right Place" is the opening song to the psychedelic planetarium feature 'Sonic Vision', organized by music artist Moby. It is played in the opening, as viewers enter a spaceship and are launched into the stars.

References

http://partners.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20001001mag-radiohead.html

External links

• Kid A lyrics (authoritative fan site)
• Kid A lyrics (wiki that can be edited by anyone)
• Archived Kid A Anti-Videos or "Blips"
• Did Napster Take Radiohead's New Album to Number 1? - article from MP3 Newswire suggests that the original Napster was the force behind Kid A's success on the charts.
• A collection of artwork from Kid A