Radiohead - Kid A, 25 Years Later

THIS IS REALLY HAPPENING.

Thom Yorke: vocals, gutiar, bass on “The National Anthem”

Ed Green: guitar, keys, synthesizers

Jonny Greenwood: guitar, Ondes Martinot, string arrangement

Colin Greenwood: bass

Philip Selway: drums, synthesizers

Andy Bush, Stan Harrison, Martin Hathaway, Andy Hamilton, Steve Hamilton, Mike Kearsey, Liam Kirkham, Mark Lockheart: brass section on “The National Anthem;” Henry Binns, “rhythm sampling” on “The National Anthem” Orchestra of St. John’s, strings on “How To Disappear Completely”

produced by Nigel Godrich with Radiohead

art by Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke

Kid Alpha

If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, we’ve choreographed three-act ballets on Kid A. I’ll start our dance with this statement: success fucks with people.

When you have the Sgt. Pepper’s of the 1990s on your hands, it’s gonna fuck with you. OK Computer defied all expectations. Critics were calling it a masterpiece before it was even out. It’s not like Radiohead didn’t play into the hype themselves: promo copies mailed out in cassette players glued shut. But more cameras and microphones were shoved in the guys’ faces than anyone anticipated. Fans clamored to wash the hands of thelatest rock-and-roll messiahs. OK Computer was only loosely biographical; serving more as a commentary on how modern society increasingly isolates us. Nevertheless, fans and music press became obsessed with the person behind the lyrics. Thom Yorke didn’t just reject the “tortured artist” label, he despised it.

Radiohead were the biggest band in the world, but it came at a cost. If they got much bigger, they could risk losing what made them them. In the words of Marvin Lin, “the media’s insistence on marketing a downtrodden yet noble artist in fact endangered the very conditions of alienation, disconnection, and simulacrum that OK Computer was lambasting...” It “kick-start(ed) a vicious downward spiral.” Production of Grant Gee’s Meeting People Is Easy on top of promoting one of the biggest albums of the decade was a lot of pressure, to say the very least. Ed wrote in a diary entry on Radiohead’s website:

“It’s taken us seven years to get this sort of freedom...but it could be so easy to fuck it all up.”

Above: Radiohead performing "Karma Police" at Glastonbury 1997

Thom was at his breaking point. He’d gone catatonic after a gig. The band went on a much-needed six-month break.

In February of 1999, Radiohead called Nigel Godrich saying it was time for the next album. But there was a problem: the band didn’t have any songs. Thom confessed to Q Magazine, “Every time I picked up a guitar, I just got the horrors. I would start writing a song, stop after 16 bars, hide it away in a drawer, look at it again, tear it up, destroy it…” And they didn’t have a clear-cut direction. No one wanted to make OK Computer II, that much they could agree on. As for literally everything else? No clue.

After unsuccessful sessions in Paris, early takes of “Pyramid Song,” “Knives Out,” “Dollars and Cents,” and “Morning Bell” were recorded in Copenhagen. Otherwise, zilch. “We did quite a lot of stuff and then spent a year hating it,” Jonny said. “It was so typical of us.” The operation moved back to England in April, where complete communication breakdown occurred. Biographer Mac Randall described, “Everyone in Radiohead is sufficiently creatively minded that there might be eight suggestions as to what a single song should sound like.” Literally, some songs had as many as nine different versions going! “They’re also very scared of themselves.”

This wasn’t the first time Radiohead nearly broke up over creative gridlock (see OK Computer,) and it wouldn’t be the last (see In Rainbows!) Why they kept making this mistake over and over, I do not know, but these guys had been in a band together for fifteen years and had known each other for twenty. With long-running interpersonal relationships like that (especially amongst a group of men,) there’s so much outsiders could never understand.

We do know there was the issue of new creative direction. Phil’s the drummer, so what does he do on a song with a drum machine? The individual members of Radiohead were risking their obsolescence. Some took better to this than others: Jonny bought an Ondes Martinot; a proto-synthesizer that looks like a keyboard and sounds like a theremin, or “a string section from Mars.”

Then you have Colin, who drunkenly played other albums over what the rest of the guys were doing.

Thom feared Radiohead were dinosaurs. He wanted to do what he felt Aphex Twin did and Radiohead didn’t: push music forward. “It’s about simply representing what you’re hearing: what you hear when you go to sleep at night, what you wake up with, what you hear when you’re driving, what you hear when you’re walking.” What did he hear when he was walking? Electronic music,synthpop, Krautrock, and jazz. He’s cited his fandom of Brian Eno, Talk Talk, the Blue Nile, Can, and Charlie Mingus as key ingredients of Kid A. He “Radiohead in the 90s” “fuck-you money” to buy the entire back catalog of Warp Records; label of Boards of Canada and Aphex Twin. These influences forced Radiohead out of its box, and that was difficult. “Thom really wanted to try and do everything different,” Nigel remembered, “and that was bloody difficult.”

Kid Beta

I hate to do the YouTube video essay trope of going back a century before the period we’re talking about, but I swear this is actually relevant!! Dada was a direct response to World War I. Think artists like Marcel Duchamp, Andre Breton, Man Ray, and Hannah Hoch. These artists thought that, if the horrors of war were “rational” and “good,” then the way to counter that was irrationality and randomness. Tristan Tzara’s Dada manifesto outlines how to write a Dada poem: cut up an article from a newspaper, put the lines in a hat, shake the hat, and write the lines as you pull them from the hat. “The poem will be like you.” David Byrne did this for Remain in Light, and Thom did it for Kid A. “...it’s the first time that we – as a band – haven’t been aware of what Thom’s singing about,” Ed explained about the approach.

Come 2000, Nigel Godrich imposed a new creative strategy. Half the guys would work on loops and sequencesin one room, while the other half worked out what to put over them. There was a catch: they couldn’t use any acoustic instruments. I’m getting war flashbacks to Pink Floyd’s “Household Objects,” but Ed was all in.“You’re literally like a kid. ‘I don’t know how this works, but God, it makes a great noise!’” This new approach clearly worked. Radiohead went from writing just six songs in nearly a year to twenty-four songs in just threemonths. Well, now Radiohead have the opposite problem. They have too many songs! The final track listing of Kid A was hotly contested. The album went through up to twenty different track listings and several rounds of grueling cuts. If something didn’t fit progression from “Everything In Its Right Place” to “Motion Picture Soundtrack,” it was out.

The music press grew impatient. (It’s hard to imagine a music industry ruled by print media nowadays, but up until about twenty years ago, a scathing quip in Rolling Stone or the Melody Maker ended a fair few bands’ careers.) Radiohead were the messiahs who will save rock-and-roll, after all! The people need their rapture!! Melody Maker were so desperate they had a reporter wandering around the Oxford campus. They sent reporters to Phil, Colin, and Ed’s homes to harass them. Once they’d heard the new stuff, Melody Maker joined the NME in being thoroughly displeased Radiohead weren’t “saving rock-and-roll” any time soon. Mark Beaumont’s pre-release review of Kid A is a real gem: calling the vocoder “pointless,” describing “Motion Picture Soundtrack”as “tripping over a massive fuck-off harp,” and the album overall as “the sound of Thom ramming his head firmly up his own arse.”

By the fall of 2000, OK Computer had sold an estimated 4.7 million copies. Kid A would take a completely different approach. It had no single or honest-to-goodness “promo campaign.” Instead, Radiohead did something in the middle; “aggressively passive,” in the words of The New York Times. An “anti-marketing campaign,” as the rest of us have taken to calling it. Radiohead did the bare minimum of interviews and press events. Instead of music videos, “blips” were posted to their official website and aired on MTV. (Bootlegging was encouraged.) Instead of sending out promo copies to critics, they were invited to pre-release listening parties. The album played in full on MTV2 on release day – a proto-streaming offer. Around this time, EMI recognized thehundreds of Radiohead fan sites on the internet were basically free advertising. Doesn’t all this sound like the modern multi-media album experience to you?

Kid A was officially released on October 2^nd, 2000; 25 years ago this week. Keyword: officially released. With my usual area of focus, leaks just weren’t a thing yet. But this is Y2K, the year 2000. A pre-iTunes world – forget about streaming! Napster.com was at the very height of its popularity. No wonder Kid A leaked in full a month before release – and talk about “mass cultural growth.”

“It sneered at commerciality. And then it went and debuted at No. 1 on the American and British charts. By making the music they wanted, and conceding nothing to the forces of the marketplace, Radiohead rocketed from star to superstar status. The capacity of the general consumer to comprehend a work of art had, once again, been underestimated.”

quoted from: Mac Randall, Exit Music: The Radiohead Story (2011 ed.)

Marvin Lin was a little more even-handed, calling Kid A “a subversion of capitalism that ultimately produced a whole lot of capital.”

Kid Gamma

What can you say about Kid A that hasn’t already been said? How many more times can we call Thom Yorke “moody” and Radiohead’s music “paranoid”? It’s almost impossible to get out from under this album’s hype. Pearl Jam and Pulp have sang its praises. Trent Reznor. Beck. Jonny Marr. Madonna called it her album of the year. Fucking John Cale of the Velvet Underground likes Kid A.

Far-fetched as her dissertation was, I agree with Marianne Tatom Letts that Kid A’s magic lies in “the binary oppositions of nature versus technology.” In plain English, the balance of man-made and organic. Synthesizers, sampling, sequencers, and electronic instruments meet the thing that makes a Radiohead song: Thom Yorke’s voice. He’s got one of the greatest voices in all of rock-and-roll, if you ask me. He has amazing control over this detatched, yet emotive, almost androgynous instrument. If Thom Yorke so much as breathes on a track, I think it’s genius. Guilty as charged!

That voice is manipulated; not unlike the photos the band sent to Q Magazine.

It was a deliberate choice. Thom explained, “I’m fed up of seeing my face everywhere. It got to the point where it didn’t feel like I owned it. We’re not interesting in being celebrities...I’d like to see them try to put these pictures on poster.” Brad Osborn said this manipulation put “a barrier between his corporeal voice and the uncomfortably dark themes in the lyrics – a coping mechanism…” This album fucks with key and time signature. It fucks with lyrics too; venturing into nu-Dadaism. With Kid A, Thom divorced Radiohead lyricsfrom the literal. In the words of author Steven Hyden, Kid A is “as opaque as ‘Creep’ was obvious.”

After a summer dominated by Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes and OD’ing on Pink Floyd’s experimental period, I knew going into my fifth year of this series, I’d need a hard reset. What harder reset could there be but Kid A?

The album opens with an instantly-recognizable note sequence, played on a Fender Rhodes by I think Ed? The opening notes of Everything In Its Right Place dial us right in to Kid A’s soundscape. Unforgiving and uncanny. Thom only really sings four lines in this song.

“Yesterday I woke up sucking on a lemon.”

“Everything in its right place.”

“There are two colors in my head.”

“What was that you tried to say?”

His approach reminds me of Lou Reed’s ultra-minimalist writing: “Sometimes I feel so happy/Sometimes I feel so sad/Sometimes I feel so happy/Mostly, you just make me mad.” As much as I love Dylan’s jewels and binoculars hanging from the head of the mule, there’s power in boiling your lyrics down into the absolute minimum. You can create a stark image that way. The music of “Everything In Its Right Place” is built aroundsamples of Thom’s voice, chopped up and scrambled into a disturbing machinal babble. Eventually, it’s revealed where those samples came from. “Yesterday I woke up sucking on a lemon.”

What does that mean? Who knows. Radiohead considered lyrics inseparable from music. They rarely issued lyric sheets with their LPs. (Or CDs, I guess. This was 2000.) Thom stretches these sparse lyrics with his delivery. He gets increasingly wound-up as the song progresses.

Tension and release has been a core component of music for as long as people have been making it. From Mozart to Stravinsky, from ABBA to Zeppelin and tribes banging on drums around a fire, it’s human nature to seek tension and resolve. Occasionally, though, an artist will resist it, as Radiohead do with “Right Place.” Every time you think the rest of the band will drop in and break the tension, they just...don’t.

“Everything In Its Right Place” and the title track establish Kid A’s mood and tone more than anything. A machine whirs into a lullaby-like keyboard, with icy sound effects surrounding it. A pitter-patter drum machine introduced. This is the “kid” of Kid A, especially the warped baby cries. Having grown up in the era of the “computer room,” I feel terribly sad when I see a toddler full-on addicted to an iPad. The false-comforting sounds invoke that sadness; observing detachment from reality from birth. “Kid A” is occasionally moved by thumping bass and fuzzy white noise. This cut introduces you to the textures Kid A is capable of. Digital recording and electronic music are anything but one-dimensional.

Mac Randall describes The National Anthem as “what Can might have done if they’d somehow hooked up with Ascension-era John Coltrane.” It’s no wonder this is the first track I connect with. It begins with Thom playing apropulsive heavy fuzz bass, there’s a drum kit, and it ends with free jazz. No-brainer! This is a language I understand. “The National Anthem” is tenuous and compelling the whole way through. Textural, scratchy guitar breaks like shards of glass. You get the sense something is about to break, either on the micro or macro level. “Everyone around here, everyone is so near/It’s holding on.” But it doesn’t sound like there’s much of anything to hold onto. You can only drink the Kool-Aid of blind patriotism for so long.

Thom’s voice is manipulated to sound like shining chrome; halfway between distinctly metallic and a busted intercom. The gorgeous sci-fi whirs, almost like a theremin, became Radiohead’s signature by the time In Rainbows rolled around. And those macho horn blasts interrupted by the avant-jazz are just perfection.

How To Disappear Completely is an early example of Jonny Greenwood’s genius, and the first emotional climax of Kid A. It’s utter lack. “That there, that’s not me.” “I walk through walls, I float down the Liffey” Our narrator is just going through the motions; haunting his own life, as opposed to living it. The repeated “I’m not here, this isn’t happening” is the exact opposite of a centering exercise. The lilting acoustic guitar, string swells, shimmering guitars, and beautiful winding and unwinding sounds up the ante.

“Strobe lights and blown speakers,

Fireworks and hurricanes,

I’m not here, this isn’t happening.”

This is the devastation of achieving everything you’ve ever dreamed of and still being unhappy. When I linger on the psychological suffering that would beget the very essence of disassociation in song, my heart hurts. Thom’s strained moans of “I’m not here” are one of his greatest vocal performances. He catches sobs with hiseuphoric falsetto. His voice is tragedy in human form. Even the music is distraught. Brad Osborn’s text identifies “How To Disappear”’s absent tonic. The relative minor is absolutely there, but the major might as well be on a milk carton. The music has no center – no home – until the very last movement of the song. By the time the music does have its tonic, the strings are panicking like a lost child.

Don’t count out Treefingers. It’s a cornerstone of Letts’s far-fetched concept album theory revolving around Jacques Lacan’s “two deaths.” I don’t subscribe to Lett’s thinking, much less that “Treefingers” is some sort of resurrection scene. I think of “Treefingers” more as Brad Osborn does:

“It evolves gently and glacially, much like the icebergs and mountains experienced visually on the Kid A cover art. Functionally, (it) serves as an abstract, monothematic conduit” between ‘How To Disappear’ and ‘Optimistic.’”

quoted from: Brad Osborn, Everything In Its Right Place: Analyzing Radiohead (2017.)

Simply put, Radiohead knew how to do a damn good interlude. See “Fitter Happier.” “Treefingers” does just what an interlude should do. It a., serves the album’s tone, and b., is the connective tissue between two major tracks on the album. It’s brief refuge after the emotional devastation of “How To Disappear.”

With its driving guitar, bass, and drums, Optimistic should feel like respite. It’s the most OK Computer-sounding track on Kid A. But after so much of the electronic, the purely organic is jarring. We can dig a little more into these lyrics, though. “Flies are buzzing around my head/Vultures circling the dead/Picking up every last crumb.” An end-of-days scene; like Kid A’s cover. What got us here? Carelessness and greed. “The big fish eat the little ones/Not my problem, give me some.” “Optimistic” illustrates a man-made apocalypse orchestrated by greed; a scorched earth populated by “dinosaurs roaming the earth.” Dinosaurs are in office right now, running the world into the ground without a care because they won’t live to see the consequences. Thom even references Orwell’s Animal Farm. (If I had a nickel for every time a Vinyl Monday album referenced Animal Farm…) The chorus steeped in irony. Thom sneers, “You can try the best you can/The best you can is good enough.” It’s a rat race.

For a guy sick of melody, “Optimistic” has a pretty great one. The recording is so textured; Jonny on the Ondes plays a sci-fi countermelody over guitars that scratch like bugs and maggots. When the whole band bursts into action, it feels like such a relief.

Above: Radiohead performing "Optimistic" for From The Basement, 2008

In his text Radiohead and Philosophy, Brandon Forbes links the last four tracks of Kid A to Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality. Disney World’s Main Street USA an example of hyperreality; a curated representation of American life that Disney represents over what real American life looks like. Baudrillard said real life would get so blurred with manufactured hyperreality that we’d get lost in the sauce; questioning if reality existed in the first place. I bring this up because I think it’s terribly relevant to a 25-year retrospective of Kid A. Its musicinherently inflames question of “authentic” means of making music vs “artificial.” Not to mention we’re re-evaluating this album in a world where AI dating chat bots exist. Hyperreality is now available at the click of a button. It’s practically Kid A’s companion piece – nevermind Amnesiac.

A wholly unexpected full-band jam segues into In Limbo. The guitar arpeggio rocks song back and forth on itself in perpetuity. As the song progresses, the band seems to pull itself apart. Key and tempo slowly diverge as group vocals repeat, “You’re living in a fantasy.” I love how restless this is. The point-of-view is constantly switching: “I’ve lost my way. You’re living in a fantasy.” A machine whirs, “In Limbo” collapses. It’sdirectionless in the best way.

On Idioteque, Jonny samples Paul Lansky and Arthur Krieger; electronic music of the 1970s. I wasn’t the biggest fan of this track in college, but now that I’ve heard the “source material,” I’m all about it. “Idioteque” seemingly references the events before “Optimistic.” It’s the end. “Who’s in a bunker? Women and children first.” But it’s not “the end.” These scenes are happening every day. For the past two years, we’ve seen them on our social media feeds every day. “I have seen too much, I haven’t seen enough.” When we bear the knowledge that people just like us are being bombed and starved, how can we carry on with our everyday life? How can we possibly stay tuned-in to our own unfolding disaster on top of that? At risk of dating my work: in a post-“Brat Summer” America in which mediocre-at-best late-night television hosts have their whole shows cancelled for saying something completely uncontroversial and objectively true; then the guy who’s supposed to be the figurehead of the country (with the power to stop aforementioned atrocities overseas but just kinda doesn’t, because money) throws a tantrum on social media when a legacy network won’t bend the knee to him for once?

Of course I can dance to a beat while scream-singing, “THIS IS REALLY HAPPENING”

It’s the foil of “How To Disappear”: “I’m not here, this isn’t happening.” Our eyes are forced open. “Idioteque” might just be the most relevant cut on Kid A right now.

Morning Bell’s soft keyboard and frenetic drumming turn the panic inwards. The song is about a failing marriage and impending divorce – specifically, the psychological distress of waking up one morning and no longer recognizing the person lying next to you. It’s ironic so many new husbands and fathers were in this band recording this song. Belongings are hastily split: “You can keep the furniture” “Where’d you park the car? Clothes all over the furniture” They even address the classic “stay together for the kids” dilemma. “Cut the kids in half” is a reference to King Solomon: “cut the living child in two, and give half to one woman and half to the other.”

Motion Picture Soundtrack opens with organ lifted from a Neil Young deep cut. No, really!

It was bold of these guys to try suing Lana Del Rey for halfway-interpolating “Creep” when they fully interpolated Neil. And didn’t Radiohead lift the bridge of “Creep” from the Hollies? Hypocrites they are!

If the narrators of the previous three songs are the cognitive dissonance between hyperreality and reality as Brandon Forbes argued, “Motion Picture Soundtrack” would be the fallout. “It’s not like the movies/They fed us on little white lies.” It’s the tragedy of modern life. When hollow coping mechanisms fail, like red wine and sleeping pills, cheap sex and sad films, you’re left with yourself. All you’ve got to get you through the horrors of modern life is you. Coming to that conclusion can be terribly distressing. It breaks some. The layered harp is like a biblically accurate angel: beautiful, but there’s so much of it. Never have a church organ, harps, and I believe an Ondes meant to sound like a choir, been so overwhelming on the psyche. It’s all the chaos and emotional distress of “seeing the light” (if you subscribe to that religion.) When the pearly gates open, that’s it. You don’t get a second chance at life.

“Beautiful angel, pulled apart at birth,

Limbless and helpless, I can’t even recognize you.

I think you’re crazy, baby.”

Above is the deleted final verse of “Motion Picture Soundtrack.” Beautiful as it is, I understand why it didn’t make the cut. It’s too personal. Thom wanted to get away from that. I think its omission benefits the song in the long run. “I will see you in the next life” leaves the song hanging open. As for the “hidden track,” it continues “Motion Picture”’s mood. Both are the detached euphoria after crying your eyes out.

Above: "Motion Picture Soundtrack" demo, c. 1995

PopMatters’s tenth anniversary Kid A retrospective said,

“Here’s a rock band not making rock songs. Here’s a group who previously wrote about alienation in our modern world now making efforts to deliberately alienate us.”

quoted from: “All Things Considered: Radiohead’s ‘Kid A’” (11/3/2010.)

Mac Randall called it a “calculated spit in the eye of the marketplace.” I don’t think they’re right.

Radiohead operate on artistic intuition. Boundary-pushing is the side effect. Jonny clarified, “We don’t sit down and say, ‘Let’s break barriers.’ We just copy our favorite records.” Now, where have we heard that before? Highway 61, Revisited. Both albums are critically and commercially beloved titans, touted as “great departures” when really they’re a return to. Bob Dylan was voted most likely to join Little Richard’s backing band in the yearbook. Thom Yorke was a sometimes-DJ in college. Jonny studied Mesainnen’s work in school. BothHighway 61 and Kid A divided the establishment and the new school. Rob Sheffield saw the similarity, too.“Nobody admits now they hated Kid A at the time, the same way folkies never admit they booed Dylan for going electric. Nobody wants to be the clod who didn’t get it.”

Having the perspective of modern history that I do: there were years of the seventies where “the seventies”hadn’t quite arrived yet. Think of how brightly-colored 1970 and ’71 still were. There were years of the eightiesthat “the eighties” hadn’t quite arrived yet. 1980 and ’81 were still very brown. The early nineties were still in pastels until Nirvana arrived. The 2000s, on the other hand. That decade immediately arrived. I think Kid A had a hand in that.

How did Kid A so immediately bring the 2000s in music? Like Sonic Youth brought the nineties in the eightiesand Zappa did whatever glorious shit he did. Radiohead struck the right balance. There’s a verse and chorus here, a drum kit and guitar there. David Fricke for Rolling Stone asserted, “this is pop...glistening guile and honest ache, and it will feel good under your skin once you let it get there.”

Kid A sounds more cutting-edge to me now than it did six years ago. I was surrounded by music influenced by Kid A in college. Now, I almost exclusively cover albums thirty years older than it. This album engaged a musical muscle I hadn’t exercised in a long time. Its influences now in my record collection: Brian Eno, Aphex Twin, Can.

Is Kid A’s subject matter timeless as timeless as people say it is? ...eh. Some of its political concerns (globalization, GMOs) date it. Global warming, political chaos, and the apocalypse? Now those are more relevant than ever. The music is demanding of the listener. It’s harsh; obfuscated by itself under heavy sheets of ice and glass. Like its cover, Kid A is like a mountain range made of mirrors. Impossible to climb and unflinching in its perspective. Brent DiCrescenzo, in arguably the review that put Pitchfork on the map, said it’s “like witnessing the stillborn birth of a child while simultaneously having the opportunity to see her play in the afterlife on IMAX.”

25 years later, Kid A still looms on the horizon; blinding us by its mirror glare.

Personal favorites: “The National Anthem,” “How To Disappear Completely,” “Optimistic”/“In Limbo,” “Idioteque,” “Motion Picture Soundtrack”

– AD ☆

Watch the full episode above!

Beaumont, Marc. “Kid A.” Melody Maker, 9/20/2000. https://web.archive.org/web/20160528134048/http://www.followmearound.com/presscuttings.php?cutting=85&year=2000

Bordowitz, Hank. “Mind Over Matter: An Interview with Storm Thorgerson.” Experience Hendrix Vol. 2 Issue 4, 9-10 1998.

Borow, Zev. “The Difference Engine.” Spin, 11/2000.

Cavanagh, David. “I Can See The Monsters.” Q Magazine Issue 169, 10/2000. Archived by CitizenInsane. https://citizeninsane.eu/media/uk/q/04/pt_2000-10_q.html

DiCrescenzo, Brent. “Kid A.” Pitchfork, 10/2/2000. https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6656-kid-a/

Doheney, James. Radiohead: Back To Save the Universe. New York: Thunder’s Mountain Press, 2002.

Fricke, David. “Radiohead: Making Music That Matters.” Rolling Stone, 8/2/2001. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/radiohead-making-music-that-matters-84574/

Fricke, David. “Kid A.” Rolling Stone, 10/12/2000. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/kid-a-185607/

Hyden, Steven. This Isn’t Happening: Radiohead’s Kid A and the Beginning of the 21st Century. New York: Hachette Books, 2020.

Letts, Marianne Tatom. Radiohead and the Resistant Concept Album: How to Disappear Completely. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.

Lin, Marvin. 33 1/3: Kid A. London: Bloomsbury, 2009.

Marzorati, Gerald. “The Post-Rock Band.” The New York Times, 10/1/2000. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20001001mag-radiohead.html

Osborn, Brad. Everything In Its Right Place: Analyzing Radiohead. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Randall, Mac. Exit Music: The Radiohead Story. London: Omnibus, 2011.

Reisch, George A., and Brandon W. Forbes. Radiohead and Philosophy: Fitter Happier More Deductive. Chicago: Open Court, 2009.

“All Things Considered: Radiohead’s ‘Kid A.’” PopMatters, 11/3/2010. https://www.popmatters.com/132579-all-things-reconsidered-radioheads-kid-a-2496119581.html

“Radiohead: Kid A.” PopMatters, 7/26/2004. https://www.popmatters.com/radiohead-kidamft-2496053343.html

“The Complete Radiohead.” Q Magazine, 2008. https://archive.org/details/RHQCompleteRadiohead/page/n13/mode/2up