Album of the Decade: “Kid A”

kid a

From the Department of Obvious Things: there were other contenders here, but I came on fairly late for The L Magazine‘s “albums of the decade” article series and was a little shocked that nobody had already picked it, so I took the not even remotely controversial position that it was Radiohead’s Kid A.

Radiohead, having long cultivated and complained about and composed around these nebulous fears about our souls being liposuctioned out from beneath us — “Heat the pins and stab them in/You have turned me into this/Just wish that it was bullet proof,” and so on — had finally decided that since nobody was quite getting the message, they needed instead to embody it, themselves becoming something too challenging to be ignored, too terrifying not to at least be remembered, whether by way of a temple or a crater. So if you could find an emotion in the throbbing cryogenic Jell-O of “Treefingers,” maybe there was still a heart in there somewhere (by which I’m not really sure whether I mean in you or in the Jell-O, but either way). More
See also: Ys by Joanna Newsom The College Dropout by Kanye West Silent Shout by The Knife Funeral by The Arcade Fire Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by Wilco The Con by Tegan and Sara