This is a brilliant exploration of Radiohead's
game-changing album, looking at its place in the career
of ''The World's Best Band'' with ten years of
hindsight. Radiohead's Kid A never had a chance on
paper. Not only did the band have the unenviable task of
following up the near-universally lauded ''OK
Computer'', but Kid A didn't even have an official
single or video. Neither did it help that the band
largely abandoned rock-pop conventions for a sound that
traversed glitch, free-jazz, modern composition, and
krautrock. Rather than simply reinforcing Kid A's
canonical status, Marvin Lin situates the album in the
temporal, examining it from various philosophical and
cultural interpretations of time in order to arrive at
its political and social stakes. Why should we care how
time is expressed through its aesthetic components like
repetition, sampling, and hybridization? Where does the
album subvert our sense of time with songs like
''Treefingers''? In which ways does it attempt to
transcend time and with what implications?Time is
perhaps art's biggest enemy - all human creations will
be erased eventually - but it's through these various
articulations that we are able to uncover some of the
most interesting insights about Kid A. For more
information on the series and on individual titles in
the series, check out our blog. |
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