This Isn't Happening: Radiohead's Kid A and the Beginning of the 21st Century

By the turn of the millennium I had pretty much given up on popular music. It had been a long-brewing shift, which started roughly the first day I got to Austin, when I heard Son Volt’s Tear-Stained Eye on KGSR on the radio. Later that year I’d be introduced to the Butthole Surfers, the sensual Goth of The Cure’s Disintegration, Failure’s Magnified, Björk’s Post, and would start toddling down a decidedly more European and/or Texan path in my music choices. By the time 1999 rolled around, I was listening to Lucinda Williams, Johnny Cash, and Edith Piaf more than any hot performer I could think of.

But in 1999 I happened to be living in a house with a Radiohead fan who introduced me to OK Computer. Also, my friend Mike had kept his ear open to the voice of the times, and thanks to his generosity, I wound up decamping to the West Coast for the first time with Tool’s Ænima and the double gift of Kid A and Amnesiac.

Over the years, I’ve never stopped thinking about Kid A.

I knew Kid A was important and notable and strange and wonderful and beautiful. It reminded me a lot of the first time I heard Bowie’s Low: while the young lady who gave me a mixtape featuring it had impeccable musical instincts, the rest of that album was excruciatingly inaccessible to me. I could sense that something significant was happening, had happened. With time, and some background in music appreciation (Eno, can, Kraftwerk), I started to find telltales that helped me understand what I was hearing. But on first exposure, it was too novel, too new. And it was that same sense I had the first time I heard Kid A.

But in those first early months in the Bay Area, when I didn’t have a social network to lean on, I would listen to the strange, bizarre worlds conjured by Kid A at night. In the quiet nights of San Jose, windows open with breezes luffing my drapes, quiet rustles of leaves and slow tires moving down narrow streets would be overlain with its electronic experimentation and dissonance. I’d work my way through tightly-budgeted, simple dinners in my room at my desk until the bleeps and bloops felt familiar.

In a turn or two of a few months I had some friends (and a few dates, even). Kid A stopped being a constant in my life. But on that dreaded day in September of 2001, it was the album I turned to while driving on near-empty South Bay highways. On the vacant route 237, the absolute weirdness around me felt almost oppressive: the strange chaos of the 2000 election and its juridical hangover; the spiraling one-two punch of the dot-com bubble’s run-up and implosion, and now terrorist attacks remaking the New York skyline — it was too much, all at once, and too mentally loud. I can only sense that something significant, baffling, scary, and incomprehensible was afoot. And that incomprehensible thing felt like Kid A.

And to capture that incomprehensible thing is darned hard work, but I think Steven Hyden has made a damned fine attempt. This Isn’t Happening situates Kid A in its time, as I’ve tried to situate it in my time in the foregoing paragraphs.

Some of the major arcs that frame the album are rooted to the band’s place in history. They’re on the caboose end of “alternative rock.” Yet they somehow managed to bridge 1995-2005 with remarkable aplomb. It was no more surprising to see them at Glastonbury or Coachella in the 2010s than it was to see Olivia Rodrigo or Tyler the Creator. How did these unassuming Englishmen remain so relevant and so connected? Hyden turns attention to the historical, economic, and cultural forces around the band and intersects them with the band’s members. Meaningful arcs like:

• Radiohead as a band: The college-town founding, the members, the personalities
• Radiohead as the last rock band standing as Napster commodified music and bled A&R budgets dry
• Radiohead as a band trying to live beyond the shadow of the highly-problematic “Creep”
• Radiohead’s Thom Yorke as a man trying to “disappear completely” from the level of attention on him as the symbol and voice
• Radiohead as a band negotiating with the internet: how much do they share; what’s the relationship to fandom after 2000?
• Radiohead as a band within an artistic context contra e.g. Britney Spears, the ubiquity of hip-hop, the garage sound rebirth of NYC around 2000

all serve to help the reader understand why this band stayed vital precisely by not playing it safe.

There’s the typical autopsy on the album itself: who produced it and to what effect, where was it recorded, what was the atmosphere like, who conceived of the brilliantly haunting cover art, what the heck instrument is that Jonny Greenwood is obsessed with — and, oh yes: what happened to the guitars?

Hyden also, in a rock critic sensibility, picks up on other threads and influences that can be heard in the writing and musicality of the album. He correctly points out that there’s a lot of Scott Walker, the teen-bop crooner turned noise soundscape artist in Kid A. And he also has a side meditation about David Berman, the driving force behind Silver Jews (long-standing personal favorite of mine), whose album The Natural Bridge is one of my prize pieces of vinyl. That was just bonus “this book was for you, Steven.”

Audiobook

The narrator — Angelo Di Loreto — is excellent. The voice sounds like a staff writer from Rolling Stone: friendly, but like he’s logged a few late nights. Since so much of Hyden’s prose hinges on nostalgia, Angelo Di Loreto keeps an earnest enthusiasm with a bit of wryness — hey, we are talking about the 00s here — that makes it an enjoyable experience.

Conclusion

If you were there for any of this — the dot-com crash, 9/11, the spiraling vertigo of 2000-2002 — read it. Hyden will name things you felt but couldn’t. It sent me back to Kid A and its step-sibling Amnesiac for the first close listen I’d given either in fifteen years. I’m grateful for that.

• Next: Absolution