Ask anyone who is the Blackest white rock band to emerge over the past 30 years, and my hunch is that few would say Radiohead.
The hypnotically wonky Oxfordshire quintet are lauded for intricate, challenging music that is now far from their grunge-era breakthrough. Their rapturous second album (1995’s The Bends) yoked together symphonic alt-rock melodies with even bigger feelings, and their post-prog-rock masterpiece OK Computer (1997) delivered darkly ominous late 20th-century dread about everything from rising neoliberal alienation to the coldness of technology. It prompted stop you in your tracks superlatives from critics, who became even more rapturous for the follow-up, Kid A, released 20 years ago today.
In sync with Black music, though? Immediately obvious contenders from that pop moment include funk rock veterans the Red Hot Chili Peppers, or perhaps – if reaching – the late 1990s rap-metal hybrid bands (Korn, Limp Bizkit) who gestured toward hip-hop rhyme schemes with little pretense toward virtuosic MC flow. But these examples miss the point entirely, emphasising superficial pop style rather than thinking more deeply about art that expresses the ideals and challenges of Black life.
It might sound absurd if judging by their slightly awkward, extremely white appearance, but I have long heard a strange and beautiful Blackness in Radiohead. There are powerful resonances between their work and radical Black art, that are more meaningful than ever amid our current racial reckoning. Resistance, futurism and critiques of bald-faced power are hardwired into Radiohead’s sound, and this blend, along with their embrace of jazz and other revolutionary Black musical forms, is likely why a whole host of contemporary Black artists have covered their work.
The Black era of Radiohead came fully to the fore on Kid A. It was famously polarising, with some longing for more guitars, others hailing the boldness of its sonic invention. The latter camp – including me – celebrated the band’s willingness to push even further past verse-chorus-verse rock towards adventurous dance and electronic music, and jazz avant-gardism, in individual song ideas as well as overall ethical vision.
As the critic Simon Reynolds would have it, Kid A was a record that did the hard thing of capturing “the vivid colours, spatial weirdness and rhythmic compulsion” of electronic music while yet still summoning the feelings one associates with “surface-and-sensation oriented, collective high-inducing dance”. It was a record that struck out, as he argues, “in search of the remotest extremities of the rock tradition”.
In the year 2000, all I wanted, as a Black girl Radiohead fan, was to live with them out at these extremities. The woozy keyboard swirl and processed vocal gibberish of Everything in Its Right Place, the album’s opening track, announced the very opposite: all was about to be thrown thrillingly out of whack. The sublime Treefingers is a glimmering object that spins slowly around the universe; the spectacular plaintive sorrow of Motion Picture Soundtrack was an invitation to dive into a cinematic dreamscape of heartbreak. Why not live in these worlds, I thought, with the disaster of the US presidential election recount unfolding deep into the fall?
What makes Radiohead’s music such a radical endeavour to me are these deeply introspective other worlds, built as bulwarks against the tyrannies of everyday life (a world where “we’ve got heads on sticks / you’ve got ventriloquists,” as Thom Yorke sings in nightmarishly garbled vocals on the title track). Kid A’s recurring lyrical insistence on “slipping away” is nothing new to rock masculinity, an anxious nod to…
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