Radiohead and the Resistant Concept Album: How to Disappear Completely

Profiles in Popular Music

by Marianne Tatom Letts

How the British rock band Radiohead subverts the idea of the concept album in order to articulate themes of alienation and anti-capitalism is the focus of Marianne Tatom Letts's analysis of Kid A and Amnesiac. These experimental albums marked a departure from the band's standard guitar-driven base layered with complex production effects. Considering the albums in the context of the band's earlier releases, Letts explores the motivations behind this change. She places the two albums within the concept-album/progressive-rock tradition and shows how both resist that tradition. Unlike most critics of Radiohead, who focus on the band's lyrics, videos, sociological importance, or audience reception, Letts focuses on the music itself. She investigates Radiohead's ambivalence toward its own success, as manifested in the vanishing subject of Kid A on these two albums.

Genres: Music

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[Andrew Corsini · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book concerns the albums Kid A and Amnesiac, the pairing Rolling Stone called "the greatest pair since the first two Godfather films". The book goes through each song chronologically, dedicating the amount of words to each. I'd love to say this means that a lesser track receives the same amount of words as something like Kid A's title track or "Optimistic", but I'm honestly struggling to think of lesser tracks in these two albums. Still, I felt like more words could have been dedicated to the heavy hitters. All the same, the author's reading of "Kid A" as an album concerning death and rebirth is absolutely fascinating.

[Lucas Mol · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought I had made a big mistake in buying this book after reading the first two chapters. They were flat, uninteresting, and all of the claims that the author was making regarding the meaning and content of Kid A seemed improbable. I think the overarching themes that the author tries to attach to the music are definitely stretches. This continues throughout the book. However, when the author analyzes actual musical elements in the individual songs of Kid A and Amnesiac in Chapters 3-6, there are a lot of enlightening, interesting facts. While some of the musical analysis is a little bit overly detailed for the casual reader, a lot of it is relevant and meaningful. The author successfully picks out important themes and moments in the music. I was surprised to enjoy some of the detailed lyrical analysis as well. After the introductory chapters I was expecting much less plausible meaning to be drawn from this type of analysis.

Overall, I really enjoyed reading the book. It got me listening to Kid A and Amnesiac again, and appreciating them in a new way.

[Jeremy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is basically an academic dissertation on two of Radiohead's more beguiling albums. As an academic exercise without any real narrative arc, it is not the kind of book you read excitedly start-to-finish: about 2/3rds of the way through it, I decided I had gotten the gist and skipped to the last chapter.

That said, fans of these albums will gain many interesting insights--as this is a far deeper read on the band's intent and sonic footprint than any commercial music reviewer would submit these (or any) albums to. The simple fact that 250 pages can plausibly be devoted to these two albums is a compelling case for their work as art that deserves as much (or more?) musicological analysis as the classical greats.

Some of the analysis is surely right on track. Some of it is pretty far-fetched, and the writer's biases about the world are evident...and I could not help thinking as I read through, 'What would Thom think of all this?' At the end, I still realized I had no idea.

[Keith · Rating 1 out of 5]

From Popmatters:

""It’s a book that’s less a study of Radiohead, and their two least accessible albums, and more an exploration into the problem of the concept album itself. “What exactly is it?,” becomes the question that drives Letts study and her answers shed light both on the more obscure work of one of the truly great rock bands and on the nature... of performance and the performer in the post-modern moment."

...Adding weight to my theory that often the people least likely to understand certain facets of various media are the ones who talk most profusely about it. "What's a concept album?" An album with a unifying concept, you dunderhead. (I might also be offended by the idea that someone could describe any album from a band as big as Radiohead as "obscure.")