The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

Is Kid A really about cloning humans? That was entirely my fault [laughs]. Early on, Stanley Donwood, who does our artwork, and I started doing this thing, Test Specimen, a cartoon about giving birth to a monster, the Frankenstein thing . . . The idea was loosely based on stuff we were reading about genetically modified food. We got obsessed with the idea of mutation entering the DNA of the human species. One episode was about these teddy bears that mutate and start eating children. . . . It was this running joke, which wasn’t really funny. But in our usual way, it addressed a lot of our paranoia and anxieties. “Kid A” was just a name flying around—it was a name of one of the sequencers. The world, as always, was changing. But it seemed increasingly possible that it was changing faster than its inhabitants could understand, so they just had to pretend that they did.