The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

In 2000, the British rock band Radiohead released an album titled Kid A. Anticipation for the record was unusually fervent. The band’s previous album (1997’s OK Computer) had been acclaimed as a minor masterpiece, and Radiohead was widely considered the most commercially popular band still making artistically important music. Kid A was shrouded in pre-release secrecy. No advance copies were available to critics.[*] When it finally came out in October, the reception was complicated: The music was a departure from the group’s previous work, sonically closer to electronica or post-rock. It was less melodic and lyrically esoteric. Kid A became the number 1 album in both the U.S. and the UK, but the standard modifier to describe it was “difficult.” It had been a while since a rock album was given such serious contemplation, and part of that analysis focused on the meaning of the title. The trendy theory, spurred by a minor mention in the British music publication New Musical Express, asserted that “Kid A” was a reference to the first cloned baby, which Radiohead vocalist Thom Yorke believed to already exist. Such a connection made sense to the group’s fan base. Radiohead (and Yorke in particular) had built a nonmusical ethos around alienation, social anxiety, and the escalating oppression from an expanding corporate dystopia. Obsessing over the menace of genetic engineering felt like a predictably Yorkean move. But like so many other things related to clones and cloning, this w...