Free Radiohead's Kid A by Marvin Lin

A
’s aesthetics are mild-mannered compared with, say, Caroliner Rainbow, Kaoru Abe, or Kevin Drumm — all of whom are so deliciously fringe they’re practically off the musical grid — but this isn’t an argument of “my experimentation is more experimental than your experimentation.” The avant-garde has never been about advancing a single idea, as if uniformly emanating from a center or point in time. It has always been much more dynamic, much more multi-pronged, much more complex due largely to the fact that anything labeled “experimental” is constantly under threat of assimilation. “What is noise to the old order is harmony to the new,” as political economistJacques Attali wrote. But unlike many current “experimental” artists, who dutifully avoid harmony and rhythm to be labeled as such, Radiohead experimented with both new sounds
and
approaches while remaining quintessentially “Radiohead” — which is to say,
Kid A
wasn’t that far off from Radiohead’s aesthetics to lose their fans, and it was fresh enough to garner new ones.
    Radiohead may not have reached the extremes of drone or 1970s minimalism, but its experimentation fit their aims, resonating far beyond obtuse academics and niche aesthetics while introducing small packets of avant-garde sensibilities into the mainstream in a manner wildly different from but no less effective than artists like John Cale or Thurston Moore or Brian Eno or Frank Zappa. The key difference? Radiohead were working on an unprecedented mass scale. Using an enormous platform from which to disseminate new ideas, new sounds, and new approaches, Radiohead didn’t merely evince an already established aesthetic; they mandated a fresh composition built on dexterous hybridization, a cobbled-together approach that was, in retrospect, more culturally fitting than the styles they so blatantly appropriated.
Kid A
wasn’t about weirding out their fanbase;
Kid A
was about change.
    “Change is a basic philosophy in life,” said Ed in an interview with
TIME
(UK). “Life is about continual learning. If you stop then that’s it. Change is your responsibility to yourself.”
    In a time when we were busy playing PlayStation 2 and debating over the US presidential election,
Kid A
played like the soundtrack to mass cultural growth, setting into motion a notable aesthetic expansion to those of us subconsciously begging to be challenged. In context, the album may not be as “difficult” as many had claimed — ten years since its release,
Kid A
sounds so normal to me that I nearly forgot about the initial media shitstorm — but to those of us at the time more in touch with “alt” than “kraut,”
Kid A
was a fucking godsend, expanding our taste into aesthetics we didn’t even know existed.
    * * *
    Charles Ives, often labeled the first “great” American composer, said that “the human ear (not one but all) will learn to digest and handle sounds, the more they are heard and then understood.” He was talking about how music that listeners might initially find repelling has the potential to become a source of pleasure, a phenomenon resulting from a process he called “ear-stretching.”
    Working primarily in the early twentieth century, Ives was a rebel of sorts, composing music with such rhythmic complexity and unrelenting dissonance that many musicians considered them impossible to perform. But his progressive sound wasn’t due to divine inspiration or a crystal ball. In his childhood, his dad would teach him “ear-stretching” exercises, like playing “Swanee River” in the key of C while singing in E-flat. As time went on, the ear-stretching exercises served a purpose beyond his own edification,eventually resulting in compositions that anticipated many of the twentieth-century musical experiments in quarter-tones, aleatoric music, and tone clusters.
    But Ives didn’t just foreshadow future musical developments. Despite coming off like a poetic device to critique