Free Radiohead's Kid A by Marvin Lin Page B

a structuring of the subject.
    If music’s structuring of time is a structuring of ourselves, and if our brains are literally being reshaped just by listening to “difficult” music, whether we liked
Kid A
is less interesting a question than whether we’d
eventually
like it. As Colin said in reference to what he called “a series of kickings” that
Kid A
received from the press, “I think we didn’t give people enough time to listen to it as a record when it first came out.” Someof the press were in fact acutely aware of this temporal phenomenon: “
Kid A
may feel cold and ahuman at first, but stick with it for the full 50 minutes: Listen long enough, and a fragile, flickering glow becomes apparent amid the chill” (
L.A. Weekly
). “It’s going to take more than a single listen for the edges to harden into shapes” (the
Vancouver Sun
). “Art-rock nonsense is exactly how
Kid A
sounded to me but, slowly, after giving the disc another chance or two, the album grabbed me to the point that I now love it without reservation” (the
Edmonton Journal
).
    Is it any wonder, then, that
Kid A
, confusing to many upon release, has since become a cultural institution? I’m not saying that
Kid A
is an inherently “great album” that merely took time for people to “understand,” but if conceiving of
Kid A
as an activity helps to emphasize its inherent temporal quality, its investment in movement, its ever-looming pulse otherwise silenced by the din of mass production, then the fluidity should also help to explain why critical reactions changed so suddenly and why the album has since been “normalized” from a weird “experimental” album to one of the defining musical statements of our time.
Kid A
stretched our ears, shaped our brains, and structured our subjectivities. And in the process, our reactions to
Kid A
showed not only how we’re continually adapting to and learning from music as time passes, but also how both music and time are
not
static and universal, and how the pleasures we feel from the former are wholly dependent on the ticking of the latter.

Kid Activism
    I started getting hundreds of letters from teenage Radiohead fans all over the world, asking how they could get involved in globalization activism.
    Naomi Klein
    One of the oddest moments in Radiohead’s storied history occurred during a nationally televised poolside performance in, of all places, the Hamptons.
    It’s 1993, and because MTV is redesigning its New York studio, its summer programming locale is shifted to a beach house in the so-called “playground for the rich.” Radiohead nail their scheduled performance of “Creep” on their second take and, at the request of several production assistants, launch into a surprise performance of “Anyone Can Play Guitar.” During the song’s final moments, Thom — dressed in a black-and-white-striped shirt and fashioning a bleach-blonde ponytail blowing ever so gently in the wind — mutters the song’s final lyrics before diving headfirst into the pool.
    He almost drowns. While the rest of the band finishes the song with the energetic showmanship expected of “grunge” rockers at the time, Thom struggles to pull himself out of the pool, his shin-high Doc Martens weighing him down like anchors. He is choking and grabbing for a mic cord when two MTV staff members pull him out of the water. As MTV production assistant Adam Freeman recounted, “Thom managed to make it to the lip of the stage but couldn’t climb up. His boots were filled and he was choking. Tim [an MTV staff member] and I rushed on to the stage just as Thom had grabbed the only thing he could — the live microphone cord. Having a basic understanding of rudimentary science, Tim and I slapped the sparking mic out of his hand and pulled this wet cat of a singer back onto the stage.”
    “We swore that would be the last time we’d do that fucking thing,” the wet cat of a singer would later say.
    While the episode has