Radiohead and the Resistant Concept Album: How to Disappear Completely

5. After Years of Waiting, Nothing Came: Amnesiac as Antidote

114 After Years of Waiting, Nothing Came 5 Amnesi ac as Antidote Just as juxtaposing the two halves of Kid A can shed light on the album as a whole, Kid A attains further meaning when compared with Radiohead ’s 2001 follow-up, Amnesiac, recorded during the same sessions but containing songs that on the surface seem somewhat less experimental. Recognizing—or perhaps anticipating—the baffled reaction to Kid A by both fans and critics, the band claimed it would be returning, if not to the old sound, then certainly to more conventional song forms and marketing techniques. In a nod to the record industry, Thom Yorke stated that the band wanted to give Amnesiac “a fair chance within the giant scary cogs of the bullshit machine.”1 Yorke also claimed, somewhat facetiously, before Amnesiac’s release that “with the next one we are definitely having singles, videos, glossy magazine celebrity photoshoots, children’s television appearances, film premiere appearances , dance routines, and many interesting interviews about my tortured existence.”2 His words are a caustic overreaction to the somewhat negative reception of Kid A, and they played on audience and critical expectations. Although the tracks for Amnesiac were not selected from the band’s body of studio work until after Kid A had been released, Radiohead has resisted saying that Amnesiac comprises simply the dross left over after Kid A was compiled.3 Allan F. Moore and Anwar Ibrahim state that Amnesiac is “more a consolidation of Radiohead’s new experimental direction than another stylistic leap. As opposed to the sense of a coherent whole created by both OK Computer and Kid After Years of Waiting, Nothing Came · 115 A, the album is more akin to The Bends through being more a collection of separate songs.”4 The release of several singles from Amnesiac could further the perception of it as a “collection of separate songs,” as it was possible for the singles to be heard apart from the album. James Doheny has argued that the difference between Kid A and Amnesiac is the “difference between coolly surveying ‘new’ influences and reconciling them with your existing music.”5 This impression is dictated as much by the release order of the albums as by their content, since by the time of Amnesiac’s release listeners would have grown somewhat accustomed to, if not completely accepting of, the experimental sound of Kid A. If Radiohead’s previous work is treated as the thesis, and Kid A the antithesis, then Amnesiac can be seen as the synthesis of the two. This perception is, however, as much a byproduct of the listener’s comfort level with the material as any effort on the part of the band. Yorke has said that Amnesiac’s title refers to the Gnostic belief that “when we are born we are forced to forget where we have come from in order to deal with the trauma of arriving in this life.”6 If we believe that both albums have the same subject, which tends to be the assumption given the conflation of the singer (or at least his voice) with the lyricalI -as-subject and in the absence of clearly drawn characters on either, then Amnesiac can be understood as an attempt to forget the trauma of Kid A, in keeping with the subject’s promise on “Motion Picture Soundtrack” to “see you in the next life.” Gnosticism is a school of theology /philosophy that flourished in the early centuries of Christianity and whose central doctrine is that salvation comes through an intuitive knowledge of the mysteries of the universe, ultimately overcoming the “grossness of matter” and returning to the universal spirit.7 Mapping Radiohead’s work onto Gnosticism could lead us to see the albums as an attempt on the part of the subject and the band itself to triumph over the commodification of modern society (expressed as “noise” on Kid A) to return to a “pure” musical state. The title Amnesiac also works as a fulfillment of Radiohead’s promise that the album would be a return to its old sound, a forgetting of the experience of Kid A for both band and listener. However, since the band had recorded the tracks for Amnesiac at the same time as those for Kid A, this is a false construction. It is doubtful that the band somehow recorded all of Kid A’s tracks first, and then recorded all of Amnesiac’s in an attempt to [3.139.82...