Radiohead’s Kid A and the Anti-Globalization Movement

 

This month has witnessed the twentieth anniversary of the release of Kid A by Radiohead. The occasion has been marked with numerous press articles and broadcasts, which have served to remind me what a fantastic album it is. I’ve also revisited an essay I wrote about it shortly after it was released, which I’ve now posted on academia.edu.

The essay was written for an MA in Popular Culture that I was then studying at the Open University. The brief was to analyse a piece of music drawing upon various strands of theory explored in the course. Hence it has references to Theodore Adorno, Antonio Gramsci and my personal favourite, Raymond Williams. It’s real theme, however, is the links between Radiohead’s work and the anti-globalization movement. I saw the album as an attempt to capture the spirit of Naomi Klein’s No Logo in sound.

            I still hold with much of what I wrote back then, but what has interested me on revisiting the essay is how it reflects a moment in time. The anti-globalization movement was at its zenith at this point. It really did feel as though it could ‘construct new alternatives to globalisation from the bottom up’.

            Then something happened. On 9 September 2001, the Twin Towers in New York were attacked. This diverted attention from the campaign. On the one hand, western allies were rallying together, with foreign nations choosing to declare ‘we are all Americans now’. On the other hand, some of the amorphous energy of the anti-globalization movement was channelled into opposition to the war in Iraq. Radiohead were swept up in this tide. Their next album, Hail to the Thief, was released in 2003. It swapped the drift of Kid A for targeted attacks on George Bush, and was overall a far less impressive work.

            I argue in the essay that Kid A was never a difficult or obscure album. You just had to be in tune with the emergent ‘structure of feeling’ of that time. It says much, then, that Kid A still resonates. 9-11 might have brought the most intense period of anti-globalization protests to an end, but the impetus behind that movement has not gone away. If anything, the need to disappear completely is felt more keenly now than it was twenty years ago.