I
should be honest. While I am forever wanting to slap people who complained that
Kid A was a precious thing for a band to do (the rationale here being that
the band, knowing they’d sell tens of thousands of copies in their first
week of release no matter what the damned thing sounded like, decided to test
their audience's gullibility and release an album they themselves didn't actually
like: I don't buy this argument, and neither should you, unless you're still young
enough to find cynicism romantic, in which case may God bless you a little more
than He’s apparently seen fit to do as of yet), I don't actually listen to
it much. I think it had some great songs on it, most especially "Idioteque,"
which scares the bejabbers out of me, but in the end it's almost too successful:
it tries to be cold and off-putting and alien and inscrutable and so shiny that
you can't look directly at it, and so it is. It’s also perhaps less fully
realized than Amnesiac, about which more shortly. It's a fair guess that
in five years or so people who listen to Kid A will hear things that absolutely
no-one noticed when the album was new. I hope to be one of those people, and I
promise to report back. It remains the case, though, that Kid A was at
the very least a strong B+, certainly better than most anything else competing
in its class, and that people who yammered on an on about how it was some sort
of big unmusical gob in the faces of the band's loyal fans are full of hot air.
Such persons should be given looks of pity and condescension whenever the opportunity
presents itself.