from Kid A (2000)

You don’t even have to say it: I do feel like a sellout having a track from Kid A on here. But I swear it’s not just because Pitchfork listed that album as the decade’s best, because I for one do not believe it was the decade’s best. It certainly might be the most important, given its timing in Radiohead’s career and in the music world of the time (of which I’m surely no expert) in large part because of its well-known anti-commercial grounding. I think it garners a disproportionate amount of its acclaim not for itself but precisely because it was so radically different and because it was an enormous step along the electronic path discovered, if not paved, by OK Computer and, as my buddy Tom would say, other Pink Floyd albums. I think another substantial part of its acclaim comes from people not understanding it, or at the very least, not knowing what to do with it. And since people who think about these things usually think they’re pretty good at thinking about these things, if they don’t understand something, it’s got to be beyond them, but only because it’s ahead of its time, not because it could be terrible. I don’t adhere to that. The album is enjoyable on a sonic-textural level but is not the decade’s best because of that. A good three-quarters of it is not very accessible to me melodically, rhythmically, cerebrally, mathematically, so I chalk those up as weaknesses, not assumed strengths, and I don’t credit Radiohead more for their obscurity, however elitist or reactionary.

Except for the first track.

It rattled my cage the first time I heard those four notes and then the first chord. And I heard them a lot: It was the winter of 2000-01. I had been seeing my girlfriend (call her Godiva) for four months, of which three of those had been spent apart at our respective schools. Spending time with her in those early days made vivid memories, one of which was meeting our circle of mutual friends, of course at Applebee’s. She was driving. It was a cold night, and the leather seats in her maroon Chevy were freezing. And this weird-ass song came on her CD player and it was “Everything In Its Right Place.” And for the rest of the break, I’d often be in the car for those first few notes and the first chord. Looking back, this song, by a band I knew but not well, had quickly come to represent that time in my life: Things were fundamentally different from how they had been before. I was happy but not in any way in which I’d been familiar. And that sounds an awful lot like how Radiohead fans perceive Kid A as an album. I can see now how that all those more or less revolutionary feelings can create awe and respect even without understanding, probably necessarily so.

A side note: This song pops up from time to time, of course, but perfectly so five years after I first heard it, in October 2005. I was looking for my first solo apartment, in Astoria, Queens. For a couple of nights I was staying with a friend of mine (call her Red) while I was doing the searching. One Sunday morning I woke up to overcast skies and cool weather and was planning to drive back to Long Island, my once and temporary home. I got some coffee and had with me Kid A, so I popped it in the CD player. The album found a place at another revolutionary moment in my life, the first time with my first real girlfriend, the second time as I was about to move in to my own place. Specifically, though, the drive out that morning was memorable because it was sensually perfect, dreamlike: I was a little groggy, but had coffee to perk me up. It was daylight but cloudy, cool but I had a thin jacket on. Everything… was in its right place. It was like those mornings when you wake up ideally cool and comfortable in bed and want to stay that way, awake but sleepy, to be conscious of how perfect it all feels in that moment. Life isn’t always like that, and Kid A doesn’t usually hit me as such. But I did stay that way for the forty-five minutes it took to drive home. It was glorious.

1. Green Day, “Basket Case”
2. Melissa Etheridge, “I’m The Only One”
3. Weezer, “Buddy Holly”
4. The Offspring, “Come Out and Play”
5. Bush, “Machinehead”
6. Foo Fighters, “Monkey Wrench”
7. Muse, “Unintended”
8. Radiohead, “Everything In Its Right Place”
9. Stage, “Live Happy, Live With Anorexia”
10. Ludo, “Save Our City”
Dan’s Definitive Top Ten 2010: Introduction