Top 25 Albums Of The Decade (#5)

5) RADIOHEAD – Kid A (2000)

It’s about time we all embraced the internet. These days if you’re not on Facebook, or mySpace, or Twitter (or all three), then you pretty much don’t exist. Newspapers and magazines are all but obsolete; in five years’ time, even the almighty television will be subsumed. Privacy is dead. An individual’s lifetime record can be accessed in about two seconds, while photo “tagging” gives lonesome stalkers more incentive to never leave the basement. And it’s only getting worse. GPS. Web-cams on just about every street corner. The National Security Agency. Identity theft. Mindless grad students starting music blogs. It is well-known that every two years the amount of transistors that can fit on an integrated circuit doubles (see: Moore’s Law). Society, in sum, is losing one of its most important attributes—its capacity to forget. Flashback to the year 2000: dial-up connections, Napster and that video where the monkey is peeing in its own mouth. And, of course, Kid A. “I don’t like it,” one of my friends told me not long after it came out. “It’s scary, and makes me feel like the universe is swirling around me.” Keep in mind, this was before Twitter. But how appropriate—that the arc of Radiohead’s career unerringly paralleled the advent this Second Industrial Revolution, much like The Beatles’ career paralleled that of the Love Revolution. Pablo Honey (1993) = we first heard about it. The Bends (1995) = we saw what it was all about and got excited. OK Computer (1997) = half awe, half Y2K paranoia, and people we knew had it in their homes. Kid A (2000) = acceptance? In a weird way, this album seems like an admission of defeat—cold electronics, programmed beats that don’t really make you want to dance, robot vocals, voided urban labyrinths. This past December, during which time I was coming up with the order of this Top 25, I was walking through the city listening to “How To Disappear Completely” on my iPod. Suddenly I found myself standing at the corner of a street that I’d never been on, with no recollection of how I’d gotten there. The song had ended, my heart was pounding, and my eyes were too frozen for tears. Gradually I pieced it together. What had happened was that I had experienced an EMOTIONAL MOMENT, had been transported for six minutes to a place outside of my mind and my active surroundings. And it probably wouldn’t have happened if I had been listening on my home stereo, all warm and comfortable and fat and happy. Maybe if I’d only owned a Discman, I wouldn’t have brought this particular CD on that day. Likely I owed it all to the fact that human history had evolved to the point of inventing the mp3 player. More than likely, even. So thank God for technology.