This Isn't Happening
Radiohead's "Kid A" and the Beginning of the 21st Century
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This Isn't Happening
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Narrated by:
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Angelo Di Loreto
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By:
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Steven Hyden
About this listen
The making and meaning of Radiohead's groundbreaking, controversial, epoch-defining album, Kid A.
In 1999, as the end of an old century loomed, five musicians entered a recording studio in Paris without a deadline. Their band was widely recognized as the best and most forward-thinking in rock, a rarefied status granting them the time, money, and space to make a masterpiece. But Radiohead didn't want to make another rock record. Instead, they set out to create the future.
For more than a year, they battled writer's block, inter-band disagreements, and crippling self-doubt. In the end, however, they produced an album that was not only a complete departure from their prior guitar-based rock sound, it was the sound of a new era, and embodied widespread changes catalyzed by emerging technologies just beginning to take hold of the culture.
What they created was Kid A. At the time, Radiohead's fourth album divided critics. Some called it an instant classic; others, including the U.K. music magazine Melody Maker, deemed it "Tubby, ostentatious, self-congratulatory...whiny old rubbish". But two decades later, Kid A sounds like nothing less than an overture for the chaos and confusion of the 21st century.
Acclaimed rock critic Steven Hyden digs deep into the songs, history, legacy, and mystique of Kid A, outlining the album's pervasive influence and impact on culture, in time for its 20th anniversary. Deploying a mix of criticism, journalism, and personal memoir, Hyden skillfully revisits this enigmatic, alluring LP and investigates the many ways in which Kid A shaped and foreshadowed our world.
©2020 Steven Hyden (P)2020 Hachette BooksCritic Reviews
"Hyden provides a thorough primer on the sound of Kid A...But Hyden truly excels at illuminating the context of Kid A, from the prerelease expectations to the oft-rapturous reviews to the music's ultimate legacy." (The Ringer)
"This Isn't Happening is beyond a mere analysis of Kid A. It is a vast and contextual examination of the world, both inside and outside of Radiohead, leading up to and flowing away from the creation of Kid A and its impact on both the band and culture as a whole. Connecting the record to film, politics, current events, and the cultural morass that comprised the final moments of the '90s, Steven Hyden gleefully and with meticulous absurdity dissects, deconstructs, and decodes the first great artistic enigma of the new millennium." (Alex Ross Perry, writer/director of Her Smell, Listen Up Philip and The Color Wheel)
"This Isn't Happening not only is an excellent way to revisit Kid A but also a springboard for thinking about the shifting fortunes of rock music, the Internet, and the uneasy century we've been living in for the past 20 years." (Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend)
What listeners say about This Isn't Happening
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Sam Hodgson
- 06-01-2022
KID A and its importance as a Zeitgeist
While I live in Australia and discovered the magic of Radiohead in my high school years of the late 2000s, Steven Hyden presents to use in this half review half personal story of how Radiohead's (by "pop"/conventional standards) avant-garde masterpiece KID A became the zeitgeist of the 2000s, with particular reference to the United States.
Steven goes into the many different mythos that surround KID A, from how another reviewer felt the album was an eerie prediction to 9/11, to how the album painted a picture of what life was to be decades before it has become more than modern place today.
He also delves into the history of Radiohead so that newcomers will get an idea of the band.
Though despite being about KID A, there are many callbacks to the song Radiohead are known for outside of the bands fanbase, Creep. Which can be a little confusing considering the book's focus is on KID A rather than their "one hit wonder". Throughout the first chapters too seems Steven can't help but bring up a lot of times either his comparisons or other reviews comparisons of Radiohead's Pablo Honey tracks and U2, which I find more or less distracting as even in Pablo Honey, Radiohead didn't even sound close to what U2 were trying to be in the 90s or before. U2 were trying to be Midnight Oil anyway.
But the story Steven tells us is very interesting to me as it's like him telling me from one fan to another his experiences with this album and what it mean to him and other Americans as it became a Zeitgeist of post-9/11 America. It is interesting to get that comparison as KID A may have played a different role in 2000s Australia, in the time period that I grew up in.
Angelo Di Loreto's narration of the book really feel like I'm listening to a reviewer talk about the albums importance, though Angelo at times does make Stevens words at times sound very snarky with a higher than though attitude, like as if its a snobbishness on why this album is better than we think. But I can imagine this wasn't Angelo's intention, it must just be his narration style.
If you're a huge fan of Radiohead like I am I recommend this book, really gives you a more broad idea on how KID A, one of the biggest surprised in music history became of the most important albums in the medium of music.
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