Nog maar een berg intelectueel geneuzel dan..:
By Andrew Jacobs
Hoya Staff Writer
"Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: When it ceases to be dangerous you don’t want it.” — Anthony Burgess
Over a year ago, Radiohead released the startlingly brilliant Kid A. I never got the chance to review Kid A. But the greatest honor I can give a work of art is to discuss it. If an album can be pulled apart and argued, then there is something deep within it. Whether you like Kid A or not, it forces you to think. You know why you love it, or you were adamant on why you hated it. Either way, Kid A pushes and pulls you all over its landscape, imbedding itself in your mind.
Radiohead’s previous album, OK Computer, was nearly perfect. Everything fit: There was not one note too many, each subtle nuance was there for a purpose that is continually revealed with every listen. But OK Computer was also confining. It cornered its creators and doomed them if they tried to make it again. There is no way to follow up such an album by using the same methods. Repetition in art becomes mundane. If Picasso painted the same picture throughout his entire career, he would not be remembered as brilliant. But like Picasso, Radiohead evolved.
“Where all is but dream, reasoning and arguments are of no use, truth and knowledge nothing.” — John Locke
OK Computer was reality-based. It took a life and went through its daily torments and joys. And at the very end, with the chime of a bell, the person is redeemed. As was said in It’s a Wonderful Life, every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings. But OK Computer’s beauty and undiminished power became a curse for the band instead of a blessing.
Kid A is a dream: Detached, disjointed, menacing and personal, it digs deep into the mind. It is full of images that we only see when we sleep, the strange languages and distorted fragments of voices that we hear in the dark. It destroyed OK Computer’s conventions. Radiohead tore to pieces all that it was so as to reconstruct itself.
“Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.” — Fyodor Dostoyevski
With Kid A, Radiohead dared to take a rarely traveled road in music. It took language and sounds of conventional music and turned them inside out, flipped them around and cut them to pieces. Radiohead re-invented pre-existing sounds. It then created its dreamscape and wintry world. The lulling music box, the pounding of your nightmares, the beautiful images of water and landscapes and then the final goodbye are all twisted into this picture of a mind collapsing in on itself.
“This is nat language in any sinse of the world.” — James Joyce
The album opens with “Everything in its Right Place.” Its ringing chimes of a keyboard played over a skewed and dismantled voice only annunciate its surreal lyrics. It uses its words to express emotions, to purge former demons while avoiding giving the listener too much information. Its words hide their true meaning in metaphors and imagery.
The title track sounds like a warped music box. A beautiful and subtle chiming tune slowly walks over top the electronic beats. Then, Thom Yorke’s distorted voice comes in. His words are barely recognizable as they dispense a rant of strange images. This beautiful song ends with a frightening image with cues the next song wonderfully. “Rats and children follow me out of town/ Come on kids ...”
To immediately follow that menacing image, “National Anthem” rages into the album’s body. Its pounding bass line carries the song along as the other sounds keep appearing and disappearing like ghosts. Then the phantasmagorical horn section blasts in with a chaotic onslaught of sounds. All of this beats the listener into submission asking for more.
But all of this disappears with “How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found.” The disc’s most beautiful number, it floats the listener down a river at night. The stars reflect off the water while the strings shimmer in the background. In Yorke’s own words: “I dreamt I was floating down the Liffey and there was nothing I could do. I was flying around Dublin. And I really was in the Dream. The whole song is my experience of really floating.”
The instrumental and purely ambient “Treefingers” follows the serene “How to Disappear.” It is just a nice interlude separating the first part of the album from the second half. “Optimistic,” like “National Anthem” storms out of nowhere. It is the only time on Kid A where Radiohead three-guitar assault is used. The lyrics contain some of the album’s darkest imagery, talking of death, failure and decay. The rumbling of the guitars accentuates the song’s dark and morbid nature.
“Optimistic” is the start of the brilliant second half of the album which fits together beautifully. “Idioteque” is the centerpiece of the second half. Pure electronic music, it beats and immediately settles into a groove. Yorke’s bizarre words dance with the music.
“Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.” — Albert Camus
“Motion Picture Soundtrack,” the final track, could be described as a love song. On the surface, it is, yet one lonely and scared. It is open with its fear of the outside world; the flowing harps create a majestic quality that keeps the listener in its wintry dream world. And the album ends with the words: “I will see you in the next life.”
“An artist’s only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else’s.” — J.D. Salinger
Radiohead made an uncompromising album with Kid A. It maybe a little pretentious, but so was the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper. The group created an artistic achievement on their own terms. It made the album it needed to make. Kid A is brilliant. It is one of the few albums capable of unrelentingly grasping its listener for an entire hour. When it is over, you don’t have a tune to hum or a lyric to remember. All you have is your feeling. And in the end, that is all that matters.
bron :
http://www.thehoya.com/guide/111601/guide24.cfmOngelooflijk hoe dit album me raakt nog elke keer... Kippevel altijd bij Everything in its Right Place.. en vochtige ogen bij How to Disappear Completely..dan weer Optimistic!...euh..welnu, is wel duidelijk he
laat ik er nu mijn mond maar weer even over houden.