Examining Kid A and retrogression

Kid A turns 10 next year. I never imagined there was, or ever could be, a future from that record. I guess I thought music was over. It was very clearly a completion of something, a sort of crowning societal achievement that started with the first Little Richard LP and stretched all the way to those last twinkling moments of Motion Picture Soundtrack. Every new and innovative idea had and held in the past thirty years all seemed to culminate there, and end there. While OK Computer can be (and is) praised as channelling the zeitgeist of 90s culture, Kid A channels the zeitgeist of all music, and somehow arrives outside and beyond. I figured there was no way to continue going on the way we had been after that record. 'Turn out the lights, the party's over', that kind of thing.
Now I see it was a bit nieve of me to assume say, Puddle of Mudd would somehow feel obligated to incorporate some jazz fusion or ambient drone into their songs just because some (as I'm sure they would say) “faggy British band” pulled off cross referencing Charles Mingus, Mos Eisley Cantina, Bjork, and Ataris all in one record (without a second of it sounding referential) . Yet it's hard not to see my original prognosis slowly come to life before my eyes as musical ideas have certainly seemed to have dried up since then, although it might all be in my head. It works out nicely Kid A was released at the turn of the century, because it lines up a whole parallel discussion between it's presence then and it's absence in the last ten years, and qualifies that speculation as some kind of big picture, 'state of music in the 00s' kind of discussion. What is music in this 'post-Kid A society' (note a dab of self parody there please children), and has it's impact really been as titanic as hysterical hype men like myself have tried to make it out to be?
This will come at no great shock to you that I still believe that Kid A has changed everything about music insofar as it raises the watermark of excellence for all musicians, regardless of chosen genre. But what might surprise you, and certainly surprises me, is that no one has really followed this record's lead. While it certainly opens up a lot of new doors and avenues down for new and interesting ideas, the music of the last decade has really failed to embrace this progress. Quite to the contrary, it seems as if the whole point of Kid A has been undone.
Kid A stands, or at least was meant to stand (we only use cold hard speculation here at 'hep2step'), to counteract the commonly tossed around parlance 'There are no new ideas'. Radiohead deliberately eschewed their comfort zone for want of something bold, fresh, and exciting. 'See kids', Thom Yorke seemed to say (or at least did say to me when he appeared in this dream I had), 'ideas don't have to be dead! Ideas don't have to be rehashes or reheated references! Music will just evolve with technology, and that will open up a world of possibilities!' Well it seems that instead of leading our collective musical culture into a new era of experimentalism and similarly bold, fresh ideas (much like the titular pied piper from the album's titular track), we being the just right combination of pussies and lemmings have for the past nine years huddled in our comfort corner, perhaps scared of the big new world Yorke and Co. briefly allowed us to see. You might say I'm being a little hard on the state of music, and am martyrizing Radiohead. You would be right, asshole.
But I feel that I have a right to diss music from the 00s, because I'm mad at the 00s. The 00s were handed the ladder by Thom Yorke and the 00s slapped it away from him like a spoiled, wicked child (Hey, that's a Radiohead ref – BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM). Instead of taking the general principle of Kid A and expanding it, which to me seems to be the only logical next step in musical evolution, we have collectively said “No Thom Yorke. No thank you. You keep your 'sleepy jack the furniture', we have...” Well, what do we have?
We have REVISIONISM. Yes, REVISIONISM, the crotchety old Conservative guard that seems to creep in just when things get good and progressive in art. The 00s was spent dressing up noble corpses in tacky, garish stage makeup and jewelry...and then casting said corpses in the MTV remake of 'Citizen Kane' starring Zac Efron and Lindsay Lohan.
To be fair, there's something to be said about the artistic merits of perfecting the past. Filmmakers certainly do it, but the medium of film is an overall far more conservative one than music, which (in my opinion) would collapse in on itself if not for the Kid As, the ...And Nicos, etc. And more to the point, there's something so cynical and shallow about revamping older genres. I'm not talking about referencing your favorite band or style of music by having a few similar chord progressions on accident or maybe channelling your favorite singer in the microphone booth. Those things would be somewhat like accidents, and are to be expected within pop music where everything is a sort of evolution of something older. No, I'm talking about literally lifting chord progressions, instrument tones, vocal styles, lyrical topics, and mixing approaches that were all utilized by an older, or perhaps a collection of older artists who did so originally and authentically, and then presenting that flat out plagiarized product as something new and hip.
A great example here is dance punk. With a few notable exceptions, the original dance punk originated 'neath the umbrella of No Wave music, which was (and still is) about as radically artistic and as far removed from anything like commercialism that you can get in music. The first 'big' (I use the term quite loosely) dance punk group was called the Contortions. Their lead singer/ saxophonist James Chance was in several No Wave bands himself – dance punk, or punk funk, or whatever you want to call it (it was then called mutant disco) was designed entirely as artistic statement, as a sort of diametrically opposed embrace of disco and black music which the punks entirely wrote off. Dance punk was also meant to be an entirely modernist style – a sort of ironic reversal, a using of a music that was predominantly for fun, dancing, and partying in a very un-party way. Frankly, the whole concept of dance punk was intended to be anti-commerical and uncomfortable.
So when a band like the Rapture, or any of those other ten billion fad groups that formed as soon as they realized dance punk was burgeoning as a new scene in the early 00s, receives countless recommendations from critics (No. 1 album of 2004? Really pitchfork?) and makes probably millions, or at least close to millions, with corporate partnerships, car commercials, and the like, it kind of runs counterintuitive to the whole spirit of the music that they're making. I can hear you say, “But Jorin, the Rapture play dance funk for a different audience, for different ends. They jettisoned all of the avant garde elements for sleek sexiness. They improved on the genre, which is what you were blabbering on about a minute ago about being the point of music or something. You're acting like a curmudgeon while condemning the music world for curmudgeon-ness. Suck it up already, or at least get your argument to follow logic and reason!”
Yes, I say in return. Good point, well done, and all that jazz. But if I may retort – the Rapture don't acknowledge their music's heritage in the slightest. The journalists never seem to bring it up, and all of the hipsters who download their album and play it at parties to feel smug at the less informed are too young to remember, and are probably too vain or lazy to trouble themselves to study the history of that 'hot new sound'. Why? Because that's all bands like the Rapture, or Vampire Weekend, or MGMT, or The Pains at Being Pure At Heart, or the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, or Crocodiles, and any of the other fucking bullshit scam artists posturing as actual artists are; exploiters of a fickle, attention deficient audience that don't care what that hot new band sounds like as long as pitchfork liked it and everyone in the room wearing American Apparel respects them for knowing about it. You can blame it on the hipsters if you like, you can blame it on pitchfork, you can blame it on the record labels, you can even blame it on the alcohol. No matter the origin of this evil, it exists and accounts for 85-93% of all music released in the past ten years.
So yeah, maybe I do hold Kid A and Radiohead in higher esteem than they perhaps deserve. But it's because, retrospectively, Kid A is looking more and more like that last notable, authentic contribution to music that signified anything. The day that the music industry becomes less shallow, and artists stop plagiarizing from dead genres and dead people who cannot even defend themselves or their art and begin to (at least attempt at) making real actual music again will be the day my ice-incased heart finally melts. Maybe Kid A should be made mandatory to listen to in high school or something...