Screamadelica vs Kid A

I would argue that Radiohead are hugely innovative - when it comes to marketing strategies, packaging, presentation, promotion, how they present themselves. I'm not being facetious at all, I think they're absolutely brilliant at that, through their hatred/distrust of traditional media, they raised different forms of promotion, especially through technology, and interaction with their fans to a kind of artwork. Which is really innovative and creative.

But I do genuinely believe that anyone who thinks that their *music* is actually innovative just hasn't had a very wide exposure to enough music, whether that's Aphex Twin *or* the obscure early electronic composers that Jonny likes to namedrop in the same way that he likes to pretend he's never been influenced by Pink Floyd, oh no, not at all, ever.

But I think that's an incredibly narrow definition of music innovation, then? I mean, for better or worse, I think what I would give Radiohead the most credit for is hitching all of those influences both structurally and sonically to plain old pretty songs in a way that actually worked.

I suppose the broader problem is the attempt to locate definitive firsts.

I'm sure someone will come up with some evidence to make me look like a hypocrite but I don't really think of music in these terms anymore.

If an artist's aesthetic is worth grasping then it's worth grasping in its totality as opposed to the sum aggregate of influences.

(the above directed at the hypothetical fans WCC talks about rather than people ITT)

eh, i've listened to a lot of aphex twin, early electronic composers and pink floyd. kid a still strikes me as one of the most successfully and satisfyingly "innovative" big rock albums of the last quarter century, with little competition. i suppose framing it as rock is a cheat in certain respects, but i don't think they ever fully escaped that context.

this all seems like eye of the beholder stuff, tbh

I mean, obviously Radiohead have a lot of fans who think they invented music in general. Their fanbase is enormous, so obviously there are a ton of 12-cd types and a ton of actual teenagers who have yet to be exposed to much music. But I don't think that that means you have to take what they say and run in the total opposite direction, either. Or feel like you have to apologize for being a fan of Radiohead because some of their fans aren't particularly musically knowledgeable and might make ridiculous claims about them. They also have a ton of fans who have a deep knowledge of music who still think that Radiohead put a new or interesting spin on things. I don't think claiming that nothing they have done is remotely innovative is particularly perceptive either, and it just reads as apologism or shame at being a Radiohead fan to me.

Oh quite a lot of discussion since my earlier post. WCC - I don't hear In Rainbows as a rawk album per se; I mean 15 Step is still very much electronic and only Bodysnatchers feels like a return to rock traditionalism. The rest is ambient mixed with songwriting, but assimilated well whereas Kid A sounds like a clunky experiment at times.

The only thing this thread is telling me is that I really ought to give XTRMNTR a better chance. Always thought Vanishing Point was their true masterpiece.

Also this whole 'calling out Radiohead for ripping off IDM is bad and wrong' thing - well I can see how it's an argument that's been driven into the ground, but Kid A really IS MAJORLY influenced by Autechre et al. There's no denying it. In retrospect though, there is a lot more going on in there than mere warpmania as I'd originally thought back when I first heard it. It's easier to recognise this nowadays because Warp and the IDM sound is generally less pervasive whereas back in 2001, Aphex was releasing 'Druqks', Autechre 'Confield', Plaid 'Double Figure' etc, so Radiohead, this big rock band, coming in and saying 'look at us, we can do this too' (and arguably doing it worse) felt like tokenism at the time. In that way it's aged considerably better for me, now I cAn stand back and appreciate it for more than the sum of its parts.

I think it's a mistake to equate stated influence with being an attempt to actually BE that thing. Autechre certainly influenced their direction but I hardly think that's equivalent to them trying to transliterate LP5 into being a rock record and somehow failing or somehow only creating a weak copy or only pasting the influence on.

There's little of Kid A that actually reminds me of the IDM that people often compare it to. It's an ingredient, but far from the only one. I think people took Radiohead speaking openly about their influences as a convenient opportunity to tear down the album by comparing it unfavorably to music it honestly sounded very little like. Songs like "The National Anthem," "How to Disappear Completely," "Morning Bell," & "In Limbo" are emblematic of the record's sound, but obviously couldn't be remotely compared to AFX or Autechre.

Agree with this. There's more to it than that yes. Although when I walked into the record shop that October morning and heard the track 'Kid A' playing over the tannoy (it being my first impression of their hailed new direction), my immediate reaction was one of suspicion, and it took a good while to shake it off. As I say, it wasn't until I dug it out again many years later that I was able to appreciate it outside of that zeitgeisty context.

I think what I would give Radiohead the most credit for is hitching all of those influences both structurally and sonically to plain old pretty songs in a way that actually worked.

I would completely agree with this. It's the fundamental basis for creating good quality music.

But that is not "innovation" in any understanding of the word.

And if it *does* count as innovation, then, quite frankly, Primal Scream qualify as just as innovative as Radiohead, and that's just crazy talk.

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But I'm kind of curious as to why Radiohead continue to get so much credit for "innovation" when anyone who suggested that Primal Scream were innovative would get laughed out of the room. Is it because of the wider audience, that the majority of people who listen to Primal Scream are already familiar with Can and club music and free jazz? I don't think that Radiohead hide their thefts better - Thom pretty much admits flat out that when he's stuck for a melody he goes to REM or U2 - is it that the things they nick are more or less cool or naff (depending on who you ask)? Thom Yorke spouts easily as dodgy political views as Bobbie Gillespie, but Bobby gets called on it, while Thom gets made a spokesman? I guess with Primal Scream it's the drugs and the steady run of terrible albums. While Radiohead avoided drugs like the nice middle class boys they were, and had the middle-management-shake-hands-and-unit-shift approach to cracking the States?

I know it's kind of random to "compare and contrast" the careers of any two bands or two albums in that way, but it's just this sense that these two albums did similar things, yet one band ended up canonised and the other ended up a laughing stock - even thought the laughing stock's album, to my prejudiced ears, is the better album. But I guess that's it. Primal Scream's reputation almost entirely hangs on Screamadelica, while Radiohead have not put out a dodgy album since their debut.

I dunno. I don't feel like I'm being apologetic. It's just that sometimes loving a band means accepting their limitations and not over-romanticising them.

Radiohead have never u-turned on their chosen style/aesthetic the way Primal Scream did throughout the nineties (and, as far as I'm aware, thereafter, though I haven't actually heard the subsequent albums). Rightly or wrongly that gets held against PS.

Rock crit tends to consider innovation and fashion as very separate and, typically, diametrically opposed - that is, it's impossible to be innovative by being fashionable. If something is innovative that is also fashionable, then it is because the fashion coalesced around it.

Of course this is nonsense: fashion and "innovation" (however you choose to define it) are in dialogue with one another, and as much innovation is produced by following the dictates of fashion as is produced by striking out on your own or swimming against the tide.

I think you and I have very different ideas of innovation then, because frankly I don't think it's even in short supply. I would happily call Primal Scream innovative, I just don't like their innovations. x-post

I don't think it would be laughable to suggest Screamadelica was innovative. Sure there were tracks that had sounded like its tracks before, but as a complete package, released by an indie rock band and having mainstream success - I can't think of another example prior to its release.

I guess also I should have raised the issue of innovation as perceived marker of quality on the Autechre vs Aphex Twin thread, when several people were saying that they preferred Autechre to Aphex Twin ~because they were more innovative~ or words to that effect. (I'm paraphrasing, which I shouldn't do on ILM, because my memory is poor.)

I do think that there has been so much Autechre discussion on ILM recently that Autechre *would* will a poll against a kitten picture at the moment, while we're (read: I) am mostly talked out about Aphex Twin, that I have done my revisiting and have nothing left to say about him until he releases another album.

But it's that idea of "innovation" as marker of quality, rather than accepting that something can be good without being particularly innovative, and still be incredibly good. Maybe this is a straw man, but I just seem to forever be encountering that argument, especially on IDM threads, and it's just perplexing to me.

I dunno, I guess I need to think about this dialogue of innovation and fashion. I don't think that innovation comes from striking against fashion *or* from following fashion. Innovation, genuine innovation, is something that occurs when a new element enters the picture - like I said, new technology or new techniques. Or that kind of weird quantum leap. It's kind of distinct, to me, from the process of synthesis, refinement, reaction against but which most musical genres form, splinter, regroup. Therefore I think of innovation as something genuinely rare.

x-post I guess that's it. That it's not laughable to think of Screamadelica as "innovative" but it is laughable to think of Primal Scream that way.

While, with Radiohead, it feels like it's almost the opposite. Like, when it comes down to it, there isn't a single Radiohead album that I can point to and say "that's genuinely innovative" in the way I can with Screamadelica, but they still somehow have this ~reputation~ for being somehow "innovative"?

(Yes, it's Rockist to speak of albums, but these are the most Rockist of Rock bands we are discussing.)

I find your stance a bit weird in the sense that you argue that innovation isn't important but at the same time it's fairly clearly an important issue to you?

it's a recovering catholic kind of thing maybe?

Well, the main reason I was comparing Screamadelica to Kid A rather than XTRMNTR was because those were the albums that happened at the same point in the bands' relative careers

I've never actually thought about it like this. To me, Screamadelica is Primal Scream's OK Computer - bolt from the blue, instantly canonized album. If I had to compare Kid A to any one Scream album, in terms of the bands' career arc, it would be Give Out But Don't Give Up, which is pretty much the polar opposite of Kid A in terms of musical intention but they share something in common, namely following up the hugely successful career-defining album with a record whose critical reception was more along the lines of "why have they done this?" The idea that both bands were sullying their legacy by doing the opposite of what critics wanted at the time.

And yes, as mentioned upthread the contemporary critical reception of Kid A was lukewarm at best although it's worth remembering that UK musical criticism was on the verge of a hugely reactionary period that Kid A just didn't fit into. It fits much better if you look at it in the context of current music - I don't think anyone anticipated how integrated into the dance music 'conversation' Radiohead would become, albeit the FACT Magazine Big Serious Face end of dance music. When Thom Yorke DJs he's usually playing people like Martyn and Untold, you'll routinely hear Eraser-era Thom songs cropping up on commercial mix albums by Ellen Allien or whoever, the last Apparat album was basically his attempt to make a Radiohead album. There's an exchange of musical ideas going on that feels current, whereas the whole Warp/IDM thing was pretty much played out by the time Kid A came out (and I don't even think Kid A sounds like Warp, particularly). I wasn't in a position to be paying any attention in 1991 but Screamdelica retrospectively feels much more of a piece with what was going on at the time than Kid A, but maybe that's because it's Weatherall's album really, not Primal Scream's.

Also, Kid A should have come as a surprise to absolutely no one in 2000, there is an absolute shit-ton of electronic music DNA in OK Computer, and even Big Rock era Radiohead had a better appreciation of rhythm than they're usually given credit for.

And Primal Scream, during the Kevin Shields/Mani era, when they hit a really good night, were actually the better live band

They were an exceptionally good live band around that time. I remember them doing evil, evil things to Kowalski which involved huge amounts of bass and guitar noise and enormous thudding drums. I've seen them at festivals intermittently since and they haven't come close to that, although any rock band's sound would suffer from suddenly removing Kevin Shields from the equation.

xposts - Screamdelica certainly feels innovative from within the context of rock music, but then so does Kid A. Viewing either from an electronic or dance music context doesn't strike me as being a particularly fruitful approach.

Also, Kid A should have come as a surprise to absolutely no one in 2000, there is an absolute shit-ton of electronic music DNA in OK Computer, and even Big Rock era Radiohead had a better appreciation of rhythm than they're usually given credit for.

Agreed.

xpost I dunno, I think Screamadelica is a useful album from a dance music perspective. Even dance fans occasionally want the big celebratory narrativistic ties-everything-together album qua album.

Which may also be part of why so many people (including but, crucially, not limited to rock fans) overrate The Chemical Bros' Surrender vis a vis the other of the duo's first 4 albums.

Radiohead were also an exceptionally good live band around 2000 though. One of the reasons I've never really liked Kid A that much is that a lot of it feels half-finished, most of those songs sounded much better and more developed and in some cases completely different when they played them live.

I had never thought anyone overrated Surrender particularly. Hey Boy, Hey Girl yes, but not the album as a whole, although it is very consciously reaching for Screamadelica territory without getting there (the same is true for most of the subsequent Chems albums).

Oh it seems everyone I've ever met IRL thought Surrender their best album by a mile.

And it seemed everyone at my school who took music seriously pronounced it the album of 1999.

x-posts it's not that innovation is important to me, I'm just perplexed and trying to puzzle through why it's something that others use as such a marker of quality that it would render Autechre as somehow better than Aphex Twin! Ha ha. I get stuck on words, concepts, and like to work through them at length. It doesn't make them important to me. It just means that right now, I want to talk about this until I understand what it means. Maybe that makes me semi-autistic or perhaps even psychotic by the qualities of that other thread.

What makes a band "good" is obviously a hugely important question. I just see "innovation" as a weird way of judging merit. And I'm trying to puzzle through why it is or isn't important.

It's like... thinking about the history of science and/or technology and the different ways that "progress" is made. This is constant question, a constant dialogue. Is change and/or "progress" something that happens in slow increments, that kind of bob-and-tack that sailboats use to travel against the tide, go with a fashion, make refinements, then have an about-face and tack back the opposite direction, and when looked at from a distance, this wiggly wavey line looks like it's heading in a single direction. But then there *are* those kind of "great leaps forward" where everything changes overnight, someone does something that literally no one has ever heard or seen before, and it's groundbreaking. And the latter is what I'd call actual innovation. And there's this narrative that this, the "great leap forward" is what is important - in science or in music or anything. As opposed to the slow and steady process of mutation and refinement. Which is not actually innovation in the same way, but the kind of picking up the pieces of the great leap forward - the Cambrian Explosion that follows the initial out-of-nowhere innovation - that is also important. Maybe more important, in terms of making this amazing new mutation actually usable or popular or whatever.

My science metaphor is getting a bit thin now. I'm going to come back to DC's post because while I agree with most of it, but disagree with some of it.

LOL, Surrender was basically where I got off the Chems bus. I remember it as being a huge disappointment compared to the first two, though I've come to like it more on revisiting it.

Also, Kid A should have come as a surprise to absolutely no one in 2000, there is an absolute shit-ton of electronic music DNA in OK Computer, and even Big Rock era Radiohead had a better appreciation of rhythm than they're usually given credit for.

I disagree. Big difference between the trip hop influences on OK Computer and the full-on where'd-Tom-go? abstraction of, say, Kid A's title track. It's not like Radiohead just tricked out some regular songs with nice dance rhythms - they took a new approach to structure, arrangements, everything. I went to the playback and I remember a definite sense of surprise all round. Afterwards people differed on whether they liked it or not but nobody was saying, oh yeah, of course, I saw that coming. Not a total surprise but a significant one.

I suppose what I'm saying is that Kid A brought something to the fore that had been latent in the band for some time that a lot of people had overlooked. The structure of Paranoid Android is all over the place and as distinctive an approach as anything on Kid A, but because it's anchored in guitar-bass-drums it was maybe easier to get a handle on. And there are sonic details on OK Computer, most notably the quartertone strings at the end of Climing Up The Walls, tucked away at in the songs that, on Kid A, they'd feel a lot more comfortable foregrounding.

They were also talking a lot about electronic music from OK Computer onwards. And actually focussing on electronic music is to overlook a lot of the other stuff that's going on in Kid A - jazz, contemporary classical etc. But yes I'd agree that the treatment of all that source material was a surprise, rather than the source material itself necessarily.

I just had a really depressing thought, on DC's comparing Kid A to Give Out... that if Give Out But Don't Give Up had been released in about 2001, it would have been universally acclaimed as the front-runner of the "New Rock Revolution" instead of being rightly laughed at. And I have the uncomfortable feeling that maybe Primal Scream were even more forward thinking in their retrofetishism that I'd given them credit for.

But I think DL touches on something that I've said repeatedly about Kid A - that when people are kind of feeling with this language of calling it "experimental" or "avant-garde" or whatever (things that to me, imply innovation) what they really meant was that it was an incredibly ABSTRACT album.

It was the musical equivalent of a band switching from lugubrious late Victorian oil painting to colour field abstraction. Which makes sense in a context where there was Impressionism and Post-Impressionism and Cubism and Expressionism in between, being done by other artists.

But you know, for all their talk about "oh Airbag was influenced by DJ Shadow" I don't think that stuff really surfaced until after OK Computer. Though maybe that was down to how the album got edited. Kid A makes sense if you'd heard the Airbag EP and things like "Meeting In The Aisle" but they were signposts that only seemed obvious in retrospect because the Airbag EP also had bursts of big rock noise on it, too.

matt otm, this was not that shocking to young fanboy ears, it didnt really represent a qualitatively different sort of leap from the one theyd already taken from the bends to okc. they'd already laid the ground in interviews, aforementioned phil selway talk about dj shadow influence on the airbag drums, thom saying they were frustrated they "weren't musical enough" (or similar) to do subterranean homesick alien how they'd like (jazzy & w/ a rhodes i think), their trajectory was p clear.

this was also post-homogenic

I find it puzzling when people say IDM was 'played out' in 2001. Most of the associated acts hit their critical peaks that year or thereabouts. If anything it was Kid A that created the wilderness period for Warp-style music - once the big rock bands were doing it, what was the point? Soon after, Warp started releasing more and more rock-format stuff. Can't help thinking there was a direct correlation.

Kid A came out in 2000.

I've said this a million times recently, but it still blows my mind that Drukqs came out the year after Kid A. It just shows how perception of time just gets completely warped and turned around by one's own memories and experiences. Because Kid A feels (not sounds, just feels) something quite recent, while Druqks feels like it happened in another era.

I'd have sworn blind that most of Aphex Twin's work came out before I moved back to the UK but the "big hits" as it were happened after.

xpost yeah if anything the fact that so many IDM acts had high profile releases in 2001 would have been assisted by Kid A rather than undermined. But I doubt it had much impact either way. 2001 IDM was really a confluence of all sorts of things (glitch, tigerbeat, microhouse, dub-techno, nu-electro etc.) of which the big Warp acts were really only well-publicised the tip of the iceberg. What happened post 2001 was the entrenchment of that burgeoning generational change.

Warp getting more rock oriented during the 00s was an effect, not a cause: the effect of it not really knowing which way the electronic music currents were going and deciding to diversify its risk instead.

Kompakt did a similar thing in an equivalent point in its lifecycle.

(How did I manage to spell Drukqs 3 different ways in the same post? And I know how that album is spelled, unlike mnay other words.)

*many

Blimey, it was 2000 wasn't it. Bang goes that theory. Must've got mixed up with Amnesiac.

I sometimes think it would be quite interesting to have people put together a "personal music timeline" of when they think "landmark" albums came out - either in relationship to the year, or in relationship to each other. And I wonder if it distorts people's sense of "influence" when they make those kinds of memory mistakes or miswrites.

You're not wrong about Druqks feeling a lot longer ago than Kid A. Mind you, I remember feeling like OK Computer was a 'recent' album several years after it came out.

I've generally got frighteningly accurate recall of when things came out. Drukqs was after Em and I met; Kid A was still at university. Kid A maybe feels more recent because Radiohead have continued their narrative and dialogue in the public sphere, whereas AFX had retreated from view to most people, and thus feels like an artist from another time.

Screamdelica never did anything for me. I have a huge list of classics from this era that never did anything for me, Drukqs included. What else? Spacemen 3, Sonic Youth, Splint...

Kid A kicked off my second year of university, Amnesiac closed it. Druqks started my 3rd year (or at least it must have but I swear I was listening to it before that)...

I'm not going to stick around for this debate cos my knowledge of both RH and PS is pretty minimal, but it seems like the rock band does club music was pretty much innovated by the Beatles "Tomorrow Never Knows".

Kid A and Amnesiac pretty much bookended a horribly abusive relationship, and one of the worst time periods of my life, I think I've just blotted reference points because I either don't want to revisit that time, or else I was drinking so heavily to cope that I can't remember.

I think maybe why Drukqs codes as earlier as I tend to think of it coming right on the heels of Windowlicker, when in truth there was about 2 years between them.

Thread made me dig out Vanishing Point, which is half MUCH GREATER than I ever remember it being, and half much much worse than I thought. It is, as usual, Bobbie Gillespie who ruins these great grooves by turning up. Again, the best songs are things like "If They Move Kill 'Em" where he does not participate at all.

I want to dig out Echo Dek now, but of course I can't seem to find the damn CD. Hmmmm.

How do I spoil my ballot paper?
― Chewshabadoo, Saturday, May 12, 2012 5:04 AM (Yesterday)

irl lol

Oh yes, I love Echo Dek.

Another of those albums where the remix album is actually better than the real release.

An old style ILM thread, long posts abound..

Am I the only one who still can't choose?

Drukqs feels like longer ago because drill and bass in general just feels like such a late 90s thing, it's had virtually no impact on music from the intervening 10 years, whereas you couldn't say the same about Kid A no matter how anachronistic it felt at the time.

I think WCC is onto something wrt abstraction, but then a lot of the source material Radiohead were drawing on is abstract as hell. But while the abstraction may have explained why listeners were nonplussed at the time that was articulated as "where did the guitars and tunes go?"

I knew several people who, at the time of Kid A's release, were doing big arm-waving "aren't they amazing, innovotaive future electronic muisc wooh!" dancing; generally people who'd paid no attention whatsoever to anything else electronic. Which I found annoying. But that was just my social circle.

guess also I should have raised the issue of innovation as perceived marker of quality on the Autechre vs Aphex Twin thread, when several people were saying that they preferred Autechre to Aphex Twin ~because they were more innovative~ or words to that effect.

who was saying this?