[The following is an abbreviated version of a chapter entitled “Kid Activism” from Marvin Lin’s forthcoming 33 1/3 book on Kid A, reworked specifically for PopMatters. The book is due November 25, and you can pre-order it now through Continuum.]
Around Kid A‘s release, Radiohead’s views on the mainstream music industry was at its most tumultuous. While the industry thrives on pearly-toothed celebrities regurgitating an established aesthetic, the problem Radiohead had was one of appropriation, in which the industry would focus on Thom’s “tortured” personality while presenting facsimiles of Bends-era Radiohead through their distribution channels. But everything changed once OK Computer proved both critically and financially successful. After seeing how horrifying the industry could be during the OK Computer tours, Radiohead realized they no longer had to be at the whim of the music and media industries; on the contrary, they were in the prime position to reshape these industries, to subvert them from within.
But how exactly does a band so knowledgeable and impassioned voice their gripes within an industry that controls the means and modes of communication? How do Radiohead engage with the industry without getting swallowed whole?
One way is to fight for more cultural space. Because Radiohead had learned from the media tornado of OK Computer, they were at that point better able to see through the industry mechanizations that threatened to co-opt anything and everything it found beneficial. And given Radiohead’s inability to assert their own context throughout most of their career, it’s not surprising that they’d finally use their cultural potency to try to regain control over both their identity and their artistic direction. Radiohead had been face-to-face with co-option many times, and Kid A was an opportunity for Radiohead to create their own cultural spaces in which to artistically and politically express themselves.
From July 1999 to June 2000, Ed maintained an online diary on Radiohead’s official website. The primary purpose was to update fans on the recording process for Kid A and Amnesiac, but this being Radiohead and all, Ed would also occasionally veer into politics. On February 25 — seven months before Kid A hit the streets — he posted an update on the frequently mentioned track “Cuttooth”. He concluded with a short but pointed request: “please read ‘No Logo‘ by Naomi Klein.” Given the abruptness and unexpectedness of the recommendation, it was hard not to take note.
No Logo is an anti-corporate treatise that arrived in stores in early 2000, roughly a month after the pivotal WTO (World Trade Organization) Ministerial Conference protests in Seattle. The first three sections of the book intimate a time in which corporations are accountable to shareholders, not the public; an environment in which stained corporations like AIG, Philip Morris, Enron, and WorldCom can rebrand themselves to evade unfavorable perception; a marketplace in which you’re buying cool, not a shoe. Klein finishes the book with an optimistic chapter entitled “No Logo,” which gives voice to the anti-corporate activists who she believes are “sowing the seeds of a genuine alternative to corporate rule.” As Klein concludes: “[The demand] is to build a resistance — both high-tech and grassroots, both focused and fragmented — that is as global, and as capable of coordinated action, as the multinational corporations it seeks to subvert.”
The book struck a deep chord with Ed, so deep in fact that Kid A was at one point rumored to be titled No Logo. As he commented in an interview with Q, “No Logo gave one real hope. It certainly made me feel less alone. I must admit I’m deeply pessimistic about humanity, and she was writing everything that I was trying to make sense of in my head. It was very uplifting.”
The ideas expressed in No Logo segue perfectly into Radiohead’s attempt to create their own cultural spaces during Kid A. Because Radiohead and their management wanted to avoid the publicity-by-numbers promotional machine, they decided not to release any official singles during the marketing of Kid A. This meant no promo cycles, no B-sides, no videos, no exhausting world tours. In place of conventional videos, the band disseminated throughout the internet a slew of promotional “blips” — 10- to 40-second animated shorts created by visual artists The Vapour Brothers and Shynola.
Part of defining new cultural spaces is to avoid those that are most susceptible to spin, so it’s not surprising that the band limited interviews to only a handful of publications. In fact, it would have been less had Jonny not convinced Thom of their responsibility to the fans. And even when they did agree to an interview, Radiohead didn’t just let the press call the shots. For example, instead of doing a routine photo shoot for Q, Radiohead submitted distorted, computer-manipulated images of each band member, where facial features were embellished and elongated, and eye colors changed. Why these images? According to Thom, “I’m fed up of seeing my face everywhere. It got to the point where it didn’t feel like I owned it. We’re not interested in being celebrities, and others seemed to have different plans for us. I’d like to see them try to put these pictures on a poster [giggles].”
Radiohead’s subversion reached a national television audience on October 14 with an appearance on Saturday Night Live, where they performed “The National Anthem” and “Idioteque”. As if the music wasn’t “weird” enough for a mainstream audience, Radiohead used this opportunity to get political: during the show’s end credits, when the SNL cast groups with the guests to wave goodbye, Thom boldly held up a “Let Ralph Debate” placard, in reference to the exclusion of then Green Party candidate Ralph Nader from the 2000 US presidential election debates.
Outside of the off-the-cuff commentary in Ed’s diary, other areas of Radiohead’s website clued us in to some of their more obvious political passions. Featuring links to organizations like Free Tibet, the World Development Movement, People & Planet, Fair, and Corporate Watch, the website served as an ideal medium for Radiohead to communicate their political concerns directly to fans, unmediated by a transnational conglomerate. The unabashed politics on their website expanded outward too: Ed marched in protest against the WTO in April 2000, while Thom, alongside Bono and Youssou N’Dour, made an appearance at the G8 Summit with the Jubilee 2000 campaign to cancel Third World debt.
But the political gesture that garnered the most controversy was the Kid A “tent tour,” Radiohead’s first major trek in three years. The tour stood in direct opposition to the commodified, industry-puppet tours for OK Computer, as Radiohead didn’t allow any advertising or corporate sponsorship in the portable, custom-built tent. Indeed, if there was ever a clear example of Radiohead wanting to claim their own cultural space, it was on this tent tour. As Jonny explained in a radio interview: “We don’t want to play in those venues that are designed for sport and have Coca-Cola adverts everywhere. That’s not what we want to do really. We’ll make our own neutral space that’s got nothing in it and play some concerts like that.”
The no-logo tent tour ignited a wider discourse on the politics of Radiohead.
Not everyone was impressed. More than just solidifying Radiohead’s anti-globalization sentiments, the no-logo tent tour ignited a wider discourse on the politics of Radiohead, where finding contradictions in their political convictions was like finding Waldo.
Similar to the criticisms lobbed at No Logo author Klein, in which she was lambasted for publishing an anti-corporate book through a multinational corporation, Radiohead were (and still are) criticized for being whining hypocritical millionaires. As Douglas Wolk wrote in CMJ, “The punch line is that, despite Radiohead’s all-permeating abhorrence of the ultimate rock-band banality, the consumerist machine […], they’ve got a more finely honed brand identity than any other band of the moment.” Q writer Danny Eccleston shared a similar view: “Logo-free tents or not, Radiohead are bound by contract to the vast global entertainment conglomerate EMI/Time Warner/AOL [sic], and their records do battle with Britney Spears and her fellow synergised icons in the marketplace.” And in an essay about the “improbability” of Radiohead’s resistance, Davis Schneiderman asked, “How can we be sure that Radiohead, for all of its deliberately muddled articulation and innovative studio work, is not a toll of this same endlessly looping beat of the marketplace?”
Even Efrim Menuck, of Canadian group Godspeed You! Black Emperor, had some choice words about the band:
“We don’t know Radiohead, we’ve never met them or communicated with them in any way, some people in Godspeed like their music others don’t . . . the fact remains, Radiohead are owned, part and parcel, by a gigantic multinational corporation, and their critique of global corporatism is tainted by that one harsh reality.”
But if you’re worried about Radiohead’s feelings, don’t be: you’re more likely to see them nodding their heads in agreement with these criticisms than weeping under the covers. And despite the fact that many of the marketing decisions were made by the label (and not the band), the contradictions of a politicized artist feeding off the industry it openly critiques isn’t lost on Radiohead: “We’re screaming hypocrites. No, we are!” admitted Thom to The Wire.
“I’ve had a very privileged upbringing,” said Thom to Mojo. “I’ve had a very expensive education. And it took me years to come to terms with that. A long, long, long time.”
That Radiohead have only continued to prosper both financially and socially could indicate how the seemingly exponential well of do-good-ism from the Radiohead camp may be directly related to this recognition of cultural sway. There’s no hiding the fact that the bulk of Radiohead’s demands since OK Computer — the marketing of Kid A, the limited touring, the “green” requirements, the distribution method of In Rainbows — were only made possible by their cultural and economic clout. They voice this luxury rather frequently in interviews. “People think we’re control freaks, and maybe we are a bit,” said Ed. “But there’s an awful lot that’s just horrible about the process of the music business, and when you’re a young band, you can’t do much about it. Now we can. And we’ve stopped having that conquer-the-world sort of feeling. It’s less important to us than doing things our way.”
Who could blame them? In a time when the channels of mass communication are controlled by only a handful of conglomerates, when subversion has become so dull it couldn’t penetrate butter, when opposition to the dominant culture is too often expressed through commodity (buy these pre-ripped jeans and you too can be subversive!), it’s no wonder that Radiohead have always kept the industry at arm’s length. Appropriation threatens them at every corner, and there has been little wiggle room to freely communicate their ideas, political or otherwise; the industry needs a band like Radiohead to sell both the disease and the cure, and Radiohead know this. While critics like culture writer Thomas Frank believe there is no real solution to this problem but to maintain oppositional autonomy, others like Radiohead feel that some level of engagement is necessary to fight the system within the system, to show faith in the masses to affect mass change. As Johnny Temple, bassist for Girls Against Boys, wrote in his essay “Noise from Underground”: “Punks, for their part, need to stop romanticizing isolation, or they may find their political endeavors, along with their music, doomed to perpetual obscurity.”
But can Radiohead live with the contradiction? As Thom told Uncut:
“Not really, I’m pretty touchy about it. But if you want to actually have your record in a shop, then you’ve got no way round it because you have to go through major distributor and they’ve all got deals and blah blah blah. There isn’t a way around it. Personally, one of the reasons that I wanted to be in a band was actually to be on the high street. I don’t want to be in a cupboard. I write music to actually communicate things to people.”
Clearly, Radiohead’s desire to communicate their ideas trumps the threat of appropriation and commodification. Swallow the contradictions, and the critiques will circulate more widely and more vigorously than ever possible outside of the mainstream. As with the band’s seventh album, 2007’s In Rainbows, Radiohead were not trying to disengage from the industry; they were simply engaging with it on their own terms, underscoring the symbiotic/contradictory dialectic of their subversions within the very industry that sustains them.
Which is precisely where we get to the stakes of Radiohead’s Trojan Horse approach to the industry: given all the energy the band puts into the process of releasing and promoting their music, is their subversive behavior even effective? According to Klein in a 2001 interview with Hot Press magazine:
“I guess the testimony for me is that I know, in a way that I think few people can know, how much they have politicized their fans because they come to my lectures. There are always three people in Radiohead T-shirts in the front row of every lecture I do. Like, every single … and I get a lot of letters from them as well, particularly after Kid A first came out, saying, “You know, I usually don’t read books like this, but I did, because I read that the band read it.” And I think that everybody needs entry points, everybody needs doorways. […] I have a tremendous amount of respect for the way they’ve chosen to do this. Not as preachers, not politicizing their music, not telling people what to do, but just providing gateways, and portals, and bridges.”
While Radiohead have had to fight for cultural space in order to provide these gateways, portals, and bridges, they have at the very least prevailed in relaying political insights to their fans without being patronizing or overbearing. Sure, they weren’t able to entirely shirk co-optation and appropriation, and sure their political efforts didn’t influence every fan to chuck bricks at the powers that be, but the cultural spaces in which Radiohead voiced their critiques ensured not only that the industry machinations generated during OK Computer wouldn’t be repeated but also that subversion in the mainstream, however dubious or contradictory, was still possible on the artist’s terms. And similar to what No Logo provided for Ed, Radiohead’s engagement with the industry gave their fans “real hope” for a more democratic future.
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