About “Kid A”

“Kid A” is one of the more challenging songs on Radiohead’s fourth LP. Much like the album’s opener, “Everything in its Right Place”, it is distinguished by a conspicuous lack of guitars and heavily compressed vocals from Yorke.

While some of the lyrics make clear references to literature and politics, it is unlikely that Thom intended for the song itself to carry a clear intellectual meaning. The severe distortion applied to the lead vocal track makes understanding the lyrics difficult, a creative choice that removes the emphasis from the words themselves, and places it almost exclusively on the sound the band have created from Thom’s voice. Additionally, “Kid A” is comprised of lines that Yorke selected randomly by writing them on slips of paper and pulling them out of a hat. So while the individual lines clearly held meaning for Yorke, they did so as individual statements rather than parts contributing to a whole.

Instead, it seems like the band’s “meaning” for the song arises from their own creative process as well as the emotional experience the music delivers to its audience.