Radiohead’s magnum opus illustrates the pitfalls of depression but offers little hope for those who have fallen victim to the illness.
The works of art that mean the most are the ones we find at just the right moment. The song you associate with a particular summer, the movie you watched a dozen times after a bad breakup — how you appreciate and remember any work is determined largely by how and when you discovered it and how it reflected your state of mind.
Kid A, Radiohead’s masterful yet punishingly bleak 2000 magnum opus, is one of my favorite albums — a record I connected with deeply at a specific time and then returned to frequently. It’s among the best and most innovative works of its time. But it’s also something that I’ve found increasingly hard to relate to, something that may have done just as much harm as good — and something I associate closely with depression.
I have lived with depression for most of my life. Recently, I’ve learned how to manage it, but it’s been an anchor around my neck for longer than I care to admit. And during those times, Kid A — a perfect sonic expression of melancholy, from the apocalyptic lyrics to the pained, distress-signal howls of vocalist Thom Yorke — was there not to lift me up, but to drag me further down.
There’s something very comforting about the notion that you’re not alone in your struggles, which explains much of Kid A’s appeal. I don’t know if Yorke or his bandmates struggle with mental health issues themselves, but they have an unrivaled ability to capture what it feels like to be deeply depressed: the apathy, the inertia, the loneliness, the sadness, the self-loathing. “How to Disappear Completely,” with its weary chorus of “I’m not here/ This isn’t happening,” perfectly captures the desire for self-negation, the wish to retreat so far inside yourself that you simply cease to be — the feeling that is such an essential part of the illness.
The album seemed to articulate essential truths I had always found inexpressible; I didn’t have to try to explain what I was feeling because it already knew. That’s a powerful feeling for a sad, lonely kid.
It’s reassuring to know that others have experienced what you’re experiencing, but, at least for me, Kid A did nothing to assuage my pain and everything to confirm and even amplify it. It embraces misery without offering the faintest glimmer of hope — there’s even a track mockingly titled “Optimistic” that opens with the lines, “Flies buzzing around my head/ Vultures circling the dead.”
Kid A isn’t just an album about ennui, however. What makes it so great — and so dangerous — is that it’s about the decay of society as much as that of individuals. There’s no line drawn between the personal and the societal; the same rot infects them both. The album’s catastrophic climax comes on “Idioteque,” a terrifying sonic Armageddon in which, over ominously throbbing synths, the world finally tears itself apart. It’s melancholy projected outward, so that the world has the problem as much as the self.
It closes with the achingly gorgeous “Motion Picture Soundtrack,” which, with its minor-key Disney majesty, sounds like a funeral dirge for happiness itself. The album firmly subscribes to an “anyone happy is a moron” mindset. With ecological catastrophe, jingoism and greed pushing humanity toward its doom, how could any intelligent person be hopeful?
It’s a seductive idea, especially for someone with depression. It means you’re not sick — you’re just smarter than everyone else. Those normal, well-adjusted people? They’re blind. They’re sheep. You may be depressed, but that’s because you’re the only one who knows “The Truth.” It’s self-aggrandizement that twists reality so that sickness is enlightenment and hope is madness, a Trojan horse that disguises depression as salvation.
It’s a self-defeating worldview, but one that’s particularly hard to root out when it provides such a comforting, if misleading, logic to a person whose mood is often dictated by a fluke of brain chemistry. Simply accepting that happiness is not an impossible fool’s hope is something I struggled mightily with for years and continue to battle with from time to time.
And Kid A was always on the wrong side of those struggles. I don’t want to sound as if I’m blaming Radiohead for my difficulties — it remains one of my all-time favorite bands, and I was drawn to it because I was depressed, not depressed because I was drawn to it — but I do think Kid A’s purpose and message deserve questioning.
The album does a near-perfect job of capturing what it sounds like to be depressed; for that, Radiohead deserves nothing but praise. It’s an artist’s job to say something real about life, and Radiohead accomplished that. But in doing so, it reproduced depression’s myopia as well, reflecting its pernicious reasoning without ever noting its failings.
Radiohead does a better job of capturing the push and pull between misery and joy on In Rainbows — probably its best album — which moves between tracks of anguish and moments of staggering beauty. It’s a more honest account of life, with its ups and downs, than Kid A, which is all valley and no peak.
It’s ultimately a great but restricted album. It’s a near-perfect expression of a particular mindset, but its perspective is fundamentally limited. It’s an of-the-moment account of despair that can’t imagine, much less point to, a way out. But there is a way out. Take it from someone who made it through.
