Throughline - History Is Over

Episode Date: December 9, 2021

As the end of the 20th century approached, Radiohead took to the recording studio to capture the sound of a society that felt like it was fraying at the edges. Many people had high hopes for the new millennium, but for others a low hum of anxiety lurked just beneath the surface as the world changed rapidly and fears of a Y2K meltdown loomed.Amidst all the unease, the famed British band began recording their highly anticipated follow ups to their career-changing album OK Computer. Those two albums, Kid A and Amnesiac, released in 2000 and 2001, were entrancing and eerie — they documented the struggle to redefine humanity, recalibrate, and get a grip on an uncertain world. In this episode, we travel back to the turn of the millennium with Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood and the music of Kid A and Amnesiac.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. Okay, a little bit of history. What? History? Because it's not like we normally do history or anything. Okay, a little bit of public radio history. NPR has been listener-supported since it began 50 years ago. Podcasts like ThruLine and the public radio station where you live are both funded in part by listeners like you.

Whether you're a fan of our episodes that transport you across the globe or the ones that hit closer to home, your donation to your NPR station can help us deliver more stories that you love. It's simple to do. Just go to donate.npr.org slash throughline. That's donate.npr.org slash throughline. So you do that, and Ramteen, how about we get on with the show? Thanks. I keep thinking of this phrase I kept writing in one of my books. I've born a monster.

You can see it when you look out your window. People walk past me and say, get a job, Bob. Or when you turn on your television. The American people can remain confident in the soundness and the resilience of our financial system. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth i'm not a bomb i'm a bmw somehow we'd mutate it and it was was not necessarily a good thing the a and then the ring around it at see that's what i said case that she thought it was about thank you so much facebook for hosting you know progress was not necessarily a good thing our success was not necessarily a good thing. Our success was not necessarily a good thing. There's no question that we must feed the monster. Because the monster is clearly one.

It's like a movie, but you can't stop it. Unless you wake up. You're listening to Thulein. From NPR. Folks, please welcome one of our favourites, Radiohead. I'm Tom York. I'm Stanley Donwood. Do we have to say what we do for a living? No.

Probably not, but I mean... I'm not quite sure what it is that I do for Donwood. Do we have to say what we do for a living? No. Probably not, but I mean... I'm not quite sure what it is that I do for a living. But I've been doing it for a long time. A bit in betweenies, isn't it? Yeah. Radiohead fans need no introduction to these two. And I'm the biggest Radiohead fan of all. But for everyone else, Tom York is the lead singer and a songwriter for the band Radiohead.

And Stanley Donwood has created all the artwork for the band since 1994, including the album art for Kid A. Kid A, a hauntingly beautiful creature. Which they released in the year 2000. It was a difficult time for many reasons. Even before the year 2000 rolls around, panic itself could cause problems. The clock was going to tick over from the last day of the 20th century... ...to the first day of the 21st. Each turning of a millennium has produced cults and strangeness and disturbances, and we were all part of that.

So often on this show, we're trying to understand not only what happened in the past, but also how it felt. And this is one of those rare times when many of you listening may remember what it felt like, the turn of the millennium, the year 2000. For some, it isn't very long ago, just one generation in the past. And for others, it's an entire lifetime. Familiar, yet foreign. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman wrote a book called Liquid Modernity that year,

in which he argued that technology was advancing faster than culture could adapt to it. He said this cultural shakiness was causing people a ton of mental stress. Amid that shakiness, Radiohead created their album Kid A and his companion album Amnesiac. They, in many ways, are the band of the turn of the millennium, because they captured what that moment represented, what it felt like. And the music sounds pretty different from anything they'd done before. Strange, experimental, a total surprise to people expecting more songs like this. If you've heard only one Radiohead song, this is probably it.

Breathe. Creep. Can you height the media's obsession with Creep? Yes. So don't ask me about it, because it won't work for me. We didn't ask Tom about Creep, which was part of an earlier era of Radiohead. We were interested in knowing more about what it took to make those albums of the new millennium, Kid A and Amnesiac. This episode of ThruLine, like those albums, is a little unconventional. It's all about capturing the mood of a moment and confronting the monsters around us and within us.

I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. And I'm Ramteen Arablui. Coming up, we dial back the clock to the turn of the century. Hi, I'm Claudine. I'm calling in from Kingston, Jamaica, and you're listening to ThruLine on NPR. Support for NPR comes from Newman's Own Foundation, Part 1. Is this really happening? It's a little bit like looking through an old photograph album that you've forgotten you had. But as soon as you look at it, it becomes incredibly familiar

and you can remember all of the surrounding around that album. Repeating once again our top story, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev has been removed from power and there are tanks now. We are the children of the end of the Cold War. When there was no longer an enemy, when there was no longer someone on the other side of that wall, that wall comes down.

The Berlin Wall doesn't mean anything anymore. The wall that the East Germans put up in 1961 to keep its people in will now be breached by anyone who wants to leave. Then... You're still left with this fear. The atmosphere, especially in America at the end of the 90s, we had been through this extended period of relative prosperity and kind of relative peace, the fall of the Berlin Wall, supposedly democracy spreading further around the world. By the words we speak and the faces we show the world, we force the spring.

America's position is sort of the epitome of democracy. A spring reborn in the world's oldest democracy. And kind of inclusive capitalism, whatever you want to call it, you know, unchallenged. Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. The idea started, you know, floating that I would follow the band and do a big piece about them, which I did. My name is Alex Ross. I am the music critic of The New Yorker. I ended up calling my article The Searchers. I just felt like they were, you know,

just always in quest of the next new sound and the next new idea. What about this Internet thing? Do you know anything about that? Sure. What the hell is that exactly? Well, it's become a place where people are publishing information.

So everybody can have their own homepage. Companies are there. The latest information. It's wild what's going on. You can send electronic mail to people. It is the big new thing. If you ain't on the information superhighway, baby, where is it? What is this thing?

What is this thing? How does this work? This was the time of the dot-com boom. There was this tremendous optimism about the internet. It was going to connect everyone. You know, it was going to be this wonderful democracy where everyone gets to express their point of view. I was speaking to somebody in Japan, somebody in Australia,

somebody in New Zealand, somebody in Russia, all over the world. We definitely felt as if we were living in a world that previous generations just wouldn't have got. You know, the idea that history is over and everything is going to be fine. But it wasn't. Everything was fraying at the edges. The refugees came through in 11 covered trucks.

Here on these faces, these broken bodies, hard evidence of the previous day's Serb onslaught on Srebrenica. History is over. Our last message was that we no longer have time to report anything. The world took a long time to realize that genocide had occurred in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica. Srebrenica was a refuge for tens of thousands of Muslims fleeing the Serbs. The Serbs decided to seize Srebrenica. This would force the Americans to bring peace to Bosnia.

But only after the people here had been sacrificed. Places that had been completely stable were suddenly like rent with the worst kind of inter-ethnic violence. It was horrible. The UN, he says, they did absolutely nothing to protect us. We came there with a will to do as much as we could do, but we failed. It soon became clear that the Serbs had slaughtered thousands of Bosnian men and buried them in mass graves.

Who's making these decisions and why are we not involved? Because especially our generation at that time, we were about to have children, we're having children. We had some place in the hierarchy of things. We had some success, we had all these things. But at the same time, most of these important ethical decisions about how does the society look after its weakest? How does our society see itself in connection with the rest of Europe or the world or Kosovo or Africa? Every Sunday, Angelique Mukabukisi thanks God for her deliverance. She hasn't much else

to thank him for. Her parents are dead. Her husband is dead. Her two young children are dead. Her husband is dead. Her two young children are dead. Who's deciding this and why the fuck, excuse me, why the hell aren't they asking us? There have been massacres in plenty in the tortured history of Rwanda. But this was something different. This was something different. This was genocide.

So when we did, when we were working on Kid A and Amnesiac, the shift was not necessarily one of just dread. There's two sorts of shift. There was the dread of the millennia coming up, but there was also a shift which was sort of saying, we now no longer have to talk about this. Everything's already been decided. You know, progress is what it is.

There's nothing you can do. We came to Kyoto to find new ways to bridge our differences. You, the parties, now stand before the eyes of the world that will reduce our own emissions by nearly 30% entrusted with the decisions needed to do what we promise rather than to promise what we cannot do we'll recommend the adoption of this protocol to the conference by unanimity The UN climate change report was 1994. And us being us, I think we would have read that, probably.

20 years old, 30 years old, this bit of scientific research. And the craziness of people still being climate change deniers now is almost, it's unimaginable. The way I was working at the time was very much, lines would go into a hat and get taken out. And when they worked, they worked. So I can't tell you if... I was trying to write a song about global warming.

I very much doubt it. I think probably it was more like I was writing down my neurosis or I was listening. Someone may have said, we're not scaremongering, or the radio is saying it, or whatever. And then it gets absorbed and then comes out. There is this kind of constant sense of tension, of questioning in the lyrics, a sense of kind of examining the state of the world,

the climate, the planet in crisis, information, technology, the seduction of technology, and then how it seems to kind of take over and sort of take over our kind of beings. The album just kind of challenged complacency. It sort of challenged the world as it was. It's like trying to create beauty from nightmares. You've got to weave some beauty because that's where you live, that's where your spirit's got to live.

You can't live in dread. No-one could do that. It's like death. There was this quiet intensity to that music that, in retrospect, it feels like it has a slightly prophetic edge to it. You can feel it in the air. There's a buzz. You hear that sound? They know it's going to happen. And they'll all be looking at the people. In 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

Before we entered the new century, before Radiohead could release their prophetic albums Kid A and Amnesiac, they had to face down fame and their own success. Because Radiohead, like our world, was teetering on the edge of a cliff, staring down into the canyon of the unknown. What would this new millennium bring? Were we barreling towards collapse or reinvention? In 1997, Radiohead released an album called OK Computer, an album that would launch them into mega stardom. But that stardom came with dread and unease.

It pushed them into difficult places and uncharted territory. Just like the world, they were stuck between success and collapse. When we come back, we fall off the cliff. Hi, I'm Victor from Mexico City, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. This message line from NPR. Part 2. I Might Be Wrong. Radio heads have charted a unique course across the international sonic and social world. Because basically I'd find myself in a place that I didn't want to be, ended up in a place that I didn't want to be.

Ladies and gentlemen, Radiohead! One of our favorites, Radiohead! Do what? Do what? Do what? Do what? What Radiohead needs! The one, the only, Radiohead! One of our favourite radio hands. Can you imagine what a radio hand is? The one, the only, radio hand. This is like the season when you let out. For the first time since the Beatles,

the band has redefined what popular music is and can be. You are one of the best bands in the world. Really? Congratulations. It's good. Every morning I get up and I think that. What we always try and do is challenge people's preconceptions of the band. They have created music

without the accepted furniture of rock and roll. You were considered one of the greatest rock bands in 1997. God help us if we fucking were, because even being called a rock band was a bit of a nightmare, really. Why? Because it sucks. Fucking rock music sucks, man. I hate it.

So I started listening to Radiohead. It wasn't right when they first started. It was sort of after a couple years that they'd been on the scene. Although it was really okay computers, but I was just really thought, oh my God, this is really quite something. I am a key to the chaos It keeps you tied to my face

OK Computer was a huge, huge record. It was a phenomenon. It became one of the defining records of that period, and it was the kind of album where just people listened all the way through. Just people became obsessed with the band and seemed to be ready to follow them wherever they were going to go. Your ambition makes you look pretty ugly. Kick a screw and goosh a little piggy. them to about as big as you can get in the rock world, short of being, you know, a complete sort of stadium act. I lost myself

I lost myself I lost myself Fitter, happier, more productive, comfortable, not drinking too much, regular exercise at the gym, three days a week, getting on better with your... The previous record had been very successful. And I think on a lot of levels, the record company would have loved another one of those. What happened when you came back from the OK Computer tour? It was a mess. Really bad mess. It was a mess. Really bad mess.

For quite a while. And I got asked to recreate the artwork I did for OK Computer by various people several times. We had no interest in those things. You know, that was in some ways kind of a perverse antagonistic position to take, but it was also the only one we could have taken, to be honest and true to ourselves. There was kind of expectations and probably disappointment at the record label when it became clear that they were not going to come up with a sort of another OK computer.

It wasn't like everybody was on board with moving off into uncharted territory, equally because it's scary. But with that, when you strike out on your own against what everyone else wants you to do, if you don't have a lot of self-confidence in the first place, then you will be riddled with doubt. Terrified. With everything you're doing. Yeah.

Because you think you might be just shooting yourself in both feet. Shooting yourself in both feet. Self-sabotage. If you've had any success doing anything, really, you've definitely thought about that. You might have asked yourself, do I do the same thing that brought me attention and affirmation, or do I push myself and try something new and risk losing the success that I've built? This was a question the members of Radiohead were actually tackling in the late 1990s. They went from a successful band to perhaps the most revered band in the world,

and their album OK Computer was largely responsible for that. It was that rare combination of commercial and critical success. Yet, it had also nearly ripped the band apart. The sudden onslaught of fame, the constant touring, it all took its toll. And they had pressure on them to repeat the success of OK Computer. Remember, this was the late 1990s, and even though Napster and other illegal downloading platforms were around, the music industry was still making tons of money by selling actual records and CDs. So naturally,

another Radiohead album would have meant more money. And so back to that choice for Radiohead. Try and make another okay computer and enjoy success again, or go in a totally different direction and risk alienating the audience and potentially the bottom line. They chose the latter, riskier move. It's a decision that makes more sense when you understand where the members of the band come from. They met at school. They met at this boys' school called Abingdon, which is in the area of Oxford. And it is not one of these super elite British public schools.

Members of Radiohead, they all came from basically middle-class families. And they weren't part of, you know, Oxford University, which is the dominant presence in the area. They were sort of townies. They were sort of outside that very, very elite, rarefied world. They had this amazing music teacher, Terrence Gilmore James, who's a very serious kind of classical music-oriented guy, but really liked what Radiohead was trying to do.

And even in high school, they were experimenting and kind of trying out unusual things in their music. And, you know, that teacher just welcomed them and they were just encouraged. And quite rapidly, you know, they ended up getting signed with EMI and, you know, were launched and had their first big hit not too long after. And so it was a very rapid, you know, development from a bunch of kids just playing together in high school to becoming, you know, one of the bigger rock bands of the early 90s. There was something quite fundamental in the way that we had grown up, which I think maybe is peculiar to our sense of Britishness, that we were

always taught that any success you have is because you've cheated. Any band that comes out of Britain is the social class, whether they're admitted or not is an important consideration. Which is what we internalised, because that was the attitude of the press. Pick up a music magazine or anything, even talking about an actor. An actor's essentially an idiot

who gets filled with the ideas of somebody else. This is the kind of attitude that we grew up with. So one's response to success when you don't feel you merit it, thinking about the people who totally subscribe to their own myths and disappear up their own cocaine-fuelled arse, or the ones who go the other way, who can't handle it, so they do the next best thing, which is go berserk, trying to work ahead and preempt any of their own mistakes

and work all the time and never stop, and just producing and producing stuff all the time, not thinking about it because that's their response to a situation that they can't compute and that was us when the members of radiohead went into the studio to record what would be the albums kirei and amnesiac they knew they wanted to throw off convention. They wanted to feel free. They wanted to create something that they felt was true to where they were in their lives and where they felt they were fitting in the world. With a generous amount of class-born skepticism about the myth-building around their previous work,

they worked for months in defiance of expectations. But what would this new direction be? It was a very complex process. There was a lot of debate in the band over what direction they were going to go in next. So did you have to be one around? Like there's three songs on Kid A with guitars on them. If I said that to you six months before the album was released, would you be like, oh my God, I can't do this? No, no, because what happened is, it's a process.

What happened with On Kid A was the process of everything breaking down over time. So what we basically did... I'm good at that. We reduced everything to a pile of rubble and ashes. So the debate was, are we going to go in a different direction? And obviously the different direction went out. The guitars were really receding into the background, disappearing altogether in some of these songs. Electronics This kind of fuzzy aesthetic bordering on kind of experimental electronic music, basically. But the years are waiting

Nothing came As your love flashed before your eyes You realised We had all of these paintings that we've now got down at Christie's. The record company, they came and picked them up from the studio and they took them to London. I can't remember where it was, but they put them all up on the wall in this big place in London where they were having an industry playback of Kid A.

No. So all of the big buyers for record shops and so on, they were all there and they listened to the Kid A. No. So all of the big buyers for record shops and so on, they were all there and they listened to the Kid A for the first time. And honestly, I've never seen a more load of people politely smiling. Chewing glass. They weren't expecting it at all.

They thought they were going to get OK Computer Part 2 and they totally didn't. Radio, I haven't got a new album out. And, yeah, there was a lot of opposition. There were a lot of, you know, reviews came out that rejected it, that said they've gone completely off track. Where are the guitars? What is this kind of arty nonsense? You know, a sense that the band really might have blown it or sort of taken a complete wrong turn. But in the UK, Kid A got absolutely panned in the press. They destroyed us.

I have to say that upon first listen, Kid A is just awful. Kid A sounds like a bit of a wank. Oh, yeah, he just wants to do fucking Aphex Twin. Where's the next OK Computer? In the time since OK Computer, Radiohead seemed to have built up reservoirs of fresh bile and listened to a lot

of Aphex Twin records. Where's the hits? Where's the acoustic guitars? You can almost hear the cry go up at the start. Come on, guys, let's underachieve. And they were mocked. They were mocked for sort of always predicting doom

and kind of, you know, there goes Tom York again, you know, trying to save the planets, you know, blah, blah, blah. Why can't they just play fun pop songs with, you know, good guitar licks? You know, why do we have to get kind of bombarded with these issues, you know? And so that was like a very standard critique of Radiohead when they took this turn. And there was this moment where we, all these reviews had come in and I'd never read them. So I was just sitting in a room with everybody else in the band who'd read them and they were like stone faces like uh oh dear Radiohead's album Kid A was released on October 2nd, 2000, many months into the new millennium. A new millennium that started to see cracks in the facade. Economic growth in the U.S. had slowed.

More and more questions were coming up about the downsides of this new thing called the Internet. Yet, despite all the fears brought on by the end of one millennium and the start of another, the Y2K apocalypse had not happened. The world had not fallen apart. But based on initial reviews, it looked like Kid A might not fare so well. When we come back, the dread and hope of a new album

and a new millennium. Hi, this is John from Newmarket, Alabama. I recently discovered ThruLine and Don't Miss an Episode. I want to thank the entire team for their efforts in creating this incredible podcast. Thank you. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Best Fiends. When it comes to match-three-style puzzle games, only one reigns supreme, Best Fiends.

It's an action-packed adventure game and puzzle game rolled into one, so it's no wonder it's got so many five-star reviews. Plus, there's new content added all the time. If you're tired of crushing the same old candy, give Best Fiends a try. You can download Best Fiends free on the App Store or Google Play Store. That's friends without the R. Best Fiends. Part 3. You Must Name It. Radiohead released two albums in the span of a year,

Kid A in 2000 and a follow-up, Amnesiac, in 2001. Initially, critics didn't respond positively to the albums. But as it turned out, that was not the reaction from the audience. And I think that's the really remarkable thing that happened, that this experimental, offbeat record, which blatantly refused to continue where OK Computer had left off, was a huge success and actually really connected with a wider public. You forgot, didn't you?

Cut what? Oh, right. What was the question again? There's a great story that one of our managers, Bryce, says that when they first played it to the publishing company, we just signed with them and they're expecting like, you know, guitars. And so, you know, the first song, everything's right place, not a guitar. Everything in This Right Place is just one of my favorite songs of theirs because it's sort of lovely on the surface and it has a kind of, you know, upbeat feeling to it

and that the message in the lyrics is also like, everything is okay, but is it you know uh it you don't quite believe it as you're listening to the song so there's like an irony everything everything everything everything Everything, everything In its rapid

There are feelings of melancholy and resignation, kind of temporary bursts of energy that kind of then trail off. In its rapid that kind of then trail off. It actually puts me under a spell, you know, when those chords kick in. But this is uneasy music. It's not happy music. Radiohead's moody, contemplative, emotional album quickly became a massive hit in the United States. It debuted number one on the Billboard charts

and eventually sold over 1.4 million copies. The American press fawned over the album. The experience and emotions tied to listening to Kid A are like witnessing the stillborn birth of a child while simultaneously having the opportunity to see her play in the afterlife on IMAX. Including this notoriously over-the-top review from the music website Pitchfork.

It's an album of sparkling paradox. It's cacophonous yet tranquil, experimental yet familiar, foreign yet womb-like, spacious yet visceral, textured yet vaporous, awakening yet dreamlike, infinite yet 48 minutes. It's kind of a pretty rare case of, you know, someone working in the commercial arena, trying something new, challenging the audience,

and succeeding, holding their audience, bringing their audience with them. And yeah, it just doesn't happen very often. There were these moments of like, oh my God, I can't believe we've done this. My favourite moment of the whole of that period was when Kid A went to number one in the US. Like, almost by accident, you know, this little monster that we created was suddenly everywhere and everyone was going,

what? What's that doing there? And it was so exciting. I found that so exciting. I took into this lovely guy, Mr. Frick from Rolling Stone, and he's literally sitting there going, how the hell did you do that? You know, it was like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Because I knew a lot of people who were in various sort of kind of electronic music subcultures, and that was the music that I was listening to before and during.

And for a lot of them, they were like, oh, Radiohead. And for the first time, I was just like, ah, yes, yes, yes, that's right. Yes, yes, yes. You know, because the rock and roll thing was not something that most of the people I knew responded to. And it felt like that I was doing something that they kind of like, oh, well, that's OK. You mean you got accepted into your mate's house? I got accepted into my mate's house, yeah.

Because they made some music that sounded like Kid A. Okay, so the obvious question is hanging here. How did an album that, on the surface, might seem like a bummer to many people, especially at a time when there were these competing visions of what progress means, do so well? According to Alex Ross, it's because the unease that Radiohead, Tom, and Stanley were expressing with the albums was an unease many people were feeling. popularity of the records may have connected with people's unconscious or semi-conscious unease and sense that there was something superficial about that sense of complacency and well-being and that something else was coming, which indeed it did. Looking back on it, well, that doesn't seem so problematic anymore, that they were insisting that people sort of think about climate change, that they were bringing up these issues around technology,

and that they were just generally challenging complacency. And then these records came along which did not really echo at all that general spirit of optimism and complacency. And I would say that the music itself is actually the primary arena in which all this is happening. The songs lull you and then challenge you, I think, which is just a great dynamic.

And it was an experiment that people wanted to, where people were ready for, you know. And so I kind of think of all this music as, I feel like they're premonitions of what was coming in the early 21st century and all kinds of issues and all kinds of dimensions. 9-11 was a sharp reminder that all was not well. And it has not really recovered.

The 90s now look like some kind of almost Victorian era when everyone was just sort of dancing around and smiling. It wasn't like that for everybody. When I first heard Kid A and Amnesiac back in the early 2000s, it stopped me in my tracks. The glitchy synths, the bass drum thump in my chest, the lyrics, the mood, they all made me feel like someone else was seeing what I was seeing. This group of English musicians who I had almost nothing in common with at the time seemed to understand my anxiety about the world that awaited me. I'm an old millennial.

I went from being a child to an adult at the same time the 20th century turned into the 21st. A time when, for many of us in America, everything felt possible, yet very little felt right. Everything was getting better, we were told. The Cold War was over and the internet was here. Yet everywhere, it seemed like our leaders were throwing coins in a wishing well. And with every listen to those albums, I felt like I could better articulate the feelings that I struggled to find words to describe. Liquid modernity, that concept from Zygmunt Bauman that we talked about earlier in the episode, basically theorizes

that the anxiety and uncertainty many people feel in the modern world is caused by the fact that technology and life are constantly changing faster than our culture and minds can keep up with. It feels like the earth is unstable beneath our feet. And that feeling was captured by Kid A and Amnesiac. The moment where we're at this particular fulcrum right now, where dread and division has become an economically useful algorithm, whatever you want to call it. We've developed this new form of interacting with each other, which is a form of sickness.

And now, finally, it's being talked about. And so as soon as it's named, its power will rescind, because that's what happens. If you want to take something's power away you have to name it with me The moon for the stars and astral cards And all the figures I used

to see All my lovers were there with me All my past and future We all went to heaven in a little old boat There was nothing to fear, nothing to do But is it enough to just name it? Who does it serve to just describe an issue and then walk away? For Tom York, it isn't enough.

And the process of making Kid A an amnesiac wasn't only to put words to the angst he and his bandmates were feeling. It was about projecting another world. It was, and still is, about possibilities. One has to imagine a form of progress or a form of living which is more beneficial to the way human beings want to be rather than being reduced to these two-dimensional avatars that appear on your phone.

Like the moment we adopt modes of behavior that mirror our avatars, but we are at the same time now, finally formulating ways to think beyond that and going, well, hang on a minute, I don't want to be that. It's a challenge many of us still face. How do we find a way through the complexity

of a world that feels like it's balancing on the edge of a blade and still imagine a different world for ourselves and those who come next? There's always a sense of dread and there's always then the need to find an adaptive language to get beyond that, a way of expressing what it's going to look like in a world that's different. Yeah. That's it for this week's show. I'm Ramtin Arablui. I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah, and you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me.

And me. And. Lawrence Wu. Lane Kaplan-Levinson. Julie Kay. Victor Ibez. Anya Steinberg. Yolanda Sanguini.

Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal. Thanks also to Anya Grunman, Tamar Charney, Jacob Gantz, Dawud Tyler Amin, Laura Elderi, and Farai Masika. Special thank you to XL Beggars Group and Radiohead for letting us use songs from Kid A and Amnesiac

in this episode. The new reissue of the albums called Kid Amnesia is out now and contains a bunch of never released before tracks. You can find it wherever songs are sold or streaming. Other music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band,

Drop Electric, which includes... Navid Marvi, Sho Fujiwara, Anya Mizani. Also, we want your voice on our show. Send us a voicemail at 872-588-8805 with your name, where you're from, and the line, you're listening to ThruLine from NPR.

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