Throughline - History Is Over (2021)

Episode Date: May 18, 2023

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 Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. 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 will 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 bimoban. Somehow we'd mutated and it was not necessarily a good thing. The A and then the ring around it. See, that's what I said. Kay said she thought it was a bomb. Thank you so much, Facebook, for hosting. was not necessarily a good thing. The A and then the ring around it? At? See, that's what I said. Kay said she thought it was about. Thank you so much, Facebook, for hosting.

What is internet anyway? You know, progress was not necessarily a good thing. Our success was not necessarily a good thing. Today. Tomorrow. Oh, wow. Fire coming out the window. The risk of the virus expanding worldwide.

The field of tears. See, they were right. Still struggling to be free. 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 Thule. 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 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. Sister, failure. Good boy.

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. Freak.

But I'm a creep I'm a weirdo What the hell am I saying? Do you hate the media's obsession with Creep? Yes. So don't ask me about it, because I won't go through. 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. things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the Wise app today,

or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. 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, well, 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. 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 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 a 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 Mukavukisi 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. 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 genocide. so when we did when we're working on kid a and amnesiac the shift was not necessarily one of

just dread there's 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 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. Radio saying it or whatever. And 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 enter 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 True Wine from NPR sponsor, the NPR Wine Club, a place to explore the exciting world of wine, including wines inspired by popular NPR shows like Weekend Edition Cabernet. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, all purchases help support NPR programming and fund quality reporting developed to connect people to their communities and the world they live in. More at NPRwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. Part 2. I Might Be Wrong. Radio heads have charted a unique course across the international sonic and social ruck. Because basically I'd find myself in a place that I didn't want to be. I ended up in a place that I didn't want to be.

I didn't want to be. Ladies and gentlemen, Radiohead! One of our favourite Radioheads! Do you want to know what Radiohead is? The one, the only, Radiohead! This is like the loosest in the world. 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 great. 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. Well, 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. and something... 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. And I met your heart Jack, my fraternal I am born again 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, you'll pay

It really launched 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 watch myself. You follow me there. I watch myself. I watch 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.

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 with a sort of another okay computer it wasn't like everybody was on board with moving off into uncharted territory equally because it's 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 with everything you're doing. 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. Wow, wow, wow.

The 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. 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'll admit it 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 pre-empt any of their own mistakes

and work all the time and never stop, and just producing and producing stuff like 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? We've got had some things We've got been to a place 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 won out. The guitars were really receding into the background, disappearing altogether in some of these songs. Electronics, much more to the forefront. This kind of fuzzy aesthetic bordering on kind of experimental electronic music, basically. 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 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. And yeah, there was a lot of opposition. There were a lot of 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 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 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 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.

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? 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 re-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 in the surface and it has kind of my favorite songs of theirs because it's sort of lovely on the surface and it has 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, you don't quite believe it as you're listening to the song, so there's like an irony. Everything Everything Everything Entrapping There are feelings of melancholy and resignation, kind of temporary bursts of energy 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 in to this lovely guy, Mr Frick from Rolling Stone,

and he's literally sitting there going, how the hell did you do that? 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 I, 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. And I think, perhaps, and this is just my totally kind of random speculation, that the 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, 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 kind of 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 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 you know because that's what happens if you if you want to if you want to take something's power away you have to name it Black-eyed angels swam with me A moon full of 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. At 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. Transcription by CastingWords That's it for this week's show. I'm Ramteen 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. Blaine Kaplan-Levinson. Julie Cade. Victor Ibeez. 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 Radio Ahead 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. And we'll get you in there. That's 872-588-8805. And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at ThruLine at MPR.org. Thanks for listening.

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