In the Radiohead canon, Kid A is the equivalent to the elephant in the living room. You simply cannot avoid talking about it; you can’t, for that matter, avoid mentioning it every couple of minutes. Indeed, practically any Radiohead-related conversation you have is going to have to make reference to it at some point. Lots of people got very tired of talking about Kid A rather quickly (though most of these people are the sorts of folks who await the opportunity to publicly announce that they have grown bored as eagerly as children await the coming of Christmas: that is to say, crashing bores), but I hope that by now they’ve at least gotten comfortable hearing about it, because it’s going to be a touchstone of conversations about Radiohead for some time to come. This is right and good. It was the album that followed OK Computer, whose eloquence and depth of feeling in describing the emotional impotence of our generation (an impotence wrongly characterized as anomie, which characterization lends fuel to the impotent fire-that-refuses-to-burn) can by no means be overstated. This life-changing, epoch-defining album was followed by lots of touring, and then by a movie that chronicled all this touring, and then by dead silence. Time passed. Music changed. In the interim nobody anywhere came along and challenged Radiohead's top-dog status; there were lots of good records, and a few great ones, but nothing as grand and incontestable as OK Computer. (The mainstream press tried desperately to convince itself that both Built to Spill and the Flaming Lips were possible contenders to the throne; meaning no disrespect to either one of these wonderful bands, but the mainstream press must surely have been kidding.) A brilliantly conceived promotional campaign masquerading as no campaign at all preceded Kid A's release: the album was coming, we were told, but there would be no advance copies delivered to the press. There would be no radio singles. There would be no videos. There would be no tour.

PEOPLE FELL ALL OVER THEMSELVES trying not to look stupid while talking about Kid A: everybody seemed spooked. It was as if, lacking a press kit with bullet points, nobody was willing to go out on a limb and describe what the album was actually like. They wrote instead about the hype. Whole articles were dedicated to the subject, in Newsweek, Time, Spin, Rolling Stone, and numerous other irredeemable landfill-destined advertising receptacles. While Kid A does look like small potatoes when placed next to Amnesiac, it’s also, in the broader context, a pretty interesting little record; at some points (the title track, and “Treefingers,” and “Everything In Its Right Place”), it seems like a study for Amnesiac. Its successes are on smaller scales, but are not without their own uneasy charm. Its songs clear the road for the songs that will shortly follow. The commercialization of all art has resulted in less room for bands who want to take full public steps toward real artistic growth (Bob Dylan used to do this sort of thing all the time), but it’s exactly what Radiohead seem to have done with Kid A: in it, they assemble the palette and define the parameters for their next move.