American editors take stock of the Kid A hype and backlash

The Hartford Courant has asked magazine editors and critics how Kid A, a record with no obvious hook, became both the biggest rock event of the year in America and its most divisive.

Spin had the only American music-magazine interview with the band and put them on its cover under the question “The World's Greatest Rock Band?” Yet critics got no advance copies. They heard the album at a night-time listening party on a Manhattan rooftop, and there was no single or video ahead of it. Rob Cherry, editor of Alternative Press, thinks the band held it back because a leak could hurt an abstract album, and he calls the release an anticlimax. A lot of fans were just scratching their heads, going, 'This isn't what I expected, or wanted.'¹

Kid A still went to number one on the Billboard 200 in its first week, on 207,000 copies, before falling to number ten in its second. The backlash's sharpest blow was Nick Hornby's review in The New Yorker, “Beyond the Pale”, in the issue of 30 October, which argued that the album asked too much of anyone who was not a devoted fan, and that the critics who loved it were listening like 16-year-olds.

Craig Marks, music editor of Inside.com, calls it too much work for any one record. He thinks some critics wanted to love it simply because important records by rock bands have become rare, and that the more genuine pleasure came from writers raised on electronic music. John Seabrook of The New Yorker, the author of Nobrow, takes the other side. The received wisdom said nobody would buy an art record, and Kid A found its audience anyway, which he counts as an argument against the power of hype.

Alan Light, Spin's editor-in-chief, says nothing else in rock this year was ambitious enough to build a consensus, so Kid A carried all of that expectation, and at the crossroads Radiohead deliberately chose not to be the defining rock band of the moment. If there's a big rock band at this moment, it's probably Creed. And how exciting is that?¹