A Freight Train Running Through the Middle of My Head

Congratulations to Mr. Ben Grant for correctly naming "Morning Bell" by Radiohead from the album Kid A as the Tuesday Song of the Day.

Speaking of Kid A, I'm not sure if I've ever listened to another album besides this one that remained alternatively maddening and sublime even years after I first listened to it.

When I was younger, I viewed Radiohead as the equivalent of that kid in class who was obviously very intelligent, but often tried too hard to demonstrate that intelligence, as if everyone else would not be able to grasp his intellectual ability unless he spun a web of words and clauses that left everyone else exhausted. The prime example in my mind of this artistic overreaching was Kid A, an album that meanders through a maze of electronic effects and noise, and at one point, during "Treefingers", does away with lyrics all together.

I'm not going to say that I began to enjoy listening to Kid A because my musical tastes matured and changed. Instead, like most true musical pretenders, I was influenced by the words of someone else, in this case, Chuck Klosterman. In 2005's Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story, which I highly recommend, Klosterman lays out his (admittedly) hare-brained theory that Thom Yorke, in composing the lyrics for Kid A, unwittingly predicted the 9/11 attacks a year before they took place.
Before you dismiss Klosterman as some kook 9/11 conspiracy theorist, you should know that he does not say that Yorke knew about the attacks, or even place blame on a responsible party. Instead, Klosterman argues that Yorke's true genius lies in the fact that if he tried to do the same thing again, there's no way he could succeed, and so much of what we characterize as genius in the world today is not the result of a conscious path of action, but is often a result of a convergence of circumstances that transform ordinary events into ones that seem remarkable in retrospect.